gistfile1.txt

When Edison had been an unknown inventor who specialized in the
telegraphic equipment business, reporters had not sought him out and begged
him for an opportunity to become his friend. Now, however, in early May 1878,
sycophantic journalists led him to believe that he was wise in all manner of
subjects, far afield of the electrical business. If they wished to listen to his
opinions, and they did indeed, he was glad to hold forth on any topic, such as the
relationship of diet to national destiny, a lecture delivered over lunch while
digging into strawberry shortcake, strawberries and cream, and an apple
dumpling.

I have a theory of eating. Variety—that is the secret of wise eating. The
Nations that eat the most kinds of food are the greatest Nations.... The
rice-eating Nations never progress; they never think or act anything but
rice, rice, rice, forever. Look at the potato and black-bread eaters of
Ireland; though naturally bright, the Irish in Ireland are enervated by the
uniformity of their food.... On the other hand, what is, take it all in all, the
most highly enlightened Nation, the most thrifty, graceful, cultured and
accomplished? Why, France, of course, where the cuisine has infinite
variety. When the Roman Empire was at its height the table was a marvel
of diversity—they fed on nightingales’ tongues, and all sorts of dainty
dishes.... Some say I get the cart before the horse, and that the diversified
food is the result of a high civilization rather than its cause, but I think I
am right about it.

This was a role, pontificating on demand, that was quite agreeable to him. As
the years passed, it came to supplant the actual work of inventing. His thinking
about an ideal diet for himself would change radically, however. In 1878, he said
he wanted to live up to his own theory about the salutary benefits of variety and
“live so that I could change my diet a thousand times a year.” This gave way in
his later years to ever more restrictive diets, each change publicly chronicled as
no alimentary detail was too private for the reporters who would always attend
to him, from when he was thirty-one until he died at the age of eighty-four.

Following his sensational April visit to Washington, D.C., he was deluged with
invitations to make personal appearances for sundry groups and occasions. He
told a visiting reporter that he had no interest at all in making such appearances.
(“You shouldn’t have become famous, if you didn’t want to be talked about and
bored by strangers,” the reporter replied.) Edison turned down the invitations
across the board, but he made two exceptions when he was still glowing from
the warm reception received in Washington. The unsatisfying results in both
cases served to show him that the role of traveling celebrity was not to his liking.

In May, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Academy of Mount Saint
Vincent, a Catholic girls’ school on the Hudson River, as a favor to an old
telegrapher friend. His hearing disability loomed as a larger issue when he was
on the road. His hosts did not know how best to overcome its isolative effects
(and Edison had yet to finish that “lap megaphone” he had been talking up with
the press). When he was taken to the chapel during Mass, he strained to hear the
celebrants’ words. (When the priest touched his arm to let him know it was time
to go, Edison misinterpreted the gesture, thinking it was a rebuke for not
showing proper reverence, and stooped down almost to his knees, remaining
with bowed head. No one knew how to clear up the misunderstanding with the
service still in progress.) Before Batchelor began the phonograph exhibition
conducted before the students, Edison took a seat on the platform, “instantly
becoming absorbed with some train of thought,” and apparently heard little or
nothing of the school’s welcome. For him, the highlight of the day appears to
have been at the end when he and Batchelor, after saying their good-byes, raced
each other down the hill, oblivious to the rain and the propriety expected of the
eminent inventor and his assistant.

A few weeks later, Edison was lured out of the lab one more time, for an
invitation-only appearance at a reception held after a public exhibition of the
phonograph in New York City. He was introduced by Hilbourne Roosevelt—
organ builder, investor in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, and first
cousin of Theodore—who said he “had almost been obliged to use force to drag
the inventor from his work.” The occasion was what a political campaigner
today would call a meet and greet, and only the professional pol could be
expected to have the stomach for it. At midnight, Edison excused himself,

explaining he had to “get home and work.”

As for family matters, hagiographers did not hesitate to see Mr. and Mrs.
Edison as a perfect couple. One journalist described Mary as “a charming
woman, and is evidently the counterpart of himself, and one would know, the
moment he put his eyes on both, that they were exactly suited to one another.”
This scene, painted by a stranger with a ripe imagination, was based on nothing
at all. Edison’s almost total withdrawal from the family’s domestic sphere was
the leitmotif that would be the one Edison and his assistants chose for Edison’s
life narrative: the tireless inventor. Edward Johnson pretended to confide to a
reporter that Edison’s “only bad habit” was work, so consuming that it
constituted “a dissipation.” For the last ten years, Johnson said in 1878, Edison
had averaged eighteen hours a day at his desk. So immersed in work’s demands,
he “does not go home for days, either to eat or sleep,” even though his house was
only a few steps away. On another occasion, a reporter observed that when his
five-year-old daughter Marion came to the lab to fetch him for dinner, Edison
had told her he would “be along in a minute”—and then had become engrossed
in something else in the lab. “That’s nothing,” Batchelor had explained when the
reporter commented on Edison’s susceptibility to distraction. “When we get
interested in a thing here we stay all day and all night sometimes, and Edison
hardly stops to eat even if they send his meals to him.” What Mary Edison
thought of her husband’s absences was not recorded. She was only rarely
included in the standard newspaper profile, and even then, merely as the
ornament.

Whether it was for a banquet in the city or supper at home, it was difficult to
extract Edison from the lab. As the months passed following the phonograph’s
first public exhibitions in early 1878 and he failed to produce a production
model, Edison remained maddeningly blasé. He puttered and procrastinated, his
attention flitting from one side project to the next.

The “telescopophon” was one of the distractions that held his attention, but
not long enough, it would turn out, for it to ever reach commercial release. This
was a giant megaphone that performed marvelously when used as a pair, one for
speaking, the other for listening, placed a mile apart on hilltops. Reporters were
invited to try it themselves—one claimed he could hear a voice that was two
miles away and out of sight—an entertainment so diverting that no one bothered
to ask Edison details of how he was going to miniaturize it to make good on his

claim that this nonelectrical mechanical device would enable the partially deaf to
“hear every whisper on the stage of the largest theater,” yet be so small that it
could be used “without your next neighbor knowing that you have one.”

Any sense of urgency was blunted by pleasing news arriving from Paris,
where the phonograph’s exhibition was drawing large crowds. Theodore Puskas,
Edison’s business agent in Europe, had had to overcome the skepticism of the
French Academy of Sciences, to whom he had first presented the machine. The
scientists thought the machine’s playback was a ventriloquist trick and insisted
that Puskas leave the room while they listened again and were finally convinced.

Puskas secured a coveted place for a machine at the Paris Universal
Exhibition. He cunningly chose to leave the machine inert and silent, without
giving visitors the opportunity to hear it. At the same time, he leased a private
hall on the Boulevard des Capucines, where he charged an admission price for
phonograph demonstrations that ran three times a day, bringing in $200 daily.
Edison called this “the sharpest kind of an advertising dodge,” which was high
praise. Edison attributed Puskas’s inspired arrangements to ideas Puskas had
picked up while in the United States.

One of Edison’s associates on the ground in Paris wrote Charles Batchelor
that the phonograph drew crowds that were overly enthusiastic and difficult to
dislodge. A dispatch from Paris reported, “So we can only show it once and
cover [the machine] up until the crowd gets away so as to give some one else a
chance.”

In the newspapers, Edison’s own name had become so familiar to readers that
humorists could invoke it without having to provide any background. Typical
was this brief item that appeared in several newspapers in June: “Edison has not
invented anything since breakfast. The doctor has been called.” In Menlo Park,
Edison could read these items and smile; they were harmless. But by July, he
had passed through the exhilarating novelty of being well known; now he was
weighed down by an accumulation of irritations. The stream of letters from
strangers was holding steady at about seventy-five or eighty a day, coming from
people whom Edison described as “the deaf, dumb, halt, blind, lame and all sorts
of people.” This one, with failing eyesight, wanted Edison to invent a
“blindoscope.” That one, a phonograph for advertising purposes, even though
the machines were not being mass produced. Many wanted only one thing: cash.

