The Wizard of Menlo Park (25 page)

Mourners lined up outside the West Orange laboratory to view Edison’s bier.

When the electrodes had been attached and preparations were complete, the warden said, “Good-bye, William.” This was the signal for the assistant to throw the lever. When the circuit closed, Kemmler’s body convulsed and then froze as rigidly as if bronzed. After seventeen seconds, the presiding doctor declared Kemmler dead, the warden signaled for the power to be cut, and the seated witnesses stood up, exhaling with relief that the ordeal was apparently over.

“Great God! He is alive!” someone cried. “Turn on the current,” implored another. The warden, who had been detaching the electrode on Kemmler’s head, stopped momentarily, then hastily reattached it. Everyone could see that Kemmler’s chest was rising and falling. The doctor told the warden to switch the current back on. The signal was given and the lever was thrown again. The witnesses were so aghast, the sight of blood drops that appeared on Kemmler’s forehead so horrifying, the stench of singed hair so strong, that no one present could later say with certainty how long the second attempt at execution lasted. After this indeterminable period, the doctor again signaled for the current to be shut off, and the witnesses stumbled out, all but a few retching.

One of the first individuals to leave the prison was the electrician who had set up the apparatus. He went immediately to the telegraph office and sent a message to Westinghouse: “Execution was an awful botch. Kemmler was literally roasted to death.”

“Far Worse Than Hanging” read the headline in the
New York Times,
which characterized Kemmler’s execution as nothing less than “a disgrace to civilization.” When asked for his reaction, George Westinghouse drily remarked, “They could have done better with an axe.” The public could place the blame where it belonged, he said, and “it will not be on us.”

Westinghouse’s prediction proved accurate: Blame did not attach to his company. Nor did blame attach to the concept of an electric chair, only on those who had handled the arrangements and done the testing. After the U. S. Supreme Court refused an appeal of another person, Shibuya Jugiro, convicted of murder and headed for death by electrocution, the electric chair got another chance. Shibuya was one of four who died one morning in 1891 at Sing Sing. By the end of the century, more than fifty had died in the chair. More than four thousand followed in the twentieth century, before lethal injection became an alternative to the chair, if not its replacement, in all states but one (Nebraska). The shift away from electricity shows that a century of experimentation was insufficient to realize Edison’s claim, made before the first execution, that electric current was sufficient to kill the condemned person painlessly “in the ten-thousandth part of a second.”

Unaffected by this experimental work that state prisons undertook in the early 1890s involving human subjects and lethal (or not-quite-lethal) electricity, the adoption of alternating current in the wider society accelerated and the future for direct current dimmed. Edison General Electric was the sales leader among the three largest power-and-light concerns, but its costs were much higher, and its strategic positioning and growth prospects the weakest. It was up against competitors that played by their own rules (historian Forrest McDonald describes Thomson-Houston’s tactics pertaining to intellectual property as “scarcely distinguishable from theft”). Samuel Insull appreciated the necessity of merging with Thomson-Houston, even if Edison still did not. While Insull carried out negotiations with the prospective merger partner, and at the same time tried to coax Edison to acquiesce, he found himself politically isolated at Edison General Electric. He was only thirty-two and had not yet mastered the more subtle techniques of persuasion; by his own admission in his memoirs, he had made “a good many enemies.” For a few weeks, Edison himself was “prejudiced” against him and the merger, but Edison came around and the two men repaired their relationship.

In early 1892, the deal was done: Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston merged as nominal equals. The organization chart, however, reflected a different understanding among the principals. Thomson-Houston’s chief executive, Charles Coffin, became the new head and other Thomson-Houston executives filled out the other positions. Insull was the only manager from the Edison side invited to stay, which he did only briefly. From the outside, it appeared that Thomas Edison and his coterie had arranged the combination from a position of abject surrender. Edison did not want this to be the impression left in the public mind, however. When the press asked him about the announcement, he said he had been one of the first to urge the merger. This was not close to the truth, and is especially amusing when placed in juxtaposition to Alfred Tate’s account of the moment when Tate, hearing news of the merger first, had been the one to convey the news to Edison.

