Edison, His Life and Inventions

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


"While at the Exposition I visited the Opera-House. The President of
France lent me his private box. The Opera-House was one of the first
to be lighted by the incandescent lamp, and the managers took great
pleasure in showing me down through the labyrinth containing the
wiring, dynamos, etc. When I came into the box, the orchestra played the
'Star-Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon
I was very much embarrassed. After I had been an hour at the play, the
manager came around and asked me to go underneath the stage, as they
were putting on a ballet of 300 girls, the finest ballet in Europe. It
seems there is a little hole on the stage with a hood over it, in which
the prompter sits when opera is given. In this instance it was not
occupied, and I was given the position in the prompter's seat, and saw
the whole ballet at close range.

"The city of Paris gave me a dinner at the new Hotel de Ville, which was
also lighted with the Edison system. They had a very fine installation
of machinery. As I could not understand or speak a word of French,
I went to see our minister, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and got him to send a
deputy to answer for me, which he did, with my grateful thanks. Then the
telephone company gave me a dinner, and the engineers of France; and
I attended the dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the
discovery of photography. Then they sent to Reid my decoration, and they
tried to put a sash on me, but I could not stand for that. My wife had
me wear the little red button, but when I saw Americans coming I would
slip it out of my lapel, as I thought they would jolly me for wearing
it."

Nor was this all. Edison naturally met many of the celebrities of
France: "I visited the Eiffel Tower at the invitation of Eiffel. We went
to the top, where there was an extension and a small place in which was
Eiffel's private office. In this was a piano. When my wife and I arrived
at the top, we found that Gounod, the composer, was there. We stayed a
couple of hours, and Gounod sang and played for us. We spent a day at
Meudon, an old palace given by the government to Jansen, the astronomer.
He occupied three rooms, and there were 300. He had the grand
dining-room for his laboratory. He showed me a gyroscope he had got
up which made the incredible number of 4000 revolutions in a second. A
modification of this was afterward used on the French Atlantic lines for
making an artificial horizon to take observations for position at
sea. In connection with this a gentleman came to me a number of years
afterward, and I got out a part of some plans for him. He wanted to make
a gigantic gyroscope weighing several tons, to be run by an electric
motor and put on a sailing ship. He wanted this gyroscope to keep a
platform perfectly horizontal, no matter how rough the sea was. Upon
this platform he was going to mount a telescope to observe an eclipse
off the Gold Coast of Africa. But for some reason it was never
completed.

"Pasteur invited me to come down to the Institute, and I went and had
quite a chat with him. I saw a large number of persons being inoculated,
and also the whole modus operandi, which was very interesting. I saw one
beautiful boy about ten, the son of an English lord. His father was with
him. He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment. I
said to Pasteur, 'Will he live?' 'No,' said he, 'the boy will be dead in
six days. He was bitten too near the top of the spinal column, and came
too late!'"

Edison has no opinion to offer as an expert on art, but has his own
standard of taste: "Of course I visited the Louvre and saw the Old
Masters, which I could not enjoy. And I attended the Luxembourg, with
modern masters, which I enjoyed greatly. To my mind, the Old Masters
are not art, and I suspect that many others are of the same opinion;
and that their value is in their scarcity and in the variety of men with
lots of money." Somewhat akin to this is a shrewd comment on one feature
of the Exposition: "I spent several days in the Exposition at Paris. I
remember going to the exhibit of the Kimberley diamond mines, and they
kindly permitted me to take diamonds from some of the blue earth which
they were washing by machinery to exhibit the mine operations. I found
several beautiful diamonds, but they seemed a little light weight to me
when I was picking them out. They were diamonds for exhibition purposes
--probably glass."

This did not altogether complete the European trip of 1889, for Edison
wished to see Helmholtz. "After leaving Paris we went to Berlin. The
French papers then came out and attacked me because I went to Germany;
and said I was now going over to the enemy. I visited all the things of
interest in Berlin; and then on my way home I went with Helmholtz
and Siemens in a private compartment to the meeting of the German
Association of Science at Heidelberg, and spent two days there. When
I started from Berlin on the trip, I began to tell American stories.
Siemens was very fond of these stories and would laugh immensely at
them, and could see the points and the humor, by his imagination; but
Helmholtz could not see one of them. Siemens would quickly, in
German, explain the point, but Helmholtz could not see it, although he
understood English, which Siemens could speak. Still the explanations
were made in German. I always wished I could have understood Siemens's
explanations of the points of those stories. At Heidelberg, my
assistant, Mr. Wangemann, an accomplished German-American, showed the
phonograph before the Association."

