Table of Contents

1. Pioneer Background

2. Discovering Science

3. Railroad Newsboy

4. Wondering Telegrapher

5. First Patent

6. Gold-Indicator

7. Business and Marriage

8. Dealing With Industrial Giants

9. Perfecting the Telephone

10. Inventing the Phonograph

11. Developing the Light Bulb

12. Lighting New York

13. Tragedy and Triumph

14. Making Moving Pictures

15. Batteries for Automobiles

16. Serving His Country

17. Final Homage

18. Summing Up

Chronology

Index

Thomas Edison

American Inventor

THOMAS EDISON

American Inventor by Roselyn and Ray Eldon Hiebert

Illustrated, with photographs

For Emily and Douglas

Copyright

Copyright © 1971 by Ray Eldon Hiebert

Republished with permission by Ebooks for Students, Ltd. June, 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

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The photographic illustrations for this book were obtained from the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, New Jersey, (U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service).

1.

Pioneer Background

Thomas Alva Edison, America’s greatest inventor, came from a humble Dutch pioneer family. He grew up with people who were inventive and adventuresome. His parents sought new frontiers and worked hard to prosper and progress. They believed they could improve the world. In Thomas Edison they had a son who probably changed more of his world than any other man of his time.

In the early eighteenth century, one of Edison’s forebears had demonstrated the pioneer spirit that would be passed down through generations. A widow in Holland, in 1730 she had made the important decision to take her three-year-old son John and follow other Dutch settlers to the New World. She emigrated to Elizabethport in the Crown colony of New Jersey. There she obtained a grant of land along the Passaic River near Caldwell.

John, the first of the Edisons to grow up in the new land, became an industrious and influential member of the New Jersey community. He married Sarah Ogden, whose family was well respected and powerful. He became the proprietor of a 75-acre farm; built a substantial home; had servants, a horse worth twenty pounds, and two dozen sheep; and claimed almost three hundred pounds sterling.

But John Edison, like other Dutch patroons of New Jersey, saw ominous signs of political dissent. More and more colonists were infected with a desire for independence from British rule. Eventually, political sparks of unrest ignited the Revolutionary War. In New Jersey a majority of the people joined the battle for independence. But some, especially those who owned property, remained loyal to the Crown.

John Edison was a Loyalist. During the Revolution the local patriots, the Whigs, took command of his county. They seized the property of all loyal Tories, or Loyalists, burned their barns, and commandeered their herds of cattle. John Edison’s property was confiscated and he was forced to flee to safety across the Hudson River into New York.

Though no longer a young man, John Edison took up arms and fought for the king as a British scout. In 1777, when General George Washington’s army massed at Trenton, New Jersey, the Tory sympathizer was captured. He was imprisoned in Morristown, where he remained for more than a year. Had he declared himself loyal to the Continental Congress and the cause of independence, he might have won his freedom. But he was a proud and stubborn man and steadfastly refused to renounce his allegiance to the King of England. When he was charged with treason and sentenced to be hanged, his wife Sarah came to his rescue. Her father had fought with the colonists for freedom, and through an appeal to him she won her husband’s release.

For the Edison family the War of Independence brought personal upheaval and financial ruin. Though John Edison regained his freedom, he lost his property, and he and his family were ordered to leave the states. In 1783, they were put aboard a ship bound for Nova Scotia, in Canada.

There, in a land of dense forests, damp marshes, and cold winds blowing off the Bay of Fundy, they settled on land granted by the British Crown. It was a remote and savage wilderness, but the Edison family struggled to make a new home for themselves.

Trees had to be chopped and hewn to make rough log cabins, and wild animals had to be hunted for food. But the Edisons were determined to succeed on this new frontier. They remained here for more than a quarter of a century as the family grew.

John Edison’s eldest son, Samuel Ogden Edison, grew to manhood in Nova Scotia, and in 1792 he married Nancy Stimpson. They had eight children in all; they named their sixth Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. Born in August, 1804, he was later to become the father of Thomas Alva Edison.

In 1811, the elder Samuel Edison—Captain Samuel, as he was called—received a grant of 600 acres of land north of Lake Erie. It was part of the rugged frontier territory that the Canadian government was eager to have settled.

The family packed their belongings and made an 800-mile trip by ship and ox-drawn wagon; it took all summer. The new land, in what is now Ontario, was part of a pine forest area, with the nearest settlement 21 miles away. The Edisons settled on Otter River, 2 miles inland from Lake Erie. Again they set to work chopping through the forest and hewing logs to build a sturdy dwelling before the winter snows arrived. The Indians were friendly, and game was plentiful. Before long, the Edisons were comfortably settled.

As time passed, the frontier appealed to other adventuresome men, and by the 1820’s the Edison settlement had grown into a village with a schoolhouse, a church, a cemetery, and a tavern. It was called Vienna. Captain Samuel Edison built a frame house overlooking the river. He worked at lumbering and carpentering and became important in the community. Though they were simple folk, the Edisons had the outstanding strength and individuality so typical of New World pioneers.

Captain Samuel Edison, who was among the toughest and stubbornest of the clan, lived to be ninety-eight years old. Later, his famous grandson Thomas Alva Edison remembered visiting him when the boy was five years old. Captain Samuel showed his grandson his treasured collection of carved pipes and molasses jugs from the family home in Holland, and the old trunks and other mementos of his Dutch background. The old man left an indelible picture in the mind of the impressionable young lad.

“I remember my grandfather perfectly,” Thomas Edison later said. . . His head was covered completely with a large quantity of white hair, and he chewed tobacco incessantly, nodding to friends as they passed by. He used a very large cane, and walked from the chair to the house, resenting any assistance. I viewed him from a distance and could never get close to him.”

Thomas Alva Edison undoubtedly inherited more than a small share of this hardy man’s strength of will and fierce independence.

Captain Edison’s son, Samuel Edison, Jr., also possessed his measure of toughness. He was a strong, restless young man. By the time he was twenty-one he had grown tall, agile, and muscular. Everyone in Vienna, Ontario, agreed that young Sam Edison could outrun and outjump any man around. Yet, although he had tried several trades, he had not found his life-work. Always ambitious to make a fortune, he took up carpentering, dropped it for tailoring, and finally became a tavern owner.

In 1828, he married Nancy Elliott, daughter of a Baptist minister. Nancy’s family, the Elliotts, possessed many of the same characteristics of determination and strength as the Edisons. Sam and Nancy met when she was a seventeen-year-old teacher in the two-room schoolhouse in Vienna. The Elliotts had come originally from Scotland and England to America. Nancy’s grandfather had fought in the Continental army. Hers was a well-educated and cultured family, and Nancy had inherited a lively intelligence, a love of learning, and a firm religious belief.

By 1837, young Sam Edison’s tavern had become the local meeting place for the town’s hotheads and political reformers. Many of the community’s young men were fired with a zeal for political reform, and they gathered around Sam at the tavern, drinking ale and debating Canada’s future far into the night.

Young Sam Edison acquired a different set of political beliefs from those his Tory grandfather had followed. Sam and his friends had grown to resent the treatment the British were giving Canadian colonists. Sam decried the lack of representative government in Canada. He argued that the voteless colonists should rise up and demand their independence from Great Britain.

Sam Edison joined a band of insurrectionists who plotted to overthrow the government. This revolutionary group secretly armed themselves and drilled in the seclusion of the nearby forest. They talked of the day when they would march on Toronto and take over the government. Finally, in December, 1837, a few hundred rebels, led by the insurrectionist William Lyon Mackenzie, marched on Toronto. But they were no match for the regular Canadian army awaiting their attack, and were badly defeated and forced to flee for their lives. Luckily, a courier intercepted Sam and his little band of men as they marched toward Toronto to join their compatriots. The courier told of the rebel defeat and warned that six hundred men were marching at that moment to intercept the dissenters. To avoid capture, Sam’s rebels retreated at once.

Sam raced back to Vienna, making plans for his escape as he fled. Once there, he took only a few minutes to say good-bye to his wife and children, then headed for a hideout near his father’s house. Just before dawn, soldiers banged on Captain Samuel Edison’s door, demanding the surrender of his son. Young Sam had already begun his flight on foot through the forests. His mother tried to protect him by some delaying tactics. Knowing full well that Sam had already escaped, she led the troops slowly around the farm.

But the king’s men were not deceived for long. With their baying pack of dogs picking up the trail, they set off through the woods to follow young Edison. Sam summoned every ounce of strength to gain distance on his pursuers. He knew his only chance of escape lay at the United States border, a full 80 miles away through Indian territory. Hour after hour through the first freezing night and on through the next day, Sam jogged along, stopping only now and then to catch his breath and sip fresh water from some icy stream. For two and one-half days he journeyed without sleep, until miraculously he succeeded in reaching the frozen St. Clair River. There he crossed over to safety in the United States, at Port Huron, Michigan.

Sam Edison could not return to Canada, for he would have been arrested for treason. He traveled along Lake Erie’s shores, exploring each little village, looking for a likely spot to settle and begin a new life. He finally picked the little village of Milan, Ohio, which seemed to be prosperous and thriving. The period—the 1830’s and 1840’s—was that of America’s canal building. Milan had been caught up in the fever, and a canal had been constructed to give access to Lake Erie by connecting the town with the navigable part of the Huron River.

As soon as work had been completed, a burgeoning wheat-growing industry brought economic prosperity to the town. Barges plied the canal as tons of grain were shipped through Milan on the way to the wheat-hungry cities of the East. Grain warehouses were constructed and wagonloads of grain rumbled through town to be dumped into the waiting ships. Sometimes one might count six hundred wagons heavy with wheat headed for eastern markets. Each day, twenty or more sailing ships loaded with grain passed through the town.

Sam Edison could foresee wealth for those strong enough to work. The shipbuilding industry was growing, and more granaries must be built; both ships and granaries depended on the large pine forests nearby and across the lake in Canada. Sam knew carpentering and he knew lumbering. He decided to manufacture shingles, and raised money for a mill. Soon his pine shingles roofed several of the warehouses in Milan.

Sam corresponded with his wife by means of notes sent by ship across the lake. Finally he sent for Nancy. In 1839, she journeyed across Lake Erie with her four children. Marion was ten; William Pitt was eight; Harriet Ann was six; and Carlile was four. For $220, Sam Edison bought an acre of land on a tall bluff overlooking the Huron Canal basin. The Edison shingle mill was situated below the bluff. In 1841, with his own hands, Sam built a sturdy little home. It was woodframe and brick, and for it he used lumber from his mill. From the open windows of the snug seven-room house the Edisons could sit and watch the ships and barges loaded with grain, or they could look out toward a pleasant fruit orchard behind the house.

But life was hard for the Edison family. In 1840, Samuel Ogden Edison III was born, and four years later another child, Eliza. The climate was intensely cold in winter, and the Edison children were not strong. They caught respiratory diseases easily and took long months to recuperate. Carlile died in 1841 at the age of six. Samuel Ogden III died next, and Eliza, the baby, became ill and followed them. Within those first few years in Milan, half of Nancy’s children were taken from her.

Despite these tragedies, Nancy Edison was a strong and optimistic woman. Though slight of build, she had a will and determination that would not admit defeat. She knew that some of her family would survive and would be strengthened by the ordeals they had endured.

On a cold February night in 1847, eight years after the Edisons had moved to Milan, snow blew in drifts and piled up against the little house. Inside, Nancy and Sam Edison, now in the nineteenth year of their marriage, awaited the birth of their seventh baby. At early dawn on February 11 he was born.

In the winter darkness, Nancy looked at her last child, a boy with light hair and large blue eyes. As she gazed at him anxiously she thought for just a moment that he might not be a normal child, for he seemed extremely frail and his head looked much too large.

Nancy ordered her husband to bundle up in his warmest clothes and dash through the freezing morning for medicine at the pharmacist’s shop. As Sam Edison ran across the glistening carpet of snow he shouted to the neighbors the good news of his recently born son, then hurried back to help his wife.

The Edisons christened the new baby Thomas Alva —Thomas after a great-uncle, and Alva after a good friend, Captain Alva Bradley. In the days of the couple’s separation, Captain Bradley had carried letters for them on his ship, which sailed Lake Erie between the United States and Canada. He had brought Nancy and the children across the lake from Canada.

“Alva is a fine name. And let us add Thomas,” Sam had said as he took down the family Bible and proudly made the new entry on a blank page at the back. Thomas Alva Edison, born February 11, 1847.

Sam Edison’s little house on the bluffs still stands in Milan, Ohio, marked as the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison.

2.

Discovering Science

Tom Edison was a frail and sickly boy with a wide, round face, broad chin, prominent nose, and lively blue eyes. His active mind was attracted by his father’s shingle mill, and at the age of three or four he spent long hours there, making tiny wooden barges and building block houses with scraps of wood from the lumberyard.

He was full of questions as he watched the ships being loaded with grain for transportation along the canal and saw the processions of covered wagons assembled for westward migration. The canal boatmen and shipyard workers liked the inquisitive boy and told him colorful stories of their work. One day when he was five, he astonished his mother as he wandered about, singing a rollicking canal song, “Oh, for a life on the raging canal,” which some musical seaman had taught him.

Tom’s boundless curiosity and his adventuresome spirit often got him into trouble, and he was frequently punished for some act of mischief.

When he was five he asked his mother why geese sat on eggs. She told him that the birds sat on eggs to keep them warm so that they would hatch into goslings.

The next day, Tom disappeared from his usual haunts. After he had been gone for several hours, his father went in search of the missing child. He found Tom in a neighbor’s barn, curled up on a nest he had filled with chicken and goose eggs; he was anxiously hoping to hatch some eggs himself.

One summer day when he was five, the boy went swimming in a creek with his friend, the son of a prominent man in the town. After the two had been frolicking in the water for a while, Tom noticed that his companion had disappeared.

Tom waited for half an hour. But the boy did not reappear, so Tom returned home. He did not seem to realize that something serious had happened. A few hours later, someone looking for the boy knocked on the Edison door, and Tom told of how the two of them had been swimming in the creek. A search party was organized and rushed to the spot where the boy had disappeared. The creek was dragged and the drowned boy’s body was recovered. The incident made a mark on Edison’s mind, for he felt his parents’ concern for his odd behavior. Later in life the experience continued to haunt him.

Tom’s father was not as patient as Nancy was with Tom’s never-ending stream of questions. Sam Edison thought his son was difficult and mischievous and he was often annoyed with the predicaments and troubles the child managed to invite—troubles often caused by his insatiable curiosity.

When Tom was six years old, his inquisitiveness got him into serious difficulties. He wandered into the barn near the house and poked around for a while, then thought he would like to see what would happen if the barn caught fire. Without thinking over the consequences, he lighted a match. In minutes, flames were shooting high into the air as the barn burned to the ground.

His father was furious and asked angrily why he did such a thing.

“I just wanted to see what it would do,” Tom answered tearfully.

Sam Edison tried to explain that the whole town of Milan might have caught fire if the wind had been blowing in a different direction. He dragged the weeping boy to the green square in the center of the village and, while many of the townspeople watched, he whipped Tom soundly.

Tom Edison never forgot that bitter experience. Many times after that he was punished for misdeeds, but after the beating in the town square he always seemed indifferent to physical pain and endured it without visible emotion, outwardly appearing not to care. Thereafter, the threat of punishment seldom deterred him.

Tom’s sense of curiosity and adventure lured him into many forbidden and dangerous spots in the town. He wandered through his father’s mill, watched the barges on the canal load up with grain, and asked endless questions at the flour mill, the brewery, or the blacksmith’s shop. Once he fell into the canal and was rescued. Another time, he was almost smothered before he could be dug out from the pit of a grain elevator.

His mother guided him with patience and love. But regularly she had to remind her son of right and wrong by using the birch switch that hung behind the old living-room clock. Even with punishment, Tom did not seem to learn how to stay away from trouble.

One forbidden place Tom especially liked to visit was the flour mill, owned by Sam Winchester, an eccentric old man called “the mad miller of Milan.” Winchester was always performing experiments, and once he had burned down his mill while attempting to make a passenger balloon.

Tom sometimes sneaked into the mill and tried to catch a glimpse of the old miller at his experiments. Long after the Edisons had left Milan, Sam Winchester did indeed succeed in making a passenger balloon that would fly. As he ascended in his airborne vehicle it slowly drifted off in the direction of Lake Erie. The miller and his balloon were never seen again.

For a time during Tom’s boyhood, Milan was a lively town, prosperous and bustling with industry. But gradually business slowed down, and the Edisons had to struggle to make a living. The canal had been the cause of the town’s prosperity, but now a new railroad—the Columbus, Sandusky 8c Hocking—had been constructed; it began to compete with the canal. Despite Sam Edison’s struggles his lumber business declined until finally he was forced to close his mill and give up his house and land. By 1854, the Edison family was bankrupt.

Surrendering to adversity was not at all in the Edison tradition, and Sam and Nancy were determined to make a new start. They joined the stream of pioneers moving westward. Like many of their neighbors, they packed their belongings and moved to the iron, copper, and salt country of Michigan’s Lake Huron. At the mouth of the St. Clair River stood Port Huron. Here, Sam Edison figured, would be a good place to settle and start again on the road to prosperity. He rented a comfortable house at Fort Gratiot on the northern edge of town. It had an excellent view of the river and the lake and the acres of land for orchards and vegetable gardens. Sam Edison set up a lumber, grain, and feed business, but he was always looking for new schemes for making money. In Port Huron he built a tall observation tower overlooking the water, and charged visitors a quarter apiece to climb to the platform at the top for a telescopic view of the surrounding country.

Tom loved the tower. He collected tolls for his father, and whenever he could he played on the top. The observation tower did not make much money at first. But after a while Sam made a deal with an excursion train that stopped in Port Huron. Soon the puffing passengers were ascending the stairs of the Edison tower to see the countryside. Before many years had passed, however, the attraction wore off, and the old tower became an eyesore long before it collapsed from disuse.

Because Tom was frail, his mother often kept him at home. But by 1855, when he was eight years old, he was allowed to join other children at school. Nancy Edison sent him to the one-room schoolhouse of Rev. G. B. Engle, a stern schoolmaster. After the tender handling of his mother, the strong-willed boy did not adjust to the strict regime of the school. He stayed at the foot of the class, and felt that his teachers did not like him and that his father thought he was stupid.

One day after he had been in school only three months he came home sobbing. He insisted he would not go back. When Nancy heard her son’s story she was furious. The schoolmaster had pointed him out to some visitors as having a mind “that was addled.”

Nancy Edison marched to the school immediately. She refused to hear any nonsense about her boy being backward, she told Mr. Engle, for she herself had taught many children and could recognize a bright child when she saw one. Furthermore, she would not let Tom return to such a humiliating environment. She would teach him herself and would do a far better job than the dull schoolmaster had.

So Tom returned to the careful and loving guidance of his mother. He prospered under her firm and patient teaching, and within a few years was reading, with her help, such books as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Hume’s History of England.

His mother directed him toward science, but she found him weak in arithmetic. Later, as an adult, he still did not like mathematics, and once said, “I can always hire some mathematicians, but they can’t hire me.

His father encouraged the home-tutoring arrangement and paid Tom a small sum for each book he finished reading. Sam Edison may actually have been eager to keep his son at home. Outside schooling cost money, and the older Edison may have found it difficult to keep up payments.

Tom’s mother was a strong influence in his life.

She believed absolutely in her son’s intelligence and thought he was unusually gifted. This attitude gave him self-confidence and a desire to learn. Nancy Edison put up forbearingly with her son’s experimental nature. One day Tom gave the hired boy a large amount of Seidlitz powders—effervescing salts of sodium bicarbonate, Rochelle salt, and tartaric acid that, when mixed, are a mild laxative. Tom claimed that the powder would enable a person to fly, and at his urging the hired boy swallowed the mixture. Instead of flying, the boy was soon in great pain—and so was Tom, when his mother administered a good spanking.

When he was ten, Tom Edison’s mother gave him a copy of Richard Green Parker’s School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy. This book introduced to the boy the world of science, especially chemistry, and it soon became well thumbed with use. The School Compendium explained how steam engines and locomotives operate; showed drawings and diagrams of the electromagnetic telegraph; demonstrated how lightning rods work; gave directions for making electric batteries; and explained why water did not enter a glass jar when it was plunged with the mouth straight downward into a pan of water. In the book, Tom found answers to many of his questions, and he immediately wanted to set up his own laboratory for experiments.

He began to assemble a makeshift laboratory in the cellar of the Port Huron house. He bought chemicals from the local pharmacist and started to perform experiments. Soon he had more than two hundred bottles of assorted shapes and sizes, which he carefully labeled poison so that no one would meddle with their contents.

Acrid smells frequently poured out of the basement workshop as Tom plunged into the world of chemistry. The cellar became littered with the remains of chemicals and bottles, and his parents grew concerned that something serious might happen. Finally his mother told him to clean up the laboratory and quit his experiments, but the boy was so grief-stricken that she relented. She made a rigid rule, however, that he must lock the cellar when he was not working, so that nobody could get in and cause an accident.

For hours, Tom locked himself in the dark room beneath the house, puttering with batteries and chemical formulas instead of playing outdoors. When his mother called him for his tutoring, he worked with her on other studies, but he never did well in English composition. Even later, when he was nineteen, his letters home showed a sad lack of proficiency in writing.

Tom’s mother understood how he loved to experiment and she sometimes let him work throughout the day with his wires, test tubes, and gases.

“My mother was the making of me,” Edison later said. “She understood me. She let me follow my bent.”

Tom’s father was not so understanding. He tried hard to keep alive the boy’s interest in literature, but with the money his father paid him for reading, Tom ran to the drugstore and bought chemicals for new experiments.

“He’ll blow us all up,” his father would shout when a dull boom shook the house or a cloud of smoke seeped under the cellar door.

Tom’s mother would calm her husband. “Let him be,” she would say.

Sam Edison always believed that his son did not enjoy his boyhood as other boys did. “Thomas Alva never had any boyhood days. He spent the greater part of his time in the cellar. He did not share to any extent the sports of his neighborhood,” he once said.

More than anything, Tom loved to tinker with the telegraph set he had made at the age of eleven. With a neighborhood friend, he strung telegraph wires between their two houses. He was already fascinated with electricity, and talked to people who knew something about it whenever he could.

Experiments with batteries, chemicals, and electricity required money, and Tom had very little. He began to look around for odd jobs. He and the hired boy, Michael Oates, decided to sell vegetables. They dug a big patch of ground, hired a horse and cart, and managed a successful vegetable garden and market. They sold onions, lettuce, and other produce, and during their first summer earned the considerable sum of two hundred dollars. It was tiring work, and Tom came to the conclusion that hoeing corn in the hot sun was an unappealing way of earning money.

When he was twelve he heard of a better job. That year, 1859, Port Huron became a railroad town. The local train ran daily to Detroit, 63 miles away, and the job of newsboy on the train was vacant. Tom would not be paid by the railroad, but he could earn money selling candy, newspapers, and food. His mother argued that he was too young and small for the work, but his father was anxious for the boy to earn his keep. Tom begged and nagged and pleaded until his mother gave in.

Tom went to the railroad master and, using his broadest smile and most convincing manner, got the job he wanted so much.

3.

Railroad Newsboy

Each morning at seven o’clock the train from Port Huron to Detroit pulled out of the station. Just before it left, Tom Edison, twelve years old, climbed aboard, tugging his basket piled high with sandwiches, fruit, peanuts, and newspapers. As the train chugged along he began to peddle his wares.

“Peanuts, apples, sandwiches. . . . Read the daily news,” he cried as he weaved his way through the moving cars.

By the time he reached Detroit three hours later, all his goods were sold. He spent each day in the city, waiting for the run back to Port Huron. The train returned at half-past nine at night, and again Tom carried a basket of snacks and papers. It was a long day for such a young boy, but he did not mind. With his energy and curiosity, he did not waste a minute of his time in Detroit.

He enjoyed meeting the colorful characters aboard the train and he easily made friends with the brake-men, conductors, and locomotive engineers. In Detroit he spent hours wandering around the railroad yard watching crews repair locomotives and switch engines. He learned more about telegraphy from watching telegraphers signal train movements between stations.

He thoroughly enjoyed his daytime wanderings in Detroit. Eventually he discovered the public library and took full advantage of his free time to read on all sorts of subjects. After a while, he decided to go through the stacks methodically, reading the books one shelf at a time, subject by subject. Although he never finished this ambitious project, he did gain knowledge and self-discipline in pursuing it.

