The Wizard of Menlo Park (30 page)

We do not know whether Bernhardt ruled out commercial considerations (she did endorsements for commercial products like a dentifrice for a fee, but she did draw the line when P. T. Barnum offered her $10,000 for the rights to display a medical curiosity: her amputated leg). We do know that Edison hated the negotiations with recording stars, which entailed monetary demands far in excess of what Edison considered reasonable. He complained that despite their talk about their love for their art, “it is money, and money only, that counts.” Even the large sums paid to the most famous failed to secure their loyalty. He grumbled that artists would bolt “for a little more money offered by companies whose strongest advertising point is a list of names.” When Edison read that Stravinsky had written “the tempo of America is greater than the rest of the world. It moves at a wonderfully swift pace,” Edison added in the margin: “Yes, with a metronome of money.”

Edison convinced himself—without consulting others, in typical fashion—that he could simply opt out of competition for stars. He tried a small-budget alternative, scouting undiscovered voices among local choirs in Orange and Newark. He wrote a correspondent in 1911, “I believe if you record Church Choir singers and Musical Club, Glee Club, etc., singers, that we shall be able to discover a lot of talent just suitable for the phonograph.” He was pleased to have found locally two tenors that “can beat any Opera tenor except Caruso.” Over time, Edison did add Anna Case, Sergei (“the Pounder”) Rachmaninoff, and a few others. But he permitted competitors to snatch up other talented performers, like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fanny Brice, and Al Jolson. The first record to sell 1 million copies was Vernon Dalhart’s hillbilly ditty, “The Prisoner’s Song.” Not surprisingly, it was a Victor recording, not an Edison.

The fame of the performers whom Victor Talking Machine astutely signed did more than bolster record sales; it also added great luster to Victor’s brand. “Victrola” soon replaced “phonograph” as the generic term, a development that caused Edison considerable distress. His office would receive letters from confused customers who assumed that Edison had introduced the Victrola. In 1912, the chairwoman of the Immigrant Aid Department of the Council of Jewish Women wrote to ask Edison to donate a Victrola for placement on Ellis Island. It would offer a little cheer to the immigrant detainees awaiting processing—and in some cases deportation. In the margin of the letter, Edison drew a line near the reference to the Victrola and scribbled a note of irritation to his secretary: “Here is another of the innumerable instances where the public misunderstands.” He directed that the correspondent be referred to the Victor Company.

Edison dealers grumbled among themselves, too. The Topeka agency, for example, complained in early 1915 to the one in Des Moines, “We have no artists of any note on the Edison.” It fell to Edison’s salespeople to explain their absence on the Edison label. A sales manual from this time laid out the company’s defense, which directed the public’s attention to “the great Wizard” who personally tested voice samples using techniques of his own devising and selected “those voices which are most worthy of Re-Creation by his new art.” Only the voice, not the reputation, mattered to the Wizard.

So determined was Edison to strip artists of their vanity and unreasonable demands that he refused to print the name of the recording artist on the record label. When one of his dealers, the Santa Fe Watch Company, of Topeka, Kansas, asked him to reconsider, Edison let loose a torrent of pent-up opinion:

I am sure you will give me the credit of having put a tremendous amount of thought into the Phonograph Business after the many years that I have been engaged on it. Not alone to the technical side of the business have I given an immense amount of thought but also to the commercial side, and I want to say to you that I have most excellent reasons for not printing the name of the Artist on the Record. Your business has probably not brought you into intimate contact with musicians, but mine has. There is a great deal of “faking” and Press Agent work in the musical profession, and I feel that for the present at least I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations.

Edison wrote this in 1913, when he was sixty-six years old. His confidence in his business acumen had, if anything, grown over time. And in taking this stand, he reveals a nature that could not see the inconsistency: Here his own companies used his fame as the Wizard to market his inventions, prominently displaying his name and driving off anyone who threatened to infringe the trademark. But he could not abide others—in this case, his own recording artists—using fame, even though much more modest, for their own commercial interests.

