The Wizard of Menlo Park (9 page)

Edison did not fully appreciate the reach of the media and the diffusion of his own name until late one night, after he and Fox had gone to sleep in their hotel room in Rawlins. The two were awakened by a loud knock. In walked a man who introduced himself as “Texas Jack” and said he had read about Edison in the newspaper and wanted to meet him. The hotel proprietor appeared and attempted to intercede on behalf of his guests; Texas Jack tossed him into the hallway and resumed his self-introduction. He had just arrived in town from a hunting trip and boasted of his marksmanship. To illustrate, he pulled out his Colt, pointed it through the hotel window, and fired at a weather vane that sat on top of the town’s freight depot. The shot hit its target and awakened the townspeople, adding to the commotion. Edison, pleading fatigue, tried to coax his new friend to leave, but he did not succeed until he promised he would see him in the morning.

These and other picturesque encounters provided abundant potential material for colorful letters if Edison had written home, but he and his wife did not correspond. Edison kept in touch with his assistants at the laboratory, but the only time he heard news about his pregnant wife was when his secretary, Stockton Griffin, wrote him on August 5 with a report that she was not well.

Mrs. E’s health is not of the best—She is extremely nervous and frets a great deal about you, and about everything—I take it to be nervous prostration—She was so frightened yesterday for fear the children would get on the track that she fainted—This morning I telegraphed Dr. Ward who came at noon…. She needs a change and right away, as the [train] cars keep her awake at night and this causes her to lose strength.

Neither Griffin nor the doctor urged Edison to cut his trip short; Griffin ended his letter with the reassurance that “there’s nothing serious in this,” and that is how Edison received it. It would be three more weeks before he arrived back in Menlo Park.

He and Barker had just finished a three-day visit to San Francisco; ahead was a tour of Yosemite; a visit to mines in Virginia City, Nevada; hunting and fishing in Wyoming; and then the appearance at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis. Barker formally presented Edison as a new AAAS member, with a soaring introduction that asserted theirs was a time when “the practical man has found science too slow, and has stepped in and discovered for himself.” On that day, Edison was not only feted by the august body of scientists, he also received word that the Paris Exposition had awarded the grand prize to the phonograph.

A perceptive newspaper reporter noticed upon Edison’s return to Menlo Park that blurring of boundary separating the private and the public that we now understand as accompanying the arrival of celebrity. “The people have come to regard him as public property, and were almost jealous of the little time he found to give his family,” said the
New York Sun
. “Little knots of people came and went all day long, and took possession of him and his office and shop as if they had been personal property.”

Nothing at all seemed to bother Edison, however. He was tanned, positively exuded health, and beamed when interviewed. His trip had been “bang-up”: “It was bully. I never saw such a country in all my life. That’s the place to go to. What with following trails, and tumbling down precipices, and riding over alkali deserts and keeping cool at 125 degrees in the shade, a person couldn’t help enjoying himself.” His freshly obtained imperturbability was put to the test by yet another stack of begging letters. But even when he read a letter from an inventor who claimed to have invented a “fluid resistance neutralizer” and a “gravimotor” and asked for $1,000 (“It shall be returned to you by God, through me, more than a thousand fold and that shortly. You will greatly oblige, for I have a family. Yours In Christ…”), he simply handed it to a reporter and said, meditatively, “There could be an awful good story made out of the letters I get.”

During his first interview after his return, with the
New York World,
Edison, the raconteur, told an entertaining story about his encounter out west with a pony that resisted his directions. The next beat, he became Edison, the absentminded scientist, falling silent as he became engrossed in a journal that was on his desk. When his daughter wandered in, “he looked at her for a moment as if trying to recollect who she was and then exclaiming, ‘Why, Dot, is that you?’” She had just returned from vacation herself and this was the first time father and daughter were reunited. After kissing her a half dozen times, he slid her from his knee and returned to his reading.