Soon he figured out how to make more money on the daily round trip. He found farm sources of fresh butter, berries, vegetables, and fruit at one end of the run and loaded them into an empty baggage car. These he sold along the route to customers who liked to buy his fresh produce.

In addition to his railroad business, he added to his ventures a tiny periodical stand and vegetable stall in Port Huron. This project made money for a time, but he found that steady help was difficult to hire and that other boys were not reliable. After a while he gave up his Port Huron business.

The study of science, particularly chemistry, was his main interest. He contributed a dollar a day to his mother for room and board, and the rest of what he earned he spent in equipping his growing chemical laboratory. He found shops in Detroit where he could purchase chemicals for his latest experiments, and he made frequent trips to replenish old supplies and add new ones.

Gradually an idea occurred to him. The train consisted of three coaches, including a baggage car that had three sections—one for luggage, one for mail, and one for smoking. The smoking section was not ventilated and was not used. Tom decided to appropriate this compartment for himself. First he got permission to keep candy and papers there. But he was entertaining a grander notion. Since he had so much time in Detroit and since he already had use of this compartment, why not take it for his own laboratory, to conduct chemical experiments?

Little by little, Tom transferred his test tubes, chemical apparatus, batteries, and supplies to his compact rolling laboratory. The laboratory grew as he bought new supplies in Detroit. When he met George M. Pullman, who worked in that city, Tom asked him to figure out a kind of shelf that would hold his bottles secure while the train moved. Pullman built the boy test-tube racks and shelves, and the two chatted about how people could ride more comfortably and sleep overnight on a train. (Just five years later, in 1864, Pullman built the Pioneer, the first sleeping car and the forerunner of the modern Pullman train.)

Now Tom had a chemical laboratory, complete with shelves of neatly stored equipment, rolling down the tracks between Detroit and Port Huron. This experimental laboratory of young Tom Edison’s was probably the only one of its kind in America.

Tom loved his railroad vending job. “The happiest time of my life was when I was twelve years old,” he said when he was an old man.

At first the twelve-year-old boy had been apprehensive about returning home alone at night. Each evening he left the station in Port Huron and rode a horse-drawn wagon over quiet, dark roads toward his home on the north side. He hated the ordeal. Tom was not usually a coward, but in this case, fright overcame his willpower. At one particular stretch of road he had to go through woods that contained a deserted graveyard. Each night he approached the spot fearfully, his eyes straining to see the gravestones through the gloom. His hands tightened on the reins and he careened along the road as fast as his horse would go. Finally, however, he realized that nothing could happen to him at the cemetery and he overcame his fear.

Tom’s business grew. In 1861, when the Civil War erupted, it brought a desire for more news. As the war developed and people anxiously bought his papers the boy’s sales mounted. He capitalized on this hunger for news and decided to publish his own local newspaper, which would contain items of interest to people along the Grand Trunk line. He scouted around and found a little press that had been used to print hotel menus. Then he found type and hauled it to his laboratory. Soon the Weekly Herald, published by Tom Edison, rolled off the press. He was the compositor, editor, publisher, and salesman.

His current news and gossip of the area became steady reading for the four hundred people along the Grand Trunk line who were subscribers to the Weekly Herald. The paper cost three cents a copy, or eight cents a month to regular subscribers.

One English visitor who rode the train heard of Tom’s journalistic enterprise. Soon The Times of London had a story that called Tom’s newspaper the first in the world to be printed on a moving train. The young publisher earned profits of close to thirty dollars a month from his paper and had to hire an assistant to help him gather information.

News of the Civil War became increasingly important. During the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, Tom showed his usual resourcefulness. When he got to Detroit he found that crowds had gathered everywhere, asking for battle news. He recognized his chance to sell more Detroit newspapers, and added a unique approach to his methods.

He marched into the office of the Detroit Free Press.

“I need papers,” he told the editors. “I can only pay for three hundred, but I want you to give me credit. I want one thousand papers.”

The men were astonished by his nerve. But one man,

Wilbur F. Storey, who later started the Chicago Times, was impressed. He felt that if the boy had confidence enough to demand the papers, he ought to get them.

Tom dragged his load of newspapers back to the station. He copied some of the news from them and got the telegrapher to send it ahead to the agents along the line.

“Put this news up on the blackboards,” he wired.

His usual sale of papers was about one hundred for the run, but he realized that the Battle of Shiloh was no ordinary occurrence. He knew he could sell one thousand papers.

The first stop was Utica. Normally he sold two papers there. That day he sold thirty-five. The next stop was Mount Clemens, where sales usually totaled six or eight. But the demand was great, and he raised his price to ten cents. At the next stop the crowd was even bigger.

All along the way he found lines waiting for his papers. When he got to Port Huron he jumped off at the edge of the station yard and met a waiting partner. This crowd was the biggest one yet.

“Twenty-five cents apiece,” he yelled. “Gentlemen, I haven’t enough to go around!” He sold every paper he had obtained on credit.

Tom was thrilled at his profit, for now he could buy wire, expensive chemicals, and new equipment. As usual, every extra penny he earned went toward his experiments. He would do anything honest to earn more money to equip his laboratory. One day he was called into the office of an important man in Port Huron. Tom was offered fifteen dollars if by the next morning he would deliver a vital message to a boat captain fourteen miles away from Ridgway Station, through wild country and dense woods.

“Give me twenty-five dollars and I’ll take a friend of mine and go,” Tom said.

The bargain was made, and the two boys set off, lanterns in hand, through the unknown forest. They encountered deer and bears and rain. As darkness fell the night grew colder and wetter and more frightening. The boys’ lanterns flickered out. As they stumbled through the gloom every noise sounded like a bear’s growling. Tom’s companion was so frightened he was ready to quit.

“Let’s climb a tree till morning, Tom,” he whispered.

But Tom urged him on. They continued through the night, and at daybreak they reached the door where their message was to be delivered.

“I thought if I ever got out of that scrape alive I would know more about the habits of animals and everything else, and would be prepared for all kinds of mischance when I undertook an enterprise....In my whole life I never spent such a night of horror as this, but I got a good lesson,” Edison recalled later.

Tom was not only interested in money and chemical experiments, but he also possessed a sharp sense of humor and relished a practical joke. Later in life he frequently told amusing stories about his youth, such as the following:

He and his friend Michael Oates once decided to play a prank at the local military post. They had listened many times as the guard shouted an order for the corporal to appear, and they had watched as the order was passed along the line until it was received at the corporal’s barracks. They decided to call out an order themselves.

The order was picked up and repeated along the line for the whole half-mile to the barracks. The corporal appeared as requested, and was angry to learn he had been tricked. The next night, the boys repeated the joke. The corporal appeared again, and was furious. The third night, the boys sneaked up to repeat the stunt.

This time things went awry. The sentries were waiting. They leaped on Michael Oates and threw him into the guardhouse, and they took off after the faster Tom. He ran to his father’s cellar and jumped into an almost empty potato barrel before they reached him. Determined to find and lock up the prankster, the sentries poked around the basement. Tom was growing dizzy from the overpowering smell of rotten potatoes when the soldiers finally gave up. But he did not escape punishment; his father was waiting for him with a switch when he got up next morning.

Another time, after a locomotive ride, Tom became the laughingstock of the railroad crew. He loved locomotives and assumed he knew a great deal about how to run them. One day, about halfway through a run, the fireman grew tired and wanted to sleep. He asked Tom to take charge of the engine, which was an exceptionally fine one with brightly polished brass and beautiful woodwork. Tom was thrilled.

He brought the train through the Grand Trunk junction without incident, but about 20 miles beyond he began to sense trouble. He looked out and was horrified to see black, wet mud flying out of the smokestack. It settled all over the shiny engine and over him.

It finally stopped, but at the next station, when Tom started to open the oil cup as usual, steam roared out, almost knocking the boy out of the train. Tom had forgotten to shut off the steam, as the fireman did before oiling. At the last stop, another gush of mud splattered all over the now filthy engine and boy. The entire crew and all hands around the yard roared with laughter at the once cocky young fireman and his dirty train. The humiliated novice found he had filled the boiler too full of water. The excessive moisture in the smokestack had caused the caked mud and soot to fly out.

One day Tom was standing on the platform of the Smith’s Creek station, loading bundles of papers onto the train. He was late, and the train started before his papers were all aboard. He ran beside the car, trying to lift the final bundle onto the train. The conductor saw his plight and reached down. He grabbed Tom by the ears and hoisted him aboard.

“I felt something snap inside my head, and deafness started from that time and has progressed ever since,” Edison later said. After the incident at Smith’s Creek, young Edison, not yet a teenager, became partially deaf. His hearing deteriorated little by little as he grew older.

But Tom’s deafness probably did not result from that railroad incident alone. As a young child he had scarlatina and suffered infections of his middle ear. His eardrum had probably been punctured during one of these illnesses. A sharp blow or tugging at his ears may have caused an already difficult condition to become incurable.

Deafness would have been a catastrophe for most boys, but not for Tom. He took his partial loss of hearing stoically. Deafness, he later found, even had its compensations.

“This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When in a telegraph office, I could only hear the instrument directly on the table at which I sat, and unlike the other operators, I was not bothered by the other instruments,” he said in later years.

Deafness may even have been the cause of his work on one of his earliest inventions. He devised an improvement on Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone receiver because it was so weak it could not transmit sound loud enough for him to hear. Edison’s great work on the phonograph was also directly connected with his deafness, for the defects he disliked most in the phonograph were its overtones in music and the hissing consonants when someone talked on a record. He worked for a year on that problem, twenty hours a day and seven days a week, to finally record the word “specie” perfectly.

Quiet was no doubt a great blessing, especially for an inventor. In the world of Thomas Edison, the adult, he said in later years, “Broadway is as quiet to me as a country village is to a person with normal hearing.”

The railroad days of his boyhood, both the good days and the bad days, were full of learning experiences. Undaunted by misfortune, Tom Edison continued his daily run, spending happy hours in his laboratory aboard the train.

But one day an unfortunate end came to Tom’s rolling experiments. As the train chugged along at thirty miles an hour, it hit an uneven section of track, which caused a severe lurch. Tom was at work in the laboratory and glanced up quickly. He saw a stick of phosphorus fly off the shelf, and leaped forward to grab it, but it fell to the floor and burst into flame.

Tom tried frantically but unsuccessfully to put out the fire. Soon the conductor saw smoke pouring from under the door. He rushed in and assisted Tom in beating out the flames. When the fire was extinguished, the angry conductor asked Tom to get rid of his dangerous equipment immediately. This was the end of Tom Edison’s portable laboratory. But soon an unforeseen incident turned his energies in a new direction.

4.

Wondering Telegrapher

On a hot August morning in 1862, Tom Edison was sitting at the Mt. Clemens station idly watching a locomotive push boxcars back and forth on the siding. He was paying little attention to his young friend Jimmy Mackenzie, the telegraph operator’s three-year-old son, who played in the gravel nearby. But suddenly Tom’s senses were alerted to danger. He looked up. His heart skipped a beat as he saw a heavy boxcar lumbering down the track and heading directly for the little boy.

Without thought for his own safety, Tom dashed headlong for Jimmy. He grabbed him just before the heavy metal wheels of the freight car rolled by, and the two tumbled to one side and came to a stop in a ditch.

By the time the boy’s father rushed to the scene, Tom was brushing off the gravel that had scratched the frightened Jimmy. Mackenzie had seen the whole incident. Tears filled his eyes as he thanked Tom.

“If there is anything I can ever do to repay you.” he said, “I would gladly do it.”

Tom was now fifteen and his train laboratory had recently been burned. He was losing interest in his job on the railroad train. He often hung around the telegraph office and watched Mackenzie and the other telegraphers, bothering them with endless questions.

“Perhaps I could teach you telegraphy,” Mackenzie offered as a reward for Tom’s saving his son.

Tom accepted without hesitation.

“Before we are done, you will have become the finest sender and receiver on the line,” said Mackenzie.

When Tom came for his first lesson he brought a package containing something to show his teacher. It was his own homemade set of telegraph instruments, which he had manufactured from wire, batteries, and metal.

The next five months were busy ones as Tom learned all he could of the art of sending and receiving telegraph dispatches. Mackenzie was impressed with his protege.

By the end of the apprenticeship, Tom was a capable telegrapher, as Mackenzie had predicted. As a second-class operator, called a “plug” in the trade, Tom could have gone into almost any Western Union office and would have been given a job. Operators were hard to find during the Civil War, for many had left to join the Signal Corps. As a telegrapher, a young boy with skills and a desire for adventure could earn good money and see the world.

In 1863, at the age of sixteen, Tom was ready to strike out on his own. He quit working as a newsboy, and hunted for a telegrapher’s position. His first job was at the Port Huron telegraph office in the local jewelry store. He put a cot in the back of the store and stayed awake all night reading the scientific journals that had been stored in the basement, and he practiced taking press reports on the telegraph in order to become a speedier operator.

The winter of 1864 was severe, and during one heavy blizzard and cold spell the telegraph cable connecting Port Huron with the Canadian shore snapped. The ferry service was stopped, as well. These mishaps left the Canadians cut off from the outside world.

Tom brought his inventive talents to bear on the situation. “Bring a railroad locomotive and engineer to the dock,” he suggested.

Somewhat mystified, officials nevertheless went along with the request. When the locomotive and engineer were in place, Tom gave more instructions. To the engineer he said, “Blow long and short blasts in Morse code on the locomotive whistle, as I tell you.”

As the blasts echoed across the three-quarter-mile gap to the other shore at Sarnia, the Canadians listened and soon got the idea. They maneuvered a locomotive to their own dock and with Morse code answered the American messages.

Grand Trunk railroad officials were impressed with Tom’s quick thinking. When he came to the railroad to seek a telegrapher’s job, they hired him at once. This was a full-time, regular position and was Tom Edison’s first adult job. He moved to Stratford Junction, Ontario, as a telegraph operator for the night shift. He had to work from seven o’clock at night to seven in the morning, signaling trains and awaiting messages. For this work he was paid twenty-five dollars a month.

The job was boring. Tom had nothing to do but sit in front of his telegraph machine and wait for an occasional message. Promptly every hour on the hour he had to telegraph the number “six” to the central office to show he was on the job.

Soon after he started the work he had set up a laboratory in which to experiment. He was irritated when he had to interrupt an experiment, put down his reading, or wake up from a catnap in order to signal on the hour. To an inventive boy like Tom this annoyance presented a challenge. He thought about the problem of the regular signals and devised his first invention.

He got a small clock. To it he attached a little wheel with notches cut in its rim. The wheel revolved slowly on the clock, and the entire device was attached to the sending instrument of the telegraph machine. Promptly on the hour, when the wheel had finished one revolution, it caused the sending mechanism to move up and down with the notches and tap out the required signal.

The invention worked splendidly. Night after night, the faithful timer signaled “six” automatically on the stroke of the hour. But soon the superintendent at the other end of the line began to notice a curious fact. Even though Tom was sending signals promptly on the hour, he was not so quick in replying to messages. The superintendent decided to investigate. When he found what Tom had rigged up on the sender he was angry and scolded the young man severely.

Tom soon got into more trouble with the superintendent. One night he got a hurried order to stop a freight train. But before he could rush out and get the signalman, the train had rumbled past the station. Tom was horrified and had visions of two trains colliding. He knew that another train was due along the single track and that unless he did something immediately there would be a terrible accident. Rushing toward the lower station, he tried desperately to catch the train on foot. But in the dark he slipped and fell into a ditch, knocking himself unconscious.

A serious accident was averted when the two locomotive engineers saw each other approaching and halted their trains. But again the superintendent was furious. The next day he called Tom into the main office in Toronto, where the general manager himself questioned the boy.

“Don’t you realize what could have happened, young man?” the manager demanded. “Men have been sent to prison for criminal negligence in such cases.”

Tom was terrified and feared his punishment. Just then an important visitor arrived to talk to the manager. Tom seized his chance and quietly sneaked out of the room. Once out, he dashed down the street and hopped a moving freight train. From the train he caught a ferry that took him safely out of Canada and back onto United States soil.

The next five years were a time of wandering. Edison became a tramp telegrapher, moving from job to job as the urge for adventure seized him or as he was fired from a particular spot. He traveled from one cheap boardinghouse to another through the Midwest, paying little attention to his habits or clothes. He wore a threadbare suit and scuffed shoes, and for a coat adopted a long cloth duster spotted with ink and chemicals. He learned to get along on sparse and unappealing meals.

During these years he grew to his full height of five feet, nine and one-half inches, and became a pleasant-looking lad despite his disheveled brown hair and a nose that jutted out from a pale face. His trademarks were a battered, squashed cap, a paper collar, and his soiled duster.

As a “lightning slinger” for Western Union, Edison wandered from a small Michigan station, where he was fired, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, then to Indianapolis and on to Cincinnati, Ohio. Several times he was discharged for insubordination; he could not follow exact orders and did not pay enough attention to his job.

His mind seemed to dwell on matters more important to himself. On every job in every town, his first act was to find a room suitable for his scientific tools, wire, batteries, and science books. He continued to spend most of his money on these items. As long as he could experiment with chemicals in his room, he cared little about the cheap boardinghouses or the “emaciators,” as he called the meager meals he was served.

On the job, Edison would readily drop work in order to take note of any new scientific idea that occurred to him. He would interrupt a manager’s wire if he thought his own message more important. He would ignore outgoing messages as they piled up on his table while he sat engrossed in a scientific magazine for hours. And he loved to play practical jokes, especially on the boss. All in all, he was not the most desirable telegraph operator.

But the young man learned some good habits during his years as a tramp operator. In those days before typewriters were common, all messages were written in longhand, and he developed a neat unslanting style of handwriting, speedy to set down and easy to write and read. He cultivated a distinctive signature, beginning his name with a tall, upward-sweeping capital T. The cross stroke of the T ran far to the right to form a roof over the rest of his name. On the job his speed and efficiency gradually increased. At nineteen, he won an intercity tournament. He had become a fast sender and receiver, capable of topnotch telegraphy.

Once, in Cincinnati, Edison arrived on the job late and did not realize that everyone else had walked out on strike. He worked alone in the office throughout the night, sending and receiving messages. In the morning the manager was surprised when he found what Edison had done.

“I want you to work the Louisville wire nights. Your salary will be a hundred and five dollars,” said the manager.

This was a big promotion for Edison.

But his habits of trying to figure out a better way of doing a job, of tinkering with the machines and wires, of installing a new gadget as a practical joke, constantly distracted him from his work.

In Cincinnati a small army of rats often marched through the Western Union office in search of food. Edison tried to think of some way to repel the rodents. One night he installed a machine, his “rat-paralyzer,” consisting of two metal plates insulated from each other and connected to a battery. When a rat stepped from one plate to the other, so that its body formed a bridge between the two plates, it would “render up its soul and depart this earthly sphere,” as Edison’s fellow telegrapher Milt Adams described it.

In another moment of boredom, Edison fixed a device that generated alternating current at high voltage from a battery. He hooked one electrode to the telegraphers’ washbasin. The other electrode was connected to the ground. When the men came in to clean up, and innocently put their hands in the water, the wet floor caused them to form a circuit and they received an electric shock. Edison would peek through a hole in the ceiling and would double up with laughter at the men’s confusion over the strange happening. Finally his boss put an end to the fun.

In Cincinnati, Edison became more adult and began to make friends. With Milt Adams he learned to enjoy sitting in garden cafes, listening to German band music, and going to the theater to see Shakespearean plays.

5.

First Patent

Edison’s bosses rebuked him often for his practical jokes and did not always see that he was no ordinary tramp telegrapher. He was an unusual young man and often a help to their business, but sometimes he was not rewarded for his efforts.

The telegraph was an intensely important part of American life at that time. Improvements were needed, and Edison was a young man deeply interested in devising and testing new ideas in telegraphy. Equipment often worked badly. For example, the Morse register— a receiver with a needle that raised dots and dashes on a moving paper tape—often slowed down when overworked, and left blank words that had to be supplied from the operator’s imagination.

Edison thought about such problems. He had the idea of using a repeating device to record impressions received from the Morse register; later, when the operator had time to take the message, these could be played back at an adjustable speed. Edison started experimenting with such a repeating mechanism.

“I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them, the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered . . . and transferred to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. They would come in at the rate of fifty words a minute and we would grind them out at the rate of twenty-five,” he said.

He was intensely proud of this invention, but felt he must use it without being observed. He and another operator secretly put the device on his machine while they were working, and took it off when the job was done. In the meantime, Edison could go along leisurely at his own speed, producing copy so clean and carefully written that the manager hung it up as a prize example.

But the manager grew suspicious. He could not understand how Edison could produce such perfect work when the other operators could not. Although Edison tried to keep his telegraph repeater carefully concealed, it was exposed during a Presidential election. He put his repeater on as usual, but newspaper copy arrived at a frantic pace and he fell two hours behind as he worked at his own speed. When the newspapers started sending in angry complaints, the manager investigated and discovered the duplicating machine. Edison was forbidden to use it and was taken off the press-copy desk.

Although unhappy, he certainly did not intend to give up his experimenting. He wandered on to Nashville, and then to Memphis, Tennessee. There he earned as much as one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and worked hard on his duplicating device. In Memphis he succeeded in adapting it to connect two cities directly. But as usual the manager, infuriated with the upstart lad who dreamed of improving the telegraph, fired Edison.

The Civil War was over now, and older men were returning to their jobs. Tom Edison found himself penniless and without prospects. He made his way by rail to Decatur, Illinois, and then walked 150 miles back, to Nashville, Tennessee. He got a train pass and headed for Louisville, Kentucky, arriving in the middle of a snowstorm. He wore his light linen duster, and people stared at the spectacle of a strange young man walking through a snowstorm in such meager clothing.

In Louisville, Edison got a job with Western Union, but he preferred to freeze in inadequate clothing rather than not buy chemicals, wire, and batteries to test his scientific ideas. While he worked on his telegraph repeater he continued to subsist in a bare room on poorly cooked food.

He loved to browse through dusty old books in the used-book stores of the town. One early morning he left Western Union at three o’clock, laden with a huge bundle of used science magazines. As he walked through the deserted streets he suddenly felt bullets zing through the air around him. He walked on for a moment before he turned around. A policeman grabbed him and demanded to know why Edison had not stopped when he had been commanded to halt.

“Open that package,” the policeman ordered.

Puzzled, the officer thumbed through the bundle of old magazines. He was more than embarrassed when he saw that the youth had no stolen goods at all.

“What are you doing out at this time of night?” he asked.

When Edison explained that he could not hear well and that the officer must talk louder, the tense situation ended. It was lucky that the policeman was a poor marksman.

In Louisville that year, Edison studied foreign languages and pored over his books. He tinkered with crude electrical equipment and tried out electrical circuits. He constantly pondered ideas about electricity and how it might be used to produce a duplex telegraph, one that would transmit two simultaneous messages over a single wire.

But the work of a telegrapher was tedious and he despaired of ever getting enough money for experimenting on such an invention. He became friends with two adventuresome tramp telegraphers. The three heard that in the Brazilian jungle they could construct telegraph lines and make a fortune. They decided to embark for this exotic foreign land.

Edison began to study Spanish, said good-bye to his boss, and headed for New Orleans. But along the way he heard frightening tales of the mysterious disappearance of fortune-seekers in the South American jungles, and had second thoughts about the whole venture. Finally he told his friends he would not go. The other two left without Edison. He had good reason not to regret his decision when later he heard that they had traveled only as far as Veracruz, Mexico, where they had caught yellow fever and died.

In the fall of 1867, Edison again found himself penniless and out of work. Back home in Port Huron his mother was ailing and the family was being evicted from their home. The young man decided to return and see if he could help. But after a few restless months at Port Huron he had to move on.

This time he decided to go to Boston, where his friend Milt Adams now worked for Western Union. Undaunted by the raw March weather, Tom headed toward the east by way of Montreal and Toronto. Traveling through Canada, his train ran into a fierce blizzard blowing down from the frozen northland, and was slowed down and finally stranded entirely in the swirling drifts of snow. After twenty-four freezing hours, the passengers were taken off the train and were left at an inn until they were sent on to Montreal a few days later.

Tired from the difficult trip, hungry, and disheveled from sleeping in his clothes, Edison finally arrived in Boston. He walked straight to the Western Union office and asked for a job. The manager stared at the newcomer’s long, tousled hair under a wide-brimmed summer hat, his rumpled and dirty clothes, and the chewing tobacco dripping from his jaw. Thinking Edison a tramp from the Midwest, the manager nevertheless said, “All right. Sit down, young man, and show me your handwriting and speed.”