His correspondents included new acquaintances who held positions of power,
and they too made requests of him. An example: John Vincent, the cofounder of
the Chautauqua program based by Chautauqua Lake, New York, which offered
summer programs for families that combined religious and secular education,
invited Edison and his family to participate. Edison agreed, making plans to stay
three weeks in August and offer a demonstration of what Vincent poetically
described as “all the marvels of electricity which you can evoke and exhibit.”

Vincent undoubtedly had no idea what a coup he had scored, obtaining
atheistic Edison’s assent to being cooped up for weeks in a family-oriented
church camp far from his lab. Vincent pressed on. He had a brother, who had a
friend, who would like to rent a phonograph—that is, the machine that had yet to
enter production. Could Edison oblige? And another thing. Vincent suggested—
no, he *instructed*—Edison to change the name from “phonograph” to
“tautophone.” When Edison politely replied that he thought that “phonograph”
was known so widely that it was probably too late to change, Vincent was
unmoved. He informed Edison he was going to write an article about the
machine, calling it by what he regarded to be its proper name, and expressed the
hope that Edison would correct his patent records accordingly.

Edison’s family plans for Chautauqua in August had been arranged early in
the year, when August was distant; then, the correspondence with the
insufferable Vincent followed. By July, Chautauqua in August was looming.
William Croffut was also proving rather pushy, inviting himself and his wife for
an overnight visit at Edison’s house. At the lab, Edison continued to flit from
one workbench to another. The work, such as it was, continued to be interrupted
by uninvited visitors and their expectations that he follow his self-assigned role
in the trained-seal-with-phonograph act. Painter urged Edison to close the lab’s
doors to visitors entirely and “only show your hand when you are ready for the
market & then its [*sic*] too late for thieves to get your things.” Edison had not yet
been convinced that he had to abandon the open-door policy, and letters from
Painter were a reminder that the principals in the Edison Speaking Phonograph
Company were waiting impatiently for the machine that they could sell in
volume. At home, Mary Edison was pregnant with their third child, due in
October.

By all the evidence, Edison felt he was being crushed by demands on him,
from strangers, reporters, associates, and family. He responded by acting on a

threat he had made in jest a few months earlier of curing his “unstrung nerves”
by “taking for the woods.” He abruptly accepted the invitation of his biggest
admirer in academe, Professor George Barker, to embark upon a one-month trip
to the West. The official purpose of the trip was to observe a total solar eclipse
on 29 July from the best vantage point, near Rawlins, Wyoming. The eclipse
provided unimpeachable justification for why Edison had to embark right then,
absenting himself from lab associates, business partners, and pregnant wife and
forcing cancellation of the Chautauqua trip. At the Wyoming site he could test
his new “tasimeter,” a scientific instrument for measuring the temperature of the
sun’s corona that he had thought up while he was working hard on not working
on the phonograph. It was Barker’s inspired idea that on their way back they
could stop in St. Louis and attend the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, where Edison would read a paper
that Barker was ghostwriting for him. It was apparently Edison’s idea, however,
to extend the trip to California before turning around for St. Louis and the return.

Edison and Barker left on 13 July, and the timing of his escape was fortuitous,
Edison being absent when, a week later, a new problem popped up back at the
lab. *Scientific American,* which had taken the lead in introducing the world to the
wonders of the phonograph, continued to do so. The journal told readers, “The
Phonograph, truly wonderful as it is, is exceedingly simple and may be made at a
slight expense.” It published detailed instructions so that anyone could build a
machine without waiting for Edison and the Edison Speaking Phonograph
Company to finally make good on their promises to the public.

Flouting the phonograph’s patents presented the Menlo Park lab with a crisis.
In Edison’s absence, it was left to Batchelor and Johnson to decide how to
respond. Reflecting their different personalities, Batchelor’s first reaction was to
write Edison for instructions, and Johnson’s, to prepare a take-no-prisoners
counteroffensive. He prepared a circular warning of the patents that protected the
invention and spelled out what would happen to anyone foolish enough to
infringe.

The manufacture, sale or use, of a patented article without the consent of
the owner of the patent is an infringement, and subjects the infringer TO
AN ARREST or prohibition from the employment of his machinery, shop,

works, or men, in the production of the article. The infringer is also
LIABLE TO BE MULCTED IN TREBLE THE AMOUNT OF
DAMAGES AWARDED BY THE JURY, TOGETHER WITH THE
SUM TOTAL OF THE COSTS.... Ignorance of the law or of what the
patent covers cannot be pleaded in Court...the Company are [*sic*] satisfied
that upon an examination of the law, anyone desirous of having a
Phonograph will find it the cheapest to procure it in a *legitimate way.*

Johnson also protested to *Scientific American*’s editors, but the journal did not
back down. “Investigators have rights as well as patentees,” a long editorial
explained, and among those rights was the one that permits making a patented
article for one’s own tests. Anticipating contemporary debates about an
individual’s right to make copies of copyrighted music or television programs
for noncommercial purposes, the editorial argued that only if a self-assembled
phonograph were offered for sale, depriving the patent holder of his “lawful
reward,” would the action be rightfully treated as illegal. With phrasing that
could have been lifted from a blog, *Scientific American* in 1878 declared,
“Unfortunately, the purchasers of patents are too apt to construe their rights so as
to make them cover pretty much the entire universe.”

Meanwhile, Edison had left the phonograph with the rest of his cares back in
Menlo Park. He was determined to see all that could possibly be seen on his trip,
and he secured the very best position to do so, obtaining permission to ride at the
very front, on top of the locomotive’s cowcatcher, with the help of a letter from
Jay Gould, with whom he had developed a relationship years earlier when Gould
had used his railroad interests to gain control of Western Union and Edison was
the telegraphic equipment expert of the day. The train traveled at a top speed of
twenty miles per hour. The only time he felt he was in danger was when the
locomotive hit an animal—Edison thought it may have been a badger. Upon
impact, the animal was thrown up against the locomotive, just below the
headlight, but Edison at that moment was leaning on the side, hanging on to an
angle brace, and suffered no harm.

Edison’s party arrived well in advance of the eclipse, but after the solar event
Edison took a dilatory four weeks to return home. What he enjoyed most talking
about when the journey was complete was not the eclipse but his adventures as a

white tourist in a West whose native inhabitants were in the process of being
violently removed. A visitor to Wyoming in 1878 saw terrain similar to that
Custer had seen only two years before at the Little Bighorn in Montana. After
the eclipse, Edison, Barker, some railroad officials, a U.S. Army major, and
some soldiers embarked on a hunting trip that took them one hundred miles
south of the railroad into Ute country. A few months later, the same major and
thirty soldiers were attacked and killed by Utes near the place Edison had
camped, or such is the story Edison later told.

Edison had left behind *Daily Graphic* reporter William Croffut, but he had not
shunned the company of reporters entirely. The *New York Herald*’s Edwin Fox
was on hand for the eclipse, and became Edison’s roommate and hunting
companion. When the two men went off on short hunting trips as a twosome,
locals spared Edison the worst pranks directed at tenderfeet from the East,
though he was the butt of a mild ruse when he was fooled into taking some shots
at a jackrabbit that happened to be near a remote rail depot. The rabbit didn’t
move; he advanced closer, and shot again, with the same result. When he got
close enough to see that the rabbit was dead and had been stuffed, a crowd of
onlookers did not hide their amusement. Fox, however, suffered more when a
stationmaster loaned him his “fine Springfield musket” when Fox had run out of
cartridges for his own rifle. Inexperienced, Fox failed to notice that the musket
had been run over by a rail handcar and was ever-so-slightly bent. Upon firing,
the recoil drove the gun against his shoulder with such force that he had to be
treated at a hospital.