Then came the trip from the Continent to England, of which this will
certainly pass as a graphic picture: "When I crossed over to England
I had heard a good deal about the terrors of the English Channel as
regards seasickness. I had been over the ocean three times and did not
know what seasickness was, so far as I was concerned myself. I was told
that while a man might not get seasick on the ocean, if he met a good
storm on the Channel it would do for him. When we arrived at Calais
to cross over, everybody made for the restaurant. I did not care about
eating, and did not go to the restaurant, but my family did. I walked
out and tried to find the boat. Going along the dock I saw two small
smokestacks sticking up, and looking down saw a little boat. 'Where is
the steamer that goes across the Channel?' 'This is the boat.' There had
been a storm in the North Sea that had carried away some of the boats on
the German steamer, and it certainly looked awful tough outside. I said
to the man: 'Will that boat live in that sea?' 'Oh yes,' he said, 'but
we've had a bad storm.' So I made up my mind that perhaps I would get
sick this time. The managing director of the English railroad owning
this line was Forbes, who heard I was coming over, and placed the
private saloon at my disposal. The moment my family got in the room with
the French lady's maid and the rest, they commenced to get sick, so I
felt pretty sure I was in for it. We started out of the little inlet
and got into the Channel, and that boat went in seventeen directions
simultaneously. I waited awhile to see what was going to occur, and then
went into the smoking-compartment. Nobody was there. By-and-by the fun
began. Sounds of all kinds and varieties were heard in every direction.
They were all sick. There must have been 100 people aboard. I didn't
see a single exception except the waiters and myself. I asked one of the
waiters concerning the boat itself, and was taken to see the engineer,
and went down to look at the engines, and saw the captain. But I kept
mostly in the smoking-room. I was smoking a big cigar, and when a man
looked in I would give a big puff, and every time they saw that they
would go away and begin again. The English Channel is a holy terror, all
right, but it didn't affect me. I must be out of balance."

While in Paris, Edison had met Sir John Pender, the English "cable
king," and had received an invitation from him to make a visit to his
country residence: "Sir John Pender, the master of the cable system of
the world at that time, I met in Paris. I think he must have lived among
a lot of people who were very solemn, because I went out riding with
him in the Bois de Boulogne and started in to tell him American stories.
Although he was a Scotchman he laughed immoderately. He had the faculty
of understanding and quickly seeing the point of the stories; and
for three days after I could not get rid of him. Finally I made him
a promise that I would go to his country house at Foot's Cray, near
London. So I went there, and spent two or three days telling him
stories.

"While at Foot's Cray, I met some of the backers of Ferranti, then
putting up a gigantic alternating-current dynamo near London to send
ten or fifteen thousand volts up into the main district of the city for
electric lighting. I think Pender was interested. At any rate the people
invited to dinner were very much interested, and they questioned me as
to what I thought of the proposition. I said I hadn't any thought about
it, and could not give any opinion until I saw it. So I was taken up
to London to see the dynamo in course of construction and the methods
employed; and they insisted I should give them some expression of my
views. While I gave them my opinion, it was reluctantly; I did not want
to do so. I thought that commercially the thing was too ambitious, that
Ferranti's ideas were too big, just then; that he ought to have started
a little smaller until he was sure. I understand that this installation
was not commercially successful, as there were a great many troubles.
But Ferranti had good ideas, and he was no small man."