I always have regretted the abruptness with which I broke the news to Edison but I am not sure that a milder manner and less precipitate delivery would have cushioned the shock. I never before had seen him change color. His complexion naturally was pale, a clear healthy paleness, but following my announcement it turned as white as his collar.

“Send for Insull,” was all he said as he left me standing in his library.

Having collected himself before meeting with the reporters, Edison could say with sincerity that he was too busy to “waste my time” on the electric light. For the past three years, since he first realized that his direct-current system would ultimately be driven to the margins by alternating current, he had been carting his affections elsewhere. The occasion of the merger did shake him into a rare disclosure of personal shortcoming: He allowed that “I am not business man enough to spend time” in the power-and-light business.

Edison found himself staring from the outside looking in, as others who had the business acumen to extend electric light with newer technology, unconstrained by the orthodoxies written by a direct-current zealot, capitalized on the opportunity. In addition, Edison lost the services of Insull, who realized he had to leave Edison in order to work unfettered as a chief executive.

At the time of the 1892 merger, Edison’s name disappeared when the new organization, the General Electric Company, was christened. Whether this was by his own choice is not clear. Years later, Insull said that Edison refused to permit the Edison name to be associated with the new entity. It is not difficult to picture Edison acting spitefully, angry that his namesake company could no longer remain independent. When Edison’s own children grew to be adults, however, they told a very different story, of his lifelong disappointment that “Edison” had been stripped from the new company’s name against his wishes. Both versions can be accommodated: Perhaps Edison refused to allow the use of his name in 1892, then, after the company narrowly escaped bankruptcy in the Panic of 1893 and grew into a far larger business, and the passage of years tempered his earlier ire, he came to feel regret about his decision—and came to think of it not as his decision but that of an ungrateful Wall Street. By that time, he had forgotten that he had become so discouraged about the commercial prospects for his electric light, outshone by the new entrants to the business, that he had given up on it.

CHAPTER NINE

FUN

H
OPPING INTO A
new field and betting almost everything he owned, Thomas Edison set off in a quest to make a name for himself—in mining. The effort cost him five years of living apart from his family and ended without success. But he enjoyed the experience immensely and walked away without regrets. It was the one time in the fifty years he lived as a public figure when he ignored what was expected of him. It was also the one time when the man who seemed cold at his core recorded in letters his affectionate feelings for his wife.

Edison’s adventure in mining began when he anticipated losing the battle of the currents. He was weighed down with self-doubt, telling an assistant that he had come to the realization that others on his staff knew more about electricity than he did. He went even further, morosely saying that he had never really known anything. But that did not matter because “I’m going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with anything electrical.”

He had long been excited by the idea that electrically charged magnets could be used to process iron ore, separating the iron from other material. In Menlo Park, more than ten years earlier, a laboratory notebook recorded experiments he had personally conducted to test the concept. Other inventors had also worked on “magnetic concentration,” as this process was called. Edison had never had the chance to devote sustained attention to it, however, and the idea had been stuck into a cubbyhole. Now he was ready to pull it out and put it into practice. New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania had considerable quantities of low-grade iron ore, but it was so costly to refine by conventional means that it drew few or no buyers. Edison was convinced that he would be able to build a system of magnetic concentration that would make easily mined, low-grade ore economically competitive with hard-to-extract, high-grade ore found elsewhere. In 1889, when he cashed out his interest in the newly formed Edison General Electric, he had the financial means to put his ideas to a real-world test. This money did not stay in his pockets for long. He bought the Ogden iron mine in rural northern New Jersey, about two miles south of Ogdensburg, and began to erect a concentrating works of his own design to process ore.

The Edison system was designed to handle the iron-laden rock in as large a chunk as the largest steam shovel of the day could bite off. Rather than blowing it up using explosives, it would be sent to the works to be crushed by rollers, breaking the rock into particles small enough to be separated by magnets. In making his plans, Edison concatenated three seemingly obvious insights that no one else had thought to put together. First, it was cheaper to break up ore using the energy provided by coal, which cost $3 a ton, rather than dynamite, at $100 a ton. Second, a five-ton chunk of rock could be pulverized into powder if the crushing rollers were built sufficiently large. Third, the rollers could do their work at low operational cost, relying on centrifugal force after steam power got them spinning at high speed. The scale of everything was outsized.

