Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [10]
Before he invented the phonograph, Edison was well known to Wall Street and telegraph men. Afterward, he became one of the most famous men in the world. When reporters flocked to Menlo Park to interview the creator of this marvelous machine, they were surprised to encounter not a solemn man of science but a beaming, boyish inventor. Pants baggy and unpressed, vest flying open, coat stained with grease, hands discolored by acid, Edison "looked like nothing so much as a country store keeper hurrying to fill an order of prunes." Newspapers described a man who rarely slept and who appeared to subsist entirely on pie, coffee, chewing tobacco, and cigars. Because of his partial deafness, which had grown worse since boyhood, Edison's face took on an aspect of gravely serious concentration when he listened, but when he described his latest inventions in his high-pitched voice, his gray eyes flashed and his smooth-shaven face lit up with joy. In 1878 the New York Daily Graphic coined the nickname that would follow him the rest of his life: "the Wizard of Menlo Park." Edison seemed to be a distillation of America's self-image—unpolished and unpretentious yet gripped by an ambition to transform the world.15
Edison with his newly invented phonograph. The famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady took this portrait during Edison's 1878 trip to Washington, D.C.
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EDISON CRAVED the public's attention, but it also exhausted him. By the late spring of 1878, he was tired and ill. He had been working at a frantic pace for more than a year and had not had a vacation since his honeymoon nearly seven years before. When a friend invited him to join an expedition traveling to the Wyoming Territory to view a solar eclipse, he jumped at the chance.16
Edison spurned the comforts of the expedition's reserved railroad car and instead spent much of the journey perched precariously on the cowcatcher, the wedge at the front of the locomotive designed to pitch cows and other obstacles out of the train's path. Despite its dangers—at one point, Edison later recalled, "the locomotive struck an animal about the size of a small cub bear, which I think was a badger," and he barely dodged out of the way—the spot allowed Edison to breathe the clear air of the West, untroubled by the black smoke billowing from the train's smokestack.17
During the western trip, Edison talked to other scientists about new discoveries in the field of electric lighting. Edison had toyed with lighting experiments before, but other projects intervened. Even before his train returned to Menlo Park, he had decided to take up the problem again. Much of the attraction was financial. In an interview in April 1878 Edison had said of the phonograph, "This is my baby, and I expect it to grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age." He soon learned, though, that the phonograph was a solution without a problem: Everyone recognized its brilliance, but no one could figure out what to do with it. Edison imagined it as a tool for business dictation, but the machine was temperamental and slow to catch on, and the market for recorded music was a decade away. In 1878 the phonograph did not appear likely to turn a profit anytime soon.18
With electric light, on the other hand, the business plan was clear. People needed ways to dispel the darkness, and the existing technologies—candles, illuminating gas, kerosene lamps—were far from perfect. A good electric lamp might well support the inventor in his old age.
*Western Union sued Atlantic & Pacific over rights to the quadruplex, and the dispute was resolved only by the merger of the two companies in 1877.
CHAPTER 3
Light
ON AUGUST 26, 1878, Edison arrived back in Menlo Park and was reunited with his wife, Mary, and his daughter and son, five-year-old Marion and two-year-old Tom Jr.—nicknamed Dot and Dash by their father, ever the telegraph man. When reporters appeared to collect