The Wizard of Menlo Park (2 page)

Reaching the top rank of skilled operators did not give Edison much satisfaction. He was increasingly devoting time to tinkering with telegraphic apparatus, looking for ways to gain speed, in sending and mechanically printing messages. He secured permission from office managers to use idle equipment and scavenge discards, and he used his wages to purchase the tools and equipment he could not beg or borrow.

When he landed in Boston in 1868 to work as a night-shift operator at the main Western Union office, he arrived hungry and penniless, and when he presented himself at the office upon arrival, he was, in the words of an operator who witnessed the scene, “the worst-looking specimen of humanity I ever saw.” He wore jeans that were six inches too short, a jacket that he had bought off the back of a railroad laborer on his trip across country, and a wide-brimmed hat with a tear on the side, through which his ear poked out. When he finished his trial test—easily—and reached the boardinghouse where he would stay with fellow operators he knew from earlier, the first question he had for them was this: Would their boss permit him to tinker during his free time? The answer was yes. Edison soon sought investors who would provide funds in exchange for half-interest in resulting patents. Three individuals quickly stepped forward to help him work on various projects, such as improved telegraph transmitters, a stock-price printer, a fire alarm that used telegraph technology, and an electric vote recorder for Congress and state legislatures.

All of this work was carried on by a twenty-one-year-old experimenting part-time. Edison filed patent applications as fast as the ideas arrived. The first application that was successful—the first of 1,093 U.S. patents he would accumulate—was for the legislative chambers’s vote recorder, which could shorten tabulation by hours. With buttons provided at each member’s desk, the chamber’s speaker could see twin dials displaying running totals for “aye” and “nay.” The deficiencies of the manual voting system seemed obvious to Edison, but not to his prospective customers. When Edison and his investor angel met with a politically savvy operator whose recommendation would be needed to secure a sale in the Capitol, the insider’s reaction to Edison’s invention was undisguised horror. The minority faction would not embrace an expedited voting process because it eliminated the opportunity to lobby for votes, nor would the majority want a change, either. The vote recorder was a bust, and the lesson Edison drew from the experience was that invention should not be pursued as an exercise in technical cleverness, but should be shaped by commercial needs.

The vote recorder had temporarily pulled Edison away from his core expertise, telegraphy, which was that day’s preeminent high-tech field. Traders in stocks and gold were keenly interested in whatever means provided them with faster communications that gave them a competitive edge. Anyone who helped them gain an edge was paid a premium, and a bright telegraphy expert like twenty-two-year-old Edison could make a nice living inventing and manufacturing improved equipment. Or so at least it seemed to him. After a year in Boston, Edison took the big step and quit his day job, which happened to be a night job, resigning his position at Western Union to try to make his living as a full-time inventor and manufacturer in the field of telegraphic equipment.

Judging by the accounts of his contemporaries, at the time he set off on his own in 1869 he was not just respected but also well liked, so much so that he could work harder than everyone else without antagonizing his peers. He was open to participating in long bull sessions at his boardinghouse and had opinions he did not keep to himself. A fellow boarder, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later described the clear division of labor in their long conversations. Edison did the talking, and he, the listening. Still, Edison remained wholly unpretentious and clubbable. He was also trusted, the person who on one occasion could collect contributions from more than fifty coworkers and friends to get a gift for a departing employee without anyone worrying that the funds would end up in his pocket. Trust was not unrelated to Edison’s temperance, a characteristic rare in that circle.

Edison was disinclined to drink with his fellows because it would pull him off track, interfering with the greater pleasures: tinkering, learning, problem solving. His outlook was secular and matter-of-fact. He once got in trouble when sacrilegiously transcribing “J.C.” whenever “Jesus Christ” came across the wire; he could not understand the fuss over his “J.C.” when “B.C.” for designating historical time was regarded as perfectly acceptable. His early career was fueled by something other than resentments, which he lacked. Whatever advantages in education or financial resources that other inventors enjoyed were of no interest to him. Nor did he regard his partial deafness as an impediment. He claimed that the deafness was actually an advantage, freeing him from time-wasting small talk and giving him undisturbed time to “think out my problems.” Late in life he would say that he was fortunate to have been spared “all the foolish conversation and other meaningless sounds that normal people hear.”

