The Wizard of Menlo Park (31 page)

The fire had broken out at the dinner hour, when Edison happened to be at home. He was one of the first to get to the scene. Neither he nor his assistants thought that the fire would spread to the neighboring concrete buildings, and no one initially took action to save what they could. When Mina arrived, she rushed in and out of the company’s general offices, carrying papers out of harm’s way while Edison stood by and watched the firefighters. Her rescue efforts ended only when the flames reached that building, too. For seven hours, the firefighters did their best in the bitterly cold night, but the fires claimed ten of the eighteen buildings of the complex. Miraculously, the disaster claimed only one victim, William Troeber, an employee who had rushed back into a building with a fire extinguisher under his arm, believing, erroneously it turned out, that some of his coworkers were still inside.

The facilities for phonograph and record manufacturing were lost. The estimated damage was $3 million to $5 million, of which, the company told reporters, insurance covered about $3 million. This latter number appears to have been dispensed in order to give employees, jobbers, dealers, and customers reassurance that the Edison works would have no difficulty recovering. A private letter, however, suggests that the insurance coverage was minimal, as Edison had been supremely confident when he began to build concrete buildings that coverage for fire damage was superfluous.

Once the embers were cool and company managers could take stock, they discovered that in some ways the fire had been considerate, skipping over two thousand gallons of high-proof alcohol that came through undamaged. They also discovered that all of the master molds of the company’s recordings were undamaged—and they would receive a kind offer of the loan of record presses from Victor. But on the night of the fire, when none of this was known, when the fire had yet to be contained and was still hopping from one building to the next and when the prospects were the bleakest, Edison’s equanimity was put to a test. His immediate reaction? He cracked jokes, laughed, and declared, “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” Nothing could rattle him.

The striking absence of visible discouragement on Edison’s part inspired a
New York Times
editorial titled “Abnormality Like His a Blessing.” The
Times
ascribed Edison’s “abnormality” to his temperament, a new concept that was explained as being beyond the control of an individual’s will. (At that time, temperament was said to be controlled by the thyroid and pituitary glands.) Some “abnormality” should have been expected, however, from the abnormal experience of playing for thirty years the role of the celebrated Wizard. His fame had been built on his work, then reinforced by his eagerness to be the hardest-working man in the invention business. Edison reacted to the disaster as if it were a tonic: “It’s like the old days to have something real to buck up against.”

“I never intend to retire,” Edison said in an interview in 1911. “Work made the earth a paradise for me.” Not merely
made,
past tense, but
continued to make
for him a paradise. He voiced heresy when he said that he did not believe that a paradise awaited in the afterlife. He was speaking, however, as a man who experienced paradisiacal pleasure every moment he was at work. No wonder he could not imagine doing anything else.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FRIEND FORD

I
N
1896,
WHEN
Thomas Edison first met Henry Ford, Edison was famous, and Ford was not. If Edison failed to remember the encounter afterward, the likely reason is not self-absorption but lopsided arithmetic: one luminary, many strangers clamoring to meet him. The occasion was a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies held at a beach hotel near Coney Island. Edison was attending in an honorific role, having sold off his electric light interests and thrown himself into his mining venture. It was not his customary practice to spend time outside of his own workplace, but for three days he settled into the role of passive conventioneer.

At dinner on the first day, Edison found himself seated at a large oval table with senior representatives of various large electric utilities. The conversation centered on the bright prospects for the industry, poised to supply the power for electric cars that would replace horses. In the midst of these happy speculations, the superintendent of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Alexander Dow, spoke up to mention a curiosity. Dow’s chief engineer, thirty-three-year-old Henry Ford, whom he had brought along with him, was an amateur inventor who had just built a cart that was powered not by electricity but by a gasoline-powered engine. It was equipped with four bicycle wheels; Ford called it a Quadricycle.

Asked to explain how his carriage was powered, Ford addressed everyone at the table and Edison cupped his ear, trying to catch Ford’s words. A man seated by Edison offered to change places with Ford so that Edison could hear better. Once the switch was effected, Edison peppered Ford with questions; Ford sketched out his answers. Then came the moment that Ford would say changed his life: “Young man, that’s the thing!” Edison told him, pounding the table for emphasis. “Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do either, for they have a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.” With encouragement from the man whom Ford regarded as “the greatest inventive genius in the world” ringing in his ears, Ford returned home with the conviction that he should persevere. He told his wife, “You are not going to see much of me until I am through with this car.”

