Edison, His Life and Inventions

F >> Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin >> Edison, His Life and Inventions


Smugglers landing laces and silks have been known to wind them around
their bodies, as being less ostentatious than carrying them in a trunk.
Edison thought his resistance-boxes an equally superfluous display, and
therefore ingeniously wound some copper resistance wire around one of
the legs of the motor field magnet, where it was out of the way, served
as a useful extra field coil in starting up the motor, and dismissed
most of the boxes back to the laboratory--a few being retained under the
seat for chance emergencies. Like the boxes, this coil was in series
with the armature, and subject to plugging in and out at will by the
motorman. Thus equipped, the locomotive was found quite satisfactory,
and long did yeoman service. It was given three cars to pull, one an
open awning-car with two park benches placed back to back; one a flat
freight-car, and one box-car dubbed the "Pullman," with which Edison
illustrated a system of electric braking. Although work had been begun
so early in the year, and the road had been operating since May, it was
not until July that Edison executed any application for patents on his
"electromagnetic railway engine," or his ingenious braking system. Every
inventor knows how largely his fate lies in the hands of a competent and
alert patent attorney, in both the preparation and the prosecution
of his case; and Mr. Sprague is justified in observing in his Century
article: "The paucity of controlling claims obtained in these early
patents is remarkable." It is notorious that Edison did not then enjoy
the skilful aid in safeguarding his ideas that he commanded later.

The daily newspapers and technical journals lost no time in bringing the
road to public attention, and the New York Herald of June 25th was swift
to suggest that here was the locomotive that would be "most pleasing to
the average New Yorker, whose head has ached with noise, whose eyes have
been filled with dust, or whose clothes have been ruined with oil." A
couple of days later, the Daily Graphic illustrated and described
the road and published a sketch of a one-hundred-horse-power electric
locomotive for the use of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Perth Amboy
and Rahway. Visitors, of course, were numerous, including many curious,
sceptical railroad managers, few if any of whom except Villard could
see the slightest use for the new motive power. There is, perhaps,
some excuse for such indifference. No men in the world have more new
inventions brought to them than railroad managers, and this was the
rankest kind of novelty. It was not, indeed, until a year later, in
May, 1881, that the first regular road collecting fares was put in
operation--a little stretch of one and a half miles from Berlin to
Lichterfelde, with one miniature motorcar. Edison was in reality doing
some heavy electric-railway engineering, his apparatus full of ideas,
suggestions, prophecies; but to the operators of long trunk lines it
must have seemed utterly insignificant and "excellent fooling."

Speaking of this situation, Mr. Edison says: "One day Frank Thomson,
the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, came out to see the electric
light and the electric railway in operation. The latter was then about
a mile long. He rode on it. At that time I was getting out plans to
make an electric locomotive of three hundred horse-power with six-foot
drivers, with the idea of showing people that they could dispense with
their steam locomotives. Mr. Thomson made the objection that it was
impracticable, and that it would be impossible to supplant steam. His
great experience and standing threw a wet blanket on my hopes. But
I thought he might perhaps be mistaken, as there had been many such
instances on record. I continued to work on the plans, and about three
years later I started to build the locomotive at the works at Goerck
Street, and had it about finished when I was switched off on some other
work. One of the reasons why I felt the electric railway to be eminently
practical was that Henry Villard, the President of the Northern Pacific,
said that one of the greatest things that could be done would be to
build right-angle feeders into the wheat-fields of Dakota and bring in
the wheat to the main lines, as the farmers then had to draw it from
forty to eighty miles. There was a point where it would not pay to
raise it at all; and large areas of the country were thus of no value.
I conceived the idea of building a very light railroad of narrow gauge,
and had got all the data as to the winds on the plains, and found that
it would be possible with very large windmills to supply enough power to
drive those wheat trains."