Immune to the clanging sounds of the city, Edison’s ears provided him with a soothing insulation, better suited to “the conditions of modern city life” than those of the average person’s. The insulation would also prove helpful when he became famous, partially protecting him from the unceasing demands from strangers for conversation and speeches.

Edison’s fame came suddenly, while he was still young. Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, he became the first hybrid celebrity-inventor. This book examines how he became one of the most famous people in the world, and once fame arrived, how he sought to use it for his own ends, with uneven success. He could act as master of his own image only sometimes. He did not understand the power of the press to shape the life story of the celebrity, to create (and destroy, should it wish to do so).

When he stood on the threshold of fame, he could not have predicted what would follow—and he did not shy away. He directed assistants to maintain newspaper clippings about him, a practice that he would maintain his entire life. The existence of those scrapbooks suggests that Edison gave up an appealing attribute of his young adulthood: his utter indifference to the expectations of others. After “Edison” became a household name, he would pretend that nothing had changed, that he was as indifferent as ever. But this stance is unconvincing. He did care, at least most of the time. When he tried to burnish his public image with exaggerated claims of progress in his laboratory, for example, he demonstrated a hunger for credit unknown in his earliest tinkering. The mature Edison, post-fame, is most appealing whenever he returned to acting spontaneously, without weighing what action would serve to enhance his public image.

One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame, and Stanley’s wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory. Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, “Mr. Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?”

“Napoléon’s,” replied Edison without hesitation.

“No, no,” Stanley said piously, “I should like to hear the voice of our Savior.”

“Well,” explained Edison, “you know, I like a hustler.”

CHAPTER ONE

ALMOST FAMOUS

1869–1877

H
AVING ONE’S OWN
shop, working on projects of one’s own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee.

Edison’s need for autonomy was primal and unvarying; it would determine the course of his career from beginning to end. Having no financial assets of his own, he was dependent upon partners who were willing to contribute capital. He had the good fortune to live within the American business ecosystem that valued technical talent and permitted him to attain equal-partner status with wealthy financiers solely on the basis of his wits. For a few restless years, until he would have the where-withal to shake free of partners, at least active ones who impinged upon his day-to-day activities, Edison hopped from one business venture and short-lived partnership to another, moving from Boston to New York City, then to a succession of cities in New Jersey, ending up in Newark.

Sometimes, the partners remained anonymous (Newark Telegraph Works; American Telegraph Works; News Reporting Telegraph Company; Domestic Telegraph Company). Other times, Edison shared the marquee. The order of names suggests that Edison’s importance was progressively recognized, as he moved from the back (Pope, Edison & Company) to the front (Edison and Unger; Edison and Murray). But it would be wrong to infer a hunger on his part for wide public recognition. Edison’s reputation grew within the insular circle of telegraph equipment customers, but neither they nor he thought anyone who dwelled within this tiny world would be a subject of interest to a wider one.

All of Edison’s first ventures were dependent upon securing contracts that funded product development and procured small lots of completed telegraph instruments. Financial prospects for Edison’s partnerships brightened and darkened and brightened again month to month, wholly typical of small firms with a highly specialized product and restricted customer base. On the eve of founding the American Telegraph Works in 1870, Edison wrote his parents in Port Huron in ebullient spirits. He reported that his shop had 18 employees and a new shop that he was starting (no mention of his partner) would employ 150. He joked he had become a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.” The next year, however, meeting the weekly payroll of $578 was so difficult that Edison wrote one of his backers in a foul state of mind, hinting that he was on the verge of being “completely broken down in health & mind.” He underlined the following for emphasis: “
You Cannot expect a man to invent & work night and day, and then be worried to a point of exasperation about how to obtain money to pay bills.
”

Notwithstanding such occasional moments of terror—and the fact that his hair turned white, which he attributed to stress—Edison was succeeding, building several businesses whose balance sheets reflected modest, but real, gains. When he and partner William Unger took stock of their shop at the beginning of 1872, three years after Edison decided to try his luck as an entrepreneur, his half share in the business was valued at about $11,438. When R. G. Dun & Company prepared a credit report about the firm, whose business was categorized as “Telegraph Fixtures,” Unger was the principal who handled the finances and Edison was “an ingenious Mechanic & inventor.” Not enough was known about the firm to warrant a positive credit recommendation, but the available evidence suggested to the outside investigators that the firm’s “transactions indicate a large business.”

