The Wizard of Menlo Park (7 page)

Having received so much attention, gratis, the phonograph seemed poised for a sensational commercial launch. Gardiner Hubbard, the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell and another backer of the Phonograph Company, was so confident that demand would outstrip supply that he developed a plan for maximal exploitation of the imagined shortage. Why not announce that sales agents must place their orders—and pay in full—in advance? Figuring that each unit would only cost $15 to manufacture and would sell for $100, Hubbard gleefully rubbed his hands together, calculating paper profits. “We incur no risk,” he wrote a fellow investor.

This proposal ran into opposition. Cheever was more concerned that early customers remain happy customers, and wondered aloud whether it would be better to lease the first small phonographs, once they were ready for release, rather than selling them. He knew that the shortcomings of the first-generation models would be a public embarrassment to the company as soon as the next-generation machine was released. Customers would naturally want “the most perfect one going and not a crude model.” If the company put all the machines out on lease, then it could “call them in and smash them up.” This praiseworthy idea disappeared.

The principals of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company debated various business models, and counted in advance the coming profits, without asking Edison’s opinion. They encouraged Edison to hasten his work on finishing the two phonograph models, and excluded him from their discussions about the business. Edison had opinions about everything, however, including marketing. When asked by reporters, he doggedly insisted that the phonograph be purchased by executives for dictating letters, which would be transcribed and dispatched by lesser-paid office boys. “They can thus save hundreds of dollars a year,” Edison asserted, without explaining how exactly the savings would be captured by executives who were paid a flat salary, not by the number of letters sent out per day.

Editorialists and feature writers were not much interested in technical details; they credulously reported Edison’s claim that he could record forty thousand words on a single disc when, in fact, he was nowhere close to being able to do so. They were more interested in projecting a heroic image of the inventor, “the Napolean of invention,” as the
New York Sun
dubbed him. Convention demanded that he be given a tender, domestic side, too. A visiting reporter read much in Edison’s pat on the head of “a bright little three-year-old boy who called him ‘papa’ with a genuine affection that showed, though the most remarkable inventor of the age, he is by no means dead to the less exciting episodes and battles of a domestic world.”

Much was said about the phonograph as a source of humor, running along the lines that had been established from the beginning: It would be the bane of philandering husbands (surreptitiously recording, for example, “Hurry up, Betty, and give me a kiss before the old hen comes down”) and a boon to sharp-tongued mothers-in-law. The
Washington Herald
described the phonograph (on 1 April 1878) as the “outside agent of the divorce courts” and urged the passing of a law “making it a capital offense to manufacture or sell this species of deadly weapon.” Edison, too, was the subject of humorous editorials, vilifying him for inventing too many things. The
New York Times
said with a rather macabre sense of humor that “something ought to be done to Mr. Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.”

The jokes and spoofs were entertaining, but the reader was susceptible to being confused, too. The phonograph, described in close detail in the
Sun
’s long profile “A Marvelous Discovery,” which had started the stampede to Menlo Park, was regarded by many as fantastic. Edison received three hundred letters that denounced the reporter’s mendacity. One professor urged Edison to protect his reputation and publicly disavow the claims that had been made in the article. “The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous, but the article is so ingeniously constructed, and some persons are so ignorant of the first principles of science, that they will be apt to believe it true, unless you deny it.”

Truth appeared to be spoof; and spoof, truth. The
New York Daily Graphic
’s William Croffut wrote of a lunch that Edison had served him on a recent visit to Menlo Park, at the conclusion of which Edison explained that he made all of the food “out of the dirt taken from the cellar.” In an almost plausible fashion, Edison provides a description of how he had found a way to speed up organic processes by inorganic means. Croffut was amazed: “This food machine is going to dispense almost entirely with farmers and stock-raisers, with millers and bakers—why it seems to me you are going to abolish all occupations except the manufacture of your machines.” Oh, no, Edison replies, laughing. But he did modestly allow that it would “certainly revolutionize the world.”

The publication date of 1 April for “A Food Creator” should have served to put readers on alert. And the final paragraph, in which the narrator is awakened by a train conductor, groggily realizing that he had been napping and was only then arriving at Menlo Park, clearly showed that the preceding story had been a parody of the boilerplate Edison profile. But just as some listeners failed to hear disclaimers that were interspersed in Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of
The War of the Worlds,
so, too, some readers, and some newspapers, failed in 1878 to appreciate Croffut’s nicely crafted spoof. Though the hoax was clearly revealed at the end, the
New York Daily Graphic
pointed out afterward, “a good many, with the careless American habit of hasty reading, seemed to have stopped short of that revelation.”

