The Wizard of Menlo Park (13 page)

In the laboratory itself, the lights were arranged on a table to resemble a miniature layout of Menlo Park, and Edison had assigned assistants on all four sides to look out for sabotage. Their vigilance was needed that day, as one man was caught applying a jumper wire that ran under his clothes and down both sleeves, deliberately short-circuiting four of the lights. He turned out to be an electrician employed by the Baltimore Gas Company and was marched out, with language ringing in his ears “that made the recording angels jump for their typewriters,” Edison later recalled.

Early in the evening of New Year’s Day, as order in the laboratory gave way to chaos, Edison sought refuge in his private office. But distinguished visitors would show up, insisting that they see the great man himself, and he would have to appear, answer the same questions that he had already addressed countless times before. Seeing this reluctant showman forced to work the crowd, the correspondent for the
New York Tribune
described Edison with tenderness: “Edison is one of the most retiring of men, detesting all pomp and show, resembling the ladies in his desire to get away into the forests of solitude.” The next day, on 2 January, Edison ordered that the lab be closed to the general public so work could resume.

The public-relations benefits from the Menlo Park demonstration proved short lived. Without the rollout of commercial service in New York or another city, the show ended without disarming the skeptics who said that Edison’s lighting system had yet to be tested outside of his cozy laboratory and own home. An English critic described Edison’s many announcements with acidic sarcasm:

What a happy man Mr. Edison must be! Three times within the short space of 18 months he has had the glory of finally and triumphantly solving a problem of world-wide interest…. If he continues to observe the same strict economy of practical results which has hitherto characterized his efforts in electric lighting, there is no reason why he should not for the next 20 years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty.

The price of Edison Electric Light Company stock quickly fell from $4,000 a share to $500.

Edison was reminded daily that as the world-famous inventor, he had to defend himself daily against attacks that his counterparts who labored in obscurity could never imagine. This was especially the case when the commercial potential of the invention was clearly visible to all. The phonograph had not caused him similar tribulation. Two years after its public debut, it was not regarded as a potentially lucrative invention, even by its progenitor. At this moment Edison had been observed to treat the phonograph “with the same degree of interest as a boarding school miss would allude to a discarded doll,” in the view of the
Philadelphia Record.
The latest attempt by a licensee to make a business out of it was in the form of a toy, but those machines were so flawed that no distributor would accept them. Edward Johnson sighed: “The trouble with them is, not one person out of 50 has mechanical skill enough to adjust them as per instructions.” Edison took what solace he could in the observation that at least no one was bothering him with claims of inventing the phonograph twenty-five years previously. But the moment an inventor “has perfected something of commercial value, something that will conflict with the interests of long-established monopolies,” he told an interviewer, “then there is a general rush to endeavor to pull him down.”

Closing the laboratory to the general public was one way to protect himself and the electric light from industrial spies. For those who had an academic or business interest in the experimental work and made arrangements in advance, he remained welcoming—too much so. A professional snoop who purported to be interested in licensing Edison’s technology for manufacturing purposes quickly won Edison’s confidence and was provided a tour of all of the facilities with Charles Batchelor as his guide. The visitor published a pamphlet based on the tour, intending to discredit Edison, but he had seen nothing that was serviceable for this purpose. Instead, he saw that the incandescent lights worked well. The worst he could say about them was that each light could be turned only on or off; an intermediate level of brightness could not be set. He was told that some of the bulbs burned continuously for eight hundred hours, but that they would be tested for eight more months before the system would be introduced for public use.

