The Wizard of Menlo Park (5 page)

Edison said that he could at least capture the human voice on paper by recording speech and then play it back “at any
future time
.” Butler thought this so remarkable that “I do not understand it at all.” However it worked, he told Edison, there was no need to go further in his experimental work (advice that ratified the Menlo Park crew’s view that the human voice was the ultimate prize in recording sound). He sensed, correctly, that Edison did not appreciate the significance of his own discovery. “I need not say that you had better keep it perfectly secret,” Butler advised.

A secret it remained, effectively, as the mention the previous month in the
Philadelphia Record
had been missed by other newspapers. But only two weeks later, Edward Johnson could not remain quiet, not when French rivals were getting attention for similar work. He was infuriated by an article in
Scientific American
describing C. L. Rosapelly and Etienne-Jules Marey’s work on instruments for graphically—and cumbersomely—recording speech by simultaneously registering the movement of thorax, larynx, lips, tongue, and palate. Once recorded, those lines would somehow have to be translated into audible speech. If
Scientific American
’s respectful treatment of this path to failure was not exasperating enough to Johnson, the magazine had also voiced the prediction that it would lead someday to the recording of speech that could be transmitted electrically by wire. With Edison’s permission, Johnson wrote to the editor of
Scientific American
to say there was no need to wait for the French to perfect their technique for capturing speech on paper—Mr. Edison had already achieved everything the French hoped for, and could use paper to reproduce speech long distances, too.

An engraved illustration accompanied Johnson’s long letter, showing a strip of paper that ran along the top of two rollers, with a recording stylus and telephone mouthpiece suspended over one, and a playback stylus and a reproducer that looked from the outside just like the mouthpiece suspended over the other roller. A “boss,” or protuberant line, ran the length of the paper, so the stylus, which rested on top, could easily make an indentation in response to the amplitude of the sound. The invention still lacked a name and was referred to as “the apparatus.”

The editors of
Scientific American
were so excited—so emotionally moved, they confessed in an introduction, by the immediate prospect of being able to listen to the voices of the dead—that they jumped ahead to a list of possible applications of this new capability. Spoken messages might replace written letters. The words of history’s greatest orators could be enjoyed in perpetuity. And “music may be crystallized as well.”

The publication of Johnson’s letter in
Scientific American
in early November set off a frenzy in America and Europe. The
New York Sun
was fascinated by the metaphysical implications of an invention that could play “Echoes from Dead Voices.” The
New York Times
predicted that a large business would develop in “bottled sermons,” and wealthy connoisseurs would take pride in keeping “a well-stocked oratorical cellar.” To the
English Mechanic,
still absorbing the capability of the telephone, it appeared that Edison’s new invention was “more remarkable still,” for it could convey the human voice at any time, even “a hundred years hence.” Such was the authority of
Scientific American
’s imprimatur that all of this extraordinary attention was lavished not on the first working phonograph made available for public inspection, but merely on a description supplied by Edison’s assistant.

No machine was ready for public inspection because just before Johnson wrote his letter describing how a paper strip served as the recording medium, Edison had shifted his experimental focus from paper to tinfoil. Instead of using a raised ridge embossed on paper as a soft surface that was easily impressed by the recording needle, Edison now conceptualized a one-foot-long cylinder, whose surface had been threaded, and upon which a sheet of tinfoil would be placed. By positioning the recording needle on the top of the cylinder at the beginning of the thread, it rested on a continuous groove below the foil’s surface, easily impressing the foil just like the embossed ridge of the paper.

When setting down on 5 November 1877 the outlines of his design, Edison still conceptualized the device as a medium for speech. He estimated that a single sheet could hold about two hundred spoken words. But the next day, Johnson’s letter to
Scientific American
appeared, and from that moment on, Edison no longer worked in obscurity. The permanence of this change was something that he, like anyone else, could not have appreciated at the time. But one immediate benefit of the press’s marveling was that the extensive coverage supplied Edison with creative ideas about how the phonograph could be adapted for many more uses than telegraphy or senatorial speeches.