Edison was tickled. He told Croffut the article was the “most ingenious hoax I have ever seen.” Following its appearance, he received letters asking for the price of the food machine and the date when it would be ready for the market. While testing the telephone the next day, he playfully acted out his role in the parody in the presence of another visiting reporter, asking Charles Batchelor, “By the way, don’t you want half a dozen of my latest? Invented since you left this morning. It changes fire clay into rice pudding and corn meal into gold dust. Warranted for nine hundred and ninety-nine years.”

Ten days after his spoof appeared, Croffut published a serious profile of Edison that differed from the
New York Sun
’s only in its ingenuity in finding new ways to extol Edison’s genius. It was Croffut who coined the new nickname “the Wizard of Menlo Park” (an improvement on Croffut’s previous attempt at coining a new name for Edison: “the Jersey Columbus”).

In Chicago, George Bliss, the head of the electric pen company, ribbed Edison that “the Mania has broken out this way—School-girls write compositions on Edison. The funny papers publish squibs on Edison. The religious papers write editorials on Edison. The daily papers write up his life…Why don’t the Graphic fill up exclusively with Edison and [have] done with [it].” Croffut had similar news: “Every paper I take up is full of you—not less than 190,547 columns in American newspapers every day.”

For Edison, these reports were entertaining, but they did not affect his life in any noticeable way. The only immediate change was the new need to devote time responding to correspondence from strangers. Referring to what he called “Begging letters,” Edison wrote Uriah Painter, one of the phonograph company investors, “My god how they little suspect—” and left the thought unfinished; it was probably something like “—I have yet to secure my own financial security.” In a recent profile, he had patted the phonograph in his lab, saying it was his “baby,” and he expected that it would “grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age.” In the present, it still was an infant and was the one being supported.

Edison had no idea how greedily the public grabs for a piece of a person who has become famous—he thought he could personally respond to every stranger who wrote him for an autograph or for money. This quickly proved impractical. Six days after the publication of “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” he told Painter he had written fifty-two letters that night and had sent twenty-three more to Edward Johnson to handle.

A “Begging letter” might begin with mention of some personal connection. Mrs. Andrew Coburn, for example, wrote Edison on behalf of her husband, who had worked for him (“you will remember”) in his Newark shop. “I am entirely beaten down,” she wrote, as she described her husband’s confinement to bed with a fractured elbow that had become infected and now required amputation. Could he assist them? He sent her a check for $5.

But this was not the conclusion of the episode. A few weeks later, Mrs. Coburn was back with a request for $50 as a loan to start a sock-and-leggings business. Then Mr. Coburn dictated a follow-up letter, and separately the surgeon wrote asking for payment for the amputation. Mrs. Coburn followed the next month with a renewed plea for assistance.

Not all the begging was done by the less powerful. Edison received a plea for financial assistance from an official in a position of power over his professional future: Zenas Wilber, who was the Patent Office’s chief examiner of electrical apparatus. He said he had to borrow $200 or $250 “immediately” and “confidentially.” It placed Edison in a difficult position. He had Batchelor send Wilber $200 under a name and address that could not be traced back to Menlo Park.

Wilber would do Edison a favor weeks later when Edison made a rare foray outside of his laboratory and arrived in Washington, D.C., on 18 April for a two-day visit. He had accepted an invitation from Professor George Barker, of the University of Pennsylvania, to demonstrate the phonograph at the National Academy of Sciences meeting. Before the meeting, a reporter with a local paper happened to see Edison standing alone outside of the Smithsonian, looking around intently, apparently studying the rich foliage and taking in a beautiful blue sky. The reporter approached and, as a conversation starter, ventured, “Handsome grounds, these.” “Yes,” Edison agreed, then pointed to what he had been studying so closely: “What an immense stretch of telegraph wire without a support.”

