The Wizard of Menlo Park (3 page)

Edison was content, however, to set up a separate company to handle the manufacturing and sales and other prosaic annoyances. It is likely that he, like his chief assistant, Charles Batchelor, envisaged no ongoing role other than receiving royalty checks. Batchelor, a British-born immigrant one year older than Edison, had come to the United States originally as a textile mechanic but had quickly acquired expertise in electrical engineering, too. He was smart, tireless, and modest to a fault in his personal ambitions. “We have now got the ‘Electric Pen’ fairly out on Royalty,” Batchelor wrote his father in England, “and in a very short time I shall have nothing whatever to do for it except receive my share of Royalty.” He also reminded his father that the last letter he had received had been misaddressed to Newark; Batchelor, Edison, and their families, along with Edison’s laboratory and its staff, had recently moved to a new location, Menlo Park, New Jersey.

The casual mention did not highlight the significance of this move, quite different from the many moves that had preceded it. This time, Edison moved out on his own, without a partner in tow, and settled in a place so empty of dwellings that it resembled open frontier (Batchelor reported that the “good shooting” available had to be balanced with the snake infestations). The move was made possible by the patronage of Jay Gould and his Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, which was keenly interested in Edison’s ongoing work on automatic telegraphy. Consulting contracts and purchase orders had brought prosperous times again to the Edison household. In January 1875, Gould paid Edison $13,500, and Western Union delivered $5,000, and it seemed as if the family would never have money problems again. Bills were paid off, relatives received cash gifts and loans for business ventures, and Mary Edison felt free to shop and entertain without worries. Edison had gone shopping himself, for a new site for a laboratory, and had settled on land in Menlo Park, about thirty miles from New York. He spent about $2,700 to build a new laboratory structure, and in the spring of 1876 moved into a nearby house with his family, which was newly expanded with the arrival of a second child, Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (nicknamed “Dash” to match three-year-old “Dot”).

A short train ride out from New York City, but half a world distant, Menlo Park was the site where a real estate developer’s ambitions had ended in bankruptcy. It consisted of about thirty large homes spread out on large lots, connected by a boardwalk and dirt roads. No town hall, school, or church. One saloon.

William Preece, a telegraph engineer for the British Post Office, happened to pay a visit to Edison’s new Menlo Park laboratory in May 1877 when the rest of the world knew nothing about Edison’s existence, nor Menlo Park’s. The town was too small to merit its own identifying sign at the train stop, and Preece almost missed it, hurriedly hopping off the train after it was in motion again. When he did so, he found himself at a desolate station in rural New Jersey. It was a blazing hot day and no porters were on hand.

Preece provides a unique account of one not-famous Englishman paying a call on a not-yet-famous American and fellow telegraphy expert. Before taking the train to Menlo Park, Preece had been most entertained in New York City by the nineteenth-century version of
The Fast and the Furious,
illegal street racing with lightly harnessed horses, roads lined with spectators, and frequent “collisions and rows” that brought unwanted attention from the police. In the little residential development of Menlo Park, however, such excitements were nowhere in evidence. Built up too recently to have the benefit of protective shade trees, the houses sat exposed to sunlight.

Starting from the Menlo Park station, Preece passed a substantial three-storied frame house, wide and shallow with cross-gables, that sat next to the tracks—this had been the sales office for the development and now was the Edison family’s house—and climbed up to the top of a hill, which offered a prospect from which one could glimpse the spire of Trinity Church in New York City. On the hilltop sat a long, two-storied plain white building variously described as “an elongated schoolhouse” or a “country shoe factory.” This was Edison’s laboratory. On the outside, the bucolic setting was not wholly intact. At the rear of the building was an old apple tree, around which were arranged discarded barrels, wheels, and machinery. The second story drew in twelve telegraph lines that came up from the station. This was not incidental; discovering improvements in telegraphy was the laboratory’s raison d’être and the primary interest of Preece.