We have only Ford’s account of the meeting, and the purported details were set down on paper for the first time no fewer than thirty years later. The stagy dialogue rings false; nor did Ford immediately quit his day job at Edison Illuminating. It would take three more years before he felt ready to try to commercialize his automobile designs as a full-time entrepreneur. But he did meet Edison at the convention and did have a conversation that must have roughly resembled what he later recollected. The two had a second conversation, too: Ford recalled that Edison invited him to ride with him on the train back to New York City at the conclusion of the convention. Edison did not resume their conversation about the internal combustion engine but instead spoke of other topics, including his boyhood memories of Michigan.

There is no question that Henry Ford felt much encouraged. He would later regard Edison with worshipful regard and spend stupendous sums to honor the inventor. Whether Edison dispensed as large a dollop of encouragement as Ford perceived is open to doubt, however. Edison was reliably polite in such situations, but he virtually never praised the technical feats of others. Edison’s subsequent actions suggest that he forgot the encounter; if he remembered it at all, he chose to pretend he did not. The second encounter came eleven years later, in 1907, when Ford, now the head of his own eponymous company, wrote Edison with a mixture of familiarity and worshipfulness: “My Dear Mr. Edison,” it began. “I am fitting up a den for my own private use at the factory and I thought I would like to have photographs of about three of the greatest inventors of this age to feast my eyes on in idle moments. Needless to say Mr. Edison is the first of the three and I would esteem it a great personal favor if you would send me a photograph of yourself.”

Ford apparently believed that the life-changing impression left upon him by Edison eleven years earlier had been equally memorable to Edison. He may also have felt a comfortable familiarity because he had recently been contacted by Edison’s son William, now twenty-nine years old, who was attempting to sell Ford Motor Company spark plugs of his own design (Will, who had briefly attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School and was determined to succeed on his own, had not kept his father informed about his activities).

If Edison remembered the earlier encounter with Ford, his response to Ford’s simple request for a photograph seems strange: Edison instructed his secretary not to respond. This was likely prompted by a spasm of competitiveness: Ford was one of many internal-combustion-engine-equipped car manufacturers that competed with the electric car equipped with Edison’s newly developed alkaline battery. Or Edison’s rebuff may have been the reaction of a famous person irritated by the presumptuous familiarity of an utter stranger whom he had no memory of ever meeting.

The episode is of interest because it occurred when Henry Ford was not yet a household name and was merely one of more than a hundred automobile manufacturers. The next year, he introduced the Model T, his fame swiftly reached the ethereal altitude of Edison’s, and his business success far exceeded that of the older man’s. This change in relative status made possible a friendship, not because Edison sought the company of the famous and successful—he did not seek the company of anyone—but because it removed the basis of Edison’s fear that a business acquaintance sought to move close for ulterior reasons. As for celebrity, the two men now shared personal knowledge of the tribulations that came with fame.

Such was Edison’s inherently solitary nature, however, that he would not likely have been willing to meet Ford in person again had it not been for the behind-the-scenes arrangements of William Bee, the sales manager at the Edison Storage Battery Company. In April 1911, Bee persuaded Edison to make amends for ignoring Ford’s earlier request for a photograph and prepare one inscribed with a carefully measured compliment: “To Henry Ford. One of a group of men who have helped to make U.S.A. the most progressive nation in the World.” Bee sent it off to Ford with a cover letter claiming that “Mr. Edison was only too glad to send you his photograph.” At the same time, Bee sent through an intermediary a note inviting Ford to visit Edison at his laboratory. Ford accepted. That was the easy part for Bee. Persuading Edison to make himself available for Ford’s visit required months of unsuccessful efforts. Finally, after Bee had arranged for Ford to pay his visit in January 1912, Edison reluctantly acquiesced: “Guess I will be here on the 9th.”

Ford arrived in Orange eager to make a pitch to his hero: Would Edison be willing to design an electrical system—battery, generator, and starter—for the Model T? The car in its current incarnation had none. It was started with a hand crank, which was at best inconvenient to use, and when it kicked back, dangerous. Edison did not accept Ford’s offer immediately but was sufficiently intrigued to mull the proposition over and return with a counterproposal later in 1912. Would Ford be interested in financing the development work on Edison’s battery? His note to “Friend Ford” explained that he had self-financed his battery experiments with profits from other lines of business but these funds limited what he could do. Alternatively, “I could go to Wall St. and get more, but my experience over there is as sad as Chopin’s Funeral March. I keep away.”