Edison’s neat sample impressed the older man. “You’re hired. Come back tomorrow,” he said.

But the men in the office decided to teach a lesson to this uncouth-looking tramp operator. The next day, when Edison sat down at the number-one wire to receive press copy, he did not know that the other men had arranged for him to receive messages from the fastest sender in the New York office.

The transmission started out slowly enough for him to receive, but soon he noticed it was speeding up. Faster and faster came the press copy, until it had advanced to a frantic pace. Tom quickly perceived the joke and saw that every man in the office was slyly watching him. Without a change of expression, he kept up with the speedy operator on the other end— but went him one better. Now and then he stopped to sharpen his pencil, then casually set to work again. The other operator started to jumble words and stick the signals, but Edison still kept up.

After some time, he opened his key and sent a message: SAY, YOUNG MAN, CHANGE OFF AND SEND WITH THE OTHER FOOT.

The entire office roared with laughter. Edison had won their approval. He could keep up with the best of them—especially with his practical joking. One day he wired the water bucket for electricity to shock a man who touched it. Another day he set up his old rat-paralyzer to use on the constant procession of cockroaches that crawled over the walls.

But he still disliked his boring job and dreamed more and more of the day when he would be a fulltime inventor. More than ever, he was determined that the work to improve transmitting messages on the telegraph would result in his first success. He worked harder than ever to solve the problems of sending two messages at once, on a duplex machine, and he concentrated even more on experiments for a multiplex machine.

Browsing in an old bookstore one day, he stumbled upon something that would be of significance to his ambitions. It was Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. He brought the set home at four o’clock in the morning and sat up until breakfast finishing the books. Then he turned to his roommate.

“Adams,” he said, “I have got so much to do and life is so short, I am going to hustle.”

He was in a hurry to test the experiments of the famous English scientist. He tried every experiment in the two books and grew to admire the man who had invented the world’s first model of the modern dynamo and so had showed how mechanical energy could be changed to electrical energy. Like Edison, Faraday had been a simple apprentice who had little schooling.

Edison and Adams also became fascinated with Alfred Nobel, who had perfected dynamite. The two studied descriptions of Nobel’s compound and rather foolishly decided to make some explosives themselves. After they had combined nitroglycerin with some inert matter and produced a loud explosion they had second thoughts and decided to get rid of their mixture. They put the explosive into a soft-drink bottle, wrapped it carefully, tied a string around it, and one morning at dawn lowered it gently into a sewer. Then they ran as fast as they could go, but there was no explosion.

Other experiments did not always end so uneventfully. A few weeks later, Tom was testing a large induction coil for use with a multiplex machine.

“I took hold of both electrodes of the coil, and it clinched my hands so that I couldn’t let go,” he said later. He looked around frantically and saw that the only way he could break the electrical circuit was to knock the battery off the shelf where it stood. He shut his eyes as tight as he could and gave a sharp yank. As he feared, the nitric acid in the batteries splashed on his face and back. Although he raced to the sink and dashed water all over himself, for the next few weeks he was burned and yellow from the acid. But no mishap would deter him. He was sure he could find a solution to the problem of the multiplex telegraph.

People whom Edison met began to be convinced that the young inventor had talent; for the first time, they began to take him seriously. He persuaded a Boston capitalist to invest in his ideas; for five hundred dollars he promised the man a half share in the profits of his multiplex telegraph.

In January, 1869, Edison publicly announced an important decision. A small notice in the local telegraph trade paper said that Thomas Edison “would hereafter devote his full time to bringing out his inventions.” He considered himself a professional inventor and was determined to succeed solely upon the merit of his ideas and his ability to persuade others of their worth.

Thomas Edison, inventor, was in business, but his first patented invention was a failure. A friend gave Edison one hundred dollars to become a partner in promoting a device the inventor had in mind—an electric vote-recording machine. This invention became the one Edison patented first. In June, 1869, the United States Patent Office granted him No. 90,646 for his electric device to record votes in Congress.

The electric vote-machine recorded votes by electromagnetic impulse. Wires connected a congressman’s seat with a master board in the front of the chamber.

When the congressman pressed a button, his vote would be registered immediately through electric impulse and would be automatically tallied. Tom thought it would be desirable to record votes quickly and accurately. Unfortunately he neglected to consider the politics involved if congressmen had to make formal and speedy records of their votes. They were not at all interested in a mechanism that might prevent them from spending endless time in filibustering.

“Young man, that is just what we do not want,” a congressman in Washington told Edison when he made a costly trip to present his invention. His vote recorder was a financial failure.

On his return trip home the depressed inventor mulled over his lack of success with the device. In the future, he thought grimly, he would not concern himself with inventing a machine that men did not need and did not want.

6.

Gold-Indicator

Edison set up his invention business in a corner of the little shop run by Charles Williams, Jr., on Court Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Here he worked among men he liked—scientists, artisans skilled in producing electrical machines, men working on such inventions as fire-alarm signals, dial telegraphs, printing telegraphs, stock-quotation tickers, and telephones.

Williams’ shop was an ideal location for a young inventor eager to see whether his ingenuity could earn him enough money to keep from starving. Edison took his risks gladly, and the small investments he received from men who believed in him gave him confidence that he could succeed.

He was now a young man in his early twenties, full of energy and ideas and a total belief in himself. The failure of his electric vote recorder did not discourage him for long. He immediately began to work on another invention. Having noticed the increased gold speculation following the Civil War, he studied the telegraphic gold-indicator just introduced on the Gold Exchange in New York. This gold-indicator sent financial information about gold speculation by wire to a central transmitter on the Gold Exchange.

Soon after its invention, a Boston scientist, E. A. Callahan, improved the indicator with a telegraphic machine—a stock ticker that printed by wire onto a moving paper tape the full stock-market quotations and changes in gold prices. Callahan’s company, the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, quickly came into competition with the New York firm.

Edison thought over the workings of the Callahan machine and easily saw possible improvements on the original. He found a willing investor and applied for a second patent. In his shop he was soon able to put several men to work manufacturing his stock ticker along with a dial telegraph machine. He sold the tickers to a company and helped string wire over Boston rooftops for the private stock-ticker lines that the firm leased to thirty subscribers.

Paramount in all his plans, however, was work on a duplex telegraph that would carry two messages over a wire. Another Boston inventor, Joseph B. Stearns, had already taken out a patent improving on the European telegraph that sent two messages over one wire, but in opposite directions only. Western Union had bought the invention and was trying it out experimentally. Edison was not satisfied with Stearns’ improvement and was convinced that his own machine, which would also send simultaneous messages in opposite directions, would be superior, and that eventually he would invent a mechanism for sending messages in the same direction simultaneously.

Edison obtained a loan of eight hundred dollars from a friend. This money gave him enough capital to complete and test his duplex apparatus. One day he marched into the Boston office of Western Union and asked the manager if he could install his new equipment there, as he was sure it would work.

The Western Union manager refused.

Undiscouraged, Edison went to Western Union’s rival, the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate sending two messages over a single wire simultaneously.

This company saw possibilities in Edison’s idea and consented to let him try the apparatus on their Rochester and New York City wires.

In April, 1869, Edison left for Rochester with his equipment and a completed model of his duplex telegraph. He gave specific instructions to a helper in New York, who would assist him at the other end of the line.

Early Sunday morning, April 11, he was prepared for his big chance. His assistant waited to receive a message, and when the wires were completely clear, Edison began to signal. He knew immediately that something was wrong; his assistant at the other end did not answer. He tried again, then once more, but there was no response.

Edison remembered the detailed instructions he had written out and decided to try again early the next day. Next morning he sought unsuccessfully to make connections with New York. All that week he continued his attempts, but something had gone amiss; he had no luck whatsoever. Finally he came to the conclusion that his apparatus was not yet ready. Grief-stricken over his failure, and unhappy about all the money he had borrowed from friends, he returned to Boston to think over his unfortunate circumstances. Fearing he would find no more backers after this fiasco, he made a fateful decision. He decided to leave Boston and start all over again in some other city.

With barely enough money for boat passage, Edison headed down the coast to New York. He could not take his books or scientific apparatus. He did not have a cent in his pocket, and he owed money to his friends. This was certainly one of the lowest moments of his life.

Landing in New York, he wandered among the booths, pushcarts, and fish stalls of Washington Market, marveling at the throngs of people shouting their wares, at horse-drawn carriages rattling along the cobblestones, and at the smell of the fish and fruit and coffee beans in the wholesale stalls. In his penniless state all he could think about was finding food for his empty stomach.

Soon he passed a tea wholesaler’s and paused to watch a teataster inside, then marched in to talk to the man who was judging the lots of fragrant tea. Presently the young visitor asked for a sample package.

The teataster may have been startled by this request, but he handed Edison a free package of tea. Edison took his prize, and within an hour had traded it at a nearby restaurant for a cup of hot coffee and an apple dumpling. Always after that first morning in New York, Edison’s favorite dish was apple dumplings.

He hunted for a friend from his telegraphing days who might put him up overnight until he could find work, but he had no luck. He spent that first night wandering the streets of the city and waiting for daybreak.

For several days the jobless inventor lived on a diet of five-cent meals bought with a dollar he had borrowed from a friend he had finally managed to find.

But fortune finally found him. He looked up Franklin L. Pope, an engineer in charge of equipment at the Gold Indicator Company near Wall Street, in the heart of the financial district. Pope had heard of Edison’s stock ticker. He offered to let the young inventor sleep on the floor of his shop, among the machinery.

Edison set up a cot in the cellar of the building. Often, instead of sleeping, he studied the workings of the transmitter that sent out information on the fluctuations in the price of gold. Named after its inventor, Dr. S. S. Laws, the complicated indicator, or stock ticker, was a telegraph instrument that recorded on a moving tape the quotations of stock as fast as they were listed on the exchange. A man would sit at this stock-printing telegraph and strike its keys, thus perforating the moving tape. The tape then passed through a transmitter that sent signals out to tickers in the brokers’ offices. Before its invention, gold-transaction information had been communicated by a system of messenger boys.

Edison had been sleeping in the shop for only a few days when something happened. As he was watching the movement of the indicator’s mechanism he suddenly sprang to attention; obviously something had gone wrong. The entire apparatus was slowing down. Finally, with a sudden resounding crash, it came to a halt.

Before Edison could fully realize what had occurred, Pope ran into the room, followed closely by Dr. Laws himself. Hastily they checked the workings of the indicator. Before they could find the cause of the failure, other people began to crowd in, surrounding the inventor and his superintendent. They were messenger boys sent from the subscribing offices. They had been dispatched as soon as the machine had stopped relaying the vital gold prices.

In his mind, Dr. Laws could see his entire company collapsing. He yelled at Pope at the top of his voice as Pope tried frantically to find out what was wrong. All the boys from the offices were screaming messages from their bosses. Everything was confusion.

Calm in the midst of this bedlam, Edison carefully examined the motionless indicator. Then, shouting that he thought he had spotted the trouble, he pushed through to Dr. Laws.

The doctor, beside himself with anxiety, looked at the young man. “Fix it! Fix it! Be quick!” he screamed.

Edison reached over to a contact spring that had broken off and fallen between two gear wheels. Within a short time he had repaired the machine, set the dials back at zero, and instructed all the messengers to return to their dials and set them back, too. The trouble had been remedied.

When things had returned to normal, Dr. Laws asked Edison to come to his office the next day.

When, on the next day, Edison told Laws of his own work, the older man was impressed. He proposed that Edison take a job with the Gold Indicator Company. He would be Pope’s assistant and would keep the stock ticker operating.

Dr. Laws had offered Edison a job at a better salary than he had ever imagined he could earn. At twenty-one years of age he would be working in the financial capital of the nation and would be concerned with machinery vital to the gold speculation so important to that era. He could not have been more pleased.

His good fortune continued. Within a few months, Pope, an electrical engineer, decided to start his own business, and Edison was given Pope’s old job of superintendent at a salary of three hundred dollars a month.

The new job working with the Laws indicator stimulated Edison’s determination to continue his inventing. His head was full of plans for new machines and improvements on old ones. He soon applied for a patent that was an improvement on the stock-printing telegraph. He had devised an alphabetical wheel and a better printing mechanism for the Laws machine.

The Edison improvements made the Gold Indicator Company competitive with Western Union, and the latter company quickly bought out the new Laws machine. Now Edison’s job was gone and he had to make a decision. Should he go to work for Western Union again or should he look for a new position?

Edison decided he had had enough dealings with Western Union, the giant of the communications held; he recognized that his opportunity would be greater as an independent inventor. He got in touch with Pope and they agreed to join forces. On October 1, 1869, an advertisement appeared in The Telegrapher, the trade journal of telegraphy. It announced that the firm of Pope, Edison & Company was now in existence. This company was the first professional electrical engineering firm of its sort in the United States. The two men had a silent partner, J. W. Ashley, editor of The Telegrapher, who would promote the company.

Edison announced his intentions to design instruments and make careful and reliable tests on them; to construct and maintain telegraph lines; to manufacture such instruments as fire alarms, thermo-alarms, and burglar alarms; to invent apparatus for conducting experiments; and to prepare drawings, catalogs, and purchasing materials.

To save money, he moved across the river to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he lived with Pope and his wife. Interestingly, this was the same area where his ancestors had settled before the Revolutionary War.

Edison set up his laboratory in an old shop in Jersey City. Each morning at six o’clock he caught a train to that city. There he worked through until one o’clock every morning. Then he walked the half-mile to the station, sometimes through rain or snow, to catch the train home. The routine stimulated rather than exhausted him. He felt that he was on the road to success, and that nothing could stand in his way.

7.

Business and Marriage

At first, things went well for Edison. He perfected a printer to report gold quotations, and his company produced and rented it so cheaply that it began to compete with the Western Union model.

General Marshall Lefferts, president of Western Union, was keenly aware of this developing competition. An astute businessman, he decided to buy out the rival machine before real trouble occurred. Within six months, Edison, Pope, and Ashley received fifteen thousand dollars from Western Union for the gold-quotation printer.

Now Edison could send to his parents a letter that he had been waiting a long time to write.

Dear Father and Mother:

I sent you another express package Saturday-enclosed you will find the receipt for same.

IC Edison writes me that mother is not very well and that you have to work very hard. I guess you had better take it easy after this—Don’t do any hard work and get mother anything she desires—You can draw on me for money—Write me and say how much money you will need in June and I will send the amount on the first of that month—give love to all the folks—and write me the town news—

What is Pitt doing—Did you sell IC a lot—>

Is truey still with you and how is she—

Your affec son Thos A

Though his personal financial situation had improved, Edison recognized one deficiency in his business. In the company, he alone was working night and day, while his partners drew an equal share of the profits.

“I get tired of doing all the work with compensation narrowed down to the point of extinguishment by the superior business abilities of my partners,” he said wryly.

He decided to leave the partnership, and announced that henceforth he would work on his own.

General Lefferts had been watching this talented young man who had already produced improvements for the telegraph. Lefferts employed a group of inventors who worked on all sorts of projects for Western

Union. “Edison is a genius and a very fiend for work,” Lefferts remarked. He made the young man an offer to join his group of inventors. Edison agreed to come temporarily, and Lefferts immediately put him to work on research and experiment that would make stock printers operate without running wild and causing costly mistakes.

Edison was pleased with the offer. He did not ask about pay nor did he ask who would own the patent rights on his work, but rather he sought immediately to solve the problem of the stock printer.

Three weeks later, he walked into the president’s office.

“Here it is,” he announced.

Edison had developed the necessary improvement, a unison-stop apparatus on which all the tickers would register if the central transmitter began to send out wild numbers. Thereafter the stock ticker brought in great profits to the telegraph industry.

“Young man,” said Lefferts, “we owe you some money for this invention. . . . How much do you think it is worth?”

Edison paused for a minute. He had no idea what to ask; he thought of five thousand dollars, though he knew he would have been happy to accept three thousand.

But he decided to gamble. “General, make me an offer,” he countered.

The general leaned back in his chair. “How would forty thousand dollars strike you?” he asked.

Edison almost fainted.

‘‘Why, that seems fair enough,” he managed to say.

When Edison returned for the money three days later, Lefferts handed him a contract along with a check for forty thousand dollars. The contract seemed incomprehensible to Edison, and he looked with uneasiness at the check. This was the first check he had ever received.

Worried about the fragile piece of paper, he hurried to the bank. Somehow he thought there might be trouble. He had no faith in the financial world.

Hesitantly Edison walked into the bank, found a teller’s window, and thrust the check at him. The teller scrutinized it carefully and waved it in the air as he talked to the young man. He did not know that Edison, with his deafness, could not hear a word he was saying.

The teller pushed the piece of paper back into Edison’s hand. Edison thought the man had refused to honor the check, and he left the bank. It had all been a swindle, he believed. He was certain he had been cheated out of his invention and all the money he should have earned.

He returned to the Western Union office unhappily. When his colleagues saw the downcast inventor and learned what had happened, they burst out laughing. They explained that the teller had only wanted to see some identification and that Edison must endorse the check.

To make sure that Edison got his money, General Lefferts sent his private secretary along to the bank to show him the proper procedure. Soon the inventor stood once more at the bank window, and the teller placed stacks of ten- and twenty-dollar bills neatly in front of him. The pile was enormous.

Edison took the bills, stuffed them into his pockets, and ran to catch the ferryboat home. Once he was in the quiet of his room and had fully realized that he had a veritable treasure stacked in front of him, he was frightened. He knew he had to do something with the money immediately, before a thief stole it from him. The next morning, after an anxious night of sitting guard over the bills, Edison caught the ferryboat back to New York. This time he headed for the bank, to open his first account.

This money was what he had been waiting for. It gave him his first real chance to be independent. In the winter of 1871, Edison quit Western Union and, with William Unger, a former associate of General Lefferts, created the firm of Edison & Unger. Edison searched through the dingy factory district of Newark until at 4-6 Ward Street he found a building suitable for setting up his own shop. He hired capable workmen, ordered new machinery, and assembled his factory. In thirty days he spent the entire forty thousand dollars to start his own business of producing stock tickers for Western Union.

In a letter home he jokingly called himself “a bloated eastern manufacturer,” for he had an order from Western Union to produce twelve hundred tickers over the next few years.

Despite Edison’s satisfaction with his business, he was sad over personal affairs. His mother, to whom he had always felt close and sympathetic, was near death. Her mind had become confused in recent years and now she was desperately ill. Edison was anxious to visit her, for he had not returned home in three years. But before he could get away that spring, she died, in April, 1871. He hurried home to attend her funeral, then rushed back to Newark, more than ever determined to busy himself with work.

The next five years were a period of intensive work and incredible productivity as Edison’s scientific genius came to full flower and his electrical business grew. He worked tirelessly in his shop. Inventions and improvements poured forth and his manufacturing business boomed. The numerous patents granted him during those five years made Edison’s name synonymous with the American industrial revolution.

Though he was still under twenty-five, the men he hired soon labeled him ‘‘the Old Man.” He had an unusual manner with his employees. He worked harder than anyone else, and he fully expected his men to keep pace with him. He had a keen sense of humor and loved to banter and joke with his workers. If he had to keep them in the factory until a job was done, he would cajole them, perhaps making bets that they could not finish the work without stopping. When a difficult task was done, he was likely to close down the factory and put on a big celebration for all the employees. But in one critical area of management, Edison was a complete failure. He had no financial sense. He was forever unsnarling himself from his hopeless bookkeeping methods.

“I kept no books,” he said later. “I preserved a record of my own expenditures on one hook, and the bills on another hook.”

It is not surprising that he lived in a constantly precarious financial situation. Frequently he would arrive at his shop to find no money available to meet a payroll or no funds on hand for a piece of new machinery. Then he would have to drop everything and set his men to manufacturing more stock tickers night and day until he had earned the needed money.

Once he received a rush order for many stock tickers. He ordered everybody to work, but discovered that something was wrong with the machines they had produced. He called in his most trusted assistants.

“Close the doors and lock them,” he ordered. “Nobody is going to leave the factory until we find out what went wrong.”

For sixty hours, without regular food or enough rest, the men worked over the faulty tickers, trying to catch the mistake that had caused the trouble. Only when they had finally found and corrected the error did they leave.

Edison supervised his shops directly, but he also spent every spare moment in the top-floor research laboratory that he maintained on Ward Street. Here, during the summer of 1871, he started to keep a notebook on the research, experiments, and ideas that occupied him over the years.

In this laboratory, Edison developed his rare ability to examine a machine and see the essential improvement that would change it from an experimental device to one capable of commercial use. Despite his whirlwind schedule of manufacturing machines, he found time for the research that resulted in a remarkable number of patents. In 1872 he filed for thirty-eight new patents on the stock ticker, and in 1873 for twenty-five more. Big business turned to the prolific inventor increasingly as its respect for him grew.

In financial circles he began to be called the “young wonder,” and was sought to work out solutions to perplexing problems.

Though he was a master at invention and was the confident and authoritative head of a thriving business, Edison’s deafness made him rather shy with young ladies.

As he left his shop one rainy evening early in 1871, soon after he had started his business, he found two young girls huddled in his doorway to avoid the downpour. Edison invited them in from the storm and was immediately attracted by the innocent charm of one of them. She was Mary Stilwell; her companion was her sister Alice. Both girls taught Sunday school nearby.

Mary was just sixteen years old. So that he might have a chance to see this lovely blonde girl every day, he offered her a job punching holes in telegraphic tape in his laboratory. Soon he knew that he cared deeply for her, and finally asked permission to call on her at her home.

Marriageable girls of that period were usually well chaperoned, and Mary was no exception. Edison’s deafness made a conventional courtship of whispers and giggles in the front parlor impossible, for the two could not converse normally. Characteristically, Edison found a way for the couple to exchange their thoughts and so become better acquainted. He taught Mary the Morse code, and soon he could sit and communicate with her by tapping out a message with a silver quarter on the palm of her hand.

One evening as they sat together, Edison took her hand and tapped, “I have been thinking of you all the time. Would you marry me?”

Mary smiled softly and tapped back, “That would make me very happy.” So the couple became engaged.

Since Edison had suffered the death of his mother in the spring of that year, the two made no plans for a formal wedding. On the snowy Christmas day of 1871 they were married quietly in Newark in a simple ceremony. Edison took his bride to their first home, a new house at 97 Wright Street in Newark.

Unfortunately, Mary was quickly introduced to her husband’s eccentric habits. No sooner had they arrived in their house on their wedding day than Edison began to pace back and forth and worry over some stock tickers that were being assembled in the shop.

Telling his bride that he was going to the factory for a while, he disappeared an hour after they had been married. All the rest of that day Mary waited tearfully for her missing husband. It was not until late in the evening that one of the men at the plant asked Edison what he was doing there.

“What time is it?” he asked.

When he found out, he answered, “Oh, I have to go home. I got married today.”

Mary soon understood that she was wedded to an unusual man. She never complained at his complete absorption in his work; in a sweet and unresentful way she made a comfortable home for him.

The couple had three children. A baby girl was born on February 18, 1873. They named her Marion Estelle after Edison’s oldest sister. Three years later a son was born, and Edison consented to his wife’s wish that they name the boy Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. Edison adored the children and soon gave them the playful nicknames of Dot and Dash. When Dot and Dash were five and two years old, Mary had another child, born October 26, 1878. He was named William Leslie.

William was the last child Mary would have. In the years ahead, when her husband would be so deeply engrossed in inventing that she might not see him for long periods of time, Mary’s children would occupy her time and energy.

8.

Dealing With Industrial Giants

One day Edward H. Johnson, a telegraph engineer, arrived at Edison’s Ward Street shop. He was carrying a new kind of automatic telegraph; he told Edison he represented men who wanted to invest in a company to produce the machine.

“Take a look at this automatic telegraph,” Johnson said to Edison. “We want to know what you think of it.”

This particular automatic telegraph, invented by George D. Little, had proved disappointing in its initial testing. Edison examined it with interest and agreed to test it further. After he had run experiments he spoke further with Johnson.

“There are weaknesses in the machine. I have some ideas on how it can be improved,” Edison said. Then he added enthusiastically, “But I really think the automatic telegraph has splendid possibilities.”

The men backing the device, who had incorporated as the Automatic Telegraph Company, were delighted. Edison’s opinion encouraged them to invest in improving the machine, and they quickly concluded an agreement with him, the one man most capable of correcting the telegraph’s flaws. For forty thousand dollars, Edison agreed to become a partner of Joseph T. Murray. In 1871, the two opened a new shop to experiment on the automatic telegraph and manufacture it when it might be ready.