The first floor of the laboratory was divided into a reception room, an office, a library, a machine shop, and a storehouse; the upper floor comprised one long room, filled with workbenches and machines, and lined with glass cases holding chemicals and sundry materials. A “spider web” of telegraph wires covered the ceiling of the laboratory’s main room, converging on a large battery placed in the center of the room. The twelve or so workers on hand were directed by a disheveled figure of medium height. He had grimy hands, wore a collarless shirt and a seedy black jacket, and his hair was uncombed. Most striking were eyes that impressed visitors as penetrating, and later inspired flights of poetical description by hagiographers (“the fire of genius shone in his dark deep gray eyes”). The man was only thirty years old, but he carried an aura of authority and a tendency toward curtness that suggested advanced years. Thomas Alva Edison was already “the Old Man” to his employees.

The Menlo Park lab had not yet attracted the attention of the general press, so Preece’s visit went unremarked. Nor did Edison record his impressions. The only notes are in Preece’s diary, which is full of praise for Edison, whom Preece described as an “ingenious electrician.” He goes on at great length about the train’s whistles (“the most horrid howls—more like an elephant’s trumpet than anything else”) but has nothing in particular to say about the apparatus upon which Edison was working. What is most remarkable is how unremarkable Preece found the inventive activity there.

The isolation of the Menlo Park setting infused the laboratory with a feeling of unbounded creative freedom. It encouraged an outlook that saw far, which also meant that little interest could be mustered for fixing problems with older products like the electric pen. Royalty checks for the pen were not adding up as Edison had expected because it had been sent into the field without anyone at the laboratory noticing that it was rather difficult to hold and use. It was likened by one unhappy customer to holding “‘the business end’ of a wasp on a sheet of paper and letting the insect sting holes into the sheet while you move him back and forth.” A sales manager reporting to Edison tried to strike an impossible balance of optimism and realism: “The thing is highly praised everywhere but it will be harder to sell than you anticipate.” The fault, Edison was told by another manager, was with the customers’ “prejudice and stupidity.” (The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.)

Despite the ideal conditions, big ideas did not materialize in Menlo Park. Instead, odds and ends were turned out and marketed by another company that Edison established for this purpose, the American Novelty Company. It sold duplicating ink, an electric drill, an electric engraving machine for jewelers, an electric sheep-shearing machine, and other oddments. At least it could be said that these used the laboratory’s expertise in electrical engineering, even if they comprised an incoherent line of offerings. Still other curiosities were added to the mix, such as Batchelor’s “Office Door Attachment,” an exceedingly low-tech sign to show the occupant’s presence or, if absent, time of return. An idea for a “Flying Bird,” capable of flying to an altitude of a thousand feet or higher, and to be used as either “a pleasing Scientific Toy” or perhaps for “carrying communications short distance,” was scribbled in a notebook, but never was worked up into a prototype. Having tried all sorts of products, and focusing on no single one, the American Novelty Company failed about eight months after it was incorporated.

Telegraphy trumped toys. Great sums of money would go to the inventor that solved the telegraph industry’s most pressing need: finding ways to pack more messages into a telegraph line. Acoustic telegraphy, also called harmonic telegraphy, opened up a new way to send more than one message at a time. This approach took advantage of the fact that a tuning fork will respond to the vibrations of another fork with identical characteristics and ignore others. By utilizing in a telegraph network many pairs of vibrating reeds that acted like tuning forks—one of each pair placed at the sending station, the other at the receiving station—each set could be operated as a separate channel of communication, unaffected by the others.

It was while Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant were experimenting with acoustic telegraphy that Bell accidentally, and famously, discovered that the instruments could convey any form of sound. The precise moment of discovery, in June 1875, did not involve speech in crystalline form. Bell, with ear pressed against a vibrating reed, could hear the faint blurry sound of Thomas Watson’s voice, but could not make out any words. This was sufficient to provide Bell with the insight that led to the telephone. (The more famous rendering—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”—came almost a year later, after Bell had filed the patent for the telephone and built a working model.)