Edison did not fully appreciate the reach of the media and the diffusion of his
own name until late one night, after he and Fox had gone to sleep in their hotel
room in Rawlins. The two were awakened by a loud knock. In walked a man
who introduced himself as “Texas Jack” and said he had read about Edison in
the newspaper and wanted to meet him. The hotel proprietor appeared and
attempted to intercede on behalf of his guests; Texas Jack tossed him into the
hallway and resumed his self-introduction. He had just arrived in town from a
hunting trip and boasted of his marksmanship. To illustrate, he pulled out his
Colt, pointed it through the hotel window, and fired at a weather vane that sat on
top of the town’s freight depot. The shot hit its target and awakened the
townspeople, adding to the commotion. Edison, pleading fatigue, tried to coax
his new friend to leave, but he did not succeed until he promised he would see

him in the morning.

These and other picturesque encounters provided abundant potential material
for colorful letters if Edison had written home, but he and his wife did not
correspond. Edison kept in touch with his assistants at the laboratory, but the
only time he heard news about his pregnant wife was when his secretary,
Stockton Griffin, wrote him on August 5 with a report that she was not well.

Mrs. E’s health is not of the best—She is extremely nervous and frets a
great deal about you, and about everything—I take it to be nervous
prostration—She was so frightened yesterday for fear the children would
get on the track that she fainted—This morning I telegraphed Dr. Ward
who came at noon.... She needs a change and right away, as the [train]
cars keep her awake at night and this causes her to lose strength.

Neither Griffin nor the doctor urged Edison to cut his trip short; Griffin ended
his letter with the reassurance that “there’s nothing serious in this,” and that is
how Edison received it. It would be three more weeks before he arrived back in
Menlo Park.

He and Barker had just finished a three-day visit to San Francisco; ahead was
a tour of Yosemite; a visit to mines in Virginia City, Nevada; hunting and
fishing in Wyoming; and then the appearance at the American Association for
the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis. Barker formally presented
Edison as a new AAAS member, with a soaring introduction that asserted theirs
was a time when “the practical man has found science too slow, and has stepped
in and discovered for himself.” On that day, Edison was not only feted by the
august body of scientists, he also received word that the Paris Exposition had
awarded the grand prize to the phonograph.

A perceptive newspaper reporter noticed upon Edison’s return to Menlo Park
that blurring of boundary separating the private and the public that we now
understand as accompanying the arrival of celebrity. “The people have come to
regard him as public property, and were almost jealous of the little time he found
to give his family,” said the *New York Sun*. “Little knots of people came and
went all day long, and took possession of him and his office and shop as if they

had been personal property.”

Nothing at all seemed to bother Edison, however. He was tanned, positively
exuded health, and beamed when interviewed. His trip had been “bang-up”: “It
was bully. I never saw such a country in all my life. That’s the place to go to.
What with following trails, and tumbling down precipices, and riding over alkali
deserts and keeping cool at 125 degrees in the shade, a person couldn’t help
enjoying himself.” His freshly obtained imperturbability was put to the test by
yet another stack of begging letters. But even when he read a letter from an
inventor who claimed to have invented a “fluid resistance neutralizer” and a
“gravimotor” and asked for $1,000 (“It shall be returned to you by God, through
me, more than a thousand fold and that shortly. You will greatly oblige, for I
have a family. Yours In Christ...”), he simply handed it to a reporter and said,
meditatively, “There could be an awful good story made out of the letters I get.”

During his first interview after his return, with the *New York World,* Edison,
the raconteur, told an entertaining story about his encounter out west with a pony
that resisted his directions. The next beat, he became Edison, the absentminded
scientist, falling silent as he became engrossed in a journal that was on his desk.
When his daughter wandered in, “he looked at her for a moment as if trying to
recollect who she was and then exclaiming, ‘Why, Dot, is that you?’” She had
just returned from vacation herself and this was the first time father and daughter
were reunited. After kissing her a half dozen times, he slid her from his knee and
returned to his reading.

If his riding on the train’s cowcatcher was a metaphor for his desire to see
opportunities before others, Edison had been successful. He returned with lots of
dazzling ideas for new investigations into fields wholly new to him. He spoke
confidently of using electricity to evaluate the value of ore deposits, of applying
cottonseed oil to the walls of underground mines to control moisture problems,
of devising ways to reduce the teeth-rattling noise of New York’s elevated
railway. The blind would benefit from his discovery of an ink that produced
raised letters, and the partially deaf from that ear trumpet he had been promising
for a while (and whose completion date he candidly said he could not even
guess).

His experience on the trip had sharpened his creative faculties, but he had
never suffered a lack of promising ideas. His principal problem prior to the trip

had been his inability to remain focused on completing the phonograph, the
single most promising invention he had ever devised. Now, after the trip, his
mind was agog with new projects of which he spoke enthusiastically. He gave no
indication that he had developed during his trip to the West an ability to
designate some projects as more important than others, and the phonograph as
the most important of all.

In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of the interviews that followed
Edison’s return to Menlo Park was the deliberate way he misled the reporters
about his plans. “Did you get any new ideas out there, Mr. Edison?” the *New
York World* asked. “No. That’s not a place for ideas,” Edison replied. “It’s
perfectly barren.” The West offered splendid country for a summer vacation, he
said, further deflecting attention from inspiration for a new project that he did
not want to disclose. He spoke of the barrenness of the West on August 27, the
day after he had returned. It was also the very day he, along with Batchelor and
Kruesi, signed and dated a page in a laboratory notebook containing three
sketches. They were labeled “Electric Light.”

# **CHAPTER FOUR**

**GETTING AHEAD**

AUGUST 1878–OCTOBER 1879

****E****DISON’S INVENTION OF the electric light is as embedded in national

mythology as Columbus’s discovery of America. The invention of the one and
the discovery of the other are also similar in that they indisputably occurred, but
their mythic significance requires ignoring preceding history in both cases.

When Edison in 1878 began to look in to ‘inventing” electric light, Europeans
had a seventy-year lead. In 1808, Humphry Davy in England had employed a
large battery to demonstrate for the Royal Society how light could be produced
with electricity in either of two ways: by inducing a strong current to leap across
a gap, which created a bright arc, or by heating an element until it glowed white-
hot—incandescent. Arc light proved to be the easiest to render into practical
form. An experimental installation on the streets of Lyon, France, in 1855,
dazzled pedestrians who, at nine in the evening, were bathed in what a local
newspaper called “a flood of light that was as bright as the sun.” Birds were
confused and began singing; ladies opened up umbrellas to shield themselves.

Creating bright light was accomplished relatively easily. What was difficult
was moderating the intensity. First used in lighthouses, then mounted on high
lampposts on the streets of European cities, the arc light was powerful, but it
lacked a dimmer switch. Genealogically, the arc light was much more closely
related to the modern arc welder than it is to the household lightbulb.
Nineteenth-century passersby did not have welder’s masks to protect their eyes,
leading Robert Louis Stevenson to write: “A new sort of urban star now shines
out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a
nightmare!”

Stevenson’s was a minority opinion. For most people, the “artificial sun”
provided by arc lights at night was welcomed. In the early years, however, they
required frequent maintenance while in use. The lights used two carbon rods
placed vertically, one above, one below, whose tips were kept at a set small
distance apart in order to achieve the arc. As the carbons burned away, however,
adjustment was needed in order to maintain a constant distance. Automatic
regulating mechanisms that eliminated the need for maintenance men to make
the rounds were tried, but their complexity and unreliability introduced new
problems.

