Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [13]
New York's financiers poured money into the creation of the Edison Electric Light Company because they were terrified of being left behind. Vanderbilt and other Western Union stockholders had seen firsthand how Edison's quadruplex and other inventions reshaped the telegraph industry, and they expected that he would do the same to the world of lighting. The investors expected nothing less than a technological and social revolution, a new service that no home or office could do without. The potential profits were immeasurable.
There was only one problem with Edison's announcement and the frenzy it produced: Fie had not, in fact, invented a working incandescent light.
Edison certainly thought he was closer to success than he was, but there may have been another motive behind his premature announcement. To invent the lightbulb, Edison needed a great deal of money, far more than investors would give him for early-stage experiments. So he simply said he had already finished. By making the premature announcement in the Sun, he hoped to fire public enthusiasm and pry open the coffers of Wall Street. The ploy worked. With the investors' money in hand, Edison set to work on the invention he claimed to have already perfected.10
"I WAS ALWAYS AFRAID of things that worked the first time," Edison had said two years earlier, after his surprisingly quick success with the phonograph. He had nothing to fear from the electric light. As work proceeded in the fall of 1878, the thermal regulator remained balky and the platinum burners still melted. Edison began to understand that the task was much larger than he had imagined.11
Fortunately, he was well prepared. Edison's successes depended in part upon the work environment he created at Menlo Park. The location in rural New Jersey offered seclusion from but also proximity to the centers of capital in New York. Although he complained about the "damned capitalists," it was their money that built him the best laboratory in the world—complete with a new machine shop, a stockroom filled with every metal and chemical known to science, and an enormous library of scientific journals and books.12
The money also allowed Edison to hire assistants of extraordinary talent. Foremost among the Menlo Park staff was Charles Batchelor, an Englishman with a bushy black beard and considerable skill as a machinist and draftsman. Batchelor had started working for Edison in Newark in 1871 and immediately emerged as the inventor's chief assistant, his methodical work habits complementing Edison's cut-and-try enthusiasm. Another top associate, John Kruesi, trained as a clockmaker in the legendary shops of Switzerland before joining Edison's team, and those skills served him well when he was called upon to translate Edison's crude sketches into working models. Kruesi built the first phonograph in just six days, and it worked the first time it was tried. The newest arrival, Francis Upton, was a Princeton-trained mathematical physicist who had studied in Berlin with Hermann von Helmholtz; Upton joined the staff in 1878 to help with the lighting experiments. A touch insecure about his own lack of formal training in mathematics, Edison liked to tease Upton about his fancy degrees. But he was venturing into territory where mathematical ability was essential, and part of his brilliance was in recognizing that Upton's mathematical talents balanced his own more intuitive grasp of technology. 13
Newspapers reported that in the early evening, when most workers could expect to go home to their families, Edison's men were just hitting their stride. After assembling to review accomplishments and chart strategy, they dispersed to their individual