Among others who visited the little road at this juncture were persons
interested in the Manhattan Elevated system of New York, on which
experiments were repeatedly tried later, but which was not destined
to adopt a method so obviously well suited to all the conditions until
after many successful demonstrations had been made on elevated roads
elsewhere. It must be admitted that Mr. Edison was not very profoundly
impressed with the desire entertained in that quarter to utilize any
improvement, for he remarks: "When the Elevated Railroad in New York, up
Sixth Avenue, was started there was a great clamor about the noise, and
injunctions were threatened. The management engaged me to make a report
on the cause of the noise. I constructed an instrument that would record
the sound, and set out to make a preliminary report, but I found that
they never intended to do anything but let the people complain."

It was upon the co-operation of Villard that Edison fell back, and an
agreement was entered into between them on September 14, 1881, which
provided that the latter would "build two and a half miles of electric
railway at Menlo Park, equipped with three cars, two locomotives, one
for freight, and one for passengers, capacity of latter sixty miles an
hour. Capacity freight engine, ten tons net freight; cost of handling
a ton of freight per mile per horse-power to be less than ordinary
locomotive.... If experiments are successful, Villard to pay actual
outlay in experiments, and to treat with the Light Company for the
installation of at least fifty miles of electric railroad in the wheat
regions." Mr. Edison is authority for the statement that Mr. Villard
advanced between $35,000 and $40,000, and that the work done was very
satisfactory; but it did not end at that time in any practical results,
as the Northern Pacific went into the hands of a receiver, and Mr.
Villard's ability to help was hopelessly crippled. The directors of the
Edison Electric Light Company could not be induced to have anything
to do with the electric railway, and Mr. Insull states that the money
advanced was treated by Mr. Edison as a personal loan and repaid to
Mr. Villard, for whom he had a high admiration and a strong feeling
of attachment. Mr. Insull says: "Among the financial men whose close
personal friendship Edison enjoyed, I would mention Henry Villard, who,
I think, had a higher appreciation of the possibilities of the Edison
system than probably any other man of his time in Wall Street. He
dropped out of the business at the time of the consolidation of the
Thomson-Houston Company with the Edison General Electric Company; but
from the earliest days of the business, when it was in its experimental
period, when the Edison light and power system was but an idea, down
to the day of his death, Henry Villard continued a strong supporter not
only with his influence, but with his money. He was the first capitalist
to back individually Edison's experiments in electric railways."

In speaking of his relationships with Mr. Villard at this time, Edison
says: "When Villard was all broken down, and in a stupor caused by his
disasters in connection with the Northern Pacific, Mrs. Villard sent for
me to come and cheer him up. It was very difficult to rouse him from his
despair and apathy, but I talked about the electric light to him, and
its development, and told him that it would help him win it all back and
put him in his former position. Villard made his great rally; he made
money out of the electric light; and he got back control of the Northern
Pacific. Under no circumstances can a hustler be kept down. If he is
only square, he is bound to get back on his feet. Villard has often been
blamed and severely criticised, but he was not the only one to blame.
His engineers had spent $20,000,000 too much in building the road, and
it was not his fault if he found himself short of money, and at that
time unable to raise any more."

Villard maintained his intelligent interest in electric-railway
development, with regard to which Edison remarks: "At one time Mr.
Villard got the idea that he would run the mountain division of the
Northern Pacific Railroad by electricity. He asked me if it could be
done. I said: 'Certainly, it is too easy for me to undertake; let some
one else do it.' He said: 'I want you to tackle the problem,' and
he insisted on it. So I got up a scheme of a third rail and shoe and
erected it in my yard here in Orange. When I got it all ready, he had
all his division engineers come on to New York, and they came over here.
I showed them my plans, and the unanimous decision of the engineers was
that it was absolutely and utterly impracticable. That system is on the
New York Central now, and was also used on the New Haven road in its
first work with electricity."

At this point it may be well to cite some other statements of Edison as
to kindred work, with which he has not usually been associated in the
public mind. "In the same manner I had worked out for the Manhattan
Elevated Railroad a system of electric trains, and had the control of
each car centred at one place--multiple control. This was afterward
worked out and made practical by Frank Sprague. I got up a slot contact
for street railways, and have a patent on it--a sliding contact in a
slot. Edward Lauterbach was connected with the Third Avenue Railroad in
New York--as counsel--and I told him he was making a horrible mistake
putting in the cable. I told him to let the cable stand still and send
electricity through it, and he would not have to move hundreds of tons
of metal all the time. He would rue the day when he put the cable in."
It cannot be denied that the prophecy was fulfilled, for the cable was
the beginning of the frightful financial collapse of the system, and was
torn out in a few years to make way for the triumphant "trolley in the
slot."