The News Reporting Telegraph Company, another Edison coventure with Unger, was brilliant in its conception, but 1871 may have been about a hundred years ahead of the most propitious time for launch. The company was conceived with the same insight that would give birth to Bloomberg News: businesspeople, unlike general readers, are able to convert news into immediate financial gain for themselves, and for that reason can be persuaded to pay for access to a news pipeline dedicated to their interests. The News Reporting Telegraph Company offered subscribers a private telegraph line and alphabetic printer that delivered news “hours before such news is published in the papers.”

When twenty-four-year-old Edison and his partner opened for business in the fall of 1871, they hired sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell, the daughter of a lawyer and sometime inventor, as one of several female employees. The surviving records do not make clear whether the company ever secured even a single client, but before it closed, Miss Stillwell and her employer had an encounter that was described in a biographical sketch,
Edison and His Inventions,
published a few years later.

Among the young women whom he employed to manipulate these machines, with a view to testing their capacity for speed, was a rather demure young person who attended to her work and never raised her eyes to the incipient genius. One day Edison stood observing her as she drove down one key after another with her plump fingers, until, growing nervous under his prolonged stare, she dropped her hands idly in her lap, and looked up helplessly into his face. A genial smile overspread Edison’s face, and he presently inquired rather abruptly:

“What do you think of me, little girl? Do you like me?”

“Why, Mr. Edison, you frighten me. I—that is—I———”

“Don’t be in any hurry about telling me. It doesn’t matter much, unless you would like to marry me.”

The young woman was disposed to laugh, but Edison went on: “Oh, I mean it. Don’t be in a rush, though. Think it over; talk to your mother about it, and let me know soon as convenient—Tuesday say. How will Tuesday suit you, next week Tuesday, I mean?”

The language may strike modern ears as sinister—
What do you think of me, little girl?
—but its veracity is bolstered by a strikingly similar account in the
Christian Herald & Signs of Our Times
. Even the author of the chronicle in the
Christian Herald
felt compelled to comment on Edison’s “off-hand business-like” manner of courtship.

Another story was told of how a telegrapher friend happened by Edison’s laboratory late one night and upon seeing a light on, climbed the stairs and found his friend half-dozing at his desk.

“Halloo Tom?” cried the visitor cheerily, “what are you doing here this late? Aren’t you going home?”

“What time is it?” inquired Edison, sleepily rubbing his eyes and stretching like a lion suddenly aroused.

“Midnight easy enough. Come along.”

“Is that so?” returned Edison in a dreamy sort of a way. “By George. I must go home, then. I was
married
to day.”

After the wedding and a weeklong honeymoon in Boston in December 1871, the newlyweds moved into a new home in Newark, which Edison outfitted with servants and $2,000 worth of furnishings, including a piano. The domestic sphere became the new Mrs. Edison’s bailiwick. According to one source, she “did not appreciate a genius for a husband” and attempted to make Edison into a well-dressed, sociable companion. The couple’s first child, Marion, born in 1873 (Edison gave her the telegraphic nickname of “Dot”) recalled a less critical, but not incompatible, impression. She remembered her mother giving parties that her father never attended, but supposedly was never pressed to do so.

When Edison was married, he was financially comfortable, able not only to purchase his first house but also sufficiently flush to make investments in his father’s and older brother’s businesses in Port Huron at the same time he had stakes in five separate shops scattered around Newark. Edison’s own businesses were dependent, however, on client firms in the telegraph business, whose fortunes were in turn dependent upon Wall Street firms. When the Panic of 1873 hit, the financial sector was hit hard, and so, too, were the businesses that served it. By 1874, Edison was in serious financial straits and had to sell his house at a loss and move his family into an apartment.

