Edison
Baldwin, Neil
A fter meeting Thomas Alva Edison on a transatlantic liner, Henry James described him in a letter as "the great bland simple deaf street-boy-faced Edison." True, but nineteenth-century America liked...
...Although nominally a specialist in modern American poetry whose earlier books include a biography of William Carlos Williams, he nonetheless makes an effortless transition to Edison's laboratory, covering the major inventions of the Menlo Park heyday in clear, accessible language, illustrated with reproductions of Edison's own drawings...
...In Paris he complained that meager continental breakfasts of rolls and coffee were "very poor for a man to do any work upon," and pondered French joie de vivre: "What has struck me so far is the absolute laziness of everybody over here...
...He wasted no time acquiring another young wife, 20-year-old Mina Miller, daughter of an Akron industrialist...
...Her death also coincided with the publication of American Nervousness by Dr...
...Martin's Press...
...Here then is the reason for his cold dismissal of the hundreds of deaf people who begged him to invent a hearing aid...
...He later sold the patent to A.B...
...Barnum streak is evident in the ad: "Like Kissing—Every Succeeding Impression is as Good as the First—Endorsed By Every One Who Has Tried It!—Only a Gentle Pressure Used...
...He switched to carbon, claiming that he got the idea by absentmindedly rolling lampblack in his fingers...
...Edison demonstrated it with "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and Sarah Bernhardt traveled to Menlo Park to recite lines from Phedre into it...
...the message was engraved as series of bumps in the foil surface, with playback achieved by a spring-held stylus...
...One day his experiment started a fire, providing him with a more Algeresque explanation for his partial deafness...
...But his chivalry did not extend to the shadows in his own home...
...People here seem to have established an elaborate system of loafing...
...called "addled," he was taught at home by his mother until he went off to seek his fortune at age twelve, working as a "news butch" (newsboy) on the railroad, selling snacks and the Detroit papers to passengers on the Port Huron train...
...True, but nineteenth-century America liked him that way...
...moment...
...Edison personified this tension, says Baldwin, and relieved it by rationalizing his deafness and using it as a defense mechanism, claiming that it "set him apart from the masses of men, gave him an excuse to turn away from tiresome social involvements, making him a far more productive thinker...
...Unable to pry him away from his lab, where he regularly stayed all night, Mary took to drink and nervous breakdowns while her husband benefited humanity...
...The author traces Edison's anti-intellectual intellectualism back to a national trait that was already well underway before he was born...
...He rose quickly to be chief telegrapher for Western Union, quitting when he found backers to finance his invention of fastertechniques...
...Expelled from school after only three months for what our age calls attention-deficit disorder and his Florence King is a regular columnist for National Review...
...as eminence grise, he would be her invention...
...William Leslie, another failed farmer whose letters his father returned marked with spelling errors, died of cancer two years after his brother...
...What do they work at...
...Edison spoke in gnostic terms about "good" electric light and "evil" gaslight, casting himself, says Baldwin, as a knight in shining armor come to rid the world of shadows...
...To people requesting secrets of his success he wrote: "I work 18 hours daily—have been doing this for 45 years...
...T his absorbing biography is a perfect blend of art and science thanks to Neil Baldwin's gift for making the technical sections as interesting as the human story...
...I don't understand it at all...
...Mina's own children by Edison turned out well—Charles was assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New Jersey, and one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom—but her stepchildren were a mess...
...The phonograph, pioneered in 1837 by a Frenchman, initially used a pig's bristle and a sheet of paper coated with lampblack rotating on a cylinder...
...There is nothing more untrue than this...
...and if Fate had placed it within my power to be of some service to him, I feel that I have not striven in vain...
...Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration...
...Yes, sir, it's mostly hard work...
...Her latest book, The Florence King Reader, has just been published by St...
...Self-effacement paid off for Mina, who spent her married life "creating and burnishing the later, mellowed image of Thomas Edison...
...Young Tom was not ragged but he had other drawbacks...