No major business figure detested Wall Street as much as Thomas Edison—except Henry Ford. The two men had this in common. “Wall Street” was less a geographic place than a shorthand for grasping Jews. The two men had lots of things to say about Jews, Ford doing so publicly and Edison, privately. If Jews “are as wise as they claim to be,” Ford wrote in his autobiography, “they will labor to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish.” Edison sent Ford clippings to add to his file on “The Jewish Question.” “Please read this—it’s very funny,” Edison added as an annotation to the text of a speech delivered to a convention of the National Builder’s Supply Association that he sent Ford. Edison helpfully highlighted with pencil the two paragraphs at the beginning, which were the speaker’s opening jokes. As a self-identified Irishman, the speaker, one Herbert N. Casson, claimed to speak for all Irish, lamenting their willingness to fight someone else’s war and then lose whatever it was they were supposed to have gained. “I have generally found that after the fight some Jew has got what we started out to get.” The audience’s laughter was transcribed along with the punch line.

The men’s anti-Semitism shaped their business plans. Henry Ford would not permit “Wall Street” to get hold of his revered Edison. He stepped forward to offer Edison forgivable loans, at 5 percent annual interest, to finance the development work on the battery. The loans were secured by future royalties that Edison’s laboratory would earn from batteries; Ford said Edison could expect sales to Ford Motor of $4 million a year. The package on offer had everything Edison could ever want: It paid homage to his expertise in electrical systems; it gave a new direction for his battery work, in case the electric car did not succeed commercially; and it provided complete autonomy, free of obligation to report to Wall Street financiers about his spending. Once staff members for Ford and Edison worked out legal and financial details, Edison signed off on the agreement in November 1912. The next month, the first slice of $150,000 arrived; the following March, another $100,000; and by the end of the year, Edison had borrowed a total of $700,000. More payments from Ford followed.

Edison did not abandon his previous ambitions to make a success of an electric car; he simply made Henry Ford his new partner. In January 1914, Ford announced that he planned within the year to begin manufacturing an electric car using a lightweight battery that Edison had been preparing for some time. Ford told reporters, “I think Mr. Edison is the greatest man in the world and I guess everyone does.” Ford, who had also just announced the adoption of the “Five-Dollar Day,” effectively doubling the wages of virtually all of his workers, was at this historical moment the single most influential businessperson in the country. The New York newspapers, however, had not realized it. When they reported on the plans for the Ford-Edison electric car, they mostly paid compliments to Edison. Ford was portrayed as the party in the transaction who was most in need (“Henry Ford Seeks Mr. Edison’s Aid.”).

Edison was not averse to the flattery, but more important, he responded to the opportunity to have a relationship with an equal, another technically inclined person who had been pushed into the strange land of the extremely famous. The two men brought their families together, too, intertwining personal and business ties. The Edisons visited the Fords at their home in Dearborn, Michigan; the Fords came down to Fort Myers, Florida, to share a winter vacation, discuss their mutual interest in gardening, and “motor” together in the Everglades area. Edison did not realize that the combination of the two families would increase a celebrity index exponentially greater than his alone, drawing reporters and curiosity seekers and unwanted attention to his remote winter hideaway. On the evening that the Fords arrived, two thousand townspeople came out to welcome them and ogle. Seeing reporters present, Edison is said to have complained, “There is only one Fort Myers, and now ninety million people are going to find out.”

It was fitting that Fort Myers would play a role in the broadening personal relationship between Edison and Ford. The last time that Edison had let down his natural guard and spent vacation time with a business colleague as he did with Ford was when he and Ezra Gilliland had bought twin plots in Fort Myers thirty years earlier. Gilliland had introduced Edison to his future wife, but the two men were not equals in the shared realm of the phonograph business. When Edison thought that Gilliland had taken pecuniary advantage of him, the relationship had ended acrimoniously. Since then, Edison had deliberately kept acquaintances from coming closer. “Mr. Edison has few friends,” Mina once observed. “Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by himself and in himself—shut out from the social contacts open to most men.”

Now, in the company of Ford, someone much wealthier than he, Edison did not need to worry about behind-the-scenes machinations. He relaxed. Ford became his neighbor—just like Gilliland, though undoubtedly unaware of the earlier history—when Ford bought a plot of land for his winter vacation home adjoining Edison’s.

Except for vacations, the two men did not have many opportunities to spend time in person with each other, and they did not, as a rule, correspond with each other. If they needed to communicate, they relied upon their secretaries to relay messages. One exception, and a revealing one, is a letter that Ford wrote Edison in March 1914, after returning home following his first visit to Fort Myers. He maintained a formal tone when addressing Edison, sixteen years his senior—“My dear Mr. Edison,” he began. He and his wife wished to thank him for the enjoyable vacation they had had with the Edisons. No, that did not capture his feelings; this vacation was “in fact the most enjoyable one we have ever had.” With the thank-you out of the way, he added a little bit of small talk, one manufacturer addressing another.