If his riding on the train’s cowcatcher was a metaphor for his desire to see opportunities before others, Edison had been successful. He returned with lots of dazzling ideas for new investigations into fields wholly new to him. He spoke confidently of using electricity to evaluate the value of ore deposits, of applying cottonseed oil to the walls of underground mines to control moisture problems, of devising ways to reduce the teeth-rattling noise of New York’s elevated railway. The blind would benefit from his discovery of an ink that produced raised letters, and the partially deaf from that ear trumpet he had been promising for a while (and whose completion date he candidly said he could not even guess).

His experience on the trip had sharpened his creative faculties, but he had never suffered a lack of promising ideas. His principal problem prior to the trip had been his inability to remain focused on completing the phonograph, the single most promising invention he had ever devised. Now, after the trip, his mind was agog with new projects of which he spoke enthusiastically. He gave no indication that he had developed during his trip to the West an ability to designate some projects as more important than others, and the phonograph as the most important of all.

In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of the interviews that followed Edison’s return to Menlo Park was the deliberate way he misled the reporters about his plans. “Did you get any new ideas out there, Mr. Edison?” the
New York World
asked. “No. That’s not a place for ideas,” Edison replied. “It’s perfectly barren.” The West offered splendid country for a summer vacation, he said, further deflecting attention from inspiration for a new project that he did not want to disclose. He spoke of the barrenness of the West on August 27, the day after he had returned. It was also the very day he, along with Batchelor and Kruesi, signed and dated a page in a laboratory notebook containing three sketches. They were labeled “Electric Light.”

CHAPTER FOUR

GETTING AHEAD

A
UGUST
1878–O
CTOBER 1879

E
DISON’S INVENTION OF
the electric light is as embedded in national mythology as Columbus’s discovery of America. The invention of the one and the discovery of the other are also similar in that they indisputably occurred, but their mythic significance requires ignoring preceding history in both cases.

When Edison in 1878 began to look in to ‘inventing” electric light, Europeans had a seventy-year lead. In 1808, Humphry Davy in England had employed a large battery to demonstrate for the Royal Society how light could be produced with electricity in either of two ways: by inducing a strong current to leap across a gap, which created a bright arc, or by heating an element until it glowed white-hot—incandescent. Arc light proved to be the easiest to render into practical form. An experimental installation on the streets of Lyon, France, in 1855, dazzled pedestrians who, at nine in the evening, were bathed in what a local newspaper called “a flood of light that was as bright as the sun.” Birds were confused and began singing; ladies opened up umbrellas to shield themselves.

Creating bright light was accomplished relatively easily. What was difficult was moderating the intensity. First used in lighthouses, then mounted on high lampposts on the streets of European cities, the arc light was powerful, but it lacked a dimmer switch. Genealogically, the arc light was much more closely related to the modern arc welder than it is to the household lightbulb. Nineteenth-century passersby did not have welder’s masks to protect their eyes, leading Robert Louis Stevenson to write: “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

Stevenson’s was a minority opinion. For most people, the “artificial sun” provided by arc lights at night was welcomed. In the early years, however, they required frequent maintenance while in use. The lights used two carbon rods placed vertically, one above, one below, whose tips were kept at a set small distance apart in order to achieve the arc. As the carbons burned away, however, adjustment was needed in order to maintain a constant distance. Automatic regulating mechanisms that eliminated the need for maintenance men to make the rounds were tried, but their complexity and unreliability introduced new problems.

When an inventor came up with an ingeniously simple, reliable electromagnetic device that kept the gap between the rods at a fixed distance while they burned two inches an hour, arc lighting was no longer a high-maintenance proposition. That inventor was Charles Brush, and he would become a very wealthy man. In April 1878—when Thomas Edison was still touting his yet-to-be-completed phonograph and months before he had gone west and returned thinking about the electric light—Brush was shipping arc lighting equipment to paying customers who were installing his lights indoors, as well as out. His lights were also garnering flattering attention from the press. The
New York Times
described a demonstration that Brush set up in a manufacturer’s space in his hometown of Cleveland providing “a pure white light” that was “unexpectedly soft and endurable to the eyes.” This latter description is not credible, however. For the demonstration, each of two floors had been provided with two three-thousand-candlepower lamps—the gas jets that they replaced were only ten to twenty candlepowers each—so the arc light’s sheer candlepower in a confined interior space made another description in the same article more accurate: “the effect was most brilliant.” Needless to say, the bulk of Brush’s sales would be for street lighting.