When an inventor came up with an ingeniously simple, reliable
electromagnetic device that kept the gap between the rods at a fixed distance
while they burned two inches an hour, arc lighting was no longer a high-
maintenance proposition. That inventor was Charles Brush, and he would
become a very wealthy man. In April 1878—when Thomas Edison was still
touting his yet-to-be-completed phonograph and months before he had gone west
and returned thinking about the electric light—Brush was shipping arc lighting
equipment to paying customers who were installing his lights indoors, as well as
out. His lights were also garnering flattering attention from the press. The *New
York Times* described a demonstration that Brush set up in a manufacturer’s
space in his hometown of Cleveland providing “a pure white light” that was
“unexpectedly soft and endurable to the eyes.” This latter description is not
credible, however. For the demonstration, each of two floors had been provided
with two three-thousand-candlepower lamps—the gas jets that they replaced
were only ten to twenty candlepowers each—so the arc light’s sheer
candlepower in a confined interior space made another description in the same
article more accurate: “the effect was most brilliant.” Needless to say, the bulk
of Brush’s sales would be for street lighting.

Incandescent lighting, the other possible form of electric light that Davy had
shown to the Royal Society, offered a tantalizing prospect of light that truly
would be “soft and endurable to the eyes.” Since Davy’s day, many fine minds
had tried different approaches toward realizing the potential. Frederick de
Moleyns, an Englishman, received a British patent for an incandescent bulb in
1841, six years before Edison was born. In addition, an American, J. W. Starr,
received patents for two different kinds of incandescent bulbs in 1845 and
traveled around England giving exhibitions. He died at the age of twenty-five.

An incandescent bulb required a filament that would glow brightly without
melting. Starr had worked with the two materials that showed the most promise:
carbon and platinum. Carbon did not melt at high temperatures, but it burned up
too easily. Platinum had drawbacks, too: It was extremely expensive and it was
difficult to bring to the point of incandescence without reaching the slightly
higher temperature at which it melted. In 1878, at least twenty different
individuals had tried to make a practical incandescent bulb, or were still engaged
in the quest, and no one had succeeded in producing a bulb that was ready for
service outside of a laboratory.

Edison had tinkered with both arc and incandescent lighting in the past, using
batteries, and on his trip out west, his traveling companion, Professor Barker,
had called his attention to the potential for unlimited electrical power from
waterfalls, which could be applied to mining, a field in which Edison was
interested. While traveling, Barker had also urged Edison to visit the workshop
of William Wallace, in Ansonia, Connecticut, to see what Barker himself had
seen: a dynamo that Wallace had designed with the inventor Moses Farmer and
built at his own foundry, which powered an arc lighting system that Wallace had
set up. Barker offered to make the arrangements for a visit to Connecticut, and
two weeks after returning home, Edison made the trip.

Edison was accompanied by Barker; another professor, Charles Chandler, of
Columbia University; and Edison’s chief assistant, Charles Batchelor. The party
included one more member: a reporter for the *New York Sun,* whose observant
eye captured an Edison who moved separately from his companions, standing
apart due to deafness and personality quirks. Barker and Chandler exchanged
jokes that Edison could not hear. Occasionally, Batchelor would repeat a choice
anecdote in Edison’s ear, and Edison would laugh appreciatively, and then
quickly lapse into “deep meditation.” Edison also expressed a curiously ghoulish
thought when Wallace showed the group his invention for use in mining that
directed a stream of water with such force that it could tear flesh from the hand.
“Barky,” Edison suddenly said to his friend, “if a person could cut a man’s throat
with such a stream of water, I don’t believe a jury could be found that would
convict him of murder.”

For Edison, the highlight of the visit was seeing the Wallace-Farmer dynamo
in operation. The inventor fell in love.

Mr. Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it. Then power was
applied...and eight electric lights were kept ablaze at one time, and each
being equal to 4,000 candles.... This filled up Mr. Edison’s cup of joy. He
ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the
instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and
made all kinds of calculations.

Everything that Edison said and did on the day of the visit to Ansonia
convinced him that the electric light was easily attainable. This required a fertile
imagination. What he had seen in Connecticut was a powerful electromagnetic
generator, a form of power vastly superior to batteries. But it powered four-
thousand-candlepower arc lights that lacked a filament—it did not suggest a way
to find a durable filament suitable for a sixteen-candlepower incandescent
lightbulb. Edison thought he saw the perfect opportunity: others had solved the
problem of power, and he would add a solution for providing a reliable bulb,
which he told the press soon after was “so simple that a bootblack might
understand it.”

A simple solution should have presented no serious problems to the great
inventor. Once uttered, however, the announcement of a solution could not be
retracted, not when a celebrity has spoken. Edison was not necessarily more
careless about making empty claims than his contemporary inventors in the
electric light field; he simply was more exposed. Many ideas, until practically
realized, will seem grandiose; but the inventor’s own interest in a given idea
often disappears as quickly as the inspiration arrived. Out of public view, these
brief enthusiasms cause no embarrassment.

Before Edison had made members of the press his personal friends, he was
free to think aloud, try out an idea, and drop it. In 1871, he recorded his
excitement about adapting a new electric motor “so as to obtain the resquisite
[*sic*] strength and still be of extreme lightness—and combined with suitable air
propelling apparatus wings parchoutte [*sic*] *etc.* so as to produce a flying
machine of extreme lightness & tremendous power.” On the next page of the
notebook, he had returned to the ongoing work of designing a new telegraphic
printer.

By 1878, however, he was the Wizard of Menlo Park, the famous inventor of
the phonograph, who had willingly given up the privacy that kept momentary
enthusiasms out of public view. Before the invention of the phonograph, he had
shown an underlying streak of vanity in his assiduous stockpiling of patents in
his name. Now, he set a far more ambitious goal for himself, confiding that he
“wished to produce something at least as good as the phonograph every year.”
That the ambition was shared not with a friend but with a reporter is telling.

“Subdividing” light was how reducing the intensity of arc light was referred
to. If Edison attained it in 1878, following the invention of the phonograph in
1877, the feat would double his fame and keep him on pace for achieving
technological breakthroughs annually. True, the task would usurp the work of
making the phonograph a practical appliance, but a past triumph held less
interest. He leaped at the opportunity to move quickly on to another great
invention. The electric light was a tantalizing object for another reason: Unlike
the phonograph, which did not exist before Edison’s invention, the incandescent
bulb had been pursued by many of the world’s best electrical engineers and
resourceful inventors. When the self-trained Wizard stepped over the failures of
others to enter what for him would be a new field, using technical knowledge
that bore no relationship to the phonograph, the satisfaction was immense. “I
don’t care so much about making my fortune,” Edison said in an interview, “as I
do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”

So great was the anticipated satisfaction that Edison convinced himself that he
had succeeded in the “subdivision of light” within a week. He had visited
Connecticut on Sunday, 8 September 1878. On the following Saturday, Edison
told the *New York Sun* that he had only needed “a few days” to learn how to
apply electricity for indoor lighting. “I have it now!” he claimed, though he was
unwilling to provide specifics, other than to say that “scientific men” had not
thought to investigate his approach and “everybody will wonder why they have
never thought of it, it is so simple.”

Edison had also somehow found time to conceive of a detailed vision of how
he would first install his “light centers” in Lower Manhattan, connecting central
power stations with individual businesses and houses by running insulated wires
underground like gas pipes and converting the gas burners and chandeliers that
were already in use into lightbulb receptacles. The same wires could also
provide power for elevators, sewing machines, and stoves. Not as prescient were

his cost estimates; he thought his electric lights would be one-tenth the cost of
gas. Furthest off was his one-word prediction of when he would provide a public
exhibition: “Soon.”