The phonograph demonstration was set up in the office of the academy’s secretary, a place that did not accommodate all who wished to witness the performance. The double doors in the adjoining hall were removed so more people could crowd in for a peek. Edison sat at the secretary’s desk, nervously twisting a rubber band, while Charles Batchelor recorded and played back the ditties and sounds that had become a routine. In the reception following, Edison was described as “shy and shrinking, and did not show off at all ornamentally.” He confessed to a reporter that he did not like to be pressed by crowds, and he had not enjoyed the academy president’s welcome because he had not been able to hear a word that was said.

Having come to town, there was no respite from the press of the curious. The demonstrations continued all day and into the evening, and continued later in the Washington office of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Finally, Edison was set free and joined academy members at the U.S. Naval Observatory for a look at the stars. It had been a long day, and was not yet over. It was only then that Zenas Wilber came up with a brilliant idea: President Rutherford Hayes should not miss out on hearing the phonograph for himself, and should get a demonstration before morning arrived. Calling up the White House was easily accomplished: Hayes liked to answer the phone himself (there were only a few dozen telephones in the entire capital at the time). Nor did Wilber, the patent examiner, have difficulty speaking with Hayes, the president: they were cousins. A command performance by Edison was quickly arranged, and he headed to the White House, arriving around eleven o’clock that night. He showed off the phonograph for the president for about an hour and a half. His country asked still more of him: the First Lady and several of her friends wanted a demonstration, too, so Edison had to run through the routine still one more time, finishing about 2:30
A.M
.

The second day brought more attention. Edison, Batchelor, and the phonograph were installed in the office of the Senate’s committee on patents, then the House’s committee, attracting drop-in visits from members and leaving Congress without a quorum for nearly an hour. After Edison’s return home, the press added new expressions to the lexicon of hagiography. Having been honored by the most distinguished men in the country, the
New York Sun
reasoned, Edison had received more attention than if Robert Fulton, Sir Isaac Newton, or Galileo had appeared. Beneath Edison’s unassuming appearance, a reporter for another paper sensed something else hiding beneath his hat: “a kingly crown.”

CHAPTER THREE

FLIGHT

M
AY
–A
UGUST 1878

T
HE PHONOGRAPH GAVE
E
DISON
an opportunity in mid-1878 that would never reappear in his eighty-four-year-long life. With no other invention did he have as open a field without competition; he was perfectly positioned to move forward. He had become renowned. Financial backers were standing at the ready, impatiently waiting for the machine to be “perfected” and made ready for sale, and were willing to accept a small, toylike placeholder in the meantime. He had at his disposal his own development lab and complete machine shop, with a staff that took orders from no one but himself. He had all the materials that he conceivably might need at his fingertips. But just then, when the whole world seemed to be focused on him and his mechanical marvel, Edison simply could not muster the focus to complete its development. The moment passed before he realized it, and it would be ten years before he would return to work on what he called affectionately his “baby.”

In retrospect, the late spring and summer of 1878 is a time easily overlooked because it is of interest for what did
not
happen. Put simply, Edison failed to read the market. Without question, he was distracted by the attention that came with celebrity. Some of his admirers sought to protect him from distraction and worry. He was publicly hailed in a letter to the editor of a Washington paper as a member of a class of “martyrs, being devoid of acquisitiveness” and ill-suited to “competing in the scramble for material wealth.” The writer urged the federal government to provide Edison with the material rewards he could not earn himself, to save him from the fate of an Eli Whitney, “begging for bread,” or a Charles Goodyear, dying in a poorhouse. Edison himself, however, never indicated he gave thought to, let alone desired, subsidy, nor did he see his work as a noble enterprise in service to humanity. Typical was his remark to an associate about Edward Johnson’s traveling phonograph show: “I told him what he should go for [is] dollars & cents for the Phono Co as they wasn’t after glory but the [money] of an admiring public.”

Edison’s own point of view was unabashedly commercial, but by temperament, he tended to flit from project to project. Most were minor in ambition and were left in an incomplete state. This had been his pattern when he was working in the field of telegraphic equipment, and the phonograph’s own serendipitous invention came from a tangential observation that had led away from the original project. He did not impose upon himself limits to his inventive excursions. He would strike off from the main path, follow an interest, then branch off from that path, and then from that one, too. With the work on the main phonograph still incomplete, and with even the placeholder toys failing to work (the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company’s Gardiner Hubbard lamented, “We shall not sell any of them”), Edison decided to renew experimental work on a commercial hearing aid. He had not actually built a working model of a “lap megaphone,” but he was confident that he would be able to pick up a $10,000 prize offered by Joseph Medill, the editor of the
Chicago Tribune,
for the hearing aid that would best ameliorate Medill’s deafness (Edison never sustained interest in ameliorating his own). That project was itself pushed aside, still incomplete, while Edison chased the invention of a microphone that he thought would serve as a successor to the stethoscope. Nothing came of either diversion.