Unknown to Edison, Jay Gould, the financial tycoon and robber baron of big business, was a secret backer of this new company that had succeeded in attracting Edison’s interest. Gould, who already controlled a powerful network of railroads, had dreams of monopolizing the wire services and newspapers that would help him manipulate the stock market. He had assumed control of Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company to fight for domination of the telegraph industry.

Secretly he was preparing for open warfare with Western Union, which was controlled by the Morgan-Vanderbilt financial combination. Automatic Telegraph was his weapon and Edison was his pawn in this game to control telegraphy.

In effect, Edison was enticed to use his genius for both sides in this industrial warfare. The situation trapped him in a web of financial and legal intrigue that kept him from earning just rewards for his work.

Edison knew little of the scheming methods common to big business of that era. His mind was absorbed with new ideas and new products. Without thinking of business complications, he set to work on the challenge of producing a working automatic telegraph. Soon he was reading books, magazines, and treatises on the subject in many languages. Time after time he performed experiments on the telegraph, and time after time he failed. But patiently he searched on, for he knew that out of many failures would come some modest accomplishment that would open the way to his ultimate goal.

The fall of 1871 came and went with continuous research and experiments, mostly on electrostatic interference problems. Winter passed, and as spring approached, Edison’s efforts were partially rewarded, for he had improved the telegraph’s speed over long distances in order to make it more efficient.

Like other existing automatic systems, his telegraph included a hand punch for perforating a moving tape that was passed through an automatic transmitter. Wherever a hole came in the tape, an electric contact was made and an impulse sent to the line. At the receiving end an automatic recorder printed the message on chemically treated paper.

By the winter of 1872 the automatic telegraph was more effective, speedier, had a better signal, and copied a much clearer message. In August, 1872, Edison filed patent applications for many improvements and delegated his rights to George Harrington, the company director, who secretly represented Jay Gould’s interests.

But Edison was not a person who could cease work before he was totally satisfied with its results. During the winter of 1873 he labored on the telegraph and developed a device that received actual letters instead of the dots and dashes of the Morse code. In tests over 120 consecutive nights he sent messages to Washington; every night he was successful. Finally the automatic telegraph became completely workable and with its adoption the telegraph industry sustained a period of unprecedented growth and expansion.

Early in 1874, Gould ordered preliminary skirmishes in the war to weaken Western Union. Using Edison’s newly perfected automatic device, Automatic Telegraph challenged Western Union to battle. Each company would use its own methods of sending and receiving, and speed would determine the winner. It was a close contest. Both companies sent one of President Grant’s messages, and the words literally flew across the wires. The victor—but only by a hair—was Automatic Telegraph; it won out over its rival by only one minute.

Edison was not much concerned with the mounting warfare. He did not fully realize how a vicious battle for control could affect him, and in the meanwhile he was working on another project for Automatic Telegraph’s deadly rival, Western Union. This was an endeavor to perfect the multiplex telegraph—Edison’s longtime dream.

Western Union had provided him with men to assist him in research in a separate shop in the Western Union building at 145 Broadway, in New York City. But as tensions increased between Morgan-Vanderbilt’s Western Union and Jay Gould’s Automatic Telegraph, Edison’s experiments on the multiplex telegraph were lost in the battle. As yet, he had been paid no money for his work, although he had spent a good deal of time on experiments and felt close to a solution. While Automatic Telegraph was defeating Western Union with Edison’s help, Western Union had lost interest in cooperating with him on the multiplex telegraph. Edison wrote anxiously to the Western Union president in an attempt to win his backing again, but the president did not bother to reply.

Panic overcame Edison’s good judgment. He had spent so much energy and time on the idea of the multiplex telegraph and was so close to a breakthrough that he could not imagine giving up. He needed to complete the project if only to receive the money due him. In an act of desperation he wrote to George B. Prescott, Western Union’s chief engineer, and foolishly promised him a partnership in the invention if Prescott could persuade his company to cooperate once again. Of course, this was an excellent opportunity for Prescott. The canny engineer agreed, and saw to it that Western Union again supplied Edison with the men and equipment he needed.

Work on the multiplex telegraph resumed. Edison worked day and night in the basement at 145 Broadway, experimenting without a break except for a hurried cup of coffee or a few hours of rest. By the beginning of summer, 1874, he had realized his dream of many long years. By combining various segments of the existing equipment with his own improvements, he actually transmitted four messages on one wire-two messages in each direction. He had finally perfected the multiplex telegraph, which he named the quadruplex because it sent four messages.

On July 9, 1874, Edison, Prescott, and President Orton of Western Union signed an agreement. Edison filed a patent application naming Prescott as his coinventor, and the rights were handed over to Western Union.

When Jay Gould heard that Western Union had succeeded in gaining patent rights to the quadruplex, he was furious because he had not been able to get Edison’s work exclusively for Automatic Telegraph. Word was sent to Edison not to sign any agreement, but it was already too late.

Edison had always considered himself a free-lance inventor, and did not see the conflict of interest in his working for the two rivals. He had received money from the Gould-backed company of Automatic Telegraph for other work, but as yet had received no payment from Western Union. Automatic Telegraph now insisted that Edison’s taking any money from their competitor would be in conflict with his agreement with them.

Meanwhile, Edison was desperately in need of immediate cash. He had mortgaged his home in Newark and would lose it if he could not raise ten thousand dollars at once. He rushed to President Orton’s office and asked for a loan, but was turned down. Then he went to Automatic Telegraph. They loaned him the money, but he did not receive it free and clear. In exchange, the company asked him to produce an invention that they needed at once. This was a new kind of relay system for sending messages over long distances. Western Union had accused Automatic Telegraph of patent infringements on their own relay system, and the courts had upheld Western Union. Now Automatic Telegraph had to produce another type of relay or cease operations in this field.

Edison’s genius came to the rescue, this time for Automatic Telegraph. Within a remarkably short time he produced a workable substitute for Western Union’s relay. Instead of the magnet used in Western Union’s equipment, the new relay system involved use of a drum-shaped piece of chalk rotated by a small motor.

Edison presented his relay with dramatic flair. The court had ordered Automatic to silence all its telegraph keys at a certain time. Precisely at that moment, Edison entered Automatic’s office carrying a package and tools. He produced a pair of pliers, removed the old relay equipment, and connected his own apparatus.

“He’s got it!” someone shouted as the keys again started clicking.

Edison had saved Automatic Telegraph Company.

The inventor received ten thousand dollars from Gould for his chalk relay. This was enough to save his house for the moment. But he still had not received a penny from Western Union for all his work on the quadruplex, though the company had already put the invention to use on some of its lines and was reaping a profit from it.

By now he was almost frantic. He was hounded by his creditors and owed countless debts. He asked Orton for a temporary advance and reluctantly the Western Union president loaned him five thousand dollars.

But the money was quickly spent in paying bills. Edison felt he absolutely had to settle the contract on the quadruplex, for he had completed his bargain with Western Union and was convinced they should honor theirs. In a letter he asked for a settlement of fifty thousand dollars, but received no reply.

Edison was disconsolate. He was certain that Western Union never intended to pay him for his valuable quadruplex. He finally decided he would have to sell the invention to Jay Gould, who of course eagerly awaited such a move. The general superintendent of Western Union, who was working secretly with Gould, encouraged Edison to meet Gould. The rumors that Edison was selling his quadruplex telegraph to Jay Gould’s Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company rocked Wall Street, and Western Union stock immediately began to plummet.

Edison met with Gould in his Newark shop. They bargained in secret over the price of the quadruplex and settled on thirty thousand dollars. This amount covered only the sale of Edison’s half-interest. Now Western Union and Gould each controlled a half-interest in the invention.

So the cutthroat battle for control of telegraphy continued. The two principals filed a court suit over ownership of the quadruplex and accused Edison of duplicity. From 1874 to 1880 the bitter war between the two communications giants advanced through the courts. In 1875, Edison participated in the trial to settle ownership. He was characterized as a rogue inventor who had betrayed his patrons, and was called many derogatory names. He realized that he was caught between two determined groups of capitalists who did not care if he was destroyed in their battle to win rights to the profitable telegraphic device.

Ultimately Edison found that he himself had been swindled by Gould. In 1875, Gould acted to merge his telegraphic interests. He promised Edison a job as chief electrician of the new consolidated company and also promised stock worth $250,000 for Edison’s share in Automatic Telegraph. But the promise was broken. Edison received neither the stock nor the job.

With other stockholders who had been defrauded, Edison joined in a suit against the communications baron; this case traveled through the courts for thirty years. In 1906, long after Gould had died, it was finally settled. Ironically, though the judgment was in favor of Edison and the stockholders, they were awarded damages of only one dollar in settlement.

After the merger of the Automatic Telegraph Company with the Gould interests, Edison was forced to go back to work once again for Western Union.

The dramatic war of the robber barons did not come to a final conclusion until long after Edison’s return. Jay Gould finally succeeded in wresting control of Western Union from his rivals in 1881. He was then the lone giant of telegraphy.

Edison later said, “When Gould got the Western Union, I knew no further progress in telegraphy was possible, and I went into other lines.”

9.

Perfecting the Telephone

By 1875 Thomas Edison had completed his work on the quadruplex telegraph. In the preceding year he had also found time to work on such inventions as waxed paper, later to become a standard item in all households, and the mimeograph machine, eventually to become standard equipment in all offices. But with work on the quadruplex finished that year, he turned his attention to another use of the electric wire.

Two inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, had separately been doing experiments on the telephone. Early in 1875, Bell went to Western Union to ask permission to use its wires in his experiments. When Western Union officials told Bell that Gray had already been given permission, Bell returned to his laboratory to work on his telephone in secrecy.

Now William Orton, president of Western Union, began to sense the possibilities of this new idea for transmitting the human voice. He called on Edison, his professional inventor.

“Get to work on the telephone,” he said.

That same year, 1875, Edison began his work. He studied the principles of transmitting the human voice and began experiments that ultimately led to the success of the telephone. He made his own model from a German device for sending a musical tone over a wire, already invented by Johann Reis in 1861. Edison experimented with this device, and by January, 1876, filed a caveat, a legal notice, with the United States Patent Office, giving formal word of his intention to work on the invention of the telephone.

Early in the spring of 1876, Edison thought it was time for a new beginning in his life. He was ready to stop putting all his energies into manufacturing and to concentrate only on research and inventing. But first he had to establish a place where he could conduct research in his own way.

He sent for his father to come stay with the family and help explore the countryside for a suitable location for a laboratory.

“You could live with me or anywhere else you pleased, and I will give you twenty dollars per week,” Edison wrote to his father.

But old Sam Edison, still as independent in mind and strong in body as ever, would consent only to visit. He packed his bags and arrived at a New York City pier to board the ferryboat for Jersey City. The boat had just left the dock and was already ten feet away from shore.

Without a moment’s hesitation the old gentleman reared back, gave a mighty dash to the pier’s edge, and leaped across the ten feet of open water to the ferry’s deck. The other passengers were astonished. A young man came up and asked the stranger’s name. When he learned it was Samuel Edison, the man inquired if he was related to the great inventor.

“He is my son,” Samuel Edison replied proudly.

The inquisitive young man was a newspaper reporter, and the next day all New York read of the athletic prowess of Thomas Edison’s father.

“Find me a quiet place in the country where I can build my own laboratory,” the younger Edison said to his father.

Sam Edison found an unlikely spot, a pasture where cows grazed, at Menlo Park, about twenty-five miles southwest of New York City. Thomas Edison thought the field a perfect site for the research institution he envisioned. He purchased the land and asked his father to direct the construction of his dream laboratory.

The completed building was a rectangular two-story frame structure, one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide. It had a porch in front and was surrounded by a neatly painted white picket fence to keep out stray pigs and cows. Soon horse-drawn vans hauled in loads of heavy machinery, chemicals, wire, books, steam engines, a gasoline converter to supply gaslight for the laboratory, and other equipment. This building in Menlo Park was the world’s first industrial laboratory—a bold invention in itself. It provided the model for the gigantic research and development laboratories of the future.

The laboratory, into which Edison put forty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment alone during the first year, was a unique institution for scientific investigation at that time. Here Edison supervised teams of men, using a group approach toward the discovery of practical inventions. Planned research of this type was a new concept, and with its creation Edison was again at the forefront of the technological revolution in the United States.

Practical scientists and engineers were beginning to gain the repute that in the past had been held only by theoretical scientists. Edison never called himself a pure scientist and had little use for scholars and theoreticians. He always proudly proclaimed that he was a practical inventor, a man who devised machines for which there was a real need. He was not interested in research for its own sake.

He moved his family into a farmhouse near Menlo Park and helped settle his crew of workmen in Mrs. Jordan’s boardinghouse, one of the five or six homes that comprised the rural village.

Now he was prepared to work on the new and engrossing problem of sending the sound of a human voice over wires. He was already too late in the race to win an initial patent; just a month after he had filed his caveat, Bell had filed for a patent on a completed telephone. Curiously, the other inventor, Elisha Gray, hied his patent for a completed telephone on the same day. The two men had experimented independently, but Bell ultimately won the rights to the patent.

Bell’s telephone was not a complicated machine. He had wound a coil of fine copper wire around the pole of a permanent bar magnet. Then a soft-iron disk was put in front of the pole and attached to a mouthpiece. The receiver was made in the same way. When a person spoke into the mouthpiece, the voice created sound waves. These struck the sending disk and made it vibrate in more or less degree, according to the sound waves. This changing vibration caused the electrical current in the wire to vary, too. At the receiving end, the disk vibrated in accordance with the electrical variations in the line: it vibrated just as the sending disk vibrated when a person spoke into it, and made sound waves picked up by the ear of the listener. So the human voice created sound waves, which changed into electrical current, then back into sound waves.

But Bell’s telephone was a crude instrument, barely capable of being heard. Bell went to Western Union and offered to sell his device for $100,000, but he was turned down. At this rejection, Bell decided to set up his own telephone manufacturing company, and Western Union began to worry that the telephone might compete with the telegraph.

In July, 1876, the new invention created a great sensation at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. William Orton then decided that Western Union should get into the telephone business in haste. He turned the matter over to Edison, who he felt sure could come up with a new invention upon request.

“Improve on the Bell telephone so that we can use it,’’ Orton said to Edison. They settled on a price of $150 a week for five years if Edison would do research on the telephone.

During the fall and into the winter of 1876, Edison worked on improving the volume of the instrument. He conceived the idea that the machine would operate more efficiently if he separated the receiver and the transmitter, which were one unit in the Bell telephone. He introduced an induction coil, and set his laboratory crew to work seeking the best substance for changing the human voice into electric impulses in the transmitter.

Edison produced telephone after telephone, using all sorts of materials, from water, sponges, wet paper, and felt, to thin films of graphite. But nothing worked well. Patiently he kept trying. He developed fifty different kinds of telephones, and gradually he began to improve the sound. He still had not found the perfect substance for transmitting sound when one night a workman walked through the laboratory carrying a broken lamp chimney covered with blackened soot.

The chimney struck Edison’s imagination. He beckoned to the workman, and soon he had scraped the lampblack off the chimney and had shaped it into a little cake. He put the cake of carbon to the test; it worked better than anything he had tried before. The Edison transmitter was born, and today it is still in use in every telephone.

The perfected carbon transmitter proved to be the addition to the Western Union telephone necessary to make it commercially feasible. Orton asked his inventor how much he wanted for his work.

Edison paused. “Make me an offer, Mr. Orton.”

“That’s fine,” responded the inventor, “only I would like to be paid six thousand dollars a year for the life of the patent.” He knew he could spend the larger sum on machinery and research if he received it all at once. By taking the money in smaller yearly amounts, he would be financially secure for the seventeen-year-long life of the patent.

Soon Edison got a cable from England requesting another improvement—a receiver that would not infringe on the Bell telephone patent.

Incredibly, in only a few weeks Edison produced a new receiver that did not make use of the Bell-instrument magnet. He converted the chalk cylinder he had used when he replaced the electromagnet of the telegraph. Then he constructed six receivers and rushed them off to England.

NEW TELEPHONE RECEIVER HIGHLY SATISFACTORY. OFFER THIRTY THOUSAND FOR IT, the British cabled back.

Edison accepted the offer, and was later astonished to find he had been given thirty thousand pounds instead of dollars—a far greater sum than he had expected.

Edison’s work on the telephone led ultimately to a great “telephone war,” for Bell and Western Union began to compete for the millions of dollars to be made on the new invention. Legal action followed, and in the next fifteen years more than six hundred lawsuits over ownership rights were fought in the courts between the two companies.

An agreement was finally negotiated whereby Western Union would withdraw from the telephone field, receiving a 20 percent royalty from Bell for seventeen years. Western Union ultimately received millions of dollars for the invention for which it had paid Edison $100,000.

Meanwhile, he had gone into even more original work in the field of sound. It culminated in an invention that was to revolutionize America’s way of spending leisure time.

10.

Inventing the Phonograph

It took courage and resourcefulness for a deaf man to experiment on the telephone, but as he worked with sound vibrations Thomas Edison compensated for his hearing disability by attaching a needle to the diaphragm of the telephone. As he spoke into the diaphragm he rested his finger on the needle in order to judge the power of the vibrations and “hear better.”

One day as he sang loudly into the telephone mouthpiece the vibrations of his voice caused the needle to prick his finger. That little accident started a train of thought. Edison had been working on improvements of his telegraph repeater during the summer of 1877 and had been fascinated by the sounds of the machine running along at high speed, for the noises it gave off were almost like human voices.

He considered what had happened. If he could record on a surface the actions of a needle connected to a diaphragm vibrating as he spoke, then send another needle connected to another diaphragm over the same surface afterward, he was positive he would hear himself talk back when the second needle made the second diaphragm vibrate. He tried his idea on a strip of paraffined paper. “Halloo! Halloo!” he shouted into the mouthpiece, pulling the paper over the steel point of the vibrating needle.

Then, with his friend Charles Batchelor leaning eagerly over his shoulder, Edison pulled the paper through again so that its marks moved the point of a needle attached to another diaphragm. The two listened.

“Halloo! Halloo!” came the distinct response. The machine had talked.

This experiment was the first step toward a phonograph. Edison proceeded patiently and confidently. He wrote in July, 1877: “There is no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.”

He was working to perfect a telephone repeater and was not actually thinking in terms of a talking machine. For four months, improvements on the telephone absorbed his waking hours.

Edison had learned by now to give no hint of a new project to inquisitive acquaintances, but word was spreading of new and miraculous work by the inventor. He received a letter from his friend General Ben Butler, in Washington:

My Dear Edison:

Tell me something about your wonderful invention in recording the human voice. I need not say that you had better keep it perfectly secret. It is so remarkable that I do not understand it at all. . . .”

One day in November, 1877, after months of thought and experimentation, Edison sat down and drew a simple sketch. It showed a foot-long shaft on which there was a cylinder with grooves around it. Tinfoil would be wrapped around the cylinder. At each side of the cylinder a diaphragm and needle were to be attached. The cylinder would revolve when a crank was turned. Edison figured it would cost about eighteen dollars to construct this simple device.

Edison handed the drawing to his assistant, John Kruesi.

“Make a model of this, John,” he said.

Kruesi looked at the drawing. “What is it supposed to be?” he asked.

“It’s a machine that will talk,” came the reply.

The Old Man was losing his grip, Kruesi thought. He was sure the idea was impossible.

When they heard about it, other workmen began to gather round. They all shook their heads and said it would not work. They bet Edison a box of his favorite cigars that the crazy machine would be a failure.

Kruesi worked through the night on it anyhow, and when he was done he brought the gadget in to his employer.

“Fine. Now you can go home and get some sleep,” Edison said, and patted his assistant on the shoulder.

“Oh, no,” came the response. “If that thing is going to talk, I’m going to stay and hear it myself.”

Kruesi watched as Edison carefully wrapped tinfoil around the metal cylinder and glued it in place. Then everyone in the shop stood intent as he began to turn the handle of the shaft. As he cranked the machine, he shouted into a mouthpiece attached to one of the diaphragms:

“Mary had a little lamb,

Its fleece was white as snow,

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go.”

When he had finished, he turned the shaft back to the starting point. He withdrew the first diaphragm with its needle and fixed the other needle to reproduce sound. Then he began to crank the handle once more.

Everybody leaned forward. For a moment not a sound was heard. Then the men were stunned to hear a faint voice:

“Mary had a little lamb

Its fleece was white as snow,

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go.”

After the workmen realized that they had unmistakably heard Edison’s voice, silence fell for a minute. Then there was bedlam and jubilation. Kruesi, exhausted from the long hours spent in constructing the machine, almost fainted. Everybody wanted a turn with the new invention.

Edison said later, “I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”

He labored through that night trying to get better results as everybody took turns singing, testing their voices, and even talking in German.

Finally Edison sent the crew home for a rest.

The first week in December an improved talking machine was ready for Edison’s unveiling. He wrapped his completed model and carried the bulky package to New York City on the ferryboat. He walked into the office of Alfred Ely Beach, editor of Scientific American. Edison, of course, was well known to the editor.

As Beach watched expectantly Edison opened the mysterious package and announced that he had a machine that would record and reproduce the human voice.

He set up his invention and gave a demonstration on the spot. Beach was astounded. Hearing the commotion, his staff pushed into the office, until the crowd was so huge that Beach was afraid the floor would collapse.

The next day all the New York newspapers carried word of Edison’s mysterious talking machine. It was such a simple device that it could easily be explained, but many people did not believe the news could be true.

On December 22, the editor of Scientific American wrote of it, “The machine politely inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial goodnight.”

Edison filed his patent for the phonograph on December 15, 1877, and immediately began to make larger and better models. Amazingly, no application for anything at all like Edison’s invention had ever been filed in the United States Patent Office.

Important men in Washington heard of the new Edison machine. They called the inventor to the nation’s capital, and in April, 1878, he set up the phonograph before leading scientists. “The speaking phonograph has the honor of presenting itself before the National Academy of Sciences,” it said.

When Edison displayed the phonograph before members of Congress assembled at a private home he got an electrifying response, but the ultimate glory came that night. At eleven o’clock he received word that President Rutherford B. Hayes was anxious to hear his phonograph. He hurried to the White House and demonstrated it to the President, who immediately roused his wife to join the party. They played with the machine until half-past three in the morning.

Overnight the phonograph was a smashing success.

“The greatest inventor of the age,” one magazine wrote of Edison.

“One of the wonders of the world,” wrote another of the phonograph.

No words were too great for the hero. From the commonest man to scientists and scholars, everyone was impressed with the inventive genius of this man who was barely thirty years old.

By the thousands, people made holiday excursions out to Menlo Park to walk through Edison’s laboratory and hear demonstrations of the talking machine. Always a master of drama, Edison did funny things to amuse the spectators. He might whistle a popular tune; record an imaginary fight on the phonograph, complete with “Help, murder, call the police!”, or record bits of various languages.

But some people refused to believe that the human voice could be recorded and played back. One day a black-frocked gentleman arrived at Menlo Park. He was Bishop Vincent, a prominent clergyman. Along with some others, the bishop believed that a man must be hidden somewhere—a ventriloquist who repeated what was said. He watched for a while, then asked to speak a few words into the contraption.

Edison attached a new piece of tinfoil and told him to proceed. The bishop took a deep breath. Then in a loud, clear voice he recited all the most difficult Biblical names he knew, just as fast as he could say them.

The machine played the names back as precisely as he had pronounced them.

“Now I am satisfied,” the bishop said. “There isn’t a man in the United States who could recite those names with the same rapidity.”

Edison’s reputation grew. Americans felt a kinship with him. He was from their own soil—a plain, ordinary, self-made man who embodied the American ideal of success through hard work and clever thinking. He became a great American idol.

As Edison’s fame spread, fantastic tales about his powers also sprang up. He was thought to be a man of weird actions and wild beliefs, working on strange machines in an other-world laboratory. Magic and mystery were connected with his name. He became known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.

In January, 1878, Edison negotiated with a group of businessmen to produce the talking machine commercially as a music box. When the first crude phonographs came out, they were regarded as oddities. Shows were organized, and people flocked to amusement halls and entertainment centers to hear the phonograph. But, as with most curiosities, the music-box fad died out after everybody had heard the machine once or twice. The sound reproduction was poor, and the tinfoil records wore out after just a few playings.