Incandescent lighting, the other possible form of electric light that Davy had shown to the Royal Society, offered a tantalizing prospect of light that truly would be “soft and endurable to the eyes.” Since Davy’s day, many fine minds had tried different approaches toward realizing the potential. Frederick de Moleyns, an Englishman, received a British patent for an incandescent bulb in 1841, six years before Edison was born. In addition, an American, J. W. Starr, received patents for two different kinds of incandescent bulbs in 1845 and traveled around England giving exhibitions. He died at the age of twenty-five.

An incandescent bulb required a filament that would glow brightly without melting. Starr had worked with the two materials that showed the most promise: carbon and platinum. Carbon did not melt at high temperatures, but it burned up too easily. Platinum had drawbacks, too: It was extremely expensive and it was difficult to bring to the point of incandescence without reaching the slightly higher temperature at which it melted. In 1878, at least twenty different individuals had tried to make a practical incandescent bulb, or were still engaged in the quest, and no one had succeeded in producing a bulb that was ready for service outside of a laboratory.

Edison had tinkered with both arc and incandescent lighting in the past, using batteries, and on his trip out west, his traveling companion, Professor Barker, had called his attention to the potential for unlimited electrical power from waterfalls, which could be applied to mining, a field in which Edison was interested. While traveling, Barker had also urged Edison to visit the workshop of William Wallace, in Ansonia, Connecticut, to see what Barker himself had seen: a dynamo that Wallace had designed with the inventor Moses Farmer and built at his own foundry, which powered an arc lighting system that Wallace had set up. Barker offered to make the arrangements for a visit to Connecticut, and two weeks after returning home, Edison made the trip.

Edison was accompanied by Barker; another professor, Charles Chandler, of Columbia University; and Edison’s chief assistant, Charles Batchelor. The party included one more member: a reporter for the
New York Sun,
whose observant eye captured an Edison who moved separately from his companions, standing apart due to deafness and personality quirks. Barker and Chandler exchanged jokes that Edison could not hear. Occasionally, Batchelor would repeat a choice anecdote in Edison’s ear, and Edison would laugh appreciatively, and then quickly lapse into “deep meditation.” Edison also expressed a curiously ghoulish thought when Wallace showed the group his invention for use in mining that directed a stream of water with such force that it could tear flesh from the hand. “Barky,” Edison suddenly said to his friend, “if a person could cut a man’s throat with such a stream of water, I don’t believe a jury could be found that would convict him of murder.”

For Edison, the highlight of the visit was seeing the Wallace-Farmer dynamo in operation. The inventor fell in love.

Mr. Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it. Then power was applied…and eight electric lights were kept ablaze at one time, and each being equal to 4,000 candles…. This filled up Mr. Edison’s cup of joy. He ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations.

Everything that Edison said and did on the day of the visit to Ansonia convinced him that the electric light was easily attainable. This required a fertile imagination. What he had seen in Connecticut was a powerful electromagnetic generator, a form of power vastly superior to batteries. But it powered four-thousand-candlepower arc lights that lacked a filament—it did not suggest a way to find a durable filament suitable for a sixteen-candlepower incandescent lightbulb. Edison thought he saw the perfect opportunity: others had solved the problem of power, and he would add a solution for providing a reliable bulb, which he told the press soon after was “so simple that a bootblack might understand it.”

A simple solution should have presented no serious problems to the great inventor. Once uttered, however, the announcement of a solution could not be retracted, not when a celebrity has spoken. Edison was not necessarily more careless about making empty claims than his contemporary inventors in the electric light field; he simply was more exposed. Many ideas, until practically realized, will seem grandiose; but the inventor’s own interest in a given idea often disappears as quickly as the inspiration arrived. Out of public view, these brief enthusiasms cause no embarrassment.