Incidental glimpses of this work are both amusing and interesting.
Hughes, who was working on the experimental road with Mr. Edison,
tells the following story: "Villard sent J. C. Henderson, one of his
mechanical engineers, to see the road when it was in operation, and we
went down one day--Edison, Henderson, and I--and went on the locomotive.
Edison ran it, and just after we started there was a trestle sixty feet
long and seven feet deep, and Edison put on all the power. When we went
over it we must have been going forty miles an hour, and I could see the
perspiration come out on Henderson. After we got over the trestle and
started on down the track, Henderson said: 'When we go back I will walk.
If there is any more of that kind of running I won't be in it myself.'"
To the correspondence of Grosvenor P. Lowrey we are indebted for a
similar reminiscence, under date of June 5, 1880: "Goddard and I have
spent a part of the day at Menlo, and all is glorious. I have ridden at
forty miles an hour on Mr. Edison's electric railway--and we ran off the
track. I protested at the rate of speed over the sharp curves, designed
to show the power of the engine, but Edison said they had done it often.
Finally, when the last trip was to be taken, I said I did not like
it, but would go along. The train jumped the track on a short curve,
throwing Kruesi, who was driving the engine, with his face down in the
dirt, and another man in a comical somersault through some underbrush.
Edison was off in a minute, jumping and laughing, and declaring it a
most beautiful accident. Kruesi got up, his face bleeding and a good
deal shaken; and I shall never forget the expression of voice and face
in which he said, with some foreign accent: 'Oh! yes, pairfeckly safe.'
Fortunately no other hurts were suffered, and in a few minutes we had
the train on the track and running again."

All this rough-and-ready dealing with grades and curves was not mere
horse-play, but had a serious purpose underlying it, every trip having
its record as to some feature of defect or improvement. One particular
set of experiments relating to such work was made on behalf of visitors
from South America, and were doubtless the first tests of the kind made
for that continent, where now many fine electric street and interurban
railway systems are in operation. Mr. Edison himself supplies the
following data: "During the electric-railway experiments at Menlo Park,
we had a short spur of track up one of the steep gullies. The experiment
came about in this way. Bogota, the capital of Columbia, is reached on
muleback--or was--from Honda on the headwaters of the Magdalena River.
There were parties who wanted to know if transportation over the mule
route could not be done by electricity. They said the grades were
excessive, and it would cost too much to do it with steam locomotives,
even if they could climb the grades. I said: 'Well, it can't be much
more than 45 per cent.; we will try that first. If it will do that it
will do anything else.' I started at 45 per cent. I got up an electric
locomotive with a grip on the rail by which it went up the 45 per cent.
grade. Then they said the curves were very short. I put the curves in.
We started the locomotive with nobody on it, and got up to twenty miles
an hour, taking those curves of very short radius; but it was weeks
before we could prevent it from running off. We had to bank the tracks
up to an angle of thirty degrees before we could turn the curve and stay
on. These Spanish parties were perfectly satisfied we could put in
an electric railway from Honda to Bogota successfully, and then they
disappeared. I have never seen them since. As usual, I paid for the
experiment."

In the spring of 1883 the Electric Railway Company of America was
incorporated in the State of New York with a capital of $2,000,000 to
develop the patents and inventions of Edison and Stephen D. Field,
to the latter of whom the practical work of active development was
confided, and in June of the same year an exhibit was made at the
Chicago Railway Exposition, which attracted attention throughout
the country, and did much to stimulate the growing interest in
electric-railway work. With the aid of Messrs. F. B. Rae, C. L. Healy,
and C. O. Mailloux a track and locomotive were constructed for the
company by Mr. Field and put in service in the gallery of the main
exhibition building. The track curved sharply at either end on a radius
of fifty-six feet, and the length was about one-third of a mile. The
locomotive named "The Judge," after Justice Field, an uncle of Stephen
D. Field, took current from a central rail between the two outer rails,
that were the return circuit, the contact being a rubbing wire brush on
each side of the "third rail," answering the same purpose as the contact
shoe of later date. The locomotive weighed three tons, was twelve feet
long, five feet wide, and made a speed of nine miles an hour with a
trailer car for passengers. Starting on June 5th, when the exhibition
closed on June 23d this tiny but typical road had operated for over 118
hours, had made over 446 miles, and had carried 26,805 passengers. After
the exposition closed the outfit was taken during the same year to
the exposition at Louisville, Kentucky, where it was also successful,
carrying a large number of passengers. It deserves note that at Chicago
regular railway tickets were issued to paying passengers, the first ever
employed on American electric railways.