Years before, Edison had begun to systematically record all laboratory findings and the progress of his own thinking about the projects. His jottings in this period reflect the influence of speculations of strangers. By late November, Edison and his staff had caught on to the phonograph’s commercial potential as a gadget for entertainment. On a page signed by Edison, Batchelor, Adams, and Kruesi, a list of possible uses for the phonograph was noted, assembled apparently by free association: speaking toys (dogs, reptiles, humans); whistling toy train engines; music boxes; clocks and watches that announced the time. There was even an inkling of the future importance of personal music collections, here described as the machine for the whole family to enjoy, equipped with a thousand sheets of prerecorded music impressed upon tinfoil, “giving endless amusement.”

The design of a tinfoil phonograph had been conceptualized, then refined, and a myriad of future uses enumerated. The first actual model, however, remained to be built. John Kruesi took on the assignment. On 4 December 1877, Batchelor’s diary laconically noted “Kruesi made phonograph today”; it received no more notice than the other entry, “worked on Speaking Tel,” the invention that continued to be at the top of the laboratory’s research agenda. Even the loquacious Johnson had little more to say when he received the machine in New York: “Complete success. Talks plainer than telephone.”

It is not clear whether the decision to immediately display the new creation to the press was Johnson’s or Edison’s. What
is
clear is that the idea was not first vetted by a patent attorney—Edison would not get around to executing his first patent application for the phonograph until the next week. The one-week delay would later cause many difficulties in his efforts to secure patents in countries outside the United States. Given his immersion in patent battles in the telegraph industry, it is somewhat surprising to see Edison’s lack of caution in proceeding with the phonograph’s unveiling. The decision can be explained, perhaps, by the absence of a professional business structure and consulting counsel for the laboratory, by haste born of pride of accomplishment, or from underestimating the commercial significance of the invention.

However ill-advised, the debut came off not just smoothly but brilliantly. On 7 December 1877, Edison, Batchelor, and Johnson walked into the New York offices of
Scientific American,
placed a small machine on the editor’s desk, and, with about a dozen people gathered around, turned the crank. “How do you do?” asked the machine, introducing itself crisply. “How do you like the phonograph?” It itself was feeling quite well, it assured its listeners, and then cordially bid everyone a good night.

To the editors of
Scientific American,
the performance was utterly astounding. How could such a small machine mimic so accurately the human voice? Even for someone thoroughly familiar with the science underlying the machine, “it is impossible to listen to the mechanical speech without his experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him.” Edison’s choice of favoring this journal with the demonstration was shrewd, as the editorial staff was familiar with the latest experiments that attempted to re-create the human voice. The state of the art was not impressive: large machines the size of a pipe organ, endowed with keyboards, pipes, and rubber larynx and lips were supposed to deliver a humanlike sound but were only able to reproduce what sounded like a single monotonous note of an organ. And yet somehow Edison could coax what sounded like a naturally inflected human voice from “a few pieces of metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square.”

So enchanted were the editors that Edison was given credit for solving what had been seen as two separate problems, decoding the sound notations (misunderstood as “dots and dashes”) that were recorded on the tinfoil, and then re-creating them. It was as if instead of having to read the individual words, one could drop a book in a machine and it would automatically read itself. In fact, Edison could not decode the scratches, and had failed in his attempt to solve the first problem, that is, translating the microscopic marks into a phonetic alphabet. But there was no need for anyone to break the recording down into analyzable units; the phonograph automatically played whatever had been recorded, blithely insensible to differences in language, equally articulate in all tongues. It was already possible to project life-sized stereoscopic images of an individual upon a screen. “Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices,” the journal suggested, “and it will be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.” This was stop-the-presses news.
Scientific American,
which had been ready to publish its regular issue on the day of the talking phonograph’s visit, delayed publication one day so that an illustrated account could be inserted, a fact that pleased Johnson exceedingly.

Thanks to
Scientific American,
Edison would never again enjoy the sweetness of anonymous obscurity. “I want to know you right bad,” the
New York Sun
’s Amos Cummings wrote him in early January, in quest of “something about the secrets of electricity and so on.” Edison welcomed Cummings, and William Croffut of the
New York Daily Graphic,
making them feel as if they were not just reporters but friends. Edwin Fox, of the influential
New York Herald,
was an old acquaintance who had originally known Edison when they were both telegraph operators; Edison granted him and other former operators access, too. The sensational news of the phonograph’s performance—so wondrous that the fact that the phonograph was wholly mechanical and had no electrical components or power was often overlooked—brought the press to Edison’s doorstep, and he, in turn, intuitively cultivated the relationships, using the press’s hunger for more sensational discoveries for his own ends.