Incidentally it may be noted here that during the same year (1889) the
various manufacturing Edison lighting interests in America were brought
together, under the leadership of Mr. Henry Villard, and consolidated
in the Edison General Electric Company with a capital of no less than
$12,000,000 on an eight-per-cent.-dividend basis. The numerous Edison
central stations all over the country represented much more than that
sum, and made a splendid outlet for the product of the factories. A few
years later came the consolidation with the Thomson-Houston interests
in the General Electric Company, which under the brilliant and vigorous
management of President C. A. Coffin has become one of the greatest
manufacturing institutions of the country, with an output of apparatus
reaching toward $75,000,000 annually. The net result of both financial
operations was, however, to detach Edison from the special field of
invention to which he had given so many of his most fruitful years; and
to close very definitely that chapter of his life, leaving him free to
develop other ideas and interests as set forth in these volumes.

It might appear strange on the surface, but one of the reasons that most
influenced Edison to regrets in connection with the "big trade" of 1889
was that it separated him from his old friend and ally, Bergmann, who,
on selling out, saw a great future for himself in Germany, went
there, and realized it. Edison has always had an amused admiration for
Bergmann, and his "social side" is often made evident by his love of
telling stories about those days of struggle. Some of the stories were
told for this volume. "Bergmann came to work for me as a boy," says
Edison. "He started in on stock-quotation printers. As he was a rapid
workman and paid no attention to the clock, I took a fancy to him, and
gave him piece-work. He contrived so many little tools to cheapen the
work that he made lots of money. I even helped him get up tools until
it occurred to me that this was too rapid a process of getting rid of
my money, as I hadn't the heart to cut the price when it was originally
fair. After a year or so, Bergmann got enough money to start a small
shop in Wooster Street, New York, and it was at this shop that the
first phonographs were made for sale. Then came the carbon telephone
transmitter, a large number of which were made by Bergmann for the
Western Union. Finally came the electric light. A dynamo was installed
in Bergmann's shop to permit him to test the various small devices which
he was then making for the system. He rented power from a Jew who owned
the building. Power was supplied from a fifty-horse-power engine to
other tenants on the several floors. Soon after the introduction of the
big dynamo machine, the landlord appeared in the shop and insisted that
Bergmann was using more power than he was paying for, and said that
lately the belt on the engine was slipping and squealing. Bergmann
maintained that he must be mistaken. The landlord kept going among his
tenants and finally discovered the dynamo. 'Oh! Mr. Bergmann, now I know
where my power goes to,' pointing to the dynamo. Bergmann gave him a
withering look of scorn, and said, 'Come here and I will show you.'
Throwing off the belt and disconnecting the wires, he spun the armature
around by hand. 'There,' said Bergmann, 'you see it's not here that you
must look for your loss.' This satisfied the landlord, and he started
off to his other tenants. He did not know that that machine, when the
wires were connected, could stop his engine.

"Soon after, the business had grown so large that E. H. Johnson and I
went in as partners, and Bergmann rented an immense factory building
at the corner of Avenue B and East Seventeenth Street, New York, six
stories high and covering a quarter of a block. Here were made all the
small things used on the electric-lighting system, such as sockets,
chandeliers, switches, meters, etc. In addition, stock tickers,
telephones, telephone switchboards, and typewriters were made the
Hammond typewriters were perfected and made there. Over 1500 men were
finally employed. This shop was very successful both scientifically and
financially. Bergmann was a man of great executive ability and carried
economy of manufacture to the limit. Among all the men I have had
associated with me, he had the commercial instinct most highly
developed."

One need not wonder at Edison's reminiscent remark that, "In any trade
any of my 'boys' made with Bergmann he always got the best of them,
no matter what it was. One time there was to be a convention of the
managers of Edison illuminating companies at Chicago. There were a lot
of representatives from the East, and a private car was hired. At Jersey
City a poker game was started by one of the delegates. Bergmann was
induced to enter the game. This was played right through to Chicago
without any sleep, but the boys didn't mind that. I had gotten them
immune to it. Bergmann had won all the money, and when the porter came
in and said 'Chicago,' Bergmann jumped up and said: 'What! Chicago! I
thought it was only Philadelphia!'"