The company directors were willing, however, to put the electric light to an immediate test in the real world for Henry Villard, one of the company’s investors, as long it was done out of public view, in case the test went awry. Among Villard’s other financial interests was the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, which had given John Roach, a leading shipbuilder, a commission to build a new 334-foot steamship, the
Columbia
. Impressed by the exhibition of the electric light in Menlo Park, Villard decided that to fulfill his wish that the
Columbia
be outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, it should have electric lights, too. Over Roach’s objections that the light should be proven on land before tried on the sea, Villard gave Edison a contract for the work. Power for the lights would be supplied by the ship’s steam plant. Francis Upton was assigned the task of hand-carrying to the shipyard a basket with a delicate cargo—the lightbulbs, wrapped in cotton batting—while dodging traffic on the city streets, as no one wanted to test whether the bulbs would survive a crosstown trip on a wagon.

The
Columbia
sailed on its maiden voyage in May 1880, carrying locomotives and railcars around Cape Horn and then up to Portland. The electric lights did well on their first practical test outside of Menlo Park, but the designers thought it best to have a professional control the lights in the individual cabins. The ship’s steward had to be called to unlock a box outside each stateroom and throw the switch whenever a passenger wanted a light turned on and off.

In reality, Edison’s electric light had yet to be tested in a setting that resembled its intended destination, in a commercial urban district. But in the imagination of his associates, it shone brightly, at least when described to lovers. Grosvenor Lowrey, the Edison Electric Light Company’s attorney, can be forgiven for concocting mumbo jumbo for impressing his fiancée: “Be thou to me, my love, a low resistance lamp! Be a voltaic arc! & not a nasty
high
resistance continuous conductor.” Lowrey also told his beloved that spending time with Edison had improved Lowrey’s spirits. “Perhaps I’d better marry him, since he cures me,” he teased her.

When Lowrey showed Edison a miniature photograph of her, Edison offered a compliment about her looks, but then asked him, “Why is it, Lowrey, that so few women
have brains
?
Men
of brains it is easy to find, but
women
—” Edison’s own wife was almost completely invisible in contemporaneous accounts of his life written by his closest associates. When she appears, it is as a foil for a tale of how Edison could not abide her concern for middle-class appearances and propriety. A man who did odd jobs around the Menlo Park lab, for example, tells a story of how Mrs. Edison managed to get Mr. Edison home, where she “dolled him up in a fifty-dollar suit.” Edison stayed put for a short while “looking pretty,” then fled for the lab. In the tale, Edison was found at the lab two weeks later, still wearing the same suit, having not been home the whole while. The suit, covered in grease and dirt, was ruined, a fact that went unnoticed by its wearer.

Edison knew how to mimic the sounds of a pragmatic businessperson, but the decisions he made then, as well as throughout the remainder of his life, favored new projects over near-term payoff of old ones. After countless performances of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the novelty of the phonograph had worn off, and he had failed to sustain his interest long enough to see the machine’s development through to commercial introduction of a model for the mass market. Still, as he and his laboratory staff brought the electric light into viable form, it is striking how Edison’s interest waned here, too. Despite his avowed near-term pragmatism, Edison got excited about another idea of his: electric trains.

The idea originated in his interest in mining, and when in the spring of 1880 he first sketched out the electric train that he had in mind, it was capable of astounding feats. He thought electrical power could give a train’s wheels the ability to grip the rails as if clamped upon them, enabling the train to run up and down steep mountains. There would be no need to drill tunnels again, he said in an interview published in the
Denver Tribune.
No need for human engineers or brakemen, either. Freight trains could be controlled by telegraph.

This project hardly offered prospects of meeting the criterion he had vowed to use, that is, likely to “pay in the near future.” But there was another aspect that made it attractive: It would make a terrific show for the public. In April 1880, Edison ordered workers to lay down a half mile of track in Menlo Park for his electric railroad prototype, equipped with a modified dynamo as its motor, with current supplied by the rails. It was the picture of a freckle-faced boy, working under a hot summer sun, that left an indelible picture in the mind of David Trumball Marshall, a laboratory associate, who, many years later, wrote a memoir about his experiences. The unidentified boy had to dip each railroad tie into hot, liquefied asphalt, to render it nonconducting were it to get wet. Day after day, the work went on with melancholy repetition. “It takes brains and brawns to perfect inventions,” Marshall observed, and it was that boy who “furnished some of the brawn.”