Edison happily embraced a thousand and one problems encountered in implementation. The rollers, for example, did not actually crush the rock as much as knock it into smithereens with knobs that were attached to chilled iron plates bolted to the curved surfaces. The rock turned out to be stubborn; its submission to the process required trial and error. The technical issues were primarily mechanical in nature; Edison had no claim to special expertise or advantages in this area, but he relished this opportunity to play in a field entirely new to him.

When he bought the Ogden property in 1889 and assigned staff to begin building the new concentrating works, he had not anticipated that he would move to the mine site himself. He had a new wife, a new estate, and a new laboratory in Orange that placed at his disposal everything he had ever desired. He had a newborn child, Madeleine, and another, Charles, would be born the next year, in 1890. Yet in 1891, when he had to accept the loss of control of his power-and-light businesses, Edison could not enjoy his blessings at home and at the laboratory. He had resolved to make his mark in mining and prepared himself to invest whatever it would take, and spend as much time away from his family as required. This was the venture that he was determined to make “so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before.”

It is hard to imagine a more stark contrast between the otherworldly luxury of the Glenmont estate and the frontier-town conditions at the Ogden site. At the mine, there was no town, so Edison and his lieutenants crowded into an old farmhouse, sardonically referred to as “the White House.” There were no amenities, no amusements, just work. In the winter, the room temperature fell below freezing; washing up in the morning required first melting the ice that had formed in the pitcher on the nightstand. In the summer, temperatures were hotter “than the seventh section of hades,” reported Edison, who added that the humidity was “so thick that some of the fish from the Hopewell pond swam out into the air.” Ambient dust made life miserable, to the point that Edison had difficulty retaining workers until he put a crew of seventeen to work to control the problem. Convincing Mina to move up to the mine, along with the children and the servants, was out of the question. So Edison took up a routine of taking the train up early Monday morning, then returning home on the last train Saturday night. One year turned into two, and still the work was unfinished. It lasted five years.

The bare facts suggest that Edison was doing his best to avoid his second wife and young children, that this was a repeat of his earlier flight to the western states in the summer of 1878, only in extreme form. The reality was something different. For most of his life, Edison did not record his feelings about personal matters, but the circumstances he found himself in during the Ogden years were an exception. He was at the mine, Mina was at home in Glenmont, and they lived at a time when the personal letter had yet to be displaced by the phone call. So the normally taciturn Edison, who usually gave nothing away about his innermost thoughts, wrote daily letters to Mina, whom he addressed by the pet name “Billy.” They are attentive, funny, and loving—unabashedly so (“Darling Sweetest Loveliest Cutest…”). Upon occasion, they are quite explicit. “Last night I felt blue without you,” he wrote Mina in 1895. “With a kiss like the swish of a 13 inch cannon projectile I remain as always your lover.”

Edison’s letters to Mina reveal an aspect of his personality that would not otherwise have been visible: his personal philosophy concerning mental well-being. To Edison, unhappiness could be vanquished by sheer force of will. In August 1895, when Mina and the children were at Chautauqua, and he was at Ogden, he responded to Mina’s expression of the “blues” with empathy, and tried as many therapeutic approaches as his philosophy permitted. He humored her with stories about the dust (“some smart weed seeds have commenced to sprout out of the seams of my coat”). He teased her that she was blue because of her disappointment in him. He praised her intelligence (“There can’t [be] 1 woman in 20,000 that is really as smart as yourself”). He lectured her on the medical basis of depression (“blues are from disordered liver”). He teased her in a way that would make a mental-health professional today cringe (referring to her in a babyish third-person voice: “I wonder if Billy Edison truly loves me or does she just say so at times to keep me deceived. If she really loved, why should she get the blues”). He advised her to stay away from novels, take up newspaper reading, and “have all the fun you can.”

He himself looked for fun in only one place—at work. He enjoyed himself immensely at the mine, even when his colleagues’ spirits dragged as the years passed, the money disappeared, and customers for what turned out to be expensively priced briquettes of processed iron ore failed to materialize. His chief assistant, Walter Mallory, was “the most dejected man you ever saw,” Edison wrote Mina, but “your lover [is] as bright and cheerful as a bumble bee in flower time.”

