The Wizard of Menlo Park (36 page)

As he felt his way in the new position of “Operating Manager and Chief Executive,” he was given the opportunity to tell the general public what it was like to find himself at the top of the organization’s pyramid at the age of only twenty-seven. In an article published in
American
magazine, Charles described “My Experiences Working for Father.” The principal purpose of his controversy-free account was to correct the impression that some readers may have had that his was an easy life. He described how, when he had walked into a notary office one day and made his identity known, the notary had laughed: “Well, I guess you don’t have to worry much! It’s pretty soft for you fellows that can work for your old man.” Charles smiled politely, but told readers that working for his father was anything but easy because he did not receive special treatment. (It did not occur to him to mention his appointment as CEO.)

Within Thomas A. Edison, Inc., Charles was aware that he was regarded as green and inexperienced by older line managers and that he could not make major changes without stirring up criticism and resistance. He tried to disguise his reforms by putting them in the hands of the second in command. Mina, who insisted on detailed accounts of everything he did, was unhappy her “Charlsie” would not receive the credit he deserved. She told him, “I do want your hand at the helm without any doubt about it.”

In March 1918, Charles Edison announced his intention to make one more change: While he and Carolyn Hawkins were vacationing with Mina in Fort Myers, the young couple decided to marry—immediately. Charles wired his father aboard the USS
Sachem,
which was stationed not far away, off Key West, to ask for his blessing. Edison bestowed his approval with characteristic absence of sentiment. “If you have decided it must be, then the sooner it is done the better,” Edison wrote his son. He lightened this with an attempt at levity: “It can’t be worse than life in front line trenches.” He closed by saying that it would be impossible for him to attend the wedding.

When the war ended, so, too, did Edison’s unhappy experience with the Navy, which had consistently ignored his suggestions. He returned to his own laboratory, where he was master of his domain. Charles was permitted to remain as the head of the business, but only nominally. His father had no interest in Charles’s new Personnel Department and reduced its size, then eliminated it altogether, growling, “Hell, I’m doin’ the hirin’ and firin’ around here.” Edison ordered dismissals throughout the executive ranks, over the protests of Charles, and then, beginning in 1920, when the postwar depression arrived, Edison fired plant workers in large numbers. (“Merrily the axe swings,” said Charles sardonically during one of his father’s campaigns to reduce the workforce.) Employees were selected for severance by Edison personally. A. E. Johnson, a longtime employee, described Edison’s methodology: “What he’d do, whenever he’d think that the overhead was getting too much, you know, and they’d been hiring a lot of men that weren’t needed, he’d start on one of his firing campaigns…. If he saw you coming down he’d stop you and say, ‘Who are you, what do you do?’ You’d tell him, he’d ask a couple of questions…[and if he did not like the answers] he’d say, ‘You’re fired.’” Johnson thought the process was harmless because many of those “fired” would report the news to their supervisor, who would then instruct them not to pay any attention to what Edison had said. Still, between 1920 and 1922, Edison did succeed in drastically reducing employment in the company’s manufacturing plants from ten thousand to three thousand.

While Charles Edison sat mutely as the figurehead chief executive, his father put into place a “mental fitness” test that all college graduates who applied for work at Thomas A. Edison, Inc., were required to pass. Edison composed the test himself. It drew wide attention because of the audacity of Edison’s antimodern message: To him, the college degree was a meaningless credential; the subjects studied in college had no relevance to managerial decision making; and the prevailing ethos of the college education—that an educated person learned where to look for knowledge—was useless. All he cared about was what facts a management candidate could produce on command by answering 163 questions in ninety minutes. In its first two years of administration, only about 4 percent of applicants passed. The average college man, he drily commented, is “amazingly ignorant.”

Thanks to an unsuccessful candidate who claimed to recall 141 questions (which, if true, should have earned him a passing mark in a special category), newspapers published the test and the reading public had the chance to see how it would do. A question sampler: What countries bound France? Where is Spitsbergen? Where do we get prunes from? Of what wood are kerosene barrels made? What states bound West Virginia? Where are condors to be found? What states produce phosphates? What is the weight of air in a room 20' x 30' x 10'? How is sulfuric acid made?