The technique that Edison used most effectively in handling the press was the seemingly offhand disclosure about what he had discovered, leaving the impression that he was parting the curtain only enough to provide a glimpse of what he had actually achieved and withholding the remainder from public view. He left it to the reporters to draw their own conclusions. The
New York World
referred to Edison’s telephone transmitter and speaking telephone, the electric pen and a sewing-machine prototype that was powered by tuning forks, as “a few selected from hundreds equally curious and of more or less practical importance.” When the newspaper estimated the number was “hundreds,” and regarded all to be equally significant, it was in effect creating a superhero, a man who was only thirty years old, lifted up to a plane above his contemporaries, including Alexander Graham Bell.

One cannot help but feel a little sympathy for Bell in the competition between the two men. The acclaim for his telephone was quickly superseded by the attention that Edison’s improvements drew, and then by Edison’s phonograph. This was especially galling because Bell had come so close to inventing the phonograph himself. He had understood how sound waves could be recorded on paper, and he also knew that the motion of one’s hand could generate waves that produced similar sounds. Indenting a medium to save and then reproduce those waves had not occurred to him, however. “It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers,” Bell said in early 1878. He recovered sufficiently to imagine that he could improve on the phonograph without violating Edison’s patents, using a technique “which can be turned to immediate account so as probably to realize a large fortune in a couple of months or so.” Time would show that he really did have the germ of the idea for what would become formidable competition for the phonograph—his “graphophone” would play wax-coated discs rather than foil-wrapped cylinders—but it would be a long while before it was ready for market. No quick, large fortune for him, but none for Edison, either.

CHAPTER TWO

THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK

J
ANUARY
–A
PRIL 1878

A
S A BUSINESSPERSON
poised to bring the phonograph to market, Thomas Edison was hindered as much as helped by experience. Having long worked within the world of telegraphic equipment, he had been perfectly placed to receive the technical inspiration for the phonograph. But that same world, oriented to a handful of giant industrial customers, had nothing in common with the consumer marketplace. It was impossible for Edison to imagine the phonograph as the basis for a new home-entertainment industry. His lieutenants were slow to appreciate the possibilities, too. “The Phonograph is creating an immense stir,” Edward Johnson wrote a business acquaintance, “but I think it impresses people more as a toy than as a practical machine.” It was as a toy that Edison planned to first introduce the phonograph, but he favored a passive role for himself: let others do the manufacturing, worry about the sales, and send him a royalty check, leaving him free to pursue a life of ceaseless inventing.

In early January 1878, Edison signed a contract with Oliver Russell to bring out an array of toys—dolls, trains, birds—all of which would be endowed with the power of speech or sound effects, thanks to a hidden phonograph. To pursue opportunities for the phonograph beyond the realm of toys, music boxes, and clocks, Edison signed with a syndicate of five investors later that month who set up the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. The syndicate gave him an immediate payment of $10,000 to “perfect” the instrument, that is, to complete the development work to ready the invention for the market. Edison would receive a 20 percent royalty on net proceeds. He insisted on embedding a clause in the agreement that protected his future royalty payments from price-cutting: phonographs had to be sold for $80 or more unless he personally granted an exception.

The investors feared that Edison would exhaust the $10,000 advance before the phonograph would be ready for the market. After the agreement was signed, they tried to arrange to have the money placed in a trust. Edison would not approve, feeling (correctly) that, as one of the investors wrote another, the proposed change “was a reflection upon his ability to take care of himself.”

According to a psychological profile published at the time in the
Phrenological Journal,
his backers had to be flexible and patient, as Edison was apt to “show irritability and people who do not understand him may think he is impatient and fretful.” The journal expressed concern that if Edison did not take proper care of himself, “he will become exhausted and break down.”

Improving the phonograph’s sound clarity, natural intonation, and volume of reproduced speech were Edison’s principal concerns. Mechanizing the turning of the cylinder when it played back a recording seemed to solve many of the problems with quality. In his lab, he used an industrial belt to hook up a phonograph to the overhead shaft that was connected to a steam engine, the source of the power for his machine shop. The results were stunning. Edison wrote one of his representatives in Europe, “Letters can be dictated & copied
with ease.
The singing is beautiful in fact I am overjoyed.”