In his private correspondence, Edison spoke in the same giddy fashion,
blurring the distinction between what he hoped for and what he had achieved. He
wrote Theodore Puskas in Europe, “Have struck a bonanza in Electric Light.”
Prospective investors quickly approached Edison, relying upon the successful
entrepreneur’s past record to project new triumphs with still-to-be-proven
technology. Several Western Union directors were keen to form a new company
around Edison, and the company’s attorney, Grosvenor Lowrey, served first as
intermediary, and then as Edison’s trusted adviser.

Lowrey quickly learned how difficult it was to persuade Edison to disrupt his
routine at the laboratory, even for the purpose of gaining financing. When
Edison missed a meeting that Lowrey had set up in New York City with
interested investors, Edison’s secretary explained that Edison had worked all
through the night and the morning, breaking off only at ten o’clock—and forgot
the meeting. When Lowrey tried again to make arrangements, Edison wrote him,
“If I come to New York I lose the day—time valuable on light please come out.”

What Edison did not explain to the investors knocking at his door was that he
had run into some serious difficulties. The approach that he had initially
proclaimed to be “so simple” was complex in the extreme: He was attempting to
use platinum as the filament and was devising regulators to automatically break
the circuit when the temperature edged too close to the melting point. This had
been tried by many inventors before Edison, and he had discovered for himself
how elusive was a design that actually worked. Drawing on his experience with
multiplex telegraphic equipment, he came up with various complex
combinations of electromagnets, switches, and levers to regulate the temperature
of the filament, to no avail. He had not yet succeeded in building a single light
whose platinum filament could remain intact for more than a few minutes.
Eventually, Edison was forced to abandon altogether his attempt to regulate the
temperature.

In October 1878, when corresponding with his most trusted associates, he
began to rein in his optimistic predictions a little bit. He cabled George Gouraud
in London: “I have only correct principle. Requires six months to work up

details.” At this point, he could have begun tempering the public’s expectations,
too, which he had stoked by his premature “I have it” announcement a few
weeks earlier. Having experienced the thrill of power from his celebrity—
Gouraud told Edison of a “panic in gas shares” in London when word was
received of Edison’s announcement of success—Edison could not bring himself
to concede publicly that he had been too hasty in his claims.

Gouraud sent Edison a continuous flow of reports from Europe that would
have stimulated the imagination of any inventor, even one without a weakness
for the grandiose. Gouraud wished he “had had my wits about me” when he had
first received word of Edison’s invention of a new approach to the electric light:
“I might have made you a clean million as it played the very devil with stocks all
over the country.” The British equivalent of $1.36 billion was “trembling in the
balance,” Gouraud wrote in another letter, while British scientists tried to
determine whether Edison’s “alleged” discovery was genuine. Gouraud urged
Edison to form an electric light company in England, without delay, to take
advantage of “universal free advertising such as cannot be bought for money
under any circumstances.”

In the excitement of the moment, Edison was unable to remain quiet. He once
again invited members of the press to his laboratory, one by one, not to bring
them up to date on the technical difficulties that he and his staff had
encountered, but to quell any doubts that his announced success was complete.
When the *New York Herald* arrived, Edison had a demonstration set up, showing
a bulb that was lit for three minutes, not long enough to expose the short life of
Edison’s platinum filaments. The reporter was impressed. When arc lights were
the principal competition, Edison’s incandescent bulb drew praise simply
because “it did not pain the eye.”

Running the sham demonstration for the representative of a second
newspaper, Edison flipped a switch, and he and the reporter waited while the
filament began to glow and finally reached incandescence. Sitting in front of the
bulb that would burn out in a couple of minutes were he to leave it on beyond
the brief demonstration, Edison was asked, “How long will it last?” He
answered, “Forever, almost.”

When the reporter from a third newspaper paid a visit for the same
demonstration, Edison was asked point-blank if he had yet encountered any

difficulties. “Well, no,” he replied with a straight face, and then claimed that the
very absence of setbacks was “what worries me.” For another newspaper, he
asked the public to be patient—not for the perfection of the “subdivided” electric
light, which was complete, but for his phonograph, which he granted was viewed
by many as a toy of little practical use. He was making daily improvements, he
claimed, and it would eventually take its place “in the niche of public utility in
good time.”

Little attention was spared for readying the phonograph for the mass market,
however. The time sheets from his laboratory for this period show that five staff
members devoted about sixty hours to the dictating phonograph in October 1878,
an insufficient investment to produce an affordable model that would
supplement the expensive model sold to commercial exhibitors. The exhibition
model’s best month had been in May, when it sold forty-six units; in July, the
number had dropped to three; in September, it had recovered slightly, to reach
the lofty level of sixteen units, netting Edison a commission of $461. The
treasurer of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company told him that these
paltry sales would soon disappear altogether and that he looked forward to the
introduction of a “‘Standard machine’ which I understand you are perfecting.”
But even the minimal ongoing work on the phonograph would be pushed aside
by the launch of frenzied efforts to find a way to fulfill Edison’s premature
public claim that his electric light was working. A couple of months later, when
asked in an interview about the state of his phonograph, Edison replied tartly,
“Comatose for the time being.” He changed metaphors and continued, catching
hold of an image that would be quoted many times by later biographers: “It is a
child and will grow to be a man yet; but I have a bigger thing in hand and must
finish it to the temporary neglect of all phones and graphs.”

Financial considerations played a part in allocation of time and resources, too.
Commissions from the phonograph that brought in hundreds of dollars were
hardly worth accounting for, not when William Vanderbilt and his friends were
about to advance Edison $50,000 for the electric light. Edison wrote a
correspondent that he regarded the financier’s interest especially satisfying as
Vanderbilt was “the largest gas stock owner in America.”

In mid-October, the American Gaslight Association, the industry’s principal
trade group, met in New York and took stock of the threat posed by the claims
issuing from Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park. Gaslight monopolies had few

friends outside of the ranks of shareholders. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, gaslight had been viewed as pure and clean; seventy years later, its
shortcomings had become all too familiar: it was dirty, soiled interior
furnishings, and emitted unhygienic fumes. It was also expensive, affordable for
indoor lighting only in the homes of the wealthy, department stores, or
government buildings. The *New York Times* almost spat out the following
description of how gas companies conducted business: “They practically made
the bills what they pleased, for although they read off the quantity by the meter,
that instrument was their own, and they could be made to tell a lie of any
magnitude.... Everybody has always hated them with a righteous hatred.”

Edison credited the gas monopoly for providing his original motivation to
experiment with electric light years before in his Newark laboratory. Recalling
in October 1878 his unpleasant dealings years earlier with the local gas utility,
which had threatened to tear out their meter and cut off the gas, Edison said,
“When I remember how the gas companies used to treat me, I must say that it
gives me great pleasure to get square with them.” The *Brooklyn Daily Eagle*
printed an editorial titled “Revenge Is Sweet” in which it observed that the
general public greatly enjoyed the discomfort of the gas companies, too: “To see
them squirm and writhe is a public satisfaction that lifts Edison to a higher plane
than that of the wonderful inventor and causes him to be regarded as a
benefactor of the human race, the leading deity of popular idolatry.”

The gas interests had been dealt a number of recent setbacks even before
Edison’s announcement of a newly successful variant of electric light. An
“enormous abandonment of gas” by retail stores in cities, who now could use
less expensive kerosene, was noticed. The shift was attributed not to stores’
preference for kerosene but as a means of escaping “the arrogance of the gas
companies.” Arc lights had now become a newly competitive threat, too. The
previous month, Charles Brush had set up his lights in an exhibition hall in New
York and then added a display in Boston. Sales to stores followed in several
cities; then, as word spread, other establishments sought to obtain the cachet
bestowed by the latest technology. William Sharon, a U.S. senator for and
energetic booster of California, retrofitted the public spaces of his Palace Hotel
in San Francisco with arc lights that replaced 1,085 gas jets. The gas-industry
conventioneers preferred to talk about the failed installations of arc lights, such
as in textile factories, in which the dark shadows cast by the light made it

difficult for loom operators to distinguish threads.