But perhaps this further story is a better indication of developed humor
and shrewdness: "A man by the name of Epstein had been in the habit
of buying brass chips and trimmings from the lathes, and in some way
Bergmann found out that he had been cheated. This hurt his pride, and
he determined to get even. One day Epstein appeared and said:
'Good-morning, Mr. Bergmann, have you any chips to-day?' 'No,' said
Bergmann, 'I have none.' 'That's strange, Mr. Bergmann; won't you
look?' No, he wouldn't look; he knew he had none. Finally Epstein was so
persistent that Bergmann called an assistant and told him to go and
see if he had any chips. He returned and said they had the largest and
finest lot they ever had. Epstein went up to several boxes piled full of
chips, and so heavy that he could not lift even one end of a box. 'Now,
Mr. Bergmann,' said Epstein, 'how much for the lot?' 'Epstein,' said
Bergmann, 'you have cheated me, and I will no longer sell by the lot,
but will sell only by the pound.' No amount of argument would apparently
change Bergmann's determination to sell by the pound, but finally
Epstein got up to $250 for the lot, and Bergmann, appearing as if
disgusted, accepted and made him count out the money. Then he said:
'Well, Epstein, good-bye, I've got to go down to Wall Street.' Epstein
and his assistant then attempted to lift the boxes to carry them out,
but couldn't; and then discovered that calculations as to quantity had
been thrown out because the boxes had all been screwed down to the floor
and mostly filled with boards with a veneer of brass chips. He made such
a scene that he had to be removed by the police. I met him several days
afterward and he said he had forgiven Mr. Bergmann, as he was such a
smart business man, and the scheme was so ingenious.

"One day as a joke I filled three or four sheets of foolscap paper with
a jumble of figures and told Bergmann they were calculations showing the
great loss of power from blowing the factory whistle. Bergmann thought
it real, and never after that would he permit the whistle to blow."

Another glimpse of the "social side" is afforded in the following little
series of pen-pictures of the same place and time: "I had my laboratory
at the top of the Bergmann works, after moving from Menlo Park. The
building was six stories high. My father came there when he was eighty
years of age. The old man had powerful lungs. In fact, when I was
examined by the Mutual Life Insurance Company, in 1873, my lung
expansion was taken by the doctor, and the old gentleman was there
at the time. He said to the doctor: 'I wish you would take my lung
expansion, too.' The doctor took it, and his surprise was very great,
as it was one of the largest on record. I think it was five and one-half
inches. There were only three or four could beat it. Little Bergmann
hadn't much lung power. The old man said to him, one day: 'Let's run
up-stairs.' Bergmann agreed and ran up. When they got there Bergmann
was all done up, but my father never showed a sign of it. There was an
elevator there, and each day while it was travelling up I held the stem
of my Waterbury watch up against the column in the elevator shaft and
it finished the winding by the time I got up the six stories." This
original method of reducing the amount of physical labor involved in
watch-winding brings to mind another instance of shrewdness mentioned by
Edison, with regard to his newsboy days. Being asked whether he did not
get imposed upon with bad bank-bills, he replied that he subscribed to a
bank-note detector and consulted it closely whenever a note of any size
fell into his hands. He was then less than fourteen years old.

The conversations with Edison that elicited these stories brought out
some details as to peril that attends experimentation. He has confronted
many a serious physical risk, and counts himself lucky to have come
through without a scratch or scar. Four instances of personal danger
may be noted in his own language: "When I started at Menlo, I had an
electric furnace for welding rare metals that I did not know about
very clearly. I was in the dark-room, where I had a lot of chloride of
sulphur, a very corrosive liquid. I did not know that it would decompose
by water. I poured in a beakerful of water, and the whole thing exploded
and threw a lot of it into my eyes. I ran to the hydrant, leaned over
backward, opened my eyes, and ran the hydrant water right into them. But
it was two weeks before I could see.

"The next time we just saved ourselves. I was making some stuff to
squirt into filaments for the incandescent lamp. I made about a pound of
it. I had used ammonia and bromine. I did not know it at the time, but
I had made bromide of nitrogen. I put the large bulk of it in three
filters, and after it had been washed and all the water had come through
the filter, I opened the three filters and laid them on a hot steam
plate to dry with the stuff. While I and Mr. Sadler, one of my
assistants, were working near it, there was a sudden flash of light,
and a very smart explosion. I said to Sadler: 'What is that?' 'I don't
know,' he said, and we paid no attention. In about half a minute there
was a sharp concussion, and Sadler said: 'See, it is that stuff on the
steam plate.' I grabbed the whole thing and threw it in the sink, and
poured water on it. I saved a little of it and found it was a terrific
explosive. The reason why those little preliminary explosions took place
was that a little had spattered out on the edge of the filter paper,
and had dried first and exploded. Had the main body exploded there would
have been nothing left of the laboratory I was working in.

