p r o l o g ue stuntman
T
he most significant and prolific inventor of modern times and perhaps of all time, Thomas Alva Edison died having altered the course of civilization several ways and with 1,093 patents to his name, ranging from a machine that recorded votes to recipes for Portland cement to a “Means for Utilizing the Waste Heat in Kilns.” He was, simply put, a virtuoso of imagination, practical mechanics, practical eloquence (a new book of his aphorisms runs to 304 pages), and obstinacy. He was not trying to comfort himself with Stoic forbearance but asserting a truth as clear to him as daylight when he wrote, after one particular failure, “I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Edison was also, to his good fortune, a profoundly able liar—a man with “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be,” sniffed one competitor; “the great professor of duplicity and quadruplicity,” the New York Tribune called him, offended by some gimmick Edison had rolled out in an effort to land front-page coverage. Later, a lawyer who was defending the Wizard of Menlo Park against a plagiarism charge (one of many that Edison faced over the years) offered a somewhat divergent view of his client’s moral predilections, calling him a man who “grasped Fortune when she came in his direction”—even if, one can read between the lawyerly lines, she was on the arm of another man when she began the hazardous approach. (Edison lost the suit but with typical mulishness kept his opponent tied up in legal wrangling long enough to make a verdict in either direction a matter of no financial moment.) Among other dissemblings, Edison habitually (and fearlessly, it seems) assured investors that he was making progress on projects that were dead in the water; claimed to have discovered great things (“the etheric force”) that proved not to exist; and drove his competitors (including the credulous Alexander Graham Bell) off the road by letting them in on scientific theories that he knew to be wrong-headed. He also took absolute credit for the ideas developed by the small and inspired band of metallurgists, machinists, drafters, glass blowers, and engineers who labored in his clanking, protean, New Jersey invention factory—though most of them, it’s worth noting, adored “the Old Man” as sailors might a mad captain who’d brought them home safe through a series of perilous, stirring, and remunerative voyages. But Edison’s most useful non-scientific gift may well have been his flair for image management. His main efforts
were, of course, focused on flogging product. He displayed his first durable electric light filaments not in a public square or ballroom in nearby New York City, but in a courtyard beside his factory over a series of December nights, drawing trainloads from Gotham to pass before the Christmas miracle. And he took no less care of self-presentation, affecting the uniform of a battered straw hat and long apron (he was a plebe arrayed against the professors, he wanted it known), and greeting significant visitors to Menlo Park not in a book-lined study (though he was a voracious reader and possessed several of these) but in a second-floor laboratory in his factory, “a wilderness of wires, jars of vitriol, strips of tin foil, old clay pipes, copies of the great daily newspapers, and sundry bits of machinery of unknown power,” according to a visiting journalist. Here Edison would arrange himself, his back to the doorway, bent over a workbench, staging the moment when he’d be forcefully summoned from exquisite thought to business responsibilities. On no invention did Edison lavish more promotional muscle than the phonograph, likely the dearest to him of all his creations. In 1877, only days after his men had developed a reliable prototype (wrapping some tinfoil around the recording cylinder seemed to fix the final technical problem), Edison had the machine plunked down on the desk of the editor of Scientific American. Then, the Napoleon of Invention put on a show, causing the machine, wrote editor Alfred Beach to “[inquire] as to our health, [ask] us how we liked the phonograph, [inform] us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good-night . . . there can be no doubt but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.” Concerned that practical (and profitable) points should not be lost, Edison soon published an essay in the North American Review titled “The Phonograph And Its Future” in which he delineated a set of tasks, drawn from both the business and domestic world, that might be accomplished with the new machine, including: letter dictation while saving the cost of stenographer; children’s elocution studies; the preservation of a song “a friend may in a morning call sing . . . which shall delight an evening company”; and capturing “the last words of the dying member of the family.” The lapel-seizing italics are Edison’s, of course. Our story of inventors in a more complex, subtle, and perilous age begins on page 14. —ben birnbaum