...As one wrote in the normal way, the needle tip punctured holes in the surface of a sheet of paper to create a stencil that was then placed over clean sheets of papers and inked with a roller to reproduce as many as fifty copies...
...He cultivated this just-plainfolks pose assiduously, endearing himself to the American public with awshucks pronouncements that downplayed the importance of formal education and superior brainpower: Any other bright-minded fellow can accomplish just as much if he will stick like hell and remember that nothing that's any good works by itself, just to please you...
...too many ideas being developed and introduced too rapidly: B aldwin's analysis of Edison's workaholism runs the gamut from William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to the landmark sociological study Homo Faber by Andriano Tilgher...
...Marion became an expatriate...
...In developing the electric light Edison first used platinum for the filament, but it stayed lit only briefly...
...George Beard, who blamed "the anxiety habit" on "the trials and tribulations of modern urban civilization...
...This, says the author, was a lie designed to make the world see him as Archimedes in a "Eureka...
...Mina guarded "his" chair lest anyone else sit in it, and always cheerfully played his favorite song, "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen," keeping the record at the ready so she could grab it fast the instant she sensed the savage beast needed soothing...
...Tom Junior changed his name twice, failed at mushroom farming, and was found dead in a hotel room...
...a few days later he got it up to one hundred hours by shaping the filament like a horseshoe...
...One cranked it by hand while shouting into a funnel...
...She stated proudly that she never nagged him, but accepted that "his work was his life . . . accomplishing great things for the world...
...you got to make the damn thing work...
...His deafness drew him to the telegraph, a "clattering embrace of dots and dashes he could understand...
...Subconsciously aware of the split between his cerebral and practical selves, he did not want to alleviate deafness, because "he refused to surrender what was essentially his passport to the inner world...
...One of the earliest inventions was the 1876 Electric Pen...
...Loath to admit that it was a congenital defect, he blamed the conductor who boxed his ears...
...Charles Steinmetz, the German-born chief engineer of General Electric, reacted to this anybody-can American modesty with European horror: This is the attitude Edison has always taken, declaring himself a mere practical man, and the newspaper men have expanded on this and so created the popular belief that Edison does not know anything about theory and science, but merely experiments and tries anything he or anybody else can think of...
...He proudly punched in and out of his lab every day: a typical time card for a week in 1912 shows 111 hours...
...Dick of Chicago, who used it to invent the mimeograph...
...Edison's P.T...
...His first carbon bulb burned for thirteen hours with the power of thirty candles...
...T o hear Thomas Alva Edison tell it, he was just a regular fella who happened to become an electrical engineer...
...A compulsive reader who devoured Victor Hugo and technical manuals with equal pleasure, he set up a chemistry lab in a corner of the baggage car...
...It was articulated by Tocqueville, who discerned an ever-present tension in the American psyche between aggressiveness and withdrawn individualism...
...Like the prurient man who can turn any conversation around to sex, Edison could turn any conversation around to work...
...More secure than Mary, she did not try to change him, but responded to his workaholism by becoming a workaholic her-self, perpetually redecorating the house and hurling herself into civic good works...
...EDISON: INVENTING THE CENTURY Neil Baldwin Hyperion / 531 pages / $27.95 reviewed by FLORENCE KING 70 The American Spectator May 1995 Baldwin marshals a wealth of evidence to prove that Edison had been experimeriting with carbon for several years, and that he abandoned platinum because of its scarcity and cost...
...When do these people work...
...Descended from Dutch immigrants (the original name was Edeson), he had a sturdy, blue-eyed yeoman look that made him, writes Neil Baldwin, the "incarnation of Ragged Dick," hero of the Horatio Alger stories...
...17I The American Spectator May 1995 71...
...As his deafness increased, she even learned Morse code and tapped out conversations on his knee...
...Edison's improvement, which he called the Speaking Telegraph, consisted of a brass cylinder covered with tinfoil...
...In 1884, soon after Edison lit up New York, Mary died at 29 of "congestion of the brain," a Victorianism that Baldwin thinks may have concealed a suicide...
...Already going gray at 24, he opened his own lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, whom he rarely saw except when he fathered their three children...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