"At another time, I had a briquetting machine for briquetting iron ore.
I had a lever held down by a powerful spring, and a rod one inch in
diameter and four feet long. While I was experimenting with it, and
standing beside it, a washer broke, and that spring threw the rod right
up to the ceiling with a blast; and it came down again just within
an inch of my nose, and went clear through a two-inch plank. That was
'within an inch of your life,' as they say.

"In my experimental plant for concentrating iron ore in the northern
part of New Jersey, we had a vertical drier, a column about nine feet
square and eighty feet high. At the bottom there was a space where two
men could go through a hole; and then all the rest of the column was
filled with baffle plates. One day this drier got blocked, and the ore
would not run down. So I and the vice-president of the company, Mr.
Mallory, crowded through the manhole to see why the ore would not come
down. After we got in, the ore did come down and there were fourteen
tons of it above us. The men outside knew we were in there, and they had
a great time digging us out and getting air to us."

Such incidents brought out in narration the fact that many of the men
working with him had been less fortunate, particularly those who had
experimented with the Roentgen X-ray, whose ravages, like those of
leprosy, were responsible for the mutilation and death of at least one
expert assistant. In the early days of work on the incandescent lamp,
also, there was considerable trouble with mercury. "I had a series of
vacuum-pumps worked by mercury and used for exhausting experimental
incandescent lamps. The main pipe, which was full of mercury, was about
seven and one-half feet from the floor. Along the length of the pipe
were outlets to which thick rubber tubing was connected, each tube to a
pump. One day, while experimenting with the mercury pump, my assistant,
an awkward country lad from a farm on Staten Island, who had adenoids in
his nose and breathed through his mouth, which was always wide open,
was looking up at this pipe, at a small leak of mercury, when the rubber
tube came off and probably two pounds of mercury went into his mouth and
down his throat, and got through his system somehow. In a short time he
became salivated, and his teeth got loose. He went home, and shortly his
mother appeared at the laboratory with a horsewhip, which she proposed
to use on the proprietor. I was fortunately absent, and she was
mollified somehow by my other assistants. I had given the boy
considerable iodide of potassium to prevent salivation, but it did no
good in this case.

"When the first lamp-works were started at Menlo Park, one of my
experiments seemed to show that hot mercury gave a better vacuum in the
lamp than cold mercury. I thereupon started to heat it. Soon all the men
got salivated, and things looked serious; but I found that in the mirror
factories, where mercury was used extensively, the French Government
made the giving of iodide of potassium compulsory to prevent salivation.
I carried out this idea, and made every man take a dose every day, but
there was great opposition, and hot mercury was finally abandoned."

It will have been gathered that Edison has owed his special immunity
from "occupational diseases" not only to luck but to unusual powers of
endurance, and a strong physique, inherited, no doubt, from his father.
Mr. Mallory mentions a little fact that bears on this exceptional
quality of bodily powers. "I have often been surprised at Edison's
wonderful capacity for the instant visual perception of differences in
materials that were invisible to others until he would patiently point
them out. This had puzzled me for years, but one day I was unexpectedly
let into part of the secret. For some little time past Mr. Edison had
noticed that he was bothered somewhat in reading print, and I asked him
to have an oculist give him reading-glasses. He partially promised, but
never took time to attend to it. One day he and I were in the city, and
as Mrs. Edison had spoken to me about it, and as we happened to have
an hour to spare, I persuaded him to go to an oculist with me. Using
no names, I asked the latter to examine the gentleman's eyes. He did so
very conscientiously, and it was an interesting experience, for he was
kept busy answering Mr. Edison's numerous questions. When the oculist
finished, he turned to me and said: 'I have been many years in
the business, but have never seen an optic nerve like that of this
gentleman. An ordinary optic nerve is about the thickness of a thread,
but his is like a cord. He must be a remarkable man in some walk of
life. Who is he?'"