Young Bell and Edison were the same age, each improving the major invention that the other had come up with first, Edison following Bell, then Bell following Edison. Edison, in fact, had been close to devising a working telephone himself. After Bell’s success, the next best thing for Edison was to come up with an indispensable improvement, the carbon transmitter that captured the human voice far better than Bell’s magnetic design. Edison also devised an entirely new kind of receiver based on his electromotograph, which involved a chalk cylinder, chemicals, friction controlled by varying current, and a hand crank; it would never prove to be a practical design for the ordinary speaking telephone, but it could reproduce music clearly and at an astounding volume. Initially, Bell and Edison were direct competitors in the brand-new telephone business, playing upon the public’s interest in musical performance to show off their wares by holding telephone “concerts” in exhibition halls.

Bell lacked the gifts of the born showman, however. In May 1877, he offered a concert-lecture to an audience of three hundred who had gathered at Chickering Hall in New York City for an evening heavy on lecture, light on concert. The
New York Times
described Bell’s presentation on “Sound and Electricity” to be “exhaustive”; the lecturer’s supplemental visual aids were panned as “complex and not very intelligible.” At last, the audience was treated to what we may guess they had been waiting for most eagerly, the novelty of hearing recognizable organ music, piped via telegraph connection, from a location miles away.

Edison was no showman, either, and, being partially deaf, hated speaking before a group. He could rely, however, upon an energetic promoter as his proxy: Edward Johnson, a former telegrapher himself (and former sales agent for the Inductorium). Johnson was technically knowledgeable, had his own ideas for invention, and possessed a gift for extolling the virtues of whatever was his preoccupation of the moment. (Johnson’s excitability, on occasion, led to misplaced enthusiasm, such as his eagerness in April 1876 to persuade Edison to lend his name to Johnson’s invention of an improved tobacco pipe that Johnson hoped to market as “Edison’s Perpetual Segar.”)

Edison, Batchelor, and Johnson oversaw preparations to launch their own concert tour of the musical telephone. About the time of Bell’s concert-lecture in New York City, Edison and his assistants were still working out the kinks while giving concerts in nearby Newark. Edison had yet to show the public a telephone that conveyed human conversation in addition to music, but he had local boosters. The
Woodbridge Independent
confided, “We should not be at all surprised if Edison taught this child of his inventive fancy to talk.” “Mr. Edison has been so often scoffed at,” the
Newark Daily Advertiser
observed, “that it has no other effect upon him than to stimulate him to increased study and labor.” In what readers of 1877 were expected to regard as a humorous touch, the reporter concluded that were Edison to succeed in devising a telephone for speaking, “what an instrument of torture it would be in the hands and at the mouth of a distant and irate mother-in-law.”

The big-city debut of Edison’s musical telephone was arranged for Philadelphia in mid-July 1877. A three-way contest was under way. Alexander Graham Bell’s musical telephone had been eclipsed by the recent debut of a competing musical telephone developed by rival inventor Elisha Gray. Would Edison’s, in turn, best Gray’s? The competition was as keenly followed as a sports rivalry. The
New York Times
did not even wait for the formal debut of Edison’s telephone; the paper dispatched a reporter to the public rehearsal held the day before.

The early
Times
’s verdict: awful. Compared to Gray’s, Edison’s telephone was not nearly as loud, its notes not as “sweet.” It might work well as a practical instrument in sending telegraphic messages, the paper reported, but as a device producing sounds intended to please the human ear, it lagged the competition.

When Johnson saw the review, he was in Philadelphia overseeing preparations for the performance. He wrote Edison that “the N.Y. times [
sic
] man is a fool,” but he was happy that the rehearsal had come off, period. His Edison telephone was behaving erratically, and he begged Edison to send him a new, more dependable one from the laboratory. He also had to pay off the newspapers, which had their hands out. The
New York Daily Graphic
explained that it was “customary” for subjects to order extra copies in order to indirectly reimburse the newspaper for the additional expense of providing engraved illustrations that would accompany the upcoming story. For the “Puff,” Johnson agreed to take one hundred copies and asked Edison to sign up for a similar amount.