The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was a venture separate from Edison’s own Menlo Park lab, which meant Edison could not be ejected. The Company’s investors could, and did, beg and implore Edison to push on with his work on the phonograph, but they could not force him to heed their wishes or anyone else’s.

Edison arranged his business affairs so that he could maintain complete independence, which required that those closest to him should not have strong opinions of their own. The composition of his inner circle of subordinates may not have been important in any case, as the best advice available to him outside of the lab was mediocre, too. Uriah Painter, one of the Speaking Phonograph Company’s investors, led Edison to believe at the beginning of May that phonograph exhibitions would be wildly profitable. “
Your
receipts will be
immense,
” Painter wrote, double underlined for emphasis, as he made plans to hold a thousand public exhibitions of the phonograph within the next ninety days. Edward Johnson, however, who was the first one out in the field actually holding exhibitions, was finding the profits uneven and was tortured by the thought that he was so close, yet so far, from touching the “money floating all about just baskets full of it thrown into ones face.” It would turn out that even though eighty men had paid the company $100 each for the privilege of undergoing training and heading out in the exhibition business for themselves, their efforts would result in total royalty payments to Edison of $1,031.91.

Imagining fabulous profits to be earned even from merely hawking Edison’s portrait, Painter offered Mathew Brady exclusive rights to Edison’s portrait, in exchange for a royalty of 25 percent. Painter had to persuade Edison to sign off on the arrangement and stop by Brady’s Washington studio during his visit to the city. He assured Edison that 100,000 prints could be sold in the upcoming summer, pointing out that P. T. Barnum had sold 150,000 Brady prints of Tom Thumb. The best portrait that came out of the sitting shows Edison dressed in a dark, dignified suit, seated by a table upon which sits the phonograph, a metallic contraption that resembled a lathe. The inventor peers at the camera with no expression. Lacking anything that is visually striking, the photograph needed someone like Barnum to push its sales. But no one at the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was much interested in this sideline, and even Painter, who was offered the opportunity to sell the prints, seems to have lost interest, too.

Edison could have used Barnum’s talents to exploit the crowds drawn to Menlo Park, too. An increase in visits to the lab by tourists and self-invited, self-designated VIPs suggested Edison’s celebrity was growing. Work at the lab could not proceed smoothly, however, when interrupted by the arrival of groups of outsiders in quest of entertainment. On a not atypical day, a group of thirty businesspeople, inhibitions loosened by a “bucket of punch” they had brought along, took possession of the laboratory, leaving Edison no recourse but to disappear, wondering what he was going to do when a party of one hundred more visitors, on their way down from Boston, arrived. Editorial writers began to notice and speak out on his behalf. A Newark paper sensibly suggested that he limit visitors’ access to the lab—“the electrical Mecca”—to just one day a week. Another paper suggested that a separate building—“a theater or entertainment hall”—be built on the laboratory’s grounds for accommodating visitors and sparing Edison the indignity and waste of his own time when he had to spend “hours each day shouting and singing into a phonograph for the amusement of a crowd of unscientific people.”

Edison had not plotted a course to obtain attention; the attention had come to him. True, when it arrived, he had swung the door open to receive it. The problem, he was now discovering, was that once open, it could not be shut, even if he sincerely wanted to do so, and he was ambivalent in any case.

Edison was cooperative, for example, when William Croffut asked him for a letter praising his paper, the
Daily Graphic,
suitable for publication. The letter from Edison that was subsequently published was not typeset but reproduced photographically, keeping intact Edison’s best calligraphy. “Dear Sir, I feel inclined to thank you for the pleasant things you have said about me and the Phonograph,” the letter read, going on to single out Croffut’s April Fool’s Day hoax for special praise. It appeared to be a sincere testimonial, written by a new celebrity who also was able to work in mention of coming improvements to his phonograph that “will soon justify all the hopes of its friends.” What the letter did not disclose was that Edison had agreed to Croffut’s request, but only on condition that Croffut write the letter that would appear in Edison’s name. Croffut had sent his draft with polite noises (“bless you! don’t follow a word if it seems not quite the thing”), and Edison had recopied it in his own hand without a single modification.