Edison did not close his laboratory, however. He could still grapple with the big problem of his professional field: how to push more messages simultaneously down a single telegraph line. The modern history of communications can be divided into two separate epochs: In the first, the race was to find a means to beat the speed of a horse, and this telegraphy achieved (technically speaking, this came even before telegraphy was electrified: “visual” telegraphy using manned signal towers were built in the 1790s in France). As Marshall McLuhan observed, the telegram was the first message to outrun the messenger. In the second epoch, from the time of early telegraphy to the present-day Internet, the race has involved sending as many messages as possible from point A to point B down a single conduit.

In the first decades of telegraphy, the very idea that more than one message could be sent at a time was incomprehensible to most. Edison had already devised a way to send two messages simultaneously in opposite directions—what would be called duplex telegraphy—but he was both too late (someone else had nabbed the first patent and placed the first working system in the field) and too early (a supervisor had lost patience with Edison and fired him because “any damned fool ought to know that a wire can’t be worked both ways at the same time”). Edison set to work on a quadruplex system—two messages sent simultaneously from one direction, and two more from the other. Succeeding, a feat involving complex electromechanical devices, he solidified his reputation in the field of telegraph equipment and pushed the limits of that particular line of multiplexing technology about as far as possible. (He later tried, but failed, to design a similar sextuplex system.)

Edison only had experience selling telegraph equipment, batteries, supplies, and related equipment in the business-to-business trade. A mass market for consumer goods, with the potential of far greater sales, also existed, if he could only come up with a suitable product. In May 1874, he and his partner, Joseph Murray, introduced the Inductorium, battery-powered induction coils for inducing electric shocks. Advertisements claimed that the device “should be in every family as a specific cure for rheumatism, and as an inexhaustible fount of amusement.” It sold well enough that the price was raised 33 percent after its introduction and it would eventually be advertised in more than three hundred newspapers. It was sufficiently successful to provide its inventor with the feeling that marketing to the masses was not particularly difficult. Invent it, and they will come.

Edison had not started out with grand ambition, but his appetite for business success was whetted. The quadruplex seemed destined for great success, though who would reap the profits would be complicated by protracted legal disputes that bogged down in the courts and would spill into Congress. The quadruplex greatly increased the carrying capacity of the existing telegraph network, but it did not change the labor-intensive process of translating a message into Morse code, then tapping, receiving, and retranslating back into ordinary language. A system to automate telegraphy would provide a fundamental advance, and this, too, Edison worked on.

The equipment that he invented to create an end-to-end system of telegraphic automation used a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter that composed messages on a long strip of paper, making small and large perforations that corresponded to Morse code. Once complete, the tape would be run across a drum that could send as many as a thousand words a minute. At the receiving end, a roll of chemically treated paper was drawn beneath a row of four styluses, each of which could be turned on and off rapidly dozens of times a second, forming roman letters that anticipated the dot-matrix computer printer of the twentieth century. The system did involve an extra step of preparing the perforated tape and was best suited for long messages such as news stories that had to be sent to many different locations. But Edison’s automatic telegraphy not only dramatically increased the carrying capacity of the telegraph network, it also eliminated the need for skilled operators. Daniel Craig, a financial backer of Edison’s, wrote him, “You captivate my whole heart when you speak of making machines which will require ‘No Intelligence.’ That’s the thing for Telegraphers.”

The next month, Craig wrote him, “If you should tell me you could
make babies by machinery,
I shouldn’t doubt it.” Automated baby production, however, was not on Edison’s list of prospective projects in 1875 when he broke off from Murray. Edison wanted to leave manufacturing and pursue invention full-time—and without the encumbrance of a partner. He did not move far, establishing a laboratory for invention on a different floor in the same building in Newark.

Using his experience developing the machinery to perforate the paper tapes used for transmitting messages automatically, he came up with a handheld, battery-powered electric pen. This was Edison’s first significant venture outside of the telegraphic field and would be the direct antecedent to the mimeograph machine: The pen had a sharp needle that moved up and down rapidly, creating a stencil master that could be used to run off hundreds of copies. Edison was sanguine about its commercial prospects. “There is more money in this than telegraphy,” he wrote a colleague in September 1875.