EDISON: Last Days of the Wizard

Few Americans have been idolized more in their own lifetime than Thomas Edison, the self-educated “wizard” of practical science, whose countless inventions- among them automatic telegraph systems, electric generators, storage batteries, the phonograph, and the first practical incandescent lamp—have so irrevocably altered our civilization. What follows is an account of Edison’s busy old age, when his every movement seemed to the public the fulfillment of a legend. It is taken from Matthew Josephson’s major biography, due this month from McGraw-Hill.

It was only after the turn of the century that the electrical age really arrived in America. Just prior to that time, through the nineties, the country as a whole, save for a few luminous city districts, still lived by the smoky glow of oil lamps or by gaslight. Then, thanks to long-distance transmission, power stations mushroomed everywhere.

Electricity gave a new tempo and a new character to all industry. It was easily carried across mountain barriers and rivers from power sites and converted into a multitude of uses. The ponderous steam-powered mills of the nineteenth century had been darkened by their huge belts and shafts. Now the electric motor permitted the greatest flexibility in the design of the factory. The introduction of electric motors into assembly-line operations during the early decades of the century, as at Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant, had the effect of raising industrial efficiency by about fifty per cent.

When men looked about them they saw that the buildings of their cities reached toward the clouds, because of the electric elevator; that thousands of electric streetcars and railway cars carried them about with an unheard-of ease and convenience; that incandescent lights blazed everywhere. And when they contemplated these changes they thought with one accord of plain Thomas A. Edison. That other brilliant inventors coming after him had developed high-voltage transmission, and an A.C. motor adaptable to manifold industrial use, mattered little. Leadership in inaugurating the electrical age was almost universally attributed to Mr. Edison.

Edison’s legendary success story, like his expressive physiognomy—reproduced millions of times on his cylindrical records—was familiar to all men. In short, he was almost universally regarded as one of the real “makers” of America, well-suited to serve as a folk hero of modern times.

He had gained both weight and girth as he grew older, yet kept them under control. With his big head, white hair, inky-black eyebrows and large pale countenance, clad soberly in dark clothes, with a rolledcollar shirt and string necktie, he could pass easily for an old American worthy out of the early years of the Republic.

The story of the intimate friendship between Henry Ford and Edison forms an important chapter in both men’s later careers and strongly illuminates the special qualities of each. They were similar in social origin and background, shared many interests in common, and yet were strikingly different in mind and temperament. Ford was extremely sentimental; he kept the most trivial memorabilia of his boyhood days and loved rustic dances, old tunes, and country folkways, in which he tried to revive interest among the helots of the assembly lines. Though one of the chief architects of the machine age, he amused himself by recreating at immense cost an old-fashioned country village in Dearborn, such as he had known in his youth. He was endowed with a fine engineering talent as well as a fierce will to power; nevertheless he was an exceedingly simple being at bottom, and dangerously ignorant.

Since their first encounter in 1898, when Ford was still an employee of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, the automobile magnate had regarded Edison with a reverence that was almost superstitious. Their next meeting came about ten years later, in 1909, when Ford was embroiled in his long court fight to break the monopoly of the Detroit manufacturing group that owned the automobile engine patents of G. B. Seiden. At a critical point in this affair, Ford is said to have walked in on Edison at his laboratory, unannounced, to seek his advice. The Model T was under way, and the future of his mass production plans depended on his decision. Edison advised him to stay out of the automobile trade association and fight their licensing monopoly. When Ford triumphed over his opponents in court in 1911, he felt again that the old inventor had guided him well.

Edison called him “Henry”; but Ford never addressed the inventor save as “Mr. Edison.” Edison was quick of thought and speech, while Ford was a dull talker. At first the older man had felt the other to be something of a simpleton, but after a while he said he was “afraid of him, for I find him most right where I thought him most wrong.”

In friendship, Ford could be most generous. Late in 1912, he decided to equip his austere black T-model, up to then started by a hand-crank, with a storage battery, self-starter, and electric lamps. His first thought was to use Edison batteries, and he soon contracted for a big supply of them. “I will design a starter, new dynamo, motor, new rigging and proper battery,” Edison wrote in a letter of agreement in 1914. If tests proved the mechanism satisfactory, the Edison Storage Battery Company was to manufacture one hundred thousand battery-generator sets especially patterned for the Ford car. To finance this undertaking the Ford Motor Company advanced $1,150,000 on account.

The Edison alkaline battery, however, showed a relatively low voltage and did not function well in circuit with an automobile self-starter; Ford was as keenly disappointed as Edison in these results. Then, still eager to help his friend, Ford undertook to build a small electric car powered by the Edison batteries he had already ordered. After visiting Edison in Florida in the winter of 1915, he returned to Detroit to find his engineers experimenting with an electric car designed to be driven by ordinary lead-acid batteries. According to his assistants, “he raised the devil. … They weren’t to build a car for lead batteries; they were to use Edison batteries, he insisted.” But the Edison battery proved to be inadaptable for such use, and by mutual agreement was abandoned.

A the same time their relations continued to be intimate on other than business grounds. In February, 1914, Mr. and Mrs. Ford had first come to Edison’s winter retreat in Fort Myers for a long visit. Under the tutelage of the naturalist John Burroughs, Ford had become so enamored of nature studies that on returning from a journey to England he had brought with him a collection of 380 songbirds, with which he hoped to stock America’s forests. On this occasion Burroughs was invited to join Edison and Ford in southern Florida. “We’ll go down to the Everglades and revert back to Nature,” the inventor promised. “We will get away from fictitious civilization.”

Between them Edison and Ford had done more perhaps than any other living men to foster, if not a fictitious civilization, then a highly mechanized one, and its mass culture. There was a touching incongruity, therefore, in their tour of the Everglades and the cypress forests, under the guidance of John Burroughs, in their bird-watching and their examination of exotic flowers. In those days the tall, thin, bearded Burroughs, “a philosopher who worshiped God’s truth in Nature,” by his pen and his example led mankind to the outdoors. Ford enjoyed himself so heartily that not long afterward he bought a winter home near Edison’s.

In 1915, when Edison and Ford were visiting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco, Ford took Edison, together with Harvey Firestone, out to Luther Burbank’s plantation at Santa Rosa. The inventor had long admired the work of the California botanist, and now conceived the idea of “botanizing” for himself in the beautiful gardens surrounding his Florida home. As with other wise old men, it was