Speakers at the gas-industry convention explained that Edison’s light did not
pose the potent competitive threat to gas that had been described in the press.
(Edison had sent Charles Batchelor to attend and enjoyed hearing Batchelor’s
account that showed “they talked in the dark.”) While the popular image of
Edison was of a wonderful man who “could accomplish almost anything he
undertook,” sober scientific authorities were shaking their heads doubtfully
about Edison’s claims of success.

One independent observer, Albert Salomon von Rothschild, in Vienna, had
had his interest piqued, and he wrote an American colleague for an impartial
assessment of whether Edison’s invention would “allow electric light to be
henceforth employed everywhere just as gaslight, and not only in very large
rooms or places, as is now the case [with arc lights].” Rothschild made clear that
he had never joined the cult that idolized Edison, whose most recent inventions,
including the phonograph, “however interesting, have finally proved to be only
trifles.” Still, he did see that if Edison’s technical claims were to prove valid, the
business implications could not be overstated.

Edison did not publicly divulge the details of his electric light experiments, of
course, so no external authorities could know for certain that his attempts to
devise a lasting filament—which he was trying to do with platinum and thermal
regulators—were as ill-fated as those of his many predecessors. He blamed his
reticence about the electric light on his past experience with the phonograph.
The premature publication of technical details in *Scientific American* had been
translated, via French, into German, causing endless difficulties with foreign
patents. He had a letter from Lemuel Serrell, one of his attorneys, to show to a
skeptical reporter, in which Serrell lectured Edison, “The confounded newspaper
men are doing you more harm and producing more trouble than they are worth.”

Not so easily put off was his friend and supporter, Professor George Barker.
As the person who had encouraged Edison during their shared trek out west to
revisit the project of developing incandescent light, Barker had been thanked
with a promise of six working sets of bulbs when Edison thought he had easily
found a simple, but complete, solution in platinum. Relying on Edison’s word,
Barker had announced he would present a public lecture on the state of the art of
electric light, complete with a demonstration. The newspapers carried the

announcement, and Edison had promised to leave his laboratory for the occasion
and make an appearance himself. Only after Barker had set about making
arrangements did Edison realize how woefully unready he was to unveil his
short-lived platinum bulbs. First, he begged off from making the trip himself,
and then he told Barker that though he personally wanted very much to provide
lights for the demonstration, he could not because the directors of the new
Edison Electric Light Company would not allow him to do so.

Barker was astonished and angry in equal measure. He did not know that the
company that Edison invoked as the villainous party in the matter had not yet
signed an agreement with Edison. The prospective investors apparently had been
told little about Edison’s setbacks in his electric light research, and Edison
understandably was not eager to make a public display of his yet-to-be-reversed
failure in the laboratory. “Positively No Admittance” was now posted at the
front door of the laboratory. “What is that inhospitable sign for?” a reporter
asked Charles Batchelor, who gallantly took responsibility for the change of
policy. Edison “doesn’t want to bar anybody out, so he lets all sorts of
inquisitive people come here and occupy his time.” Batchelor said he and the
other assistants had prevailed upon him to keep the curious out. Closing the front
door also served to restrict the outflow of information, too, in this delicate time
of arranging financing.

Professor Barker would not be denied without a protest, however. If Edison
would honor his promises for the lecture, Barker would go to New York and
personally ask individual company directors to give permission. The thought of
giving a lecture on the electric light without having one of the Edison lights that
had been advertised would put him in a position in which “I would rather lose
my right hand than occupy.” In the event, he did not have an Edison bulb for a
demonstration in his survey of the state of the art, but Charles Brush’s company
also failed to show. It had asked for, and secured, a place in Barker’s program,
then the company had suddenly begged off only twenty-four hours in advance.
Barker forgave Edison for his breach of promise, and publicly covered for him at
the demonstration by saying that Edison’s London attorney had advised against a
public showing quite yet. Afterward, he privately indulged with Edison in the
pleasure of knocking Edison’s arc light rival (“not always fair in their statements
or scrupulous in their dealings”).

At the same time that Edison was careful not to let outsiders see the true state

of his electric light research, he continued to accept cheerfully individual
requests for interviews from the major newspapers. He conveyed complete
confidence in his still-secret solution, and charmed reporters with his disdain for
conventional formality. The press was fascinated with Edison’s fondness for
chewing tobacco—the Professor tore into a “yellow cake as large as a dinner
plate” while being interviewed by the *New York Sun,* as he talked on without end
about the advantages of indoor electric light and the imminent test of lights in
every home in Menlo Park in order to “keep the bugs out of the invention.”

Talking at such length in the *New York Sun* was hurtful to Edison’s public
image, advised another reporter-friend, Edwin Fox, who wrote Edison with
unsolicited advice about proper management of Edison’s celebrity. “Keep
yourself aloof and reserved,” Fox said, like the extremely reserved, and much-
loved, General Ulysses S. Grant (Fox had no way of knowing in 1878 that Grant,
pressed by financial need, would drop his reserve at the end of his life and write
two volumes of bestselling memoirs, published in 1885–1886). In Fox’s not
unbiased view, the image of Edison that came through in the competitor’s
interview was abhorrent. “Holding you out to the world as a chewer of tobacco
and all such trash...is really too bad.” For his own reporting, Fox said he had
always “sought to keep you on a high pedestal.”

Days after he wrote this, however, Fox sought intimate access to Edison and
the laboratory, so that he could write about everything: “how you act, talk, live,
work, and look—the struggles and obstacles attending the completion of your
chief inventions.” Showing a sure, and strikingly modern, understanding of the
popular appeal of fly-on-the-wall journalism, Fox said he planned to spend at
least a week living in Menlo Park, dropping into the laboratory “when the spirit
moves” to fill his notebook with “fresh crisp data.” This was the only way to do
justice to his subject, did not Edison agree, “my esteemed manipulator of the
fiery lightning”? Fox’s flattery is not especially noteworthy; not just Edison, but
his wife and children, too, received uncommon compliments on a daily basis. A
speed record in sycophancy was established when a story in late October
reporting the birth of the Edisons’ third child, William, credited the newborn
with “indications of precocity” and “intellectual independence” because he had
kicked mightily as he was dressed for the first time.

Members of the press, academics, investors—everyone made their own
individual appeal for access to Edison. At the same time, he had nothing to show

them that would withstand scrutiny. Edison’s position must have been
uncomfortable, and all the more so because he had no close friend in whom he
could confide. Stress may have played at least some role in a severe attack of
neuralgia that kept him in bed on 23 October. Without being privy to a complete
view of Edison’s predicament, Barker ascribed the attack to overindulgence in
work. “Be regular about your meals and sleeping hours,” the amateur doctor
advised, “or some day you will break down entirely.” Edison had a different
theory about the cause of his malady: on seven successive nights he had looked
too long into arc lights that he had set up. “I think electricity burned me,” he
said. “I shall not repeat that trick.” When he recovered, he wore a floppy black
sombrero in the lab for protection.

