Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [56]
Not much troubled by his daughter's sadness, Edison devoted himself to winning over Mina's devoutly Methodist family. Although her father, Lewis Miller, earned his money in farm equipment, he gained fame as the cofounder of the Chautauqua Institute, a new type of religious enterprise in western New York. Nineteenth-century Protestants harbored deep suspicions about most leisure activities. Virtue lay in hard work, they believed, while reading novels, attending plays, or going to the beach simply provided occasions for sin. At the Chautauqua Institute, Lewis Miller and a minister friend created an educational summer camp where middle-class believers could come together to listen to lectures on science and literature—as well as swim, boat, and fish. Chautauqua made vacationing safe for Protestants.23
Although the Millers were religious liberals by the standards of the time, they were far more church-oriented than Thomas Edison. To the extent that he thought about religious matters at all, he was a deist: He thought the design of the universe indicated a creator, but he did not believe in a personal God and never went to church. "My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sunday—it must be incrusted [sic] with a sort of irreligious tartar," he wrote in his diary. Later in the summer he traveled to Chautauqua, where he had an opportunity to charm the Miller family. Lewis Miller needed little convincing—what better match for his daughter than a wealthy inventor and industrialist like himself? Lewis's wife, Mary, was worried by Edison's ungodliness, but she accepted his explanation that he avoided church because he was hard of hearing. She was also won over by Edison's storytelling skills, which became legendary in the Miller family. "Our folkes try to tell storys," Mary Miller wrote in a letter, "when they gett along a little ways they will stop and say O if Mr Edison was hear he could tell it."24
Mina Miller Edison at about the time of her marriage to Edison.
As for Mina's two young brothers—ages ten and twelve—Edison knew the way to a boy's heart. He sent them a telegraph set and a telescope, as well his own favorite: the induction coil. Edison gave elaborate instructions for making the battery ("be sure in pouring the sulphuric acid that you do not let any of it spatter into your eyes") and explained that turning the crank built up an electrical charge that could be administered to unwitting victims. "The wheel should be turned about 200 times per minute for a black cat and 199 1/2 for a cat with a sanguine temperment [sic]," Edison told the boys. "This coil is very powerful. I tried it on a Dutch carpenter today and it knocked him down instantly."25
After his stay at Chautauqua, Edison persuaded Mina to join him and the Gillilands on a trip into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Edison taught Mina Morse code, and on long drives through the mountains the pair conversed secretly by tapping messages onto each other's hands. On one of the last drives, Edison asked her to marry him. She tapped out "yes" in reply.26
The pair was married in Akron, Ohio, in February 1886, a year after they first met. On their honeymoon the couple traveled to Chicago, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, Florida, before arriving in Fort Myers, where Edison was building a winter home and laboratory. While in Florida he sketched plans for telegraph and telephone improvements, a new cotton-picking machine, a cream separator, and a hearing aid. He and Mina tried some more fanciful experiments as well. "Shock an oyster see if it won't paralize [sic] his shell muscle & make the shell fly open," he wrote in a lab notebook. "Dead failure," he scrawled below.27
For their northern residence, the couple chose a house in an area called Llewellyn Park in Orange, New Jersey, not far from Newark. Llewellyn Park was the first planned residential suburb in the United States, an exclusive neighborhood of private streets and grand houses on landscaped, wooded lots. The Edison house, known as Glenmont, was enormous—a twenty-three-room mansion in the Queen Anne style with