Edison knew that his machine had many flaws and that it needed more research to make it commercially successful. In the spring of 1878 he began to test materials other than tinfoil and began to experiment with wax substances. He melted, blended, and mixed all kinds of wax, and tried but failed to change the shape of the phonograph record from a cylinder to a flat disk. He finally found that stearin, an animal fat, was best suited for record making and produced a wax cylinder with an extremely hard and smooth recording surface.

Edison loved his talking machine and saw its possibilities. He was amazingly accurate in his predictions of its future uses. He forecast phonographic devices for dictation, books for the blind, aids in elocution teaching, recorded music, talking toys, clocks announcing the hours of the day, the preservation of the voices of great men, and various educational uses.

Despite his belief in the future of his phonograph, Edison went ahead in other areas of research and neglected his pet invention for ten years. This lapse proved to be a costly error on his part. For the time being, though, he was satisfied. The phonograph could now talk. He must move on.

But first, Edison badly needed a rest. He had worked without pause for ten years, and he was tired. In the summer of 1878 he was offered the opportunity to make a trip to the West with a scientific expedition to observe a total eclipse of the sun. He jumped at the chance.

Professor George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania, a friend of many years, had asked him to come along to test his tasimeter, an instrument Edison had devised to measure small variations in temperature. Edison intended to record the heat transmitted through space from the sun during the eclipse.

With an eminent group of astronomers, Edison left by train for Rawlins, Wyoming Territory, on a leisurely journey westward. Upon arrival, the group set up instruments to observe the eclipse on July 29, 1878.

Meanwhile, Edison had great fun talking to train robbers and horse thieves in the local jail, and shooting jackrabbits out on the prairie. On the day of the observation, the tasimeter proved too delicate to measure the sun’s heat accurately, but the experiment showed clearly that knowledge of outer space could be obtained through instruments on earth.

Jay Gould had given Edison a free pass for use on the Union Pacific Railroad, and Gould could not refuse this important man an unusual request. From the time of his early newspaper-selling days, Edison had wanted to ride in front on the cowcatcher of a locomotive. Now he asked for the chance, and rode a good part of the way from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, comfortably seated upon a pillow on the cowcatcher, while scientists inside the train prayed that no accident would befall him.

One slight incident occurred when the cowcatcher hit a small animal about the size of a bear cub. It struck with great impact near Edison, but no harm came to him, and daily he continued to enjoy the clear view and fresh air. He retreated inside the passenger car only when the train climbed through the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas.

In August, Edison returned home to Menlo Park rested and refreshed. He had already finished work on the multiplex telegraph, the talking machine, and improvements on the telephone. Now he was about to begin the greatest search of his career—one that would literally turn night into day all over the world.

11.

Developing the Light Bulb

On the way home from the trip to the West, Edison’s friend Barker had talked enthusiastically of recent experiments in the search for an electric light. Man had always sought better ways to light the world, and Edison himself had long been fascinated by the problem of turning electricity into light.

Scientists had already made much progress. In 1808, in England, Sir Humphry Davy had passed an electric current through two carbon rods. He had produced a silvery blue bow of light shaped like an arch, wavering between the glowing pieces of carbon. The arc lamp had been devised.

In 1831, Michael Faraday had invented the dynamo, which converted mechanical power into electrical energy for inexpensive electric power. Gradually the dynamo had been improved.

More research on the arc lamp had been done both in Europe and America, but its basic problems had not been overcome. Its glow was far too bright for home use; it gave off great heat; it burned only a few hours; it emitted a bad odor.

Scientists had also worked to perfect an incandescent light different from the arc lamp. The incandescent lamp used a slim, pencil-like filament inserted into a globe that was free of oxygen. Electric current heated the filament to a glowing point, but the lack of oxygen kept the filament from burning or melting. Nobody, however, had yet succeeded in producing a commercially usable incandescent lamp.

On the way home to Menlo Park, Edison realized that perhaps he could solve the puzzle of how to turn electricity into light for man’s better use. He was immediately interested in the problem, and wrote in the notebook he always kept: “Object, Edison to effect exact imitation of all done by gas, so as to replace lighting by gas, by lighting by electricity.”

With Barker, Edison visited Ansonia, Connecticut, where Moses Farmer and his partner William Wallace were deeply involved in work on the arc lamp. Edison was fascinated as he walked through their brass-manufacturing shop. He made rapid calculations on what he saw of the arc lamp. His spirit of scientific inquiry was aroused, and at the end of the visit he turned to Wallace.

“I do not think you are working in the right direction,” he said. “I believe I can beat you making the electric light. In order to get an electric light, you must divide the current. Then the light will not be so hot and bright.”

“Divide the current! Impossible,” Wallace responded.

With that challenge the race was on. Edison realized that much work had already been done on the arc lamp, and that he was entering the contest late, as he had with the telephone.

Many men had tried and failed to produce a workable incandescent light and had turned back to experimenting on the arc lamp. But Edison’s scientific insights told him that he must venture along a new and more difficult path.

The arc lights in use at the time worked on very high currents, and terrible accidents had occurred in which linemen had been electrocuted in the street before horrified witnesses. Edison knew that he could not bring such dangerously high currents into homes. The current must be subdivided.

Arc lights were wired in series so that if one light went out, all the lights on the line followed. But in the home, lights had to work independently so that each customer could turn his lights on and off when he wished. Therefore, Edison reasoned, the lights had to be wired in a parallel or multiple circuit, or strung between the lines instead of in the lines themselves. Each light would have its own small supply of electricity, drawn from the main line, and each could be operated apart from the others.

Rather than producing the blinding light made by an arc lamp, Edison decided, he would develop a soft, mild light that did not smell, that would be cheap enough for use in homes, and that could be individually controlled—if he could but succeed in subdividing the current. Many scientists of the time, however, were convinced that subdivision was impossible.

Inventors working on incandescent lighting had concentrated on lamps of low electrical resistance. To keep the conductor in the lamp from overheating, they made it thick and strong. The only way to make a low-resistance conductor incandescent was to use a great deal of current. Edison calculated how much current would be required for this type of lamp, and he found that the cost of installing the amount of copper wiring necessary to conduct the high currents would be prohibitive.

The answer became clear to him. He had to design a high-resistance lamp that would consume less current and lower the cost of copper wiring in the electrical distribution system. The high-resistance lamp would be the key to a successful electrical industry.

He announced that he would have a light invention ready in six weeks. When he had done that, he would find ways to convert steam power into electricity so that steam plants turning dynamos could produce current to light homes. Little did he realize that the electric light would be one of the most frustrating problems he had ever tackled, and would be perhaps the most difficult to solve.

At that time in America, gaslights were overtaking candles and oil lamps as the predominant way of lighting homes in big cities. Streetlamps using gas were also being installed in the cities. Characteristically, Edison studied the entire gas industry. He read many volumes in a study that he said filled two hundred notebooks with forty thousand pages of notes and diagrams. He intended to use the gas system as his model for creating a new business that would compete with and eventually surpass the growing gaslight industry.

But major research of the kind he contemplated would take a great deal of money. Grosvenor P. Lowrey, a patent attorney who had great respect for Edison, aided him in organizing the new venture. Lowrey approached financiers, several of whom were connected with Western Union. Together, they formed a syndicate, with the behind-the-scenes backing of J. Pierpont Morgan, to buy the rights to Edison’s prospective electric light. In October, 1878, the Edison Electric Light Company was created to pay Edison $50,000 for his research. There were $300,000 worth of capital stock in the company. Of this stock, Edison received twenty-five hundred of the total three thousand shares. In return, he agreed to assign to the company all his inventions and improvements in the electric-light field for five years.

The founding of this company is a landmark in American business history, for it shows the increasing impact of technology on big business. The trend would continue and accelerate as new discoveries and inventions dictated the creation of new corporations and the direction of existing ones.

On October 14, 1878, Edison applied for his first lighting patent: Improvement in Electric Lights. With the announcement of this application, gas stocks in America and England tumbled, for people had great confidence in anything the inventor undertook.

Edison had determined his course of action. He must find a lamp of high resistance with a filament that would heat to a point where light would be given off, but that at the same time would not burn up.

Since Edison had already worked with carbon, he first thought of a filament of this substance. He tried using strips of carbonized paper, putting them into glass jars with the air partly pumped out by hand. Carbonized paper would glow for a few minutes before burning out, but Edison found that carbon was not practical. Patiently he tested all sorts of rare metals: barium, rhodium, ruthenium, titanium, zirconium. When all these proved unsuccessful, he experimented with platinum. The metal became incandescent and lasted somewhat longer, but it melted too fast.

By now it was 1879. Progress continued slowly but steadily. Edison found a better pump—the Sprengel mercury vacuum pump—to exhaust air from his glass globes. He tried putting a double spiral of platinum wire in the globes, completely sealing them, and exhausting the air out with the more efficient pump. He passed current through the platinum to remove the gases remaining in the metal. The process increased the strength of the platinum and gave the globes a more complete vacuum—another step forward. He had increased the light-power of the platinum filament. Before, in open air, it had given a light equal to four candles; now, in the almost complete vacuum, it produced the light of twenty-five candles. Putting the filament into a globe from which almost all the oxygen had been removed was the critical element in producing incandescent light.

But the job was going too slowly, and Edison’s initial research grant of fifty thousand dollars was running out. So far, he had not produced a practical electric light.

Edison worked night and day—often without sleep, often without eating regularly—spending twenty hours a day in his laboratory while he struggled to find a successful filament that would burn for a long time. His eyes became strained and pained him terribly. He feared that he would go blind as well as deaf, but compulsively he refused to give in. He felt he was at the threshold of success. But the money was gone.

One day in April, Edison summoned the investors in his Electric Light Company in order to give them a demonstration of his platinum light. He assured them that he would soon have an incandescent lamp, but the men showed serious misgivings about their financial risk. Edison took them on a tour of the Menlo

Park plant and showed them the physical expansion that had taken place in the past six months. He had ordered a big enginehouse in back, and had built a neat brick office and library building to the front, complete with a beautifully furnished reception room and a private office.

Once inside the laboratory, he ordered John Kruesi to “turn on the juice slowly,” and the platinum lamps installed along the walls glowed “like stars” until they finally burned out. The financiers were not totally convinced by the demonstration, however, and the meeting broke up in pessimism.

By now, Edison himself was convinced that he had taken the wrong direction in pursuing platinum for his filament. After the stockholders had departed, he suddenly ordered the platinum lamps to be put away. He would start again.

Edison had worked out a method to improve vacuum in the globes; he had raised the resistance of his incandescing coil; and he had improved the globe by sealing the joints. Now he had only to find the right substance for the filament.

But time was pressing. The newspapers that had printed his boasts about finding a light in six weeks now began to criticize and taunt him. His competitors scoffed at his work. They called him a fake and a charlatan, and even said he was sick and dying. They began to convince the public of their accusations.

But Edison ignored his critics and worked harder than ever. While his men slept he could be found in the dead of night working over his desk or sometimes stretched out on a laboratory table, a book under his head, for an hour’s catnap. Once in a while, to relax, he would sit at the organ installed in the back of the laboratory and play a tune, even though he was deaf. Slowly and painstakingly he was thinking out a grand scheme to produce an entire electrical distribution system with all its parts functional, so that when the time came, his incandescent light would be commercially possible.

By late summer of 1879, he had produced a constant-voltage dynamo (soon called the “long-waisted Mary Ann” because of its shape), which was 90 percent efficient in converting steam power into electrical energy. Now he could string many small lights in parallel lines. He only needed the right substance for his filament.

One afternoon in early September, 1879, he sat thinking at his table. As he meditated he toyed with a little pile of lampblack that he had absentmindedly rolled into a thin filament. He idly observed the carbon in his hands. What about trying carbon once again? It had the highest melting point and the highest resistance. It had been too hard to handle when he had first experimented with it, but now conditions were different, for with the new pump he could make an almost perfect vacuum in a glass globe.

He decided to retest carbon, and set to work at once with mixtures of lampblack. But still the carbon substance crumbled or broke or did not burn long enough. His jokes and his enthusiasm and his fantastic patience kept his team of helpers working when they became discouraged.

“The trouble with other inventors is that they try a few things and quit. I never quit until I get what I want,” he told his men.

As tests on carbon filaments continued, excitement gradually mounted. Edison was positive that this was the right substance. If only he could find the right form. On October 21, 1879, he tested a spool of cotton thread. He cut off a piece and put it in the furnace to carbonize it; then he carefully took the horseshoeshaped filament and slowly carried it to the glass-blower’s laboratory where the globes waited. But on the way the filament broke. He went back to make another. A jeweler’s screwdriver fell on this one, and it broke too. For a third time Edison made the trip. It was not until late that afternoon that he produced a successful carbon filament. It was placed with great care inside the globe, and the oxygen was pumped out.

He turned on the current. As he and his men watched, the incandescent lamp began to glow. They waited breathlessly for the flash of light that would show it had burned out. But the lamp continued to glow. It was a memorable sight, and the tension mounted as the men sat and stared. Minutes passed— an hour, eight hours, twelve hours. Edison sat motionless, watching the tiny globe glow with a steady light. Some of the exhausted men went home to rest, but the Boss sat in the laboratory watching and waiting for the lamp to die.

“We sat and watched with anxiety growing into elation,” he later said.

After thirteen and one-half hours, Edison finally decided to give the lamp the grand test. He turned on the full electric power to see at what point it would burn out. Now that the power had been increased, the incandescent light finally died.

“If it can burn that number of hours, I know I can make it burn a hundred,” Edison said wearily, running his hands through his disheveled hair.

Edison continued to search for the perfect carbon filament, and tested everything from wood splinters, paper, cedar shavings, celluloid, fishline, coconut shells, hickory, and twine, to all sorts of grass and even the hairs from a friend’s red beard. He sent men out to other parts of the world to obtain materials to test. Finally he settled on a type of paper cardboard that glowed for 170 hours before burning out.

On November 1, 1879, Edison applied for his patent for the carbon filament lamp. It was not the world’s first incandescent light, but it was the world’s first practical and usable electric light for the home.

Though he had kept his success a carefully guarded secret, news leaked out. Rumors had been spreading for several weeks, and finally he invited a reporter from the New York Herald to Menlo Park. The reporter returned to his office after a demonstration of the light and wrote about the fantastic event he had witnessed.

On Sunday, December 21, 1879, headline stories of Edison’s successful lamp flashed around the world. People were agog. Most of them simply could not believe the stories, and some thought they were a gigantic hoax. News of the electric light spread even faster than word of the phonograph had. During Christmas week, swarms of curious people descended upon Menlo Park to see the incredible Wizard. The crowds had come to witness an exhibition, and he had only one dynamo and a few lights to show them.

But Edison announced that there would be a grand demonstration of the incandescent lamp at Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve. He was not really prepared for the magnificent show he intended to produce, but he ordered his crews to work stringing wires along the road and producing enough bulbs to light the plant. They labored day and night to complete the wiring, for Edison intended to put on a dazzling display such as the world had never before seen.

On New Year’s Eve, more than three thousand curious people, some dressed in evening clothes, pushed into the Pennsylvania Railroad station in New York, bound for the Edison display. Scientists, financiers, doctors, and their friends were among the crowd that alighted from the train into the dark of a snowy New Jersey winter night.

Suddenly the entire crowd was transfixed with awe. Edison had thrown a master switch, and along the road from the station to the laboratory, lines of bulbs strung on wooden poles gleamed and twinkled and cast dancing light upon the frozen countryside. The spectators were overwhelmed. Never before had they seen anything like this.

The crowd wandered through Edison’s laboratory turning lights on and off, exclaiming over the miracle, and echoing praise of the great Wizard of Menlo Park. Only a few recognized Edison, who was dressed in a worn gray shirt, chemical-stained trousers, and an old coat full of acid holes. Wearing his ancient black felt hat, he circulated among the throng.

When the people realized who this man was, they asked him about the future of his electric light. What they had witnessed this evening was only a small portion of what they would see in the future, he promised. When his new generator was completed, he intended first to light up the neighborhood around Menlo Park, then Newark, and then even New York City. And someday, he predicted, his electric lamp would sell for only a quarter of a dollar and would cost only a few cents a day to run. The crowd listened with respect, but could hardly comprehend the vast world changes he described.

Edison realized that the deed was far from accomplished, however. Though his New Year’s Eve party had proved beyond doubt the invention of a successful electric light, his work had just begun.

The acclaim from the press succeeded in persuading the suddenly amiable stockholders of the Edison Electric Light Company of the value of more research. They offered him $57,568 to complete another year’s work.

But the struggle to light the world had only just started, for Edison had yet to work out the actual plans for the central lighting system necessary for the installation and commercial use of the electric light. A major task lay ahead.

12.

Lighting New York

On January 28, 1880, Edison applied for a patent on his System of Electrical Distribution. His plan called for multiple-arc distribution of current from a number of generators. Step by step that year he proceeded to design and develop an entire generating and distributing system to furnish electricity to light New York City.

Improvements on his plan came steadily. During the summer he developed the “feeder and main” concept, which allowed for a sharp reduction in the amount of copper needed for conducting electricity and also remedied the problem of a voltage drop over distances —a drop that made lights farther away dimmer than those near the generating station. Now, instead of connecting his conducting mains directly to dynamos, he planned smaller feeder lines that carried power to short sections of main located at the places where there were a great number of lamps. A drop of voltage occurred only in the feeder lines. The 110-volt current remained constant as it went from the local main to the local distributing circuits. The cost of copper wiring for the nine-block area of coverage planned in New York City was reduced from $200,000 to $30,000. This was an important breakthrough.

By the fall of 1880, Edison had set up in Menlo Park the first factory in the world to manufacture his incandescent lamp. Unable to get financial backing from outsiders, he and some of his assistants had pooled a sum of ten thousand dollars. With this modest start they had begun production lines. But in order to organize the Edison Lamp Company, Edison had been forced to sell much of his own stock and property and gamble on his eventual success.

At first, it cost the company $1.25 to make each lamp bulb. Edison contracted to sell the bulbs for only $.40 while he worked to cut costs. By the end of the first year he was able to reduce lamp-bulb cost to $1.10 apiece; the next year he brought the price down to $.70, and the company still lost money. Finally he succeeded in producing each lamp bulb for $.22, while his original price of $.40 was to last for the duration of the patent. By then, millions of bulbs were being produced, and the company made up all the money it had lost over the years.

As Edison worked to improve production on the incandescent lamp he intensified his efforts to devise a better filament. He continued to send teams of men around the world to find a perfect vegetable fiber for the filament.

“Before I got through I tested no fewer than six thousand vegetable growths and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material,” he said.

But Edison was never content to limit himself to one undertaking. That same year he startled local residents with his newest contraption, America’s first full-sized electric locomotive. In fields near his Menlo Park laboratory his men laid out a narrow-gauge track running up and down the hills, around curves, and over rises in the pasture. Edison believed in the future importance of electric power to transportation, and he sought to prove the worth of the electric engine. For him, the experimental electric-traction railroad was almost an escape from his other work. By the day of its trial, in the spring of 1880, he had whimsically attached a searchlight to the front of the locomotive, a bell to warn stray cows from the tracks, and a little open-air passenger car behind.

“All aboard! Fire her up!” he cried.

Everybody waved handkerchiefs, shouted farewells, and watched the little train gather speed and careen around a bend. Everything went fine until the switch was reversed at the end of the line. Then the friction wheels underneath the train burst with the sudden force, and the locomotive came to a halt. Edison and his passengers descended and pushed the little train around the curves to the beginning of the line.

Working on the traction railroad provided relaxation from Edison’s arduous task of creating his electrical system. This task was not simply a matter of installing lights in homes and shops in the city. First, Edison had to invent every single device necessary to operate the system—from fuses, sockets, switches, tubes, conductors, and junction boxes to the power plant that would generate and distribute the electricity. Almost nothing could be bought, for none of the necessary electrical devices existed. In the next few years, Edison took out no less than 360 patents on electrical parts.

All during 1880 he spent a great deal of time in supervising the installation of the first scale model of his electrical system, constructed in a square mile area at Menlo Park. Patiently he devised and tested each necessary unit. His men dug trenches, experimented on the difficult problem of insulating underground wiring, and built a small model central power station of the sort he would need in the city.

Edison ordered huge boilers and steam engines, but their delivery was distressingly slow. Christmas of 1880 passed, and finally the first steam engine arrived for testing in the model system. By then, Edison had designed and completed a bigger model of a new dynamo.

During the winter of 1880-81, Edison traveled back and forth between New York and Menlo Park to work out preliminary arrangements in the city while he supervised the manufacture of light bulbs in the country.

Not everything went smoothly. The aldermen of the city had to be convinced that their best interests lay in permitting Edison to install electric lights despite the fierce opposition of the powerful gas corporations. The financiers who controlled the purse strings of the light company were reluctant to finance all the equipment Edison needed before the first electric light could be turned on.

“Wall Street could not see its way clear to finance a new and untried business,” he said later. “We were confronted by a stupendous obstacle. Nowhere in the world could we obtain any of the items or devices necessary for the exploitation of the system. . . . Thus forced to the wall, I was forced to go into the manufacturing business myself.”

Only twelve years after Edison, a shabbily dressed and penniless young telegraph operator, had arrived on the docks of lower New York, he returned to the city. He left his Menlo Park laboratory sadly, but he knew that his work in the tranquil countryside was almost done. Now he had to implement his grand dream—the creation and installation of an efficient electrical system that would eventually bring cheap electricity into homes everywhere.

Edison rented a beautiful old four-story mansion at 65 Fifth Avenue in New York. This was the birthplace of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Elegantly decorated, the building contained a public reception parlor, sumptuous private quarters, and offices for activities ranging from legal work to drafting and engineering. Here at “Sixty-five,” as he called it, Edison created two of the giants of the industrial world of the future: Consolidated Edison Company and General Electric.

In the basement, Edison installed a generator for power to operate the many incandescent lamps that were suspended in brilliant crystal chandeliers in all the high-ceilinged rooms. Soon the Edison headquarters was the showplace of the city, and thousands of people trooped through the building to see displays of electric lights and to express admiration for the inventor who had designed them. The displays were so impressive that Edison’s millionaire acquaintances Morgan and Vanderbilt asked him to install similar systems in their own mansions.

Edison laid careful plans to enter the Paris Electrical Exposition of 1881. All the major inventors in the electrical field would show their work, and his presence was vital for his future business in Europe. He displayed a model of his plan for an electrical system to light New York City, so turning the exposition into a triumph for himself. His technical advances were recognized by the judges and his peers, and he won five gold medals and the coveted ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.

In London the following year, at the important Crystal Palace Electrical Exposition, a brilliant display of his lamps won over the formerly reluctant European scientists and some industrialists, who proceeded to set up his commercial lighting stations on the continent.

Edison’s task of lighting New York City consumed his energies for the next two years. First, to turn out his new dynamo, he converted an old ironworks on Goerck Street into the Edison Machine Works. The Goerck Street plant ultimately grew into the industrial giant, General Electric Company.

Along the way to his final success, Edison literally created each company to manufacture the devices he needed. On Wooster Street he developed a factory to produce meters, fuses, cutouts, chandeliers, sockets, and switches, and he brought in Sigmund Bergmann from Menlo Park to run it. His assistant John Kruesi moved into town to oversee the manufacture of underground conductors and junction boxes at the new Edison Electric Tube Company on Washington Street. Soon Edison was running an industrial empire with two thousand employees, and was working night and day just to keep the businesses functioning smoothly.

To save energy, he moved his family into town to a hotel near Gramercy Park, and finally settled them permanently in the city, except for summers, when Mary and the children returned to Menlo Park.

At the office he ordered huge maps set up to show every available fact and statistic of the area he intended to light. Edison had pinpointed a half-mile-square section running north from Wall Street to Spruce and Ferry streets and from the East River to Nassau Street. In the middle of this square, he had to build a power station. He hunted for a spot, and finally settled on two buildings in a rundown neighborhood on Pearl Street. Here he eventually installed six enormous dynamos of his own design, called Jumbos after the circus elephant popular at the time.

Then Edison began the colossal job of getting fourteen miles of trenches dug for underground mains; despite the added expense he insisted on laying wire below ground as a safety precaution. Besides getting the trenches dug, he had to persuade property owners in the area to convert to electricity, and after their permission had been obtained he had to wire their houses and buildings.