When the questions were revealed, editorial writers picked up their pens to condemn the examination from every angle. The
New York Times
pointed out that Edison could not grade “the human soul.” Why was it important to know what copra was, it asked, unless one clerked in a grocery store? The
Chicago Tribune
sent a reporter to the University of Chicago to see how well current students would do on the test and, not surprisingly, they did not do well (no one, in fact, could handle that question on the bounding of West Virginia). When Albert Einstein arrived in Boston, he was confronted with what one paper called the “ever-present Edison questionnaire” and was asked, “What is the speed of sound?” He was not able to say, he replied calmly through his secretary, but pointed out that the answer was readily available in reference books. The headline in the
New York Times
gave readers this summary of the news story: “Einstein Sees Boston; Fails on Edison Test.”

The test originally began without publicity, and Edison is likely to have devised it simply to cut off the annoying importuning by various managers and acquaintances to place their own sons, nephews, and grandsons into management positions in his company. That said, having placed Charles as company head, Edison was in no position to pretend that he proscribed nepotism.

Once the examination had come to the attention of the general public, however, and the pettiness of its content was roundly criticized, Edison defended his creation with justifications that were, by all appearances, conjured as he went along. He said that he needed the kind of manager who could make decisions without delay, without “waiting to find something out that he might have had right in his head.” The inability of one of his managers to have memorized crucial data had, he claimed, cost the company as much as $5,000 (in a way that was left unspecified). The more that Edison’s exam was criticized, the more obdurate he became. When newspapers published the correct answers in addition to the questions, rendering the exam useless, Edison was undaunted and drew up a second exam consisting of questions as picayune in nature as those in the first. Later, he said he was surprised to discover that he could continue to use the first exam because candidates did no better on it than on the second, which proved to him that “the average college man doesn’t read newspapers.”

Few businesspeople defended Edison’s methodology. Nor was Edison’s friendship with Henry Ford helpful in Edison’s public campaign to defend the questionnaire. In a letter to the editor of the
New York Times,
a resident of West Orange asked Edison to explain his close relationship to “a well-known automobile manufacturer whose inability to answer the most elementary questions asked him in the courtroom about a year ago made him the laughing-stock of the entire English-speaking world.” Ford had initiated a libel suit against the
Chicago Tribune
and testified at the trial that he did not read anything in the newspaper but headlines. Inadvertently contradicting the basic premise of the Edison questionnaire, Ford had said he was not concerned about his own lack of understanding a given topic because “I could find a man in five minutes who could tell me all about it.”

Edison’s youngest son, Theodore, was a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, unlike Charles, academically inclined with special strengths in mathematics and the sciences. He gamely sat in his dormitory room for a mock examination by a reporter who administered Edison’s questionnaire. Theodore’s impromptu calculation of the vibrations per second of a red ray of light was impressively accurate, but he did not know where La Paz was the capital, what states bounded Idaho, nor what two rivers converged near Pittsburgh. At the end of the exercise, his self-evaluation was that he had “failed” the test. The pretend exam would be all he would face, however. When he graduated two years later, his father said Theodore could have a position at the family company without having to endure the questionnaire. Theodore was in no hurry: He elected to stay at college for graduate work before joining his brother at the company.

As the phonograph business declined, the famed Edison name was attached to small kitchen appliances that the company resorted to selling in desperation. Theodore was put to work on electric coffeemakers, waffle irons, and toasters. His technical talents would have been a valuable addition to Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had his father been more receptive to his and brother Charles’s suggestions for a fundamental change in strategic direction for the struggling company. The phonograph business faced a challenge in the 1920s unlike any that had come before: the advent of commercial radio stations and the wide availability of free music broadcasts and other entertainment. By the end of 1921, an estimated 1 million listeners had access to radios and listened to programs broadcast from the eastern seaboard. A single station in Roselle, New Jersey, which offered the voices of operatic stars among its musical programs, had a broadcast range of a thousand miles, covering New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and reaching as far west as Missouri. A contemporary newspaper account explained to readers not yet acquainted with the phenomenon that those who owned radio sets could enjoy entertainment that was “literally as free as the air.”