In the eyes of an entirely neutral party, the credit-reporting agency of R. G.
Dun & Company, Edison was seen as “an untiring genius apt to run from one
effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on.” His
world renown was acknowledged; so, too, was a history of commercial
disappointments: “the financial fruits seem to be mainly plucked by other
hands.” The report summed up rather nicely Edison’s reputation and prospects:

Now claims to have solved the problem of furnishing cheap Electric light
to dwellings & places where multitudes of single lights are required at less
cost than gas. His claim is not yet demonstrated to be good, but if he is
successful this time his ability to pay need not be questioned. He is
reported to be a thoroughly honorable steady & industrious man. He must
have some means but probably all his ready money is continually being
planted in the expenses of his experimenting. It is impossible to Estimate
his worth, or in fact to say that he has a class of assets valuable as a basis
for credit.

Edison was not much interested in what a credit-reporting agency had to say
about him, as he was not interested in obtaining commercial loans. When R. G.
Dun wrote him a few years later for information about one of his companies, he
scrawled some basic information in the margin as his reply, closing with “hope
nobody will ever give us any credit.” What he sought were passive investors
who would provide his laboratory with the funds necessary to make good on the

breakthrough he had thought he had obtained in early September. He left
negotiations to Grosvenor Lowrey, saying he did not care about the details, he
simply needed money to “push the light rapidly.” In fact, he was in no position
to do anything rapidly with the electric light; he first needed the money to make
his incandescent filament durable.

Lowrey, in turn, told the senior executives at Western Union; Drexel, Morgan
& Company; and his fellow law partners, all of whom wished to invest in
Edison’s electric light venture, that “all serious difficulties have been
overcome.” Lowrey knew just what to say to bring investors on board, letting
them know that some refinement was still needed, but not letting them know so
much that they were scared off. On 15 November, the newly formed Edison
Electric Light Company gave Edison an advance royalty payment of $30,000, of
which $25,000 was to go for work at the laboratory for “further necessary
investigations and experiments” related to the light.

A few days later, some members of the company’s executive committee paid
a visit to Menlo Park, and Lowrey did his best to convince Edison that such
visits were helpful in making their expectations of progress more realistic. “It is
all the better that they should see the rubbish and rejected devices of one sort and
another,” Lowrey wrote Edison. When other company directors made another
visit, Lowrey again labored to convince Edison that it was good that the backers
had had “their imaginations somewhat tempered.” He wrote Edison: “They
realize now that you are doing a man’s work upon a great problem and they
think you have got the jug by the handle with a reasonable probability of
carrying it safely to the well and bringing it back full.”

In a matter of just a few weeks, Edison had spent $19,000 of the $25,000
advance on a new laboratory building. When directors showed up at Menlo Park
when the move was in progress, and Edison himself was not present to offer
reassurance that all was well, the visitors saw “general dilapidation, ruin and
havoc.” Lowrey met with the executive committee and shared with them what he
later described to Edison as a “very good natured laugh over their
disappointment at their visit.” Edison was fortunate that the committee members
were so willing to tamp down their rising concern.

While Lowrey undertook the education of the company’s trustees, Edison
continued to release little puff balls of news and anecdotes for the general public

that were meaningless at best and outright misleading at worst. In his telling,
work at the laboratory was going so well that he could not do anything, even
clumsily dropping a tool, without improving his electric lightbulb. He claimed
he had doubled the intensity of light in one of his platinum filaments after a
screwdriver was accidentally dropped and bent it. From now on, he declared, he
would make all of his filaments in the same misshapen form. Edison packaged
this and other entertaining partial disclosures as if he were being candid to the
point of being imprudent. “I have begun by taking the public into my
confidence,” he told the public in December 1878, “and I don’t propose to keep
from them anything I know, or propose to do, if I can help it.”

One blemish-free story was fed to the press for the public; another, more
candid version went to the investors; and an uncensored version was provided
only to his most senior, trusted employees. There were no financial conflicts-of-
interest regulations in Edison’s era. In January 1879, when the Edison Electric
Light Company issued 500 shares, there were only ten shareholders. One was
Edison, who received 219 shares; but, significantly, one was Edwin Fox, of the
*New York Herald,* and another was William Croffut, of the *New York Daily
Graphic,* who received 8 and 5 shares respectively as gifts from Edison. Not
having heard acknowledgment that Croffut had received his shares, Edison sent
a follow-up note and received the following effusive reply:

My Dear Edison,
Yes! Bless you, yes, of course I got the five shares of stock and have

been commercially ecstatic ever since. You are a brick. If I can do
anything in the world for you at any time, order me up & I’ll go it alone.

The thank-you note that Fox sent to Edison treated the gift as recognition of past
services rendered (it made Fox “truly sensible of the pleasing fact that my
friendship is not unappreciated”), but he, too, served up fulsome flattery, closing
with the wish that Edison continue in his “triumphal march to undying fame.”

Edison misled the general public, and, in more sophisticated fashion, the outside

investors of the Edison Electric Light Company, not to effect a stock swindle but
to buy precious time so that he could work his way out of the corner his
premature boasts had backed him into. He did not confide to a diary or in letters
how the discouraging results in the laboratory little resembled the daily miracles
he publicly claimed or hinted at. But the mood in the lab is chronicled in the
letters written home by one of Edison’s new hires, Francis Upton, a twenty-six-
year-old physicist from Peabody, Massachusetts. Upton came from a
background of privilege and formal academic training, different from Edison’s
in every imaginable way. He had studied at Bowdoin College, in Maine, then at
Princeton, and had done postgraduate work under Hermann von Helmholtz at
Berlin University in Germany. Before being invited to Menlo Park, he had been
a temporary subcontractor doing a patent search for Edison in the Astor Library
in New York City. In November 1878, Edison offered him a permanent position,
which Upton accepted without even knowing what he would be paid. Excited
about the prospect of having his first real job, he wrote his father, “I cannot
really believe that I am earning money.”

Upon arrival in Menlo Park, Upton was brought into Edison’s inner circle,
even as he was referred to by some colleagues as “the mathematician” rather
than by name. Edison, Batchelor, Upton, and three other assistants worked from
7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.—a schedule necessitated by the well-intentioned visitors
who made work during the day impossible. Edison complained that they would
appear as a line of heads coming up the hill in the morning, “devour” his time,
and then “pay for it with expressions of admiration.” When a tornado and fierce
rain hit the area in early December, Edison and his staff were glad for the storm,
as it kept the curious away for a day.

Upton arrived just at the moment when Edison was coming to the realization
that he and his staff would never be able to make a durable electric light based
on platinum. This conclusion, accepted most reluctantly, meant starting over.
Alternative filament materials, which could reach incandescence without soon
melting, all shared a similar vexing attribute: In the presence of oxygen, they
oxidized, ruining the light. To prevent this, they had to be placed in a high
vacuum that was difficult to achieve even with the best technology available at
the time. It was the troublesome vacuum that Edison had thought he could avoid
when he had rashly seized upon platinum as the “simple” solution.

Contrary to his published avowal that he would be perfectly candid with the

public about the progress on the electric light, Edison did not tell reporters that
he had hit a dead end. Even when he decided to tell the Edison Electric Light
investors in late January, he had Stockton Griffin, his secretary, go into New
York to deliver the news. Edison had no patience for attending personally to the
care and feeding of his backers; that was for minions like Griffin or his attorney,
Grosvenor Lowrey, to take care of. The most striking thing about how the
investors received the news was their meekness—no one demanded that Edison
appear to explain his failure to secure the first principles for a working
incandescent bulb. On 25 January 1879, when Lowrey visited the offices of
Fabbri & Chauncey on the same day that Griffin had come and gone delivering
the news that Edison had been forced to abandon the platinum filament, the
Edison Electric shareholders gathered around Lowrey and jokingly asked him if
he knew anybody who would want to buy their shares. Lowrey did what he was
supposed to do, dispensing homilies as Edison himself did, saying that doubt and
tribulation accompanied any great accomplishment, and “this was just the time
when we must all stand by the inventor.”