Before Edison had made members of the press his personal friends, he was free to think aloud, try out an idea, and drop it. In 1871, he recorded his excitement about adapting a new electric motor “so as to obtain the resquisite [
sic
] strength and still be of extreme lightness—and combined with suitable air propelling apparatus wings parchoutte [
sic
] etc. so as to produce a flying machine of extreme lightness & tremendous power.” On the next page of the notebook, he had returned to the ongoing work of designing a new telegraphic printer.

By 1878, however, he was the Wizard of Menlo Park, the famous inventor of the phonograph, who had willingly given up the privacy that kept momentary enthusiasms out of public view. Before the invention of the phonograph, he had shown an underlying streak of vanity in his assiduous stockpiling of patents in his name. Now, he set a far more ambitious goal for himself, confiding that he “wished to produce something at least as good as the phonograph every year.” That the ambition was shared not with a friend but with a reporter is telling.

“Subdividing” light was how reducing the intensity of arc light was referred to. If Edison attained it in 1878, following the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the feat would double his fame and keep him on pace for achieving technological breakthroughs annually. True, the task would usurp the work of making the phonograph a practical appliance, but a past triumph held less interest. He leaped at the opportunity to move quickly on to another great invention. The electric light was a tantalizing object for another reason: Unlike the phonograph, which did not exist before Edison’s invention, the incandescent bulb had been pursued by many of the world’s best electrical engineers and resourceful inventors. When the self-trained Wizard stepped over the failures of others to enter what for him would be a new field, using technical knowledge that bore no relationship to the phonograph, the satisfaction was immense. “I don’t care so much about making my fortune,” Edison said in an interview, “as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”

So great was the anticipated satisfaction that Edison convinced himself that he had succeeded in the “subdivision of light” within a week. He had visited Connecticut on Sunday, 8 September 1878. On the following Saturday, Edison told the
New York Sun
that he had only needed “a few days” to learn how to apply electricity for indoor lighting. “I have it now!” he claimed, though he was unwilling to provide specifics, other than to say that “scientific men” had not thought to investigate his approach and “everybody will wonder why they have never thought of it, it is so simple.”

Edison had also somehow found time to conceive of a detailed vision of how he would first install his “light centers” in Lower Manhattan, connecting central power stations with individual businesses and houses by running insulated wires underground like gas pipes and converting the gas burners and chandeliers that were already in use into lightbulb receptacles. The same wires could also provide power for elevators, sewing machines, and stoves. Not as prescient were his cost estimates; he thought his electric lights would be one-tenth the cost of gas. Furthest off was his one-word prediction of when he would provide a public exhibition: “Soon.”

In his private correspondence, Edison spoke in the same giddy fashion, blurring the distinction between what he hoped for and what he had achieved. He wrote Theodore Puskas in Europe, “Have struck a bonanza in Electric Light.” Prospective investors quickly approached Edison, relying upon the successful entrepreneur’s past record to project new triumphs with still-to-be-proven technology. Several Western Union directors were keen to form a new company around Edison, and the company’s attorney, Grosvenor Lowrey, served first as intermediary, and then as Edison’s trusted adviser.

Lowrey quickly learned how difficult it was to persuade Edison to disrupt his routine at the laboratory, even for the purpose of gaining financing. When Edison missed a meeting that Lowrey had set up in New York City with interested investors, Edison’s secretary explained that Edison had worked all through the night and the morning, breaking off only at ten o’clock—and forgot the meeting. When Lowrey tried again to make arrangements, Edison wrote him, “If I come to New York I lose the day—time valuable on light please come out.”

What Edison did not explain to the investors knocking at his door was that he had run into some serious difficulties. The approach that he had initially proclaimed to be “so simple” was complex in the extreme: He was attempting to use platinum as the filament and was devising regulators to automatically break the circuit when the temperature edged too close to the melting point. This had been tried by many inventors before Edison, and he had discovered for himself how elusive was a design that actually worked. Drawing on his experience with multiplex telegraphic equipment, he came up with various complex combinations of electromagnets, switches, and levers to regulate the temperature of the filament, to no avail. He had not yet succeeded in building a single light whose platinum filament could remain intact for more than a few minutes. Eventually, Edison was forced to abandon altogether his attempt to regulate the temperature.