Now he worked harder than ever. He organized men to dig trenches. He trained workmen in the basic principles of electricity. He supervised men in connecting dynamos and in leading wires from homes to the underground mains. He personally superintended the connecting of every junction box. Tirelessly he drove his men, remaining on the job himself day and night. As he went along, he invented necessary devices, from a mixture of asphalt and linseed oil blended with waxes for insulating his wire to meters for measuring the current in each house that was wired. He ate and slept where he could; sometimes at night he could be seen curled up on a pile of tubes in the basement at the Pearl Street station.

All the while, he continued to perfect his unique dynamo. He planned to build one of greater electrical capacity than had ever been seen before. Everyone said that his idea—to couple a generator directly with a steam engine into one single unit—was impossible. He ordered a steam engine capable of turning seven hundred revolutions a minute, and he ordered an equivalent dynamo. The two were mounted as one unit on a single cast-iron bedplate.

Edison publicly predicted that the switch to light the city for the first time would be pulled by autumn, 1881. He worked like a demon to achieve his goal. But accidents happened and unforeseen events occurred, and the date was continually postponed.

One day a workman rushed up. “Kruesi needs you right away. He says the pavement has become electrified and the horses are dancing in the streets.”

Indeed, when Edison rushed over to Kruesi’s section, broken-down old nags and spirited horses alike were jumping in terror on a particular part of the street. A leak had occurred underground and had to be fixed.

So it went with the monumental job as workmen laid mains at the rate of 1,000 feet a day throughout the frozen winter and into the spring of 1882.

By the summer of 1882, Edison was ready for a trial run of the power station’s first Jumbo dynamo—the largest dynamo yet built. On July 6 he threw the switch. Everything went as scheduled. Three days later, Edison connected the second machine. When he threw the switch to start that dynamo, the two machines together made an incredible noise, filling the place with sparks and flames.

The workmen who watched were terrified and scattered in all directions, but Edison and Johnson, an assistant, had the presence of mind to grab the throttles of the two engines and shut them off.

Mishaps of this sort slowed down the work. Edison had set so many dates for starting the system and had postponed them so often that he himself was getting worried. Meanwhile, the gas companies, deadly enemies of the electric-lighting system, became bolder in their denunciations.

By September 4, 1882, everything was finally ready. Worried over possible failure, Edison stayed up all night checking each installation and inspecting the entire system. At the last minute he rushed home to dress for the occasion in a Prince Albert coat, white cravat, and striped trousers. For once, he had decided not to publicize the great event; this time there was no preliminary fanfare in the newspapers.

In the late afternoon Edison issued his order, “Pull the switch.” For the first time in history, electric current began to flow under the streets of a city. It was still broad daylight when suddenly lights began to flicker and then glow in the homes and businesses of the eighty-five first customers of Edison’s electric-lighting system. He had accomplished what everyone had said was impossible.

Twilight fell and the effect became more dramatic as the electric lights glowed from the streets and homes of New York for the first time.

That night everyone hunted for Edison, to praise him, but he had vanished. Finally a newsman tracked him to the Pearl Street station. There searchers found him, still dressed in his fancy outfit, all covered with grease and dirt, fiddling with his prized Jumbo dynamo.

The New York Times had subscribed to Edison’s electric-lighting system, and the next day the newspaper described the lights as “soft, mellow, grateful to the eye.”

The great age of electricity had begun on Pearl Street at the first power station in America. But running the electric business was not easy. “It is all so complicated that I do not like trusting it to new and untried hands, because science and dollars are so mixed up in it,” said Edison.

The patent-holding corporation, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, had invested enormous sums of money to bring about that first lighting, but the business developed slowly for the first few years thereafter. People were reluctant to change from gas to this unproved new way of lighting. By 1884, the number of customers had grown from the original 85 to 508. Eventually, a phenomenal rise in customers brought an enormous profit to the company.

But in order for the industry to grow, Edison found he had to promote it. He spent great amounts of time running the companies that manufactured parts to keep the electrical system going. He planned central stations for other cities and set up independent lighting systems for businesses. To his surprise, he found that these isolated systems, independent of a central power source, were in great demand. He had to organize still another subsidiary company merely to manage, finance, and install systems for factories and department stores.

Edison was everywhere, keeping his finger on the electrical pulse of his empire. He was promoter, engineer, entrepreneur, and financier. He lighted the first theater in America to use incandescent lamps—and on opening night was found down in the cellar nursing along a faltering steam boiler.

At Niblo’s Garden, an old music hall where Edison enjoyed late evening talk, the proprietor designed a new entertainment, the Mimical Dramatic Ballet, which featured five hundred tiny lamps in a “drama of the incandescent lamp.” During the show a line of hefty ballet dancers waved wands, each tipped with a light bulb, and flashed electric lights on their foreheads, with bizarre effect. Edison helped plan the spectacle.

He outfitted a new luxury liner with its own system of lights. He staged a parade where all the marchers wore electric-lamp helmets. It seemed that there was no end to his virtuosity. He entertained visiting dignitaries, politicians, scientists, and show-business people at his Fifth Avenue showroom. He enjoyed chomping on a good cigar and showing people through the mansion.

Edison loved cigars and could never keep enough on hand, since people were always “borrowing” them from his desk. To pay back these cigar thieves, he finally thought up one of his many practical jokes. He ordered a box of trick cigars, composed of old paper and hair, and left the box on his desk. A few months later, someone asked about his cigar joke. Absent-minded Edison had to confess that he had forgotten all about the cigars by the time they had arrived.

“On coming to investigate, it appeared . . . that I had smoked them all,” he later admitted.

13.

Tragedy and Triumph

The past ten years had been remarkably productive for Edison, and in 1883, at the age of thirty-six, he could have retired to enjoy the fame he had already earned. Any one of his many patents in the field of electricity represented an accomplishment great enough for the lifetime of most inventors. But a man like Edison would never be content to relax his exploring mind.

While expending most of his energies on refining the incandescent bulb in 1880, Edison had still found time to work experimentally in his shop. During his research there he had come upon a peculiar circumstance that fascinated him. He was investigating carbon to see why his bulbs became blackened inside and to lengthen the life of the bulb. In the process of investigating what he had observed, Edison noticed that particles of carbon were being discharged from the carbon filament.

At that time, scientists still believed that the smallest particle possible was a molecule. It was not until years later that scientists learned that molecules are made up of smaller particles called atoms and that atoms in turn are made up of three kinds of particles: electrons, protons, and neutrons. Each of the protons and electrons carries an electrical charge, and the charges cause them to push or pull each other. The charge on a proton is called a positive charge; the charge on an electron is called a negative charge.

The atom has a center or nucleus around which electrons travel. The nucleus holds the orbiting electrons by a force of attraction called a positive charge. In addition to being attracted to the nucleus, electrons, being negatively charged, repel, or push, each other.

Electricity is apparently electrons in motion in a stream or current. A circuit is the path of an electric current. Electrons flow through the wire—the conductor—constantly pushing each other from the negative end, the end that has an excess of electrons, to the positive end, the end that has a deficiency of electrons.

Edison made the hypothesis that an electrical current was carrying the tiny carbon particles to the inside of the glass bulb he had noticed. Soon he observed that a sort of shadow—a white streak—occurred on the glass and that this streak appeared in the direction of one leg of the horseshoe-shaped filament. This shadow seemed to be cast by the leg of the filament connected to the positive side of the direct-current circuit supplying electricity. Edison reasoned that the tiny particles of carbon shot through space inside the bulb in a straight line from the negative leg of the filament, and that the positive leg stood in their way, deflecting them and so resulting in a clear, carbonless streak on the bulb.

The observation was new and the idea unheard of. Unfortunately, Edison did not have time to pursue his hypothesis, although he continued to ponder the phenomenon of the tiny particles and their unusual movement. He found himself wondering if the carbon particles might themselves be charged and could be deflected or collected by inserting an added pole—a positively charged electrode—into the bulb to prevent “electrical carrying,” as he called it.

He did not continue his research on this matter until 1883. Then he placed a platinum wire between the horseshoe-shaped legs of the carbon filament. With this addition, he found that current flowed within the sealed bulb when the added electrode was connected to the positive side, but current did not flow when the added electrode was connected to the negative side of the circuit. Edison had accidentally discovered that current was passing through space without the use of wires. He had managed to stumble upon electrons, as they came to be known later.

Edison worked to improve his new lamp and finally developed the “Edison-effect” bulb, which contained an added metal plate as a second electrode between the legs of the horseshoe-shaped filament. In 1883 he applied for a patent for his two-electrode bulb, which he called a tube.

In the fall of 1884, Edison presented his new lamp at the International Electrical Exposition in Philadelphia. Scientists flocked to study his newest discovery. They immediately recognized its importance and set to work to find out more about it.

The “Edison-effect” tube opened the way to the field of electronics. Although Edison was the father of this first electronic device, his usually perceptive mind never imagined how the phenomenon he had discovered would develop into the twentieth-century field of radio communication, television, and radar. He himself did not fully understand what he had come across. “In experimenting, I find a good many things I never looked for,” he later admitted. He lost interest in the tube and so missed perhaps his greatest opportunity: to pioneer in a field, electronics, around which our entire modern network of broadcasting communications is built.

At that time he did other work to perfect a method of sending telegraph code without wires by erecting huge poles to receive messages. He suggested that the idea might be applied to seagoing vessels, which would use their masts for receiving purposes.

Meanwhile, other men did research in electronics. In 1888, Ambrose Fleming improved upon the Edison-effect lamp by inserting a metal cylinder as a second electrode in the tube. Later, Fleming used this device to detect high-frequency radio currents. After 1904 the Marconi Telegraph Company used this vacuum tube to detect radio waves, and from that time the tube became an essential part of electronic communication. Lee De Forest perfected it further, and in our day radio and television have become an indispensable part of our lives.

Edison could explain the reason why he did not pursue his significant discovery. He claimed to be an inventor working for monetary gain, not a scientist. “I measure everything I do by the size of the silver dollar,” he said.

It is ironic that in the next ten years he would have made a far greater fortune in electronics than he did on research in extraction of iron ore—research that cost him millions of dollars but failed in the end to produce anything significant.

Perhaps one reason Edison was distracted was the tragedy that struck his personal life at that time. His wife Mary, a tender, loyal, and uncomplaining companion, had always stayed in the background, content to raise the three children as her inventor husband rode the crest of fame. Although she loved entertaining and giving parties, she knew that Edison had no desire for such frivolity and so she lived a quiet life, often not seeing him for weeks on end.

Once in a while, Edison took time to join the children for special occasions like a birthday party or a fireworks celebration on the Fourth of July. But the boys, especially, did not see their father often. His favorite was Marion; she was allowed to carry his lunch to the laboratory in Menlo Park during the early years of her childhood.

In the summer of 1884, Mary, who had suffered painfully from neuralgia for some time, moved with the children from the heat of New York City to the Menlo Park house. Suddenly, in July, she came down with typhoid fever. At first there was no thought of alarm, but soon a doctor was needed at her side, and Edison rushed to his home to be with his critically ill wife.

On August 8, 1884, Edison stayed with his wife constantly, for she had begun gradually to slip away. Throughout the night he kept a silent vigil, but as he sat at her bedside, holding her hand gently to help her bear the pain, she died.

In the morning, Edison awoke his daughter, Marion. He was overcome with grief and wept disconsolately, hardly able to tell his daughter that her mother had died during the night.

Life now became sad and lonely for the inventor. Seeking to forget the wife who had died before she was thirty years old, he left Menlo Park and vowed never to return. He took his young children to stay with Mary’s mother, who lived in New York, and Menlo Park became a thing of the past. As time went by, the once thriving laboratory fell into disrepair. Gradually Edison removed all his valuable tools and equipment. For a while the townspeople used the laboratory as a meeting hall, and later on as a livestock barn, but slowly Edison’s research center began to disintegrate.

The winter of 1885 was a period of difficult readjustment for the inventor. He worked as hard as ever, but there were times of solitude when he craved companionship. His daughter, Marion, by now a lovely girl of thirteen, became a proud companion to her father, going with him to the opera, listening to him play operatic arias at the piano, and trying to fill in the gap caused by her mother’s death.

But Edison knew it was time for a change in his life. He was a man of considerable wealth and fame and realized he must begin to enjoy society more. While formerly he had despised the superficiality of fancy clothes and parties, now he began to force himself to fit into a more elegant station in life.

Edison had recently resumed a longtime friendship with Ezra T. Gilliland, who had worked with him on the telegraph many years before. Now they started their telegraph experiments again and Edison began to spend time in the Gilliland home in Boston. Gilliland was most sympathetic, and understood Edison’s personality well. He thought that the inventor would be better off to remarry. That winter of 1885, Gilliland and his wife invited a steady stream of beautiful young ladies to parties in their home when Edison was visiting the family.

For a time, the Gillilands’ transparent attempts at matchmaking were fruitless. But one evening Mina Miller, a most attractive young lady and a longtime friend of the Gillilands’, was invited to dinner. Mina came from Akron, Ohio, where her father was a wealthy industrialist and manufacturer of farm tools. At eighteen, she had just completed finishing school and had already traveled in Europe. A gifted, darkhaired beauty, she was unusually dignified and perceptive for her age. On the evening she met Edison, she seemed to realize that she should not fuss over the famed inventor. Rather, she sat at the piano and played and sang simple songs.

Edison was captivated.

Though he was twice her age, the attraction was obviously mutual. Edison showed his interest by ordering his secretary to send Mina a photograph of himself, and the romance flourished. The two saw each other often, and soon they were deeply in love.

During that winter, Edison took a trip to Chicago, where he suddenly became ill. He realized that he needed a thorough rest after all the years of little sleep and overwhelming work. He traveled for a winter vacation to the west coast of Florida, but in the warm breeze, balmy climate, and lush tropical growth of Fort Myers he could do little but dream of Mina.

The following summer he taught Mina the Morse code and soon the two were tapping out secret love messages. On a trip to New Hampshire with the Gillilands that fall he used the Morse code to propose marriage. Mina consented, but said that her father must approve.

Edison wrote Miller a letter:

My Dear Sir:

Some months since, as you are aware, I was introduced to your daughter Miss Mina. The friendship which ensued became admiration as I began to appreciate her gentleness and grace of manner, and her beauty and strength of mind.

That admiration has on my part ripened into love, and I have asked her to become my wife. She has referred me to you, and our engagement needs but for its confirmation your consent.

I trust you will not accuse me of egotism when I say that my life and history and standing are so well known as to call for no statement concerning myself. My reputation is so far made that I recognize I must be judged by it for good or ill.

I need only add in conclusion that the step I have taken in asking your daughter to intrust her happiness into my keeping has been the result of mature deliberation, and with the full appreciation of the responsibility I have assumed, and the duty I have undertaken to fulfill.

I do not deny that your answer will seriously affect my happiness, and I trust my suit may meet with your approval.

Very sincerely yours,

Thomas A. Edison

Miller was proud to consent to his daughter’s becoming the wife of the illustrious inventor, and plans were made for the couple to be married on February 24, 1886, in Akron. The wedding was, of course, the biggest event of the year in the Ohio town. Waiters were brought all the way from Chicago to serve the important people who attended. In a simple ceremony, Edison and Mina took wedding vows beneath a colorful bower of roses, and their friends cheered them to an extended honeymoon at Fort Myers. And so began a thoroughly happy marriage that was to last for forty-five years.

Edison wanted only the best for his young bride. When she consented to marry him, the first thing he asked was whether she would prefer to live in the city or the country. When she said she loved the country, Edison hunted for a perfect home to present to her as a honeymoon present. He finally found what he wanted.

Located in West Orange, New Jersey, Glenmont was a magnificent estate built by a millionaire at the cost of $200,000. The owner was willing to sell it to Edison for $50,000. The house at Glenmont was a huge mansion with gabled roofs, carved balconies, enormous rooms, wide stairways, ornate panels, and stained-glass windows. Surrounding the house were thirteen acres of perfectly kept gardens, stately trees, and an acre of greenhouses to grow the flowers Mina loved to arrange. It was a palace for a princess, and Mina loved it. She filled her husband’s home with fine furniture and performed her duties as mistress of Glenmont with grace and dignity. Mina understood her husband well and was happy with her role in his life, though she sometimes did not enjoy the solitude that his work brought her.

“You have no idea what it means to be married to a great man,” she said. But she loved Edison deeply, and with the passing years became his ears as his deafness increased.

Mina brought to Edison’s life a refinement, a poise, and a charm that gradually changed him into a man of greater polish and good taste. The marriage was a good one.

Edison’s first three children visited at Glenmont, but for the most part went to boarding school or stayed with relatives. Three more children were born—Madeleine, in 1888; Charles, in 1890; and Theodore, in 1898.

One evening shortly after the Edisons had settled in their new home, Thomas Edison sat at the window, gazing out across the still meadows. As he sat there he had a vision. He would build a new research center there.

And so he did. When the new Edison center a half mile away at West Orange was completed a year later, it was the finest workplace Edison could hope for. Ten times bigger than the establishment at Menlo Park, it had a library, shops for glassblowing, machine shops, chemical and photographic laboratories, dynamo and motor shops, a drafting room, and a stock room that, according to newspapers, had eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minks, camels . . . silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, sharks’ teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell . . . cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock’s tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores, metals.

The library itself had ten thousand books neatly cataloged. The ceiling was thirty feet high and had tiers of galleries. In it, holding the place of dominance, was Edison’s old rolltop desk.

Of this great research laboratory, Edison said, “I will have the best equipped and largest laboratory extant, and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid and cheap development of an invention. . . . Inventions that formerly took months and cost large sums can now be done in two or three days with very small expense, as I shall carry a stock of almost every conceivable material.”

With a staff of sixty men, Edison could indeed supervise simultaneously a variety of types of research. But even with this large staff and every possible facility for instant research, the new industrial complex did not outshine in brilliant achievement the modest establishment at Menlo Park.

Edison worked at the famed West Orange laboratories for many years, until the close of his career. Here he spelled out his philosophy: “There is no substitute for hard work. Restlessness is discontent— and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man—and I will show you a failure.”

But perhaps the most widely quoted of Edison’s remarks was his statement that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Though increasingly forced to work at West Orange on administrative decisions, Edison refused to limit himself entirely to them. He saw to it that he retired regularly to an upper room to do original research on some project.

The importance of Edison’s unique concept of a research laboratory was seized on by others quick to see its importance. In Washington in 1881, Alexander Graham Bell had already set up a small general research laboratory modeled after Menlo Park. From this grew the massive Bell System laboratories. George Westinghouse, a serious competitor of Edison’s, successfully built his organization by using the same research model. But for another twenty years, Edison’s private industrial research organization would remain unique—a brilliant model for the laboratories that would grow in the next century.

On a wall in the West Orange laboratories hung a framed piece of paper. Written on it were these words:

Give this boy all the papers

HE WANTS ON CREDIT

W.F.S.

It was a reminder to Edison of the long-ago days when he was a penniless newspaper boy, and the editor of the Detroit Free Press had written this note for him. Those days seemed far away.

14.

Making Moving Pictures

At the West Orange laboratories in the spring of 1887, Edison returned after years of neglect to one of his favorite inventions, the phonograph. Mass enthusiasm for the first talking machine had long since waned, and the invention had been pushed aside by the busy inventor. Other clever men had seen its possibilities, however.

Alexander Graham Bell had begun to experiment with the machine and had applied for a patent for the graphophone, as he called it. In the spring of 1886 he had come to Edison with his modified phonograph to propose that the two work out a mutual agreement on the Edison and Bell phonograph inventions and together manufacture a sound-reproducing machine.

Edison was beside himself with anger at what he considered an outrageous suggestion. He was convinced that the idea for the graphophone had literally been stolen from his own phonograph. He would have nothing to do with Bell’s proposal; it was as though someone had waved a red flag at an angry bull. Edison determined at once to start working to make a better talking machine. For the next two years he sought to produce an inexpensive and improved phonograph.

He revitalized his old phonograph company, began experimenting with wax coatings instead of tinfoil on his cylinder records, and soon improved his version with a floating stylus similar to that on Bell’s machine.

Edison made a methodical list of the obstacles to be overcome in his quest for a perfect phonograph. Crackling sounds, scraping, poor recording, uneven tracking, chips in the wax cylinder, humming sounds in the motor—all these would have to be eliminated if he were to achieve his goal of producing a cheap, effective machine that people would buy in the millions. He had thought the job would be an easy matter, but it took longer than he had anticipated.

In order to produce records in volume, Edison had to figure out how to make a long-lasting original-record mold. After considerable work he patented a successful electroplating process that made many copies of a wax record from an original mold.

Before he had finished working in this particular field of sound, he had applied for a hundred patents for improvements on his talking machine. It is incredible that he was able to work at all on inventions that involved sound. His hearing had deteriorated through the years so that he was completely deaf in his left ear and partially so in his right ear. To compensate for this overwhelming disability, he listened by pressing his right ear against the machine or the horn attached to it. Sometimes he would actually grip the horn tightly with his teeth in order that sound vibrations might be transmitted through his teeth and bones to his hearing nerves.

In the summer of 1887, after Edison had worked for six months, he decided that it was time to inform the public about his latest work. He had a gift for capturing the people’s imagination by dramatizing his inventions. Throughout his life he always managed to secure free publicity. This time was no exception.

By the summer of 1888 a full-scale publicity “war of the phonographs’’ raged in the press. Bell and his partners had sold out their interest to a businessman who was pushing the Bell phonograph. Edison yelled “patent infringement” to the newspapers as loud as he could.

Before starting mass production, Edison always insisted on perfection. Now he felt that his own machine was not yet ready for sale. He called his assistants into his office.

“The machine isn’t good enough,” he said. “Until it is, nobody will leave the shop.” The men knew he meant what he said.

Of course, the newspapers were quick to find out Edison’s latest order, and word of the great attempt to perfect his phonograph flashed to the public. For five days and five nights, the men stayed in the locked laboratory, and for five days and five nights, news headlines everywhere proclaimed the story. It made great copy—and it would sell phonographs, too.

At the end of the ordeal a picture of Edison appeared and instantly became immortal. It showed a rumpled man at five o’clock in the morning on June 16, 1888, after five days without rest. Edison was flopped across a table, listening to his phonograph, his haggard face tired but triumphant. The picture helped to sell millions of phonographs for the Edison Phonograph Company.

The five-day marathon effort had ended triumphantly, just as Edison had planned. Actually, the men had probably worked no more than seventy-two hours of the five days, but Edison was not one to minimize his efforts before the public. Now he was ready to manufacture records and phonographs in quantity.

“I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes,” he said, but the phonograph quickly became an entertainment machine. In parlors across the land, people were enthralled by the songs of nightingales, the beat of brass bands, and the vibratos of renowned operatic stars.

Edison had succeeded again. But sad to say, he did not receive for the phonograph the financial returns that he had anticipated. His old friend Gilliland had been put in charge of all business negotiations for the >machine. He had manipulated in such a way that the manufacturing contracts turned out to be almost as remunerative to Gilliland as to his employer. Edison received $500,000 for the manufacturing rights, and Gilliland received one-half that amount, although he had done no creative work on the project. When Edison found out what his friend had negotiated for himself he was angry. He tried to straighten out the swindle with court action, but finally dropped the case. To his intense sorrow, Edison became suspicious and was wary of trusting anyone after that bitter experience.

Edison’s professional life had always been a confused intermingling of commercialism and technology, a merging of money and invention. In order to invent, he needed money for research. When an invention was successful it had to be manufactured, and sometimes the money poured in. By 1888, he had actually become a captain of industry, for he commanded a research and manufacturing empire that employed between two and three thousand men.

On paper he was wealthy. In reality, he was constantly trying to find investment money to finance his research and manufacturing. Once in a while he was actually caught without funds for purchasing materials he critically needed.

Particularly as his electrical manufacturing business became profitable he was faced with cutthroat competition. He had to institute patent-infringement proceedings against more than one company producing incandescent bulbs. Edison believed that some major competitors—the George Westinghouse and Thomson-Houston companies—were guilty of patent infringement, and he fought these “patent pirates” in the courts over many years.

Like Edison, Westinghouse, a strong competitor, was a man of vision and courage. He was rapidly overtaking the inventor in the fight for control of the electrical industry. Westinghouse advocated the use of alternating-current generators, which he said would produce electricity less expensively and over far greater distances than the Edison-favored direct-current generators.

Edison argued that alternating current was hazardous, and soon another war, the “war of the currents,” developed. The two men bitterly argued their points of view before the public. Edison’s stubborn refusal to accept progress in the electrical field proved to be foolhardy, as the alternating-current system turned out to be the best method for industry.

