Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [23]
Edison and his men had been fiddling with filaments to lengthen bulb life even before the steamship project arose. Manufacturing the lamps seemed to be a hit-or-miss affair: A few lamps lasted as long as 500 hours, while apparently identical ones expired after just a few minutes. Starting in January 1880, dozens of materials—horsehair, fish line, teak, vulcanized rubber, cork, celluloid, grass fibers, linen twine, tar paper, wrapping paper, parchment, rattan, California redwood, corn silk, flour paste, leather, sassafras, cinnamon bark, eucalyptus, turnip, ginger, and macaroni—made their way into the carbonizing furnace and thence into evacuated bulbs. A carbonized thread of spider silk displayed a beautiful light pink phosphorescence but expired quickly.
By late spring of 1880 Edison and his men had a fairly good idea of what they were looking for: raw plant materials with dense, long, uniform fibers, which tended to hold their shape after carbonization. Rejecting jute and hemp, Edison finally settled on bamboo. Not quite satisfied with the quality of available specimens, Edison ransacked New York for new varieties of bamboo, then dispatched explorers to Japan and the Amazon. Another explorer, John Segredor, slogged through the Florida swamps. "What renders this job interesting is the strong probability of getting bitten by a snake," Segredor wrote to Edison. He traveled on to Cuba, where Edison sent him $150 for expenses. Two weeks later the explorer was dead of yellow fever. Sent news of the death, Edison drafted a response: "Bury him my expense with funds his possession." Reconsidering, he crossed that out and wired simply, "Bury him my expense." Edison located a source of high-quality bamboo in Japan.7
When the lamp experiments started in 1878, Edison employed about two dozen men, but by 1880 his staff had ballooned to sixty-five. With many different projects proceeding simultaneously—lamps, generators, insulators, conductors—Edison's role became that of director of research, but he took the lead role in every project. Although the staff had more than doubled in size, the atmosphere stayed largely the same. The boss still worked superhuman hours, and his men were expected to work whenever the boss did, day or night. Few seemed to mind. "The strangest thing to me is the $12.00 I get each Saturday," Francis Upton told his father, "for my labor does not seem like work, but like study and I enjoy it."8
The black sheep of Menlo Park's happy family was the glassblower Ludwig Boehm, whose arrogance made him the target of pranks. To escape harassment, Boehm moved out of his Menlo Park boardinghouse and into the attic room of the glassblowing shed, but it proved an unsafe retreat. Late at night the boys used one of Menlo Park's lesser-known inventions, an enormous ratcheting rattle mounted in a soapbox and turned by a crankshaft. It was known as "the corpse-reviver." They pressed it against the wall outside Boehm's bedroom, turned the crank, and produced a sound like a dynamite explosion, knocking Boehm clear out of bed.9
Boehm complained to Edison, who never bothered to solve the problem, though later he probably wished he had. Boehm quit in October 1880 and found work with a new Edison rival, the Manhattan-based United States Electric Lighting Company.
U.S. Electric was founded in 1878 to exploit the lighting patents of Hiram Maxim. Late in 1880 U.S. Electric installed 150 incandescent lamps at the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company in Manhattan. The lamps were round, not pear shaped like Edison's, and the filament was shaped not like a horseshoe but like a capital M. They nonetheless looked familiar, and there was a good reason for this. Earlier in 1880, Maxim had appeared in Menlo Park. In a display of courteousness that he later regretted, Edison spent an entire day showing him around and explaining the lamp-making process. Maxim then went back to his own lab at U.S. Electric, copied Edison's design,