With this modest but brilliant demonstration, to which the illustrious
names of Edison and Field were attached, began the outburst of
excitement over electric railways, very much like the eras of
speculation and exploitation that attended only a few years earlier
the introduction of the telephone and the electric light, but with such
significant results that the capitalization of electric roads in America
is now over $4,000,000,000, or twice as much as that of the other two
arts combined. There was a tremendous rush into the electric-railway
field after 1883, and an outburst of inventive activity that has rarely,
if ever, been equalled. It is remarkable that, except Siemens, no
European achieved fame in this early work, while from America the ideas
and appliances of Edison, Van Depoele, Sprague, Field, Daft, and Short
have been carried and adopted all over the world.

Mr. Edison was consulting electrician for the Electric Railway Company,
but neither a director nor an executive officer. Just what the trouble
was as to the internal management of the corporation it is hard to
determine a quarter of a century later; but it was equipped with all
essential elements to dominate an art in which after its first efforts
it remained practically supine and useless, while other interests
forged ahead and reaped both the profit and the glory. Dissensions arose
between the representatives of the Field and Edison interests, and
in April, 1890, the Railway Company assigned its rights to the Edison
patents to the Edison General Electric Company, recently formed by
the consolidation of all the branches of the Edison light, power, and
manufacturing industry under one management. The only patent rights
remaining to the Railway Company were those under three Field patents,
one of which, with controlling claims, was put in suit June, 1890,
against the Jamaica & Brooklyn Road Company, a customer of the Edison
General Electric Company. This was, to say the least, a curious and
anomalous situation. Voluminous records were made by both parties to
the suit, and in the spring of 1894 the case was argued before the
late Judge Townsend, who wrote a long opinion dismissing the bill of
complaint. [15] The student will find therein a very complete and
careful study of the early electric-railway art. After this decision was
rendered, the Electric Railway Company remained for several years in a
moribund condition, and on the last day of 1896 its property was placed
in the hands of a receiver. In February of 1897 the receiver sold the
three Field patents to their original owner, and he in turn sold them to
the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The Railway Company
then went into voluntary dissolution, a sad example of failure to seize
the opportunity at the psychological moment, and on the part of the
inventor to secure any adequate return for years of effort and struggle
in founding one of the great arts. Neither of these men was squelched by
such a calamitous result, but if there were not something of bitterness
in their feelings as they survey what has come of their work, they would
not be human.

As a matter of fact, Edison retained a very lively interest in
electric-railway progress long after the pregnant days at Menlo Park,
one of the best evidences of which is an article in the New York
Electrical Engineer of November 18, 1891, which describes some important
and original experiments in the direction of adapting electrical
conditions to the larger cities. The overhead trolley had by that time
begun its victorious career, but there was intense hostility displayed
toward it in many places because of the inevitable increase in the
number of overhead wires, which, carrying, as they did, a current of
high voltage and large quantity, were regarded as a menace to life and
property. Edison has always manifested a strong objection to overhead
wires in cities, and urged placing them underground; and the outcry
against the overhead "deadly" trolley met with his instant sympathy.
His study of the problem brought him to the development of the modern
"substation," although the twists that later evolutions have given the
idea have left it scarcely recognizable.

[Footnote 15: See 61 Fed. Rep. 655.]