In the midst of attempts by each side to discredit the other, Henry Villard, a financier, approached Edison. He offered to consolidate the tangled web of Edison’s electrical holdings and buy him out for almost two million dollars in cash and stock. Edison was greatly relieved. He would be a 10-percent stockholder and a member of the board of directors, and at the same time would be free of an enormous burden.

The transaction was completed in 1889. The J. P. Morgan interests took control of the Edison General Electric Company, as it was now called. Edison later said, “When I sold out, one of the great inducements was the sum of cash received, so as to free my mind from financial stress, and thus enable me to go ahead in the technical field.”

Later on, the Edison General Electric Company consolidated with its old competitor Thomson-Houston. To his sorrow, Edison’s name was taken out of the title of the company. It became the General Electric Company.

After Edison had completed his business deal and was relieved of his financial worries, his wife persuaded him to take a vacation trip to Europe. He journeyed to the Paris International Exposition, where he was given magnificent homage. Everywhere, kings and cheering crowds celebrated his presence. A gala luncheon was held atop the newly erected Eiffel Tower; “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played when Edison entered the Paris Opera; numerous honors and titles were awarded him. In Italy he was even made a count. His wife Mina loved every minute of the trip, but Edison tried to avoid the formal occasions and refused to wear the ribbons and medals that had been presented to him.

He was anxious to return home—for a good reason. He had never been able to confine his mind to one project at a time. For quite a while before the trip he had worked in complete secrecy on a unique and revolutionary idea, and he could hardly wait to get back to the laboratory to see what had happened during his absence.

The minute Edison returned to West Orange he headed for Room 5 of the laboratories, where behind locked doors supersecret research had been going on. He sat down. His assistants turned down the lights. As his assistant William Dickson began to turn a crank on a machine, Edison watched a screen hung on one wall. There on the screen appeared a flickering picture. It looked like Dickson himself.

The man on the screen stepped forward, raised his hat, and opened his mouth. “Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back. I hope you are satisfied with the Kineto-phonograph,” the picture said.

This was the first workable motion-picture apparatus.

For many years, men had been experimenting with the possibility of moving pictures. Early in the nineteenth century the zoetrope was very popular; this was an optical toy with figures of people inside a revolving cylinder. When the cylinder was turned and the figures were viewed through slits, the many pictures appeared like a single animated person. And in an experiment in the 1880’s a man named Eadweard Muybridge had put together photographs of horses running on a track and had revolved them rapidly to give the appearance of motion.

Edison was fascinated with the notion of moving pictures. Up to his time, none of the men who had worked on the problem had possessed his inventive genius. Edison had started by learning everything there was to know about photography. He had read mountains of material in his extensive library, then had begun to experiment.

By October, 1888, he had filed his idea with the patent office. “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both cheap, practical and convenient. This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope.” The Edison penchant for concentrating on the cheap, the convenient, and the commercially feasible was again evident.

On dry plates of glass his assistant had made tiny— one-sixteenth of an inch—photographs of people moving. The glass was too breakable. Edison began to experiment with celluloid film, instead. Next he got to work on a stop-and-start camera that would run at a speed so that motion would be simulated when the film was shown. Soon he found that narrow strips of celluloid coated with photographic emulsion worked better than a cylinder, and that the strips must be joined together so as to roll across the front of the camera.

With the use of a long strip of film, bigger frames could be taken and more exposures put on a roll. Edison heard about the work of George Eastman, the Rochester, New York, pioneer in photography, and asked Eastman to develop an improved him in the fifty-foot length Edison wanted.

With the advent of the Eastman him, Edison knew that success was within reach. By the summer of 1889 the secret project had shifted into high gear. Edison invented a movie camera that drew him through rollers at a constant rate of speed and then rewound it automatically. The him had perforations on the outer edge so that the teeth of a locking device could catch and hold it steady as pictures were taken. The him advanced one step at a time, took an exposure, and moved forward. When the him was shown at the right speed, the effect of motion was achieved.

While Edison toured Europe the work at his laboratories speeded up. When he returned, Dickson greeted him with the first historic picture of a man moving. Now the motion picture was a reality.

Edison hoped to make talking motion pictures by coordinating the sound of his phonograph with the movement of his film. But first he had to concentrate on the commercial success of his invention. He devised a peep-show machine, the Kinetoscope, to display the film. A viewer saw motion pictures when he looked through an eyepiece and lens into a box. The box contained batteries and a motor for turning the filmstrip and operating a light. In the Kinetoscope, people could see pictures of Edison’s assistant Fred Ott sneezing; a man smoking a big cigar; an Italian organ-grinder and his monkey.

Edison decided that he had to have a place to make his films, and accordingly a most peculiar structure arose at West Orange, New Jersey. It was a fifty-foot-long building constructed of wood, completely covered with black tar paper, and mounted on a revolving pivot foundation so that it could be rotated slowly to present any side of the building to the sun. It had a movable roof to let in more light. It was the first motion-picture studio. People called it the Black Maria.

Inside the Black Maria, Edison built a darkroom with a stage at one end. By 1894, all sorts of films were being produced on that stage. They ranged from fight sequences between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett—the great boxing hero—and a hired opponent, to Japanese dancers, Buffalo Bill and a cast of wild Indians, knife throwers, acrobats, and muscle-bound strong men.

The film showing Corbett caught the fancy of the public, and soon Edison found financial backers to help him organize his Kinetoscope Company. The company set up film parlors where coins were fed into the boxes and people peered into the peepholes. They saw a thrilling extravaganza of French ballet dancers, Indian battles, and train wrecks.

Kinetoscopes became the rage, and people thronged to see them. In April, 1894, there was actually a riot on lower Broadway in New York when people besieged a film parlor to view “the Wizard’s latest invention” for the first time. The era of mass entertainment at the movies had started.

Again ironically, Edison was so busy on so many ideas during this decade that he did not file for patents on his Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects until 1891. These patents turned out to be incomplete, and he had neglected to file for foreign rights. Once again a business blunder led to disputes, prolonged court action, and outright pirating of his work.

Edison made another costly mistake. The backers of the Kinetoscope film parlors soon saw the fortune to be made on the movies. They asked Edison to adapt the motion-picture machine for use in a theater with a large screen, so that audiences could sit and see life-sized action without moving from machine to machine. But Edison stubbornly resisted the change and refused to work on a projector for a large screen.

Of course, other men quickly stepped into the vacuum. By 1896, a competitor had put out precisely such a machine. Lawsuit after lawsuit followed because Edison had failed to patent all the possibilities of his invention.

In spite of his legal expenses he made money on films. He built a large film-making studio in New York

City’s Bronx, and the Edison label soon became familiar to moviegoers everywhere. Action-packed dramas, exciting Westerns, and terrifying train robberies were churned out for mass consumption. Later, until court action dissolved the patent-trust and distributing company that was formed with his consent, the Edison company made up to a million dollars a year in royalties and film sales.

Edison’s unique vision for the possible and his great gift of invention had changed the entire pattern of American leisure and learning.

“I firmly believe that the moving picture is destined to bear an important part in the education of the future,” he predicted. His estimate has proved correct.

15.

Batteries for Automobiles

During the two years that he was deep in negotiations to sell his electrical holdings, the inventor had spent a good deal of time away from West Orange. He was busy planning strategy for another big battle, this time to invent a magnetic separator to extract iron ore.

Before he had left for the Paris Exhibition he had ordered his men to make a comprehensive survey of iron-ore deposits; when he returned, they gave him a lengthy report on key states where low-grade iron-ore deposits existed. He pinpointed Ogdensburg, New Jersey, as the perfect base of operations, and bought a 3,000-acre site in the northwest corner of the state, where his men had surveyed more than 200,000,000 tons of ore. In 1891 and for the next eight years he struggled at this dusty site, expending countless time and energy and a fortune of two million dollars before giving up the iron-ore project.

But he started out enthusiastically. He renamed the town Edison, built a neat little community of fifty houses complete with running water and electric lights, and put his mill into operation. He installed a system of gigantic rockcrushing machines, called Giant Rolls. Ore was dug from deep in a mountain and run through the sets of rockcrushing rollers and on conveyor belts to an adjoining mill where it was pulverized. In the final process the crushed rock passed a giant magnet that separated the pure ore. The ore was then molded into iron briquettes and shipped on railroad cars to steel furnaces.

It was a grand plan, but it did not work. The crushers broke down and breakages occurred on the conveyor belts. Edison had to build and rebuild, test and experiment, revise plans and timetables. People began to call the project Edison’s Folly.

The inventor loved to figure out a way of doing a task more economically and efficiently, and here at Edison, New Jersey, he spent many sleepless nights working out improvements for his ore process. Once Edison asked an engineer to design a special process. The engineer turned in three plans, all poor, according to his boss. When the employee protested that there was no other way to do the job, Edison spent a weekend thinking, and returned on Monday morning with forty-eight other ways of tackling the project.

Life at the iron-ore mill was grueling and backbreaking, but Edison was so completely absorbed in achieving a moneymaking operation that he forgot everything, including holidays and his birthdays. On Christmas Day in 1898 his wife sent him a giant cake in the shape of his ore mill. He took a look at it and said, “What, is it Christmas already?”

Twice he was almost killed. Once he crawled down a deep hole and was at the bottom of the shaft when fourteen tons of ore fell on him. The other time he was standing in the mill when a huge rod from a machine came loose, flew through the air, and struck within an inch of his nose. The rod penetrated a two-inch board.

In 1899, just as Edison felt that he was achieving his goal of devising a commercially profitable method for magnetic extraction of iron, an event occurred that meant catastrophe. Some time before, in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, a massive deposit of high-grade iron ore had been discovered. It was enough to last for many years. John D. Rockefeller had now bought it and had announced plans to ship the ore by boat through the Great Lakes. This was the end of Edison’s low-grade ore experiment.

“I have never been connected personally with a company which failed to pay its debts,” he said, but by now his company was several hundred thousands of dollars in arrears.

He had spent two million dollars on his scheme, but he remained philosophic about the financial disaster. He said he had never had a better time spending money.

The years that had been taken up with the failing project had been eventful. His father had died in 1896; and his wife had delivered her second son. Of those years he could say, “I never felt better in my life than during the years I worked here. Hard work, nothing to divert my thoughts, clear air, simple food made life very pleasant.”

He was fifty-three years old and had a debt of $300,-000. As he intended to make up the loss as soon as possible, he turned his attention to a related project. Soon he was deep in plans for building a plant to manufacture Portland cement. Later, Edison cement, produced by using some of the cost-cutting processes the inventor had devised on the iron-ore project, would help build such important structures as Yankee Stadium. Characteristically, Edison himself designed the entire Edison Portland Cement Company plant.

Even as he spent his time at the iron-ore millsite, he could not break his lifetime pattern of dabbling in other ideas. He maintained his interest in experiments on the motion picture and also worked more on the phonograph. By 1896, this machine had come into its own as a national institution, and people everywhere were buying Edison’s popular cylinder records. This was fortunate, as every cent of profits was needed to fill up the empty bank account at the ore works.

During these same years, Edison worked out still another invention that would benefit all mankind. In 1895, Professor Wilhelm K. Roentgen, a German physicist, had discovered X rays. After this discovery, Michael Pupin, a Columbia University professor, invented the fluorescent screen for use in taking X-ray pictures. He approached Edison for help, asking the inventor to find the best chemical to use on his fluorescent screen. After eight thousand chemicals had been tested by his men, Edison settled on calcium tungstate.

He sent Pupin a device he had made, called the fluoroscope, which was a box curved at one end so that it would fit closely around the eyes. The other end of the box was closed. Inside this end was spread a layer of calcium tungstate. When a hand or any other part of the body to be observed was placed between a vacuum tube and the fluorescent screen, the shadow of the bones could be seen on the screen. This fluoroscope would help surgeons perform the first X-ray operation in the United States.

Edison declined to patent this invention, but presented it to the public to be used in medical research. Another result of his research was a lighting device, the fluorescent lamp, for which he did apply for a patent. But he dropped it when the danger of experimenting with X rays became evident as one of his men became seriously ill and eventually died of radiation exposure.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, Edison was over fifty years old. Though he was a man of energy and good health, he began to worry about the passing of time and worked harder than ever on all his interests.

The year 1900 exploded with the rattle, din, putt-putt, and smelly fumes of the Age of the Automobile. The horse-drawn carriage soon became a relic of the past, for all sorts of machine-powered vehicles began to dominate the muddy roads of America. Careening along at the then phenomenal speed of twenty to thirty miles an hour, the automobiles, driven by gasoline engines or electric motors, heralded a new concept in transportation.

Edison was fascinated by the horseless carriage. In 1897 he had met Henry Ford at a convention of Edison illuminating companies. For many years, Ford’s idol had been Thomas Edison, and Ford, a shy young man, found himself speechless as he sat next to the great inventor. But Henry Ford had been working on something he wanted to tell Edison about, and finally he started to talk about his gasoline-powered automobile, which he was sure would revolutionize the automobile industry.

When Edison showed interest in the Ford car and began to ask all sorts of questions, Ford became animated and talked freely. At the end of the conversation he was thrilled, for Edison told him to stick with the work.

“Young man, you have it . . . keep at it,” Edison advised Ford.

These words encouraged Henry Ford to work even harder on his car. By 1899, he had begun to manufacture a gasoline automobile. He never forgot the consideration that Edison had showed him, and a lifelong friendship between the two men began.

In the meantime, Edison thought no more about gasoline cars. His interest centered on the electric automobile, for it was lighter, quieter, and cleaner than the dirty, noisy, smelly automobile that ran on a gasoline internal-combustion engine. But Edison knew that if the electric automobile were to be successful, a more workable storage battery must be invented. Because the lead-acid storage battery of Edison’s time was expensive, corroded easily, and had to be constantly recharged, drivers did not care to venture any great distance.

With his knowledge of electricity, it was entirely natural for Edison to decide that a new battery could be his next breakthrough. He would solve the problem by inventing a better “box of electricity”—one that would be durable, quickly rechargeable, and inexpensive. He believed the future of transportation lay in electric automobiles.

The battery Edison intended to improve contained two open lead grids called electrodes, one positive and the other negative, placed in a solution of sulfuric acid and water, called electrolyte. Chemical action between the lead and the acid discharged electrical power. When the chemical reaction was reversed by “charging” the battery, its power could be restored.

With his usual enthusiasm and confidence, Edison jumped into the work of designing a battery using a better chemical combination than lead and sulfuric acid. The quest for a successful battery would take ten years of his life and a good deal of his fortune.

Since his boyhood, chemistry had been Edison’s greatest love. In 1900, at the age of fifty-three, he still enjoyed the tedious analysis involved in the search for a perfect chemical combination. Day after day, month after month, surrounded by hundreds of test tubes, he sought a chemical solution, but nothing seemed to work.

Eighteen months passed, thousands of experiments were recorded, and still Edison knew certainly only those combinations that did not work. Only after three years of experiments, in 1905, did he achieve some measure of success. He found that the chemical combination of nickel hydrate, with graphite for the positive element and a refined grade of iron for the negative element, seemed to work in the battery.

Edison built a small factory at Silver Lake and continued experimenting. Because he wanted a foolproof final product, he ordered exhaustive tests to see if the batteries he made would stand up under heavy use. Vehicles containing them were driven on back roads full of bumps and ruts; the batteries were jarred and jolted up and down in the laboratory; they were thrown from an upper-story window in the laboratory to see what would happen to them.

By 1904, Edison was satisfied with his battery’s performance. At the Silver Lake plant a few thousand of the batteries were manufactured and an eager public quickly snapped them up.

Of course, Edison had seen to it that people would be ready and waiting for his latest product. His keen promotional sense was well tuned to publicity methods. In a great press campaign the newspapers rhapsodized about the Wizard’s newest marvel.

But things went wrong with the nickel-iron battery. The container leaked; the cells were not constant in performance; power failed.

Edison had spent $500,000 to build the factory and begin production, but he refused to let an inferior product remain on the market. It took him only a short time to decide to shut down the factory. He ordered his employees to take back all the batteries and repay purchasers in full. To publicly admit his mistake must have been humiliating for the great inventor, but he met the difficulty with courage and honesty.

More testing must be done, he told his staff. The leaky containers must be improved, the iron element tested further. More experimenting must be done on nickel hydrate. By 1905, more than ten thousand tests had been made.

That winter was an agonizing one for Edison. He was growing older, and he suffered a severe attack of mastoiditis. An operation became necessary, and he lost more of his hearing. He wanted to recuperate at Fort Myers on his yearly vacation, but felt he could not leave in the midst of work on the battery. So he continued long hours of research, taking catnaps on his desk when fatigue overcame him.

The morale of his men began to flag, for they had spent five years of unending work without finding a foolproof battery. It was useless, they told the “Old Man”—a waste of time. “Go on to other things,” they said.

But Edison refused to admit defeat. His phonograph business and motion-picture productions were making money and paid for the research.

In 1907 a severe depression struck. The phonograph company slid downhill as flat-disk records dug deeper into the sales of Edison’s old-fashioned cylinder records. But still he persisted. He was sixty years old now, white-haired, and ashen-looking from long nights of work and little sleep.

Edison heard the news that Rolls Royce had emerged triumphant on a 10,000-mile successful road test of a gasoline-powered engine. His friend Ford was now selling his cheap gasoline car for six hundred dollars, and people were buying the automobiles as fast as they could be produced.

Little by little, kinks were ironed out of Edison’s battery and he was able to patent many improvements. By 1908, he achieved a final breakthrough. He had made a battery of improved design, better electrical contact and conductivity, lighter weight, longer capacity, and extended wattage.

The Edison storage battery, which is still in use, consisted of a positive plate of nickel oxide packed into a steel grid. The negative plate consisted of pure powdered iron packed into a grid. Positive and negative plates, alternated and separated by rubber insulators, were stacked together. The electrolyte was a solution of potassium hydroxide. When discharging, the nickel oxide decreased and the iron oxidized. When charging, the reverse process occurred.

“The battery is finished. . . . It is an almost perfect instrument,” Edison announced.

The Edison Storage Battery Company went into full production in 1910. Within a year the million dollars spent on research had been rung up in sales, and profits grew. But the electric car for which the battery was intended did not enjoy the same good fortune. Even as the storage battery went into production, the electric runabout and truck dropped in popularity and were finally put aside as gasoline-powered cars crowded the highways.

The people’s choice of a gasoline-powered engine did not spell complete failure for Edison’s battery. It was used in railway signals, miners’ lamps, train lights, on merchant vessels and military ships, and later in World War I for radio telegraphy. It is still used today as a competent industrial battery, easy to maintain and longer-lasting than the lead-acid type.

During that first decade of the twentieth century, Edison continued to manage his other businesses. His cement factory had been completed in 1907 and soon produced tons of cement each year. He had toyed with the idea of poured-concrete houses, which could be built for three hundred dollars apiece. The idea was ignored at the time, and it was not until thirty years later that the construction industry adopted the methods he had designed.

Throughout these years, Edison’s phonograph company had provided money for research. He kept trying to improve his talking machine and cylinder record in the face of tough competition from such companies as Victor and Columbia, who were producing the more popular flat-disk records. Finally, in 1912, Edison saw the financial handwriting on the wall and changed from cylinder to disk records. By 1914 his record business was earning over seven million dollars a year, and his motion-picture production company was making even more.

In 1914, at the age of sixty-seven, he was a remarkable specimen of vigor and health. He had thick white hair, eyes as sparkling as ever, and a weight of 175 pounds—exactly what it had been twenty-five years before. He accounted for his health by stating that he was a man of moderation who never drank alcohol, did not eat meat, and in fact ate very lightly. Yet he loved strong coffee and good cigars.

Someone asked Edison if it was not time for him to retire and travel. “I already have a schedule worked out. From now . . . until I am seventy-five years of age, I expect to keep more or less busy with my regular work. ... At seventy-five I expect to wear loud waistcoats with fancy buttons; also gaiter tops; at eighty I expect to learn how to play bridge whist and talk foolishly to the ladies. At eighty-five I expect to wear a full-dress suit every evening at dinner, and at ninety —well, I never plan more than thirty years ahead,” he joked.

In 1911, Edison combined the many companies he had founded into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. But no matter how many businesses were consolidated and what efforts at efficiency were made, he would never be a good manager. Henry Ford called his friend “the world’s greatest inventor and worst businessman.”

Edison’s many industries had made him a millionaire several times over, but he always put the profits back into further research or a new invention or factory. And in 1914 he would spend still another fortune, for a great disaster occurred that would take his entire wealth.

16.

Serving His Country

On the evening of December 9, 1914, Edison left the laboratories at West Orange early to dine at home. Just before six o’clock, fire broke out in a film-inspection booth in the factory compound. A conflagration exploded instantaneously. Chemical laboratories, film-processing rooms, and manufacturing plants all erupted into disastrous flame.

Informed of the fire, Edison raced back to the compound and looked at the incredible scene. He realized the tragedy at once, for he knew there was almost no insurance on his buildings.

He turned to his son. “Get Mother over here, and her friends too. They’ll never see a fire like this again!” he said.

The local fire department rushed in, but it was not capable of fighting such an enormous blaze. Burning chemicals gave off such heat that building after building billowed into fierce flames. Many men fought and were injured. One worker perished in the fire.

Edison remained at the scene throughout the fire, directing workmen to salvage what they could of the priceless machinery. Even while flames still lighted the sky, he called for his assistants to meet with him. Equipment was ruined and priceless materials burned to ashes, but his courage remained strong.

“It’s never too late to make a fresh start!” Edison told his men.

Then and there they set to work on plans to rebuild the factories. The next morning, Edison hired fifteen hundred men. They carried the rubble from the seven concrete structures that had been gutted, moved the remaining equipment to temporary quarters in nearby towns, and hauled in machinery to begin the massive job of rebuilding the Edison works bigger and better than ever.

Without hesitation, Henry Ford loaned Edison $750,000. This amount took care of most of the $1,000,000 Edison had lost by the fire. Edison eventually repaid Ford in full.

Within a month, equipment had been installed and was operating in new factories, and disk records were coming off a double-shift production line. Advance orders that would amount to almost $10,000,000 that year helped compensate for some of the losses.

When the fire occurred, Edison was an aging man of sixty-seven. Some people said the disaster took years off his life. Most men might have given up in despair, but the ordeal only strengthened his fierce determination to succeed.

World War I had already erupted in Europe. A naval blockade had caused a shortage of German-supplied chemicals, and Edison needed carbolic acid for phonograph-record production. He devised a process of manufacturing the acid and designed a plant to produce it. Seventeen days from the start of construction, the plant was completed, equipped, and ready to commence production.

Edison possessed an unexcelled ability to approach a problem objectively and find a speedy and practical solution, even when others called the problem impossible. This was an important attribute in a war effort, and Edison was the kind of person who was needed. When the Lusitania was sunk in May, 1915, and war became a definite possibility, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels decided to form a blue-ribbon board of scientists and inventors to advise on naval warfare.

“You are recognized by all of us as a man above all others who can turn dreams into realities,” he wrote to Edison, asking him to serve as chief of the Naval Consulting Board.

Edison loathed war. He pondered the honor, and finally his sense of patriotism overcame his feelings of horror. He accepted Daniels’ proposal and dropped other activities to work on the war effort. He undertook a study of defense weapons and traveled extensively on land and sea to determine what wartime devices the Navy needed.

One of the most important contributions Edison made was a proposal to the Navy to establish a research laboratory for the study and development of new weapons. Edison became convinced that little creative thinking about weaponry could come from a naval officer. He proposed that the research laboratory should be under civilian control. He was overruled by the admirals, but it was by his advice that a naval research laboratory was later created. After the war, the laboratory did much to prepare the military services for the technological advances needed in World War II.

To help win the war, Edison invented many useful devices for the Navy. His inventions included defensive instruments against submarines; devices to turn ships quickly in times of attack; nets to deflect torpedoes; sound devices to detect oncoming torpedoes in U-boat attacks; camouflage techniques for military vessels; searchlights for submarines; smoke screens for ships; gas masks; and fire extinguishers.

Despite the many useful inventions he made during World War I, his service on behalf of the Navy was not satisfying to him. “I made about forty-five inventions during the war, all perfectly good ones, and they pigeonholed every one of them. The naval officer resents any interference by civilians,” he said.

For his services, however, the Navy planned to award him the Distinguished Service Medal, a rare honor for a civilian. But Edison turned it down out of respect for others who had worked as hard as he but had received no recognition of any kind.