The typical office or home parlor was unlikely to have an industrial steam engine already on the premises to provide steady power, of course, so Edison tinkered with a weight-driven clockwork mechanism, which replaced the hand crank and assured a steady rotation speed. Without mechanizing the rotation, the sound of the phonograph, whether for music or speech, left much to be desired. When Edison finally wrote to Preece about his invention in February 1878, he said that the machine had to be cranked at 120 turns per minute in order to achieve acceptable sound. A clockwork mechanism also made all the difference in comprehensibility when transcribing business letters that had been dictated.

Listening comprehension was influenced by subjective factors, Edison noticed. If a person who had never heard of the phonograph was pulled off the street and asked to listen to a recording of a simple sentence, he would not find it comprehensible, even if it were played a dozen times. If that same person were first told what he was about to hear, he would declare, after hearing it played, that it was a perfect reproduction. The same phenomenon was observed when novices first listened through a telephone. Edison speculated, “They do not expect or imagine that a machine can talk hence cannot understand it[s] words.”

In his lab, Edison made good progress in increasing the phonograph’s volume, using copper sheets for recording instead of tinfoil. If a speaker shouted into the microphone, Edison was able to make the playback distinctly audible at a distance of 475 feet. Shouting would not be practical in an office setting, but the progress encouraged him to find still better means of increasing playback volume. He got the idea that sound could be amplified by triggering a valve releasing steam or compressed air that would hit an enormous diaphragm, effectively sending a phonograph’s sounds outward for miles. The idea was so novel that, at the Patent Office’s urging, he separated the idea from his workup for the phonograph and filed a separate patent application, granted in early March 1878. He called this talking foghorn an “aerophone.”

Outside of the lab, Edward Johnson was the first to successfully commercialize the phonograph, albeit only modestly, when he added it to his traveling “concerts” featuring the musical telephone. His prospectus promised that

Recitations, conversational remarks, Songs (with words), Cornet Solos, Animal Mimicry, Laughter, Coughing, etc, etc, will be delivered into the mouth of the machine, and subsequently reproduced by the machine with such fidelity of tone, Articulation, emphasis, etc., as will kindle an enthusiasm as hearty as it will be spontaneous…. The Apparatus is really a great discovery and not a mear [
sic
] trick or toy for producing deceptive effects—the known reputation of Mr. Edison as a producer of practical inventions is however the best guarantee I have to offer of the genuinness [
sic
] of this great discovery.

His show played in small towns in New York and Pennsylvania, where competition in the amusement business was scarce: Elmira, Cortland, Homer, Dunkirk, Fredonia, Jamestown, Lockport, and so on, each night a different locale. Local promoters were so pleased to receive Johnson and his assistant that they agreed to his demand of a guaranteed flat fee of $100 rather than accept a percentage of the gate receipts.

Johnson first had the telephone deliver piped-in music, saving the phonograph to close the show. “You should hear me bring down the House by my singing in the Phonograph when I failed to get a Volunteer,” Johnson wrote a colleague. “The effect when they hear me is stupendous, but when they hear the Phonograph reproducing my song with all its imperfections they endanger the walls with clamor.”

Johnson reported that he was paid promptly by the promoters, even though for them the concerts “had not been pecuniarily successful.” Did Edison show him proper appreciation? He had not, Johnson groused, nor had Edison provided him with one of the newest phonograph models, instead sending him off to struggle with the oldest one on hand. Johnson assumed he had been deliberately slighted, and lobbied to attain higher standing in Edison’s eyes. Others felt the same, jockeying for what they imagined was better position. But Edison did not give or withhold attention deliberately. He tinkered in the lab, oblivious to politics.

In February 1879, Edison sent out a premature announcement to an acquaintance that the phonograph was now
perfect,
underlining the word for emphasis. Perfection had not yet been attained, however, and Edison knew it. To another friend, he allowed it was “almost perfect,” but felt it was not yet ready to release commercially. The investors in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company were less fastidious about the issues of quality that concerned Edison. They pressed for a ship date, but Edison resisted release before the product was ready.

Bugs had to be removed. In Edison’s time, the term “bugs” was used exactly as it is today. In the early 1870s, when Edison was working under contract on the quadruplex telegraph with a group of assistants, the work had established the proof of concept, but the prototype was not wholly reliable. For Edison, that was sufficient. “Boys,” Edison told his underlings, “the principle is all right, and the sharps upstairs can get the bugs out of it.”