Victor was especially receptive to the fads of popular music. The company immediately responded to a dance craze around 1910, in which taxi dance halls opened, school proms multiplied, and lodge cotillions drew avid attendees. Victor signed the ballroom dance stars Vernon and Irene Castle to oversee all of the company’s dance recordings. Columbia Records issued and promoted dance records, too.

Edison, however, stood aloof. He continued to follow the marketing plan with which he had begun, which was to make his phonograph the centerpiece of a home entertainment center, eliminating the need to go out in search of fun. Without mention of “cocooning,” the Edison marketers in the early twentieth century tapped a preference for private consumption of entertainment, a preference that is only now, a century later, finding full expression in the installation of high-definition television sets and multichannel sound systems. One aspect of Edison’s advertising campaign that does not have a contemporary ring is its depiction of married life: “When a man leaves home in the evening it is because he seeks amusement. The best way to keep him home is to give him the amusement there. Make home a competitor of downtown, the club, the cafe, the theatre and the concert hall. No such thing will furnish so much amusement for so many people, so many times, and in so many ways as the Edison phonograph.”

The voice that is speaking is smooth and omniscient, wise in all domestic matters. It is not Thomas Edison’s real-life voice, however, that had the burr of irritation when swatting away the complaints of his dealers. If one complained about the poor quality of the finish on the phonograph cabinets, Edison twisted the complaint into something else, a wish to have a $150 cabinet provided for a $100 machine. If he complied, “I would have to go out of business,” he condescendingly explained to one dealer. As for his reasons why he did not affix the price on the face of the record, he wrote that he did not have time for “lengthy explanations,” but there was a good technical reason that should have been taken on faith. The Wizard could not understand why his dealers refused to acknowledge his competence to make such simple decisions: “I should be credited in cases like this with as much intelligence as the general average of the genus homo.”

His voice was more often than not tinged with irritation about the exasperating tastes of the public, too. A typical letter that he dictated in 1914 went on at some length about the regional variations in musical taste and the difficulties this created for his company. He did not display any interest in the New Englanders’ objections to “ragtime and Coon Songs”; it was just one of many mysteries about likes and dislikes, conveyed to him in sarcastic letters. He claimed to be so discouraged by the hostility that these correspondents expressed that had he known about the differences of opinion, he never would have entered the music business.

Edison invested so much time personally managing every aspect of his music business that it is easy to forget that in this same time period he was principally concerned with work on automobile batteries. Music was merely a sideline. He launched other projects, too, such as promoting the sale to the working class of all-concrete houses, designed by Edison (but not adopted as a replacement for his own house at Glenmont). The project that was most ahead of its time was the home movie projector, named the Home Projecting Kinetoscope, that he introduced in late 1911. It was both an engineering marvel and a commercial flop. The film’s frames were tiny: three-sixteenths of an inch high and a quarter of an inch wide. When the image was projected upon a six-foot-tall screen, each was enlarged about 120,000 times. In order to keep the dimensions of the unit small and its weight to twenty pounds, Edison and his assistants designed the projector to accommodate filmstrips that were only eighty feet long, but it was effectively triple this length because the film was composed of three narrow ministrips, mounted side by side. The film would be run through once, showing the images on one edge, then the film-transport mechanism would be shifted so that the images in the middle, which ran in the opposite direction, would be visible, and then the home projectionist would adjust the projector one more time to project the third row. This arrangement yielded a show that ran sixteen minutes.

Along with the home projector, the company introduced a central clearinghouse for used films, which offered customers a way of replenishing the family’s entertainment supply by using the postal service to swap titles with others for a nominal processing fee. Edison, however, wanted to use his projector not for entertainment but for education. For preschoolers, his idea was nothing less than brilliant. For teaching the alphabet, Edison explained in an interview, “suppose, instead of the dull, solemn letters on a board or a card you have a little play going on that the littlest youngster can understand,” with actors carrying in letters, hopping, skipping, turning somersaults. “Nothing like action—drama—a play that fascinates the eye to keep the attention keyed up.” (A prospectus for
Sesame Street
could not have made a better case.)