Charles and Theodore Edison could see that if the company were positioned as being in the music business rather than just in the phonograph business, it could offer a combination phonograph-radio that would permit its product line to evolve with this new line of consumer technology. Their father need not feel slighted because the vacuum tube, the key component in the radio set, was a modern descendant of Edison’s experimental work on the incandescent bulb.

Edison did feel slighted, however. Such, at least, was the opinion of Thomas Cowan, a former employee who was working for Westinghouse in 1921, conducting experiments in radio broadcasts with the aid of a phonograph that Edison was willing to loan him. Cowan had several conversations about radio with Edison, who became upset and recalled the loaner when he heard the Westinghouse broadcasts and was appalled at the poor quality of the sound. Edison appeared resentful that he had not personally developed the vacuum tube. He did not quash this impression when he hung a sign on his door: “I will not talk radio to anyone.”

Theodore Edison held to a different explanation of his father’s refusal to consider his and Charles’s recommendation to enter the radio business. His father’s hearing had deteriorated further. The only way he could hear music that was reproduced electrically was by wearing headphones with the volume set to an extremely high level, producing extreme distortion. It also produced sparks that darted out from the earphones, making the staff uneasy about accidentally electrocuting their employer. That experience convinced his father that radio could not reproduce music without distortion. Without Edison’s personal approval, the company’s preparations to enter the radio business were frozen.

Edison’s sentimental attachment to the phonograph and his resistance to entering the radio business were on display side by side in 1922, on the occasion of the phonograph’s forty-fifth birthday. “I have the phonograph close to perfection,” Edison boasted, not for the first time. As for radio, his experience with it on submarines during his wartime research had shown him that the “mutilation of sounds” was a problem that was not amenable to solution. He had all the empirical data he needed, and once his opinion was set, he had no wish to reopen the matter. In 1924, he reiterated, “We would not for a moment think of combining a phonograph with a radio.”

Until 1925, radio receivers were powered by batteries. When manufacturers introduced a new design that drew upon electrical current, sales climbed steeply. His sons continued to press him to reconsider and enter the radio business, but Edison remained unmoved: The “radio fad,” as he called it, would soon pass.

Father and sons could see that their phonograph business was disappearing, and none of them showed much interest in the waffle irons and other kitchen appliances that had been introduced to carry on the Edison name in the form of the “Edicraft” line. The design of the small appliances was innovative—the Edicraft Automatic Toaster had springs that pushed the heating elements away from the toast rather than popping it into the air—but customers did not want to see novelty tricks performed by their toaster, nor did they wish to pay premium prices.

The business struggled. With Edison in his eighties and still working, he and his sons wanted to distance themselves from the humiliations of plying the electric toaster trade. They shared existential anxiety about defining Edison’s legacy in the domain of business with a project that was as grand in scale as those in the past that had secured his reputation. Where should Thomas A. Edison, Inc., head during Edison’s remaining time among the living? The two generations did not agree on the answer.

Edison elected to start an entirely new career in industrial botany, based at his winter home in Fort Myers. With the financial support of Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, he established a new company, the Edison Botanic Research Company, whose mission was to discover a source of rubber that could be cultivated in the United States as a backup source in case war interrupted imports from Southeast Asia. Ford and Firestone provided Edison with $500,000 annually to pursue the project. The official history gives us an inspiring tale of the octogenarian testing seventeen thousand different varieties of domestic plants in the course of discovering that goldenrod would serve as an alternative source. This sanitized version acknowledges that his findings were never actually used; by the time of World War II, synthetic rubber had been invented. But the story still serves the purpose of showing Edison’s desire for new challenges, even when his age was advanced and his health was failing; he suffered from diabetes and stomach problems that probably were caused by radiation exposure in his laboratory years earlier.