Mr. Villard, as President of the Edison General Electric Company,
requested Mr. Edison, as electrician of the company, to devise a
street-railway system which should be applicable to the largest cities
where the use of the trolley would not be permitted, where the slot
conduit system would not be used, and where, in general, the details of
construction should be reduced to the simplest form. The limits imposed
practically were such as to require that the system should not cost more
than a cable road to install. Edison reverted to his ingenious lighting
plan of years earlier, and thus settled on a method by which
current should be conveyed from the power plant at high potential to
motor-generators placed below the ground in close proximity to the
rails. These substations would convert the current received at a
pressure of, say, one thousand volts to one of twenty volts available
between rail and rail, with a corresponding increase in the volume of
the current. With the utilization of heavy currents at low voltage it
became necessary, of course, to devise apparatus which should be able to
pick up with absolute certainty one thousand amperes of current at
this pressure through two inches of mud, if necessary. With his wonted
activity and fertility Edison set about devising such a contact, and
experimented with metal wheels under all conditions of speed and track
conditions. It was several months before he could convey one hundred
amperes by means of such contacts, but he worked out at last a
satisfactory device which was equal to the task. The next point was
to secure a joint between contiguous rails such as would permit of
the passage of several thousand amperes without introducing undue
resistance. This was also accomplished.

Objections were naturally made to rails out in the open on the street
surface carrying large currents at a potential of twenty volts. It was
said that vehicles with iron wheels passing over the tracks and spanning
the two rails would short-circuit the current, "chew" themselves up,
and destroy the dynamos generating the current by choking all that
tremendous amount of energy back into them. Edison tackled the objection
squarely and short-circuited his track with such a vehicle, but
succeeded in getting only about two hundred amperes through the wheels,
the low voltage and the insulating properties of the axle-grease being
sufficient to account for such a result. An iron bar was also used,
polished, and with a man standing on it to insure solid contact; but
only one thousand amperes passed through it--i.e., the amount required
by a single car, and, of course, much less than the capacity of the
generators able to operate a system of several hundred cars.

Further interesting experiments showed that the expected large leakage
of current from the rails in wet weather did not materialize. Edison
found that under the worst conditions with a wet and salted track, at a
potential difference of twenty volts between the two rails, the
extreme loss was only two and one-half horse-power. In this respect the
phenomenon followed the same rule as that to which telegraph wires are
subject--namely, that the loss of insulation is greater in damp, murky
weather when the insulators are covered with wet dust than during heavy
rains when the insulators are thoroughly washed by the action of the
water. In like manner a heavy rain-storm cleaned the tracks from
the accumulations due chiefly to the droppings of the horses, which
otherwise served largely to increase the conductivity. Of course, in dry
weather the loss of current was practically nothing, and, under ordinary
conditions, Edison held, his system was in respect to leakage and the
problems of electrolytic attack of the current on adjacent pipes, etc.,
as fully insulated as the standard trolley network of the day. The cost
of his system Mr. Edison placed at from $30,000 to $100,000 per mile of
double track, in accordance with local conditions, and in this respect
comparing very favorably with the cable systems then so much in favor
for heavy traffic. All the arguments that could be urged in support of
this ingenious system are tenable and logical at the present moment; but
the trolley had its way except on a few lines where the conduit-and-shoe
method was adopted; and in the intervening years the volume of traffic
created and handled by electricity in centres of dense population has
brought into existence the modern subway.

But down to the moment of the preparation of this biography, Edison has
retained an active interest in transportation problems, and his latest
work has been that of reviving the use of the storage battery for
street-car purposes. At one time there were a number of storage-battery
lines and cars in operation in such cities as Washington, New York,
Chicago, and Boston; but the costs of operation and maintenance
were found to be inordinately high as compared with those of the
direct-supply methods, and the battery cars all disappeared. The need
for them under many conditions remained, as, for example, in places
in Greater New York where the overhead trolley wires are forbidden as
objectionable, and where the ground is too wet or too often submerged
to permit of the conduit with the slot. Some of the roads in Greater
New York have been anxious to secure such cars, and, as usual, the most
resourceful electrical engineer and inventor of his times has made
the effort. A special experimental track has been laid at the Orange
laboratory, and a car equipped with the Edison storage battery and other
devices has been put under severe and extended trial there and in New
York.