Upon completion, the track was extended across the hilly countryside, and a ride on the little railroad became the new novelty for visitors. Edison took strange enjoyment in his own ability to remain unaffected by conditions that made others around him physically queasy. In previous summers, when he had taken his laboratory assistants fishing on the banks of the Atlantic, and rough seas had driven the others to the bottom of the boat, immobilized with seasickness, Edison thought it amusing to swing a piece of rancid pork across the noses of his suffering men. “The smell was terrific,” said one account, “and the effect added to the hilarity of the excursion.”

Offering rides on the train offered opportunities for more “hilarity.” In early June, Lowrey wrote his fiancée with an account of his ride at forty miles an hour through sharp curves, protesting that the speed was not safe, while Edison brushed his concerns aside. Then the train jumped the tracks, throwing the temporary engineer from the track, face down in the dirt, “and another man in a comical somersault through some underbrush.” Edison hopped off, but instead of rushing to the aid of the two, he was described as “jumping & laughing & declaring it a most beautiful accident.” The foreign-born engineer managed to stand up, though clearly shaken up, and with face bleeding, mimicked Edison’s earlier reassurances to everyone: “Oh, yes,
pair-feckly
safe!”

Work proceeded on the electric light at the same time. In July, the laboratory began experimenting with bamboo for use as a filament in place of cardboard. This created the need for “bamboo hunters” to search out the varieties with characteristics most suitable for the purpose. The first bamboo hunter dispatched was John Segredor, who was a laboratory staff member known for his fierce temper. His lab mates liked to provoke him just for their own entertainment. On one occasion, they were rewarded richly when Segredor told the group, “The next man [who provokes me], I will kill him.” The threat was received as entertainment and instantly forgotten. The next day, a colleague directed a sarcastic remark at Segredor as before, but this time, Segredor left without a word and was next seen marching back up the hill toward the lab with his gun (the building quickly emptied). This brought an end to the sarcasm. In late August, Edison sent Segredor first to Georgia and Florida to collect bamboo specimens, and then on to Cuba, turning botanical research into an adventure. For Segredor, the adventure did not last long. He arrived in Havana on a Tuesday; that Friday, he died of “the black vomit” (yellow fever). Edison placed the blame on the victim himself, writing a mutual friend that he had cautioned Segredor “about his diet and about drinking cold drinks but as you say he was very self-willed and would always do in these respects about as he pleased and this I doubt not caused his death.”

Edison decided against sending a replacement to Cuba, but sent another emissary, William Moore, to Japan and China, and an indefatigable traveler, John Branner, to Brazil. Traversing Brazil’s interior by canoe and foot, Branner collected many specimens during a two-thousand-mile journey, but none was the equal of a certain Japanese variety that Moore had found. Moore arranged to have one Japanese farmer supply all of the bamboo that Edison would ever need, an arrangement that must have been satisfactory to all parties as it would last many years.

Edison designated Menlo Park itself as an outdoor annex for his work and prepared to expand the real-world demonstration of his bulbs by laying out a grid of wires through the fields, along imaginary roads, to support three hundred or four hundred streetlights. The work was well advanced, with more than five miles of wire placed underground, when Upton began testing the insulation and discovered that it was defective. Even at the time, there was considerable head-scratching among Edison’s colleagues about how Edison could have permitted the project to advance so far without anyone testing the circuits as work proceeded.

Perhaps the explanation is a simple one: The overly hasty rush was the consequence of Edison’s desire to retain the attention of the press so that his electric light would not be outshone by those of competitors. As the months passed, more disturbing news about the competition came in. In October, Edwin Fox, the reporter, wrote Edison from Manhattan that as he sat at his desk and looked out the window of his skyscraper office and peered into the window of the office in the next building, he saw about twenty individuals busily at work—making electric lightbulbs. Fox was certain that they were baldly infringing upon Edison’s patents.