succeeded him, and dominate science to can only be called an artistic imagination. caboose as it left the station. But it seems more likely that Edison became deaf through an attack of scarlet fever, or some other middle-ear infection that went untreated. At any rate, from then on he could not participate in a conversation unless his interlocutor shouted directly into his right ear. Anybody who’s ever had to do that to a deaf person knows how exhausting it is, so no conversation lasts long, and loneliness begins to accumulate around the sufferer, like a gradually thickening shroud of felt. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk of loneliness and suffering in Edison’s case, any more than in Beethoven’s, because both men turned their disabilities to advantage. Solitude is an essential adjunct to the creative process (except in group efforts like the making of movies or the choreography of ballets) and although Edison was, when he wanted to be, the most jovial, gregarious person imaginable, he wanted most of the time to be left alone: to think, to brood, to create. For that reason, he said his deafness actually helped him concentrate, by screening him from the distracting noises of the world, and from that ninety-nine-percent quotient of human conversation that consists of unnecessary information. (He would have welcomed Twitter, I think, not only because it is noiseless, but because unlike the telephone it forces message-senders to be concise.) In another parallel with Beethoven, who used to absorb the vibrations of his piano by means of a reverberating stick held against the soundboard, Edison chose singers for his recording company by playing their sample cylinders and biting into the wood of the phonograph to hear their voices through his teeth. He claimed that he got purer sound that way than people afflicted with normal hearing, since he didn’t have to listen to the distraction of what audio engineers these days call “room tone.” (Or, in my alltime favorite quote, George Eliot’s line, “the roar that lies on the other side of silence.”) In 1868, at the age of 21, Edison won his first patent, for an electrical vote recorder. Ironically, it didn’t succeed because it was too efficient. Politicians then as now prefer clumsy vote-counting, in order to retard the workings of democracy. Within a year the young man had moved to New York City and set up shop as a full-time inventor. He opened a laboratory
in Newark, New Jersey, and one afternoon during a rainstorm a buxom schoolgirl, not yet sixteen, ducked in to take shelter. Among his other attributes, Edison had a normal supply of hormones, so he asked, after she had dried off, if he could escort her home. Her name was Mary Stillwell. “I thought he had very handsome eyes,” she said afterwards, “but he was so dirty, all covered with machine oil, etc.” For the next five months Mary received his suit as an old-fashioned “gentleman caller.” Thirteen years and three childbirths later, Mary Stillwell Edison voiced no regrets about becoming the wife of a smelly scientist whom she rarely saw by daylight. He was quite capable of experimenting for ninety-five hours at a stretch, neglecting food and sleep in his endless quest for what he called “life & Phenomenon.” Come to think of it, I might call my biography that. The Life and Phenomenon of Thomas Edison— sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, they married in 1871 and had three children, but it was not a happy relationship. As Edison advanced rapidly in success and sophistication, Mary did not, and his friends began cruelly to suggest that she was the blue-collar girl he should have left behind. She died mysteriously of a morphine overdose in 1883. By then he was world-famous as the inventor of the phonograph and the builder of the world’s first R&D laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He had also discovered the principle of electromotography; invented the quadruplex telegraph, press copier and electric pen; pioneered a new system of duplex telegraphy in Britain; devised a carbon-pellet transmitter that made him, in effect, the co-inventor with Alexander Graham Bell of the telephone; and last but not least, perfected the incandescent light bulb. That enabled him to incorporate the Edison Electric Company, and to construct the world’s first power grid around Pearl Street Central Station in New York, electrifying all of lower Manhattan. In 1882, the year before Mary died, he patented 87 inventions, and rejoiced in the popular nickname of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”
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