And it wasn’t just the youngest students who would benefit by adoption of the new medium; Edison was convinced all students would. He compiled a list of subjects suitable for his new pedagogical tool—the total came to four thousand, and he vowed in 1912 to “make films of them all.” His marketing pitch to school systems was simple: He would rent a set of educational films to a school for $8 a week. “You couldn’t hire much of a teacher for $8 a week, could you?” he chortled. “And then think of the saving—you won’t need any truant officer. No, siree! Every little toddler in the district will just want to scoot to school!”

A year after the release of his home projector, Edison offered only twenty-five feature titles, including the scintillating
Manufacture of Paper, Apple Pies,
and
Modern Weapons for Fighting Fire.
It was not a catalog large enough to draw significant numbers of customers, nor was it sufficient to keep the clearinghouse well supplied. In 1913, two years after the debut of the projector, all owners received a letter from the company imploring them to send in any “idle films” for exchanges. The venture languished.

No critic at the time apparently commented on the outlandishness of Edison’s carelessly announced ambition to radically remake American education—and in his spare time. The side projects multiplied, each initial announcement bringing reporters running and forcing Edison to dilute his attention.

When he plunged into a campaign, no subordinate would have any grounds to tease him for working less hard than anyone else. When a business colleague in 1912 wrote him and casually asked how he was feeling, Edison replied, “Well, I worked 122 hours in six days last week, hence I must feel fine—and do.” The next month, he had a time clock installed in the laboratory, which permitted him to document his hours and call in reporters to let the world know that he outworked everyone. The first week the clock was in operation, Edison logged ninety-five hours and forty-nine minutes, or, as one story put it, “nearly twice as long as any of his 5,000 employees who enjoyed an eight hour day.” His recorded hours would have been longer had he been able to log in properly on the first day, as he had been working all night and left the building at 8:15
A.M
.

Five years earlier, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Edison had told reporters that he was retiring from business and would spend all of his time in the laboratory, pursuing pure research. His self-exile from business matters ended, however, almost as soon as it had been announced. He felt compelled to personally oversee—and personally decide—everything, as he was wont to do. He drove himself hard, as hard in his sixties, seventies, and even eighties, as he had ever worked as a younger man, because he felt a burden that was uniquely his to shoulder: protecting the public image of “Thomas Edison,” omnipresent and omniscient, the Wizard with a magical touch (“It is irresistible because Edison made it”). Protecting the brand required the deployment of lawyers to warn off anyone who attempted to trade on the Edison name. Brand protection also required that Edison remain personally involved in everything, trying to live up to the legend. He did not regard this as a burden. On the contrary, it was the very thing that gave his life meaning. As long as he was the one who made the decisions, he was happy, no matter what consequences followed for his businesses.

Edison had the ability to remain imperturbably content even when disaster struck. In the early evening of 7 December 1914, an explosion rocked his film-finishing building, part of the complex of buildings surrounding his laboratory. The building was swiftly evacuated, just ahead of the fire that swept the two-story structure. As the film stock fed the flames, the fire jumped to the surrounding buildings, where it was fed by the rubber and chemicals used in record manufacturing. These buildings were made of reinforced concrete, the material that Edison had boasted was completely fireproof. Their combustible contents, however, fed conflagrations whose temperatures melted the floors, and soon the walls collapsed. Even the newest building, less than two years old, and said to be state of the art in fireproof construction, succumbed when its contents—phonograph records—caught fire. Liquid chemicals poured down the sides of the building as streams of flame. The high temperatures rendered the efforts of the firefighters, who had been summoned from six neighboring communities, largely ineffectual. Ten to fifteen thousand people gathered to watch.