1. CHAPTER I
THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial
acquisition by the American people, with incalculable
additions to their actual and potential wealth.
By the rational compromise with England in the dispute
over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured
during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three
hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land,
and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley.
Our active "policy of the Pacific'' dated from
that hour. With swift and clinching succession came
the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848,
saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west
of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United
States. Thus in about eighteen months there had
been pieced into the national domain for quick development
and exploitation a region as large as the
entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War
of Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries
was embraced all the great American gold-field, just
on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the
Sierra Nevada nine days before Mexico signed away
her rights in California and in all the vague, remote
hinterland facing Cathayward.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where
the attempt to secure opportunities of expansion as
well as larger liberty for the individual took quite
different form. The old absolutist system of government
was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were
tottering. The red lava of deep revolutionary fires
oozed up through many glowing cracks in the political
crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the
wild outbursts of insurrection midway in the fifth
decade failed and died away was not surprising, for
the superincumbent deposits of tradition and convention
were thick. But the retrospect indicates that
many reforms and political changes were accomplished,
although the process involved the exile of not a few
ardent spirits to America, to become leading statesmen,
inventors, journalists, and financiers. In 1847,
too, Russia began her tremendous march eastward into
Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first
gains on the littoral of northern Africa. In England
the fierce fervor of the Chartist movement, with its
violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering
down and passing pervasively into numerous practical
schemes for social and political amelioration, constituting
in their entirety a most profound change
throughout every part of the national life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and
his relations to them and to the events of the past
sixty years are the subject of this narrative. Aside
from the personal interest that attaches to the picturesque
career, so typically American, there is a broader
aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the
Nineteenth Century'' touches the welfare and progress
of the race. It is difficult at any time to determine
the effect of any single invention, and the investigation
becomes more difficult where inventions of the
first class have been crowded upon each other in rapid
and bewildering succession. But it will be admitted
that in Edison one deals with a central figure of the
great age that saw the invention and introduction in
practical form of the telegraph, the submarine cable,
the telephone, the electric light, the electric railway,
the electric trolley-car, the storage battery, the electric
motor, the phonograph, the wireless telegraph; and
that the influence of these on the world's affairs has
not been excelled at any time by that of any other
corresponding advances in the arts and sciences.
These pages deal with Edison's share in the great
work of the last half century in abridging distance,
communicating intelligence, lessening toil, improving
illumination, recording forever the human voice; and
on behalf of inventive genius it may be urged that its
beneficent results and gifts to mankind compare with
any to be credited to statesman, warrior, or creative
writer of the same period.
Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress,
the first half of the nineteenth century had passed
very profitably when Edison appeared—every year
marked by some notable achievement in the arts and
sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition
in commerce and industry. There had been
exactly four decades of steam navigation on American
waters. Railways were growing at the rate of
nearly one thousand miles annually. Gas had become
familiar as a means of illumination in large cities.
Looms and tools and printing-presses were everywhere
being liberated from the slow toil of man-power.
The first photographs had been taken. Chloroform,
nitrous oxide gas, and ether had been placed at the
service of the physician in saving life, and the revolver,
guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies
for slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and elements
had become available in large numbers, gases had
been liquefied and solidified, and the range of useful
heat and cold indefinitely extended. The safety-lamp
had been given to the miner, the caisson to the bridge-builder,
the anti-friction metal to the mechanic for
bearings. It was already known how to vulcanize
rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The application of
machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the
embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the
automobile were heralded in primitive prototypes. The
gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was
foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the
smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought
with it, like the friction match, one of the most profound
influences in modifying domestic life, and making
it different from that of all preceding time.
Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their
novelty, most of them were in the earlier stages of
development. But it is when we turn to electricity
that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new
kingdom of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word
"utilization'' or "application'' is better than discovery,
for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena
noted by experimenters from Gilbert to
Franklin and Faraday awaited the invention that
could alone render them useful to mankind. The
eighteenth century, keenly curious and ceaselessly active
in this fascinating field of investigation, had not,
after all, left much of a legacy in either principles or
appliances. The lodestone and the compass; the
frictional machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of conductors
and insulators; the identity of electricity and
the thunder-storm flash; the use of lightning-rods;
the physiological effects of an electrical shock—these
constituted the bulk of the bequest to which philosophers
were the only heirs. Pregnant with possibilities
were many of the observations that had been
recorded. But these few appliances made up the
meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth century
entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences
now such an intimate part of "human nature's
daily food'' that the average American to-day
pays more for his electrical service than he does for
bread.
With the first year of the new century came Volta's
invention of the chemical battery as a means of producing
electricity. A well-known Italian picture represents
Volta exhibiting his apparatus before the
young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the
Peninsula its treasure of ancient art and founding an
ephemeral empire. At such a moment this gift of despoiled
Italy to the world was a noble revenge, setting
in motion incalculable beneficent forces and agencies.
For the first time man had command of a steady supply
of electricity without toil or effort. The useful
results obtainable previously from the current of a
frictional machine were not much greater than those
to be derived from the flight of a rocket. While the
frictional appliance is still employed in medicine, it
ranks with the flint axe and the tinder-box in industrial
obsolescence. No art or trade could be founded
on it; no diminution of daily work or increase of daily
comfort could be secured with it. But the little battery
with its metal plates in a weak solution proved
a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and
controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will.
That which was wild had become domesticated; regular
crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from
brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation
was forever left behind.
Immediately new processes of inestimable value
revealed themselves; new methods were suggested.
Almost all the electrical arts now employed made
their beginnings in the next twenty-five years, and
while the more extensive of them depend to-day on
the dynamo for electrical energy, some of the most
important still remain in loyal allegiance to the older
source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications,
and new types were evolved—the storage,
the double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies
next pointed to the use of heat, and the thermoelectric
cell emerged, embodying the application of
flame to the junction of two different metals. Davy,
of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current across
the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic
arc, forerunner of electric lighting, shed its bright
beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of
water by electrolytic action was recognized and made
the basis of communicating at a distance even
before the days of the electromagnet. The ties
that bind electricity and magnetism in twinship of
relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's
work in induction gave the world at once the
dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a
star,'' said Emerson. To all the coal-fields and all
the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels
of industry. Not only was it now possible to convert
mechanical energy into electricity cheaply and in
illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed
its ubiquitous availability as a motive power. Boats
were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even papers
printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy
sprang into active being on both sides of the
Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy,
upon which he was to leave so indelible an imprint,
had barely struggled into acceptance by the public.
In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a
ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in
1840, Morse had taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic
telegraph, the principle of which is dominating
in the art to this day. Four years later the
memorable message "What hath God wrought!'' was
sent by young Miss Ellsworth over his circuits, and
incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the
action of the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in
nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung
between Washington and New York, under private
enterprise, the Government having declined to buy
the Morse system for $100,000. Everything was crude
and primitive. The poles were two hundred feet apart
and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare,
copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the
circuit was "down'' for thirty-six days in the first six
months. The little glass-knob insulators made seductive
targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to insulate
the line wire were limited to coating it with tar
or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees
in the neighborhood. The farthest western reach of
the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three-ply
iron wire mounted on square glass insulators with
a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that office,
where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the
magnets in use to receive the signals sent with the aid
of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as
seventy-five pounds apiece. But the business was
fortunately small at the outset, until the new device,
patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its
utility. Then came the great outburst of activity.
Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the
whole occupied country with a network, and the first
great electrical industry was a pronounced success,
yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of
electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp struggle for bare
existence, during which such a man as the founder of
Cornell University had been glad to get breakfast in
New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.