Edison took great pleasure in the novelty of the technical challenges and in the opportunity to redeem his reputation as a savvy businessperson, even though redemption never came. The low-grade iron ore in New Jersey did not have a competitive chance once huge reserves of high-grade ore were discovered in the Mesabi Range of northeastern Minnesota; the Mesabi ore was easily mined near the surface and close to economical shipping on Lake Superior. Well after the first Mesabi mine opened in 1890, Edison remained pitiably hopeful about his Ogden mine, even when objective facts made the future of its business appear bleak to anyone else. In 1897, when failure was inevitable, he refused to acknowledge the facts. Edison wrote a colleague, “My Wall Street friends think I cannot make another success, and that I am a back number, hence I cannot raise even $10,000 from them, but I am going to show them that they are very much mistaken. I am full of vinegar yet.”

Edison was not so emotionally invested, however, that he sold all of his other assets in order to keep the business alive. Glenmont and his laboratory remained untouched, and he was proud that the mine enjoyed a top credit rating because he would not permit it to take on a penny of debt, even when it had exhausted his ready cash and the last of the General Electric shares that he had held. He had to close the mine repeatedly, then reopen when money from an unrelated line of business came in, only to exhaust the new funds. The enterprise did not turn out to be a complete waste: The rollers that were developed at the mine were moved and adapted for use in a new line of business—producing cement. For a while it would become a viable business, which Mallory headed, but not an innovation in the same class as electric light.

In 1902, at a time when General Electric shares were trading at a historic high and well after Edison had sold his, Mallory happened to be traveling with him and saw in the newspaper the eye-popping closing price. Edison asked what his stake would have been worth had he held on to it. Mallory quickly worked out the number: over $4 million. Hearing this, Edison remained silent, keeping a serious expression for about fifteen seconds. Then his face lit up and he said, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a good time spending it.”

The story would be retold by Edison’s hagiographers many times. The evidence suggests that Edison did have a jolly time, which, to him, was well worth the $4 million. He did not include in the calculations, however, the opportunity that he lost to profit from his own inventions, beginning with the phonograph that would bring into being the modern entertainment industry. It would be others who began to make money offering to the public recorded entertainment. Edison, distracted in the pursuit of his own fancies, was slow to observe the limitless business opportunities made possible by the commercialization of fun.

Edison could not take the pulse of a public from which he was isolated. First, cloistered within Glenmont and his new lab in Orange, and then even more isolated in unpopulated mining country, Edison was not well situated to listen to a mass consumer market clamoring for the opportunity to spend money on popular music. Work was the only form of fun he was personally familiar with; it took him a long time to even consider marketing the phonograph as a device for entertainment. As late as 1892, he told Alfred Tate, “I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes.” Tate explained in his memoirs that Edison was “unable to visualize the potentialities of the amusement field.” By the next year, Edison had begun to relent, but only a tiny bit. He was able to picture the phonograph being marketed to the individual household for the “best in Oratory and Music.”

The masses did not want to turn their parlors into a music appreciation class—they had neither the parlors nor phonographs, which were still expensive, nor hunger for classical music. But entrepreneurs materialized to give the people what they wished to hear. They added a gizmo to the Edison phonograph and came up with the “nickel-in-the-slot” machine, the earliest coin-operated jukebox. It only played a single selection, but many machines could be placed in a saloon, hotel lobby, or amusement hall. Each was equipped with rubber listening tubes that were placed in the ears of the paying patron, which permitted an individual to enjoy music in public space without disturbing others. Public health authorities worried, however, that the listening tubes were “disease breeders”; the park commissioners in Philadelphia ordered the machines removed from park grounds for this reason.

Phonograph dealers who invested in the machines discovered that the nickels added up to considerable profits, even after they turned over 50 percent of revenues to the patent holder, the Automatic Phonograph Exhibition Company. A San Francisco distributor said in 1890 that he collected more than $4,000 in about six months. That money was not earned from the “best in Oratory and Music.” The impresarios of the nickel-in-the-slot machine provided whatever was not classical: popular music supplemented with programs of prurient storytelling that brought occasional censorship.