The investors did stand by the inventor, which was important to young Francis
Upton, who, like any new hire at a start-up that was in trouble, spent much time
wondering if he had made a mistake. In late February, Upton, reasoned, “I am
learning a great deal and nothing will be likely to take that from me,” even if the
venture ran aground. At times like early March 1879, when Upton wrote his
family marveling that he was actually paid $12 a week for labor that “does not
seem like work but like study and I enjoy it,” he seemed younger than his
twenty-six years. A few weeks later, however, he had worked up the courage to
ask Edison for a raise. Edison ruled that out, but offered to provide him with the
fees Edison would receive for publishing magazine articles if Upton would serve
as the ghostwriter who would “dress his thoughts for the press.” Flattered, Upton
accepted the offer.

In May, when Upton was visiting his home in Peabody, he heard about a mill
owner in Lawrence who was unhappy about paying $30,000 a month for gas
lighting and interested in trying Edison’s light in his mill. He wrote Edison
excitedly, offering to investigate the opportunity, and doing the arithmetic for his
employer: “Three or four hundred thousand dollars a year are not to be sneezed
at.” Inexperience with the world of business must have contributed to Upton’s
failure to see that he was working with the wrong numbers. The mill owner paid

the gas company $30,000 *yearly,* not monthly, Upton sheepishly had to inform
Edison.

Upton’s value was revealed not in business development but in the
experimental work in the laboratory. In early June 1879, Edison offered to
provide his young assistant a 5 percent share of equity in the Edison Electric
Light Company. Edison made his offer to his protégé on an either/or basis:
salary *or* equity, not both. At the time, Upton had not yet married and was
childless, but he knew his financial obligations would soon become
considerable. He was engaged and would be married later that summer when his
fiancée returned from travels in Europe. He could see that the electric light was
“far from perfection,” and there was no way of predicting when it would ever be
ready for commercial introduction. Edison had difficulty letting go of his
original design based on platinum, which served only to delay the inevitable day
when all of his focus could be trained on alternatives.

In writing about his quandary to his father, Upton preserves the jumble of
conflicting feelings he had at that moment. On the one hand, he wondered if he
should ask Edison for 7.5 percent of the company instead of 5 percent, as Edison
was anything but stingy when making such allocations. On the other hand, it was
generous of Edison to have offered 5 percent, without requiring any contribution
from Upton other than forgoing wages of $600 a year. Upton wrote, “I think it is
not becoming in me to try and jew him.”

Upton’s father urged him to choose the salary, but Upton elected in July 1879
to take the offer of a 5 percent share of the company. He reasoned that a salary
was ultimately dependent on the success of the electric light anyway, so he
might as well select the option that provided the largest potential gains. He
immediately felt a freedom as “master of my own time,” free to come and go as
he pleased, confident that Edison trusted him that “I should know what is best.”
As time passed, however, uncertainty about Edison Electric’s prospects grew.
On 19 October, he wrote home, “The electric light goes on very slowly.” It was
impossible not to think about the fact that if it were to succeed, “the money will
come in enormous amounts.” But if the efforts were to end in failure, Upton said
he would be “contented with the experience I shall have, though of course very
much disappointed at not having the money.”

He did not foresee that the very day he was drawing up this somber

assessment, Sunday, 21 October 1879, his laboratory colleague Charles
Batchelor spent ten hours evacuating the air in a bulb with an untested filament,
a carbonized sewing thread. That night, the bulb was placed on a test stand and
the power was switched on. The bulb burned on and on, passing the twenty-four-
hour mark. Bets were laid down, and the round-the-clock vigil continued for a
second night. It stayed on into the afternoon of Tuesday, having performed
admirably for more than forty hours, when Edison decided to end the endurance
test under normal conditions and increased the voltage until the bulb turned into
a ball of dazzling white, and then—pop—burned out.

In retrospect, those forty hours would be looked upon with fondness as the
first successful test of a durable incandescent filament, a breakthrough, but the
laboratory records at the time show a laconic reaction. Batchelor wrote without
affect that “we made some very interesting experiments with cotton thread,” but
he was also testing at the same time fishing line, paper, cardboard, and other
materials. We might guess that Edison’s premature declaration of success with
platinum the year before made everyone at the laboratory wary of committing
the same mistake again.

Edison could not trumpet the promising results in public because he had
maintained all along that the necessary technical innovation had been
accomplished in short order at the beginning of the initiative. He did tell the *New
York Times* in a story published on 21 October 1879 that “the electric light is
perfected,” allowing that unspecified problems “which have been puzzling me”
had now been solved. Francis Upton had already learned, however, that Edison
used “perfect” as verb or adjective without regard for conventional definitions,
and it was best not to be carried along by his optimism. Upton discounted
Edison’s claim that the Edison Electric Light Company stock was now worth a
thousand dollars a share. “He is always sanguine,” Upton wrote his father about
Edison, “and his valuations are on his hopes more than on his realities.” A
couple of weeks after seeing the cotton-thread bulb burn steadily, Upton’s spirits
had fallen again. “Continual trouble” continued to dim the electric light’s
prospects, as “we cannot make what we want.” He acknowledged, and mocked,
his own disappointment when it appeared that he and his fellow experimenters
would never “see the untold millions roll in upon Menlo Park that my hopes
want to see.”

And then, in mid-November, the work in the laboratory produced new

excitement, when carbonized paper, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, was
tested as a filament and proved more durable than the cotton thread had. Finally,
Upton said, “we now know we have something.” He could not yet say whether
the economics of electric light would make it competitive against gaslight, but at
least the laboratory had a working prototype. By the end of November, private
trading of shares of the Edison Electric Light Company had sent the price
upward to vertiginous heights. No one associated with Edison’s laboratory then
foresaw that commercial introduction of the electric light would still be three
long years away. Upton, however, did not have to wait to enjoy pointing out that
Father had not known best, that in giving up less than $300 in wages at that
point, Upton’s shares were already worth more than $10,000. He told his father,
“I cannot help laughing when I think how timid you were at home.” Already
forgotten were his own doubts about the venture that had left him depressed only
a few days before.

# **CHAPTER FIVE**

**STAGECRAFT**

DECEMBER 1879–JANUARY 1881

****N****EWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES had made Edison famous with portraits

created with words, not cameras. Were Edison to leave his laboratory for a rare
trip to New York City, he could do so without attracting attention to himself.
Occasionally, on a Saturday night, Edison would go into the city with Francis
Jehl, a young assistant, taking in lowbrow theater, or a boxing match, or a
streetside phrenological exam. As the two strolled at leisure, taking in the sights
of card hustlers, street vendors, and quack doctors, Edison “enjoyed being
incognito,” Jehl recalled in his memoirs. It is indeed remarkable that Edison
could move in public with such ease, at the very time that one New York paper
asserted that the general public discussed at greater length the probable life span
of Edison than most anyone else in the world, “outside the crowned heads.”
Edison was in possession of “more inventions than any man living,” and was all
of thirty-two years old.

When Edison announced the perfection of his electric light, one fan expressed
a wish to meet the great man and got her wish. But then, Sarah Bernhardt always
got her wish. Bernhardt, a French actress and singer, enjoyed a movie star’s
celebrity decades before movies were invented (and when they did arrive,
Bernhardt became the medium’s first star). In December 1879, as she completed
a run of stage performances in New York, Bernhardt was only thirty-five and,
like Edison, a prodigy in her profession. But having made her acting debut at the
age of eighteen, she had much more experience than he in the management of
celebrity and was quite expert in the art of drawing attention to herself. She
moved with an entourage as large as a contemporary hip-hop star’s posse. The
juxtaposition of Bernhardt and Edison exposed their differences: he,
uncomfortable with celebrity; she, fully in her element.