Croffut, on his part, acted less as a reporter than as Edison’s unofficial amanuensis, recording whatever Edison claimed without independently sorting through Edison’s pronouncements to distinguish truth from wishful thinking. An example of Croffut’s apparent gullibility: While giving Croffut a tour of the lab, Edison had told the story of a dog that had wandered up to the lab’s door and whose bark was then recorded. “We have hung up that sheet yonder,” Edison said, “and now we can make him bark any time.” Not true. Edison could not make the dog bark again, and he knew it, because once the foil was removed from the cylinder, it could not be reinstalled on the cylinder in playable form. This problem rendered the tinfoil phonograph virtually useless, except for the limited purpose for which it was being used, that is, as a machine permanently in demonstration mode. Croffut was silent, either because he was completely credulous, or perhaps because he knew of this problem but calculated his own career was best served by preserving the mythic image he was working so hard to create.

When Edison had been an unknown inventor who specialized in the telegraphic equipment business, reporters had not sought him out and begged him for an opportunity to become his friend. Now, however, in early May 1878, sycophantic journalists led him to believe that he was wise in all manner of subjects, far afield of the electrical business. If they wished to listen to his opinions, and they did indeed, he was glad to hold forth on any topic, such as the relationship of diet to national destiny, a lecture delivered over lunch while digging into strawberry shortcake, strawberries and cream, and an apple dumpling.

I have a theory of eating. Variety—that is the secret of wise eating. The Nations that eat the most kinds of food are the greatest Nations…. The rice-eating Nations never progress; they never think or act anything but rice, rice, rice, forever. Look at the potato and black-bread eaters of Ireland; though naturally bright, the Irish in Ireland are enervated by the uniformity of their food…. On the other hand, what is, take it all in all, the most highly enlightened Nation, the most thrifty, graceful, cultured and accomplished? Why, France, of course, where the cuisine has infinite variety. When the Roman Empire was at its height the table was a marvel of diversity—they fed on nightingales’ tongues, and all sorts of dainty dishes…. Some say I get the cart before the horse, and that the diversified food is the result of a high civilization rather than its cause, but I think I am right about it.

This was a role, pontificating on demand, that was quite agreeable to him. As the years passed, it came to supplant the actual work of inventing. His thinking about an ideal diet for himself would change radically, however. In 1878, he said he wanted to live up to his own theory about the salutary benefits of variety and “live so that I could change my diet a thousand times a year.” This gave way in his later years to ever more restrictive diets, each change publicly chronicled as no alimentary detail was too private for the reporters who would always attend to him, from when he was thirty-one until he died at the age of eighty-four.

Following his sensational April visit to Washington, D.C., he was deluged with invitations to make personal appearances for sundry groups and occasions. He told a visiting reporter that he had no interest at all in making such appearances. (“You shouldn’t have become famous, if you didn’t want to be talked about and bored by strangers,” the reporter replied.) Edison turned down the invitations across the board, but he made two exceptions when he was still glowing from the warm reception received in Washington. The unsatisfying results in both cases served to show him that the role of traveling celebrity was not to his liking.

In May, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Academy of Mount Saint Vincent, a Catholic girls’ school on the Hudson River, as a favor to an old telegrapher friend. His hearing disability loomed as a larger issue when he was on the road. His hosts did not know how best to overcome its isolative effects (and Edison had yet to finish that “lap megaphone” he had been talking up with the press). When he was taken to the chapel during Mass, he strained to hear the celebrants’ words. (When the priest touched his arm to let him know it was time to go, Edison misinterpreted the gesture, thinking it was a rebuke for not showing proper reverence, and stooped down almost to his knees, remaining with bowed head. No one knew how to clear up the misunderstanding with the service still in progress.) Before Batchelor began the phonograph exhibition conducted before the students, Edison took a seat on the platform, “instantly becoming absorbed with some train of thought,” and apparently heard little or nothing of the school’s welcome. For him, the highlight of the day appears to have been at the end when he and Batchelor, after saying their good-byes, raced each other down the hill, oblivious to the rain and the propriety expected of the eminent inventor and his assistant.