In early 1878, Edison’s laboratory was his alone. There were no “suits,” as “sharps” would be called today, to foist a not-yet-bug-free product upon the public. But postponing release was difficult when the clamor of prospective customers was so loud. Most eager to get their hands on the new invention were college professors, who wrote Edison, pleading for the privilege of purchasing one. For example, Alfred Mayer, a professor of physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, flattered Edison with mention of “admiration of your genius.” Mayer said that the phonograph “has so occupied my brain that I can hardly collect my thoughts to carry on my work.” He and a colleague were writing a physics textbook, which would introduce students to “all really worthy American work” and would replace, they hoped, the European textbooks that everyone in their field used. Would Edison be willing to provide a phonograph for this noble endeavor? No one could resist such an appeal, combining the scientific and patriotic; Edison assented.

Wanting to please the impatient scientific community, but at the same time not wanting to endanger his own reputation by releasing the phonograph prematurely and allowing it to be scrutinized before it was ready, Edison found himself in an uncomfortable position. The pressure to ship applied by the investors added to his discomfort. In early February, he came up with what he thought was a plan that would please all parties. His clockwork-driven machine, which reproduced sound at about half the volume of the original, was showing sufficient promise that he would make it the basis for a commercial model to be released in April. In the meantime, he would rush out five hundred copies of a small, inexpensive model for those who could not wait. It would be hand-cranked, capable of recording no more than fifty words, and would be clearly advertised as nothing more than a novelty whose only purpose was to “illustrate the principle.” His backers debated the proposal, but came around, agreeing with Edison that “a good deal of money could be made in selling these small traps.”

Judging from the volume of correspondence coming in to the Menlo Park laboratory, the articles in
Scientific American
and reprints and secondhand digests of the articles carried in various newspapers had spread the word effectively. The task at hand was readying for the market the two models, one larger, one smaller. Edison must have slapped his forehead with irritation for having promised
New York Sun
reporter Amos Cummings a month earlier that he would be willing to sit for an interview. Cummings was comically self-deprecating (“I know no more about electricity or electrical machinery than a cow”) and polite, but now he was also insistent in getting Edison to name a date for the promised interview. Edison put him off awhile longer, perhaps hoping Cummings would lose interest in the campaign. Cummings was not to be denied, however, and finally Edison capitulated. The inventor leaves no record that he had any inkling that the resulting story that appeared in the
Sun
on 22 February 1878 would change his life.

Below the comparatively restrained headline “A Marvelous Discovery” was a subheadline that nicely summarized the theme of the profile: “A Man of Thirty One Revolutionizing the Whole World.” This was not the product of grandiosity on Edison’s part, nor was he playing the public relations game with a master’s touch. He was, in fact, entirely passive. He did not even go into New York to meet with Cummings. Edison interrupted his work at Menlo Park, answered his questions, and then resumed what he had been doing.

It was Cummings, his employer, the
New York Sun,
and its readers who jointly conspired to create a mythic inventor hero to suit their craving for a larger-than-life, yet accessible, figure. For everyone who was not an engineer, this was a time when technology seemed to be both overwhelming and increasingly incomprehensible. The cotton gin’s workings had been transparent; the telephone’s were not. If the latest technology itself could not be explained, at least the inventor could be rendered in terms that made him accessible and appealing as a person. At the same time, it was entertaining to view him as endowed with extraordinary power.

Permitting others to make him famous was easy. Drawing up realistic plans for marketing the phonograph was not. If any person in Menlo Park was in a good position to provide what we today would call a consumer perspective to help plan the introduction of the phonograph to the marketplace, it would have been the person who stood clear of the self-absorbed laboratory: Mrs. Mary Edison. She would have been ideally situated, that is, were she interested in offering advice, and were her husband interested in receiving it. Edison was not receptive to guidance from others, whether its nature was technical, strategic, or business. For the very shortest time after they were married, Edison had viewed his wife as his helpmeet in the lab. This was a short-lived idea—only a month later, Edison wrote in a laboratory notebook in an agitated hand: “My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!!” He redefined their roles with a conventional boundary: his sphere was work; Mary’s, the home.