Edison said of war, “It is curious that the better impulses of our humanity do not work as hard to spread their careful, helpful thought as the less worthy elements do to spread their evil thought and foolish reasoning. If this could be reversed, the world very quickly would become a better place to live in.”

He was an old man by now, but more than ever he was determined to work for the betterment of humanity.

He kept busy as the years of the 1920’s flew by. Gradually he handed over the daily business management to his son Charles, who ran the Edison manufacturing interests. Charles Edison persuaded his father to manufacture radio receivers along with phonographs, but Edison hated radio. In 1930, at the depth of the depression, the Edison Phonograph Company shut down production of its phonographs, and a year later, after losing two million dollars, ceased production on radios, too.

Edison’s family wished him to slow down and stop working so hard. To this idea he replied, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits,” and he continued to punch the time clock that showed a sixteen-hour day for him even when he was seventy-five.

The inventor turned to the challenge of hiring new personnel, and invented a unique questionnaire for testing and grading prospective employees. It was a combination of a modern-day psychological test and a general-knowledge quiz. But his standards were so high that few could pass the test.

Edison thoroughly believed in the Puritan tradition of hard work, and simply could not slow down. People slept too much and ate too much, he said, and he did little of either. He refused even to take time out for exercise, which he never seemed to need. Mischievously he told the world that he used his body only to carry around his brain.

Edison did not care what people thought of him, and his unconventional views on religion caused something of a stir. “I do not know the soul; I know the mind,” he told a reporter. “I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence, I do not doubt.”

As Edison grew older he enjoyed the world of the outdoors more and more. Henry Ford and his wife visited Edison’s winter home in Fort Myers in 1914 and decided to buy a retreat nearby. John Burroughs, the famous naturalist, became acquainted with Edison and Ford, and the trio took a trip through the Everglades to watch birds and observe tropical growth.

Ford joined Edison on another trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Harvey Firestone came along that time, and the three visited the botanist Luther Burbank at his home in Santa Rosa.

Edison loved to tour the countryside in an open car, and took a camping trip with Firestone and Burroughs in the summer of 1916. Bumping along back roads in a touring car and a Model-T Ford truck loaded with supplies and camping gear, they visited upper New York State and New England. This was the first of many carefree expeditions across the country.

Edison had a wonderful time on these trips. He loved to sit by the campfire at night and tell funny stories. He slept happily in his clothes, washed in the icy waters of mountain streams, and stopped to admire the views and vistas of the countryside.

Newspaper reporters in search of a good story got wind of the camping trips after a time, and loved to trail along after Edison, Ford, Burroughs, and Firestone. On one trip the newsmen reported that the Ford car had broken down in an isolated mountain town. A local mechanic took a look under the hood and suggested that the motor might be the cause of the breakdown.

“I am Henry Ford, and I say the motor is running perfectly,” said the first passenger of the car.

The mechanic then thought that the electric spark distributor might be causing the trouble.

“I am Thomas A. Edison and I say the wiring is all right,” answered the second passenger.

The mechanic turned to John Burroughs, who had a long white beard.

“And I suppose you must be Santa Claus,” said the disbelieving village repairman.

Edison was always quotable and people loved to read about him.

“When do you expect to retire?” he was asked.

“Never,” he replied emphatically. “I have enough ideas to last for another hundred years.”

Along with President Herbert Hoover and John D. Rockefeller, Edison was chosen as one of the greatest living Americans.) The Epworth League voted him the greatest man in history. The New York Times placed a cash market value of more than fifteen billion dollars on his brain, for it was said that investments in industries created from his inventions amounted to more than fifteen billion dollars in America alone.

He spent more and more time at his winter lodge in Fort Myers, but he had not retired. When he had visited the Burbank plantation in California with Harvey Firestone, an exciting idea for pioneer research in a new field had come to him. Firestone had suggested that Edison should work out experiments for bringing a method of native-rubber production to America, since all rubber for tires had to be imported.

The thought of rubber research was a challenging one, and in 1927 Edison began to work on his last great project, setting up a complete laboratory for rubber research in Florida. There, at Seminole Lodge in Fort Myers, he tackled the subject, reading books and journals and immersing himself in the subject of rubber. He sent men out on collection trips to bring back every possible source of rubber, and he experimented on more than fourteen thousand different plants and shrubs to find their latex content.

He narrowed the field down to the one plant most practical for growing in the United States. It was goldenrod, which had a 5 percent yield of latex, the milky white fluid from which rubber is made. He experimented on goldenrod painstakingly—dividing roots, planting, replanting, and crossbreeding in the Burbank manner. Ultimately he produced a giant goldenrod fourteen feet tall, which yielded about 12 percent latex.

He shipped his harvest of goldenrod latex to Harvey Firestone that year, and his friend turned out four rubber tires for Edison’s Model-A Ford car.

“Give me five years, and the United States will have a rubber crop,” Edison predicted in 1929. But he was not to have five years.

A full measure of fame and honor had come to Edison as an octogenarian. He was the grand old man of invention and seemed almost immortal. The world had honored him with medals, ribbons, decorations, and plaques. He remained, however, the simple, straightforward man he had always been, as full of practical jokes and humor as ever.

He commented that at Glenmont he had a bushelful of baubles presented in his honor and that he did not know what many of them were for. Once, when a delegation came to honor him, he entered the library where they waited, shouting, “Any rags, bottles, or old medals today?”

In 1928, at the forty-ninth anniversary of the incandescent light bulb, officials gathered at West Orange to honor him. President Coolidge had presented him with a special congressional gold medal and said, “Noble, kindly servant of the United States and benefactor of mankind, may you long be spared to continue your work and inspire those who will carry forward your torch.”

At the ceremony the British charge d’affaires presented Edison with the original first model of the phonograph, made in 1877. It had been kept in Britain since then. Edison said happily that his baby was home at last.

But the greatest tribute was yet to come.

17.

Final Homage

The fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the electric light approached in October, 1929, and plans to honor the great inventor gathered momentum. A special commemorative postage stamp was issued by the United States Post Office and was sold first in Menlo Park. General Electric made elaborate plans to sponsor a grand program in Edison’s honor.

The program was to be called Light’s Golden Jubilee, and Schenectady, New York, where General Electric was located, had been chosen as a site for the celebration. Public relations men for the company decided that Edison should reenact the first lighting of his incandescent lamp. Unfortunately, they neglected to consult the inventor.

When informed of his role, Edison realized the value to General Electric of the free advertising involved. He did not see why he should give so much publicity to the company that he no longer owned or controlled and that had been somewhat less than generous in protecting his interests. He insisted that the jubilee be moved to Dearborn, Michigan.

At Dearborn, Henry Ford’s hometown, Edison’s friend Ford had spent three million dollars on a museum devoted to the history of industry and invention. In Dearborn, he had erected the Ford Museum and a memorial to Edison at Greenfield Village, a replica of a nineteenth-century American small town. As part of the village, Ford had built an accurate restoration of Thomas Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park.

The laboratory had been reassembled and restored brick by brick and plank by plank, after Ford’s men had searched the New Jersey countryside around Menlo Park and had shipped to Dearborn the former pieces of the laboratory that they had found.

Ford had collected original models of Edison’s tools and inventions: telegraph sets, stock tickers, dynamos, a mortar and pestle. He had even managed to reproduce the Pearl Street station in New York; Mrs. Jordan’s boardinghouse in Menlo Park; the little railroad station at Smith’s Creek, Michigan; the Grand Trunk Railway train where Edison had worked as a boy. Ford’s workmen had built a duplicate of Edison’s first laboratory on wheels.

Ford planned a grand banquet at Greenfield Village, in an impressive replica of Independence Hall, and great men from all over the nation were invited to join in celebrating Light’s Golden Jubilee.

Edison arrived at Dearborn a few days early. He had been gravely ill with pneumonia, but managed to tour the restored village. Once inside his old laboratory, the old man was overcome with emotion. He viewed the original bottles of chemicals, the testing tables, the gas jets, a chalk telephone, the first vote-recorder, the “long-waisted Mary Ann” dynamos. Most moving of all was the reunion between Edison and his longtime assistant Francis Jehl, who now lived in Europe. Edison had not seen him for many years.

‘‘Well, what do you think of it?” Ford asked his friend after the tour.

Edison looked around his old laboratory. “Well, you’ve got this just about ninety-nine and one-half percent perfect,” he replied.

“What’s the matter with it?” Ford asked.

“We didn’t keep the floor that clean,” Edison laughed.

On the morning of October 21 the notables began to arrive for the grand banquet that night. President Hoover and his wife came by train. They stopped outside the town and transferred to the same kind of train that was in use when Edison had been a newsboy.

Edison climbed on board at the spur line near the restored Smith’s Creek Junction. Just as he had done so many years before, he carried a basket of fresh fruit and other goods.

“Fruit, candy, popcorn,” he called in a weak voice to the President of the United Stales. It was a dramatic moment, and millions of radio listeners were damp eyed as they heard the failing voice of the great inventor.

Now the time had come to begin the lighting ceremony. Edison stood at his table on the second floor of the laboratory, with Francis Jehl at his side. He held the model of the original incandescent lamp, which they would light once again.

Throughout America and around the world, people sat listening to their radios as the emotion-packed voice of the announcer described the event:

“The lamp is now ready, as it was a half century ago. Will it light? Will it burn? Edison touches the wire.”

All over America excitement mounted. The announcer cried, “It lights!”

Everywhere lights flashed on to symbolize and honor Edison’s great triumph of electricity. The Golden Jubilee was an overwhelming tribute to a man who could claim 1,328 separate patents as the result of his creativity.

At dinner that evening, great men from the world of finance, politics, science, and education congregated to pay their respects. Those who could not attend— the Prince of Wales, the President of Germany, Commander Richard E. Byrd at the South Pole, and Professor Albert Einstein among them—sent messages of congratulation.

The event was almost too much for the frail and weakened old man. He had been overwhelmed with emotion that afternoon at the lighting of the lamp. He did not want to attend the banquet, but Mina Edison had gently persuaded him, and he sat that evening next to the President of the United States, eating little and hearing nothing.

President Hoover delivered the address.

“I have thought it fitting for the President of the United States to take part in paying honor to one of our great Americans. Mr. Edison . . . has repelled the darkness . . . has brought to our country great distinction throughout the world. . . .”

Edison, thoroughly exhausted yet pleased, summoned up energy for a short reply.

“This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are sentimental and this crowning event of Light’s Golden Jubilee fills me with gratitude. I thank our President and you all. As to Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say to you that, in the fullest and richest meaning of the term—he is my friend. Good-night.”

Tears filled his eyes, and suddenly he became pale and faint and slumped over in his chair. Alarmed, Mina Edison called for the President’s physician, who quickly ordered the inventor to an adjoining room and took measures to revive him. Then he was taken to the Ford residence.

“I am tired of all the glory. I want to get back to work,” Edison said.

Even as Edison lay stricken in Michigan, and worsened in those final days of October, 1929, historic events in the nation’s financial market were developing. The stock market took a disastrous tumble; the worst depression in history dealt a deathblow to the prosperity of the 1920’s.

Edison had seen many other economic upheavals, but this was the last depression the inventor witnessed. When he arrived home, doctors found he was suffering from uremic poisoning, Bright’s disease, diabetes, and a severe gastric ulcer. His extraordinary willpower prevailed for a remarkably long time. For the next two years, in the last gallant battle of his life, he fought the debilitating illnesses that gradually conquered his body. Though he could no longer work in his laboratory, he insisted on daily reports of progress on his rubber experiments; he took fresh air rides in the country with Mina; he sat frequently in an armchair and heard the news of the world.

On August 1, 1931, Edison had a sudden sinking spell, but again he refused to accept defeat and remained mentally alert, though he was physically weaker. Now, however, he finally realized that he would never be able to work again, and it was as if he had decided it was time to send up a white flag of surrender.

In September his friend Henry Ford arrived for a final visit, and Edison revived sufficiently to have one last animated conversation with his old camping crony. But time soon began to stand still.

Even on his deathbed, Edison remained a difficult and obstinate man. He insisted that Mina remain with him constantly, and fretted whenever she left. Each time the doctor visited, Edison demanded to hear the diagnosis and review the tests. He helped nurses measure his own dose of medicine. He even studied his blood samples through a bedside microscope.

On the hillsides the green leaves of late summer changed to the vibrant colors of autumn. October advanced, and Edison took another turn for the worse. Now a frail and wasted invalid, he dozed for the most part, eating nothing at all and failing to recognize his old friends.

Days passed. Edison lay in a semicoma with a smile upon his face. His family gathered at Glenmont and waited, while Mina kept a constant tender vigil over her husband. To her, he spoke his last words. One day, in a moment of clarity, he looked toward the brilliant show of fall leaves outside and said to her, “It is very beautiful over there.”

At 3:24 A.M. on Sunday, October 18, 1931, the electric lights of Edison’s darkened bedroom flashed on brightly as a signal to the waiting world. He had died at the age of eighty-four.

Someone proposed that in honor of the man who perfected the electric light the President of the United States should ask that all electric current be turned off for a few minutes. But of course the idea was impractical. Edison had taken his country into the Age of Technology where several moments without electricity might bring near-disaster to the life of the nation.

At ten o’clock on October 21, 1931, on the evening of his funeral, however, many lights across the land were darkened in voluntary final homage to the great inventor.

18.

Summing Up

Thomas Alva Edison will live on in history as one of the immortals of invention. He was not a great scientist, for he had little interest in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Nor was he a great businessman, for he overlooked many opportunities even while pursuing financial success.

Although he was interested in invention for money’s sake, he often lost out in his business dealings because of legal entanglements over patent rights and because of corporate manipulations. While his work led to the creation of dozens of companies, including such giants as General Electric, he was not concerned with maintaining their control.

He sometimes lacked the vision to see the full potential of innovations such as alternating current, flat-disk records, large-screen movie projection, gasoline automobiles, and wireless broadcasting. But he was an imaginative, creative, and inventive genius whose unique combination of traits and skills enabled him to make a major contribution to mankind. Many of his traits were those so common to the American character that he can truly be called an American inventor.

He was, indeed, the embodiment of the pioneer spirit of the New World and the Puritan ethic of America. Like the apple dumplings that were his favorite dish, he was simple and modest. He was a self-made man with little formal education. In his careless dress, he displayed his rugged individualism like a flag. His strict habits and demanding routine were balanced by a prankish sense of humor and zest for life. Most important among his traits was his ability to work hard and persevere. A man of amazing energy, he labored from the age of twelve until his middle eighties, often day and night, and almost always harder than those he employed. He rarely gave up in the face of great obstacles. By trial and error he patiently attacked problems until he found a way to solve them.

He must be considered a great promoter. He knew how to get personal publicity and stir public curiosity about his work. Perhaps his early days as a newspaper boy and newspaper publisher gave him the lifelong ability to understand and achieve news coverage. This publicity often gave him an edge over his industrial competitors.

Finally, he was an organizer. He understood the value of attacking problems systematically, and he perfected the teamwork approach to systematic research. He was one of the first men to organize scientific work, and his laboratories in Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, became the models for the huge industrial research and development institutions that have become so important a part of twentieth-century American life.

Someday this may be considered Thomas Edison’s most important contribution. His research laboratory and think-center concept, by which he gathered many men together to solve problems jointly, probably did more than anything else to help usher in the age of technology. Today this approach to research is basic to almost all scientific discovery and technological innovation.

Certainly his most important single achievement was the perfection of the incandescent light bulb and the establishment of an electrical system to make electric light usable everywhere. For this alone, regardless of his more than thirteen hundred patent applications, he has earned a place as one of the most important and inventive men of the industrial revolution.

In the future, however, Thomas Edison may be given more credit for his work in the communications revolution than in the industrial revolution. Except for his later work on automobile batteries, cement, iron ore, and rubber, his major contributions were devices to increase man’s ability to communicate.

From boyhood he was interested in telegraphy, and his developments and improvements increased the productivity and efficiency of the telegraph for sending messages. His invention of the phonograph was a major communications achievement that has changed the entertainment habits of the world. His improvement of the telephone helped to make that instrument one of the most important communications tools of the twentieth century. His pioneering efforts in motion pictures helped to establish the film industry as a dominant medium of entertainment and education. And his development of an early electron tube, which became the basis for wireless transmission, helped make possible radio and television, so omnipotent and omnipresent in our daily lives.

It has been said that the electric media are revolutionizing mankind. If so, Thomas Edison must go down in history as one of the most important and revolutionary innovators of all time. His work in communications is today helping to change the world.

Thus he helped to usher in both the Age of Technology and the Age of Electricity. Few men have been more intimately involved in the important developments of their era, and few men have been more completely a part of their time and their place than was Thomas Alva Edison.

Chronology

1847 Thomas Alva Edison born on February 11 in Milan, Ohio.

1854 Family moves to Port Huron, Michigan.

1857 Edison sets up chemical laboratory in cellar of home.

1859 Becomes newsboy and candy vendor on Grand Trunk Railway.

1862 Publishes own newspaper, Weekly Herald, on train.

1862    Begins to study telegraphy with J. U. Mackenzie.

1863    Gets first adult full-time job as telegraph operator at Stratford Junction, Ontario.

1863-68 Spends years as wandering telegrapher in Midwest.

1868    Becomes telegraph operator for Western Union in Boston.

1869    Sets up independent inventing business in January.

1869 Applies for first patent for electric vote-recorder in June.

1869 Moves to New York City and finds job with Gold Indicator Company.

1869 Establishes firm of Pope, Edison & Company in October. This is first professional electrical engineering firm in the United States.

1869 Perfects printer for gold quotations.

1870    Improves stock ticker for Western Union.

1871    Establishes firm of Edison & Unger in Newark, to produce stock tickers.

1871 Establishes firm with Joseph T. Murray to develop automatic telegraph.

1871 Mother dies in April.

1871 Marries Mary Stilwell on December 25.

1871-75 Works in field of telegraphy and applies for many patents for stock tickers, automatic telegraph, and multiplex telegraph.

1873 Daughter Marion Estelle born.

1876 Moves from Newark to new laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

1876 Improves on Bell telephone by invention of carbon transmitter.

1876    Son Thomas Alva, Jr., born.

1877    Begins work on talking machine, which leads to invention of phonograph, patented in December.

1878    Makes trip to Wyoming to test tasimeter.

1878 Begins research into incandescent light in August.

1878 Son William Leslie born.

1878    Edison Electric Light Company formed in October.

1879    Experiments to find best filament for incandescent bulb. Finds better vacuum pump to remove air from bulb. Produces improved dynamo. Tests carbon filament. Tests successful incandescent bulb.

1879

1880 1880-

1880

1880

1881

1

1882

1883

1884

1886

1887

1888 1888

1889

1890 1891-

Gives public demonstration of incandescent lights on December 31, at Menlo Park. Establishes factory to manufacture incandescent light bulbs.

82 Develops numerous inventions necessary for generation, distribution, regulation, and measurement of electric current.

Builds and demonstrates model electric railway at Menlo Park in June.

Organizes Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, in December.

Moves from Menlo Park to New York in February, to begin construction of electrical system for lighting New York.

Begins operation on September 4 of first central station to distribute electric current in New York City.

In experimenting on “Edison-effect” bulb, discovers that current passes through space without wires.

Wife Mary dies on August 6.

Marries Mina Miller on February 24.

Moves to new laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey. Begins work on improving phonograph. Daughter Madeleine born.

Begins work on motion-picture camera.

Sells Edison electrical holdings.

Son Charles born.

99 Works on new methods of iron-ore extraction.

)

1893 Develops peep-show box, Kinetoscope, for viewing motion pictures.

1893 Builds Black Maria, first motion-picture studio.

1896 Invents fluoroscope.

1898 Son Theodore born.

1900-10 Develops Edison storage battery.

1907 Establishes Portland cement factory.

1912 Improves phonograph records by changing from cylinder to disk records.

1914    Plant at West Orange burns down on December 9. Rebuilt within a month.

1915    Becomes chief of Naval Consulting Board.

1916-18 Works on national defense problems. Develops numerous devices to aid war effort.

1927    Begins last great research project—to grow rubber successfully in the United States.

1928    Presented with a congressional gold medal.

1929    Fiftieth anniversary celebration of perfecting of incandescent light, on October 21.

1931 Dies on October 18 at age of eighty-four.

Index

This index contains all the original headings and subheadings from the print version of this book. Page numbers have been removed since they are no longer relevant.

Adams, Milt

Arc lamp

Ashley, J. W

Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company

Automatic Telegraph Company

Automobiles

Barker, George F.

Batchelor, Charles

Beach, Alfred Ely

Bell, Alexander Graham

Bell System laboratories

Bergmann, Sigmund

Black Maria

Burbank, Luther

Burroughs, John

Butler, Ben

Callahan, E. A.

Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia

Civil War

Consolidated Edison Company

Coolidge, Calvin

Court suits

Crystal Palace Electrical Exposition, London

Daniels, Josephus

Davy, Humphry

De Forest, Lee

Depression

Dickson, William

Dynamo

Eastman, George

Edison, Carlile

Edison, Charles

Edison, Eliza

Edison, Harriet Ann

Edison, John

Edison, Madeleine

Edison, Marion

Edison, Marion Estelle

Edison, Mary Stilwell

Edison, Mina Miller

Edison, Nancy Elliott

Edison, Nancy Stimpson

Edison, New Jersey

Edison, Samuel Ogden

Edison, Samuel Ogden, Jr.

Edison, Samuel Ogden, III

Edison, Sarah Ogden

Edison, Theodore

Edison, Thomas Alva assessment awards background birth chief, Naval Consulting Board childhood deafness death education finances health laboratories See also Menlo Park laboratory,West orange laboratory

marriages newsboy, railroad patents physical appearance publishes Weekly Herald sense of humor telegrapher trips

See also Inventions and work, Edison’s

Edison, Thomas Alva, Jr.

Edison, William Leslie

Edison, William Pitt

Edison Electric Illuminating Company

Edison Electric Light Company

Edison Electric Tube Company

Edison General Electric Company. See General Electric Company

Edison Lamp Company

Edison Machine Works

Edison Phonograph Company

Edison Portland Cement Company

Edison Storage Battery Company

Edison & Unger,

Electricity, theory of

Electronics

Experimental Researches in Electricity (Faraday)

Faraday, Michael

Farmer, Moses

Firestone, Harvey

Fleming, Ambrose

Ford, Henry

Ford Museum

Gas companies

General Electric Company

Gilliland, Ezra T

Glenmont

Gold Indicator Company

Gould, Jay

Grant, Ulysses S.

Gray, Elisha

Harrington, George

Hayes, Rutherford B.

Hoover, Herbert

International Electrical Exposition, Philadelphia

Inventions and work, Edison’s automatic telegraph carbolic acid manufacturing process duplex telegraph dynamos

“Edison-effect” bulb electric locomotive electric-traction railroad electric vote-recording machine fluorescent lamp    fluoroscope    gold-quotation printer   incandescent lamp, filament for  magnet separator to extract iron ore mimeograph machine   moving pictures (Kinetoscope, Kineto-phonograph)

multiplex (quadruplex) telegraph phonograph relay system rubber research stock-printing telegraph  stock ticker storage battery system of electrical distribution tasimeter telegraph repeater telephone telephone receiver waxed paper for World War I

Jehl, Francis

Johnson, Edward H.

Kinetoscope Company

Kruesi, John

Laws, S. S.

Laws gold indicator

Lefferts, Marshall

Legal actions. See Court suits

Light’s Golden Jubilee

Little, George D.

Lowrey, Grosvenor P.

Mackenzie, Jimmy

Marconi Telegraph Company

Menlo Park laboratory

Miller, Mina. See Edison, Mina Miller

Morgan, J. Pierpont

Morse register

Murray, Joseph T.

Muybridge, Eadweard

Naval Consulting Board

New York Times

Nobel, Alfred

Oates, Michael

Orton, William

Ott, Fred

Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco,

Paris Electrical Exposition

Pope, Edison & Company

Pope, Franklin L.

Prescott, George B.

Pullman, George M.

Pupin, Michael

Reis, Johann

Revolutionary War

Rockefeller, John D.

Roentgen, Wilhelm K.

Stearns, Joseph B.

Stilwell, Alice

Stilwell, Mary. See Edison, Mary Stilwell

Stock market crash

Storey, Wilbur F.

Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

Thomson-Houston Company

Unger, William

Vanderbilt, Cornelius

Villard, Henry

Wallace, William

Weekly Herald

Western Union

Westinghouse, George

West Orange laboratory

Williams, Charles, Jr.

World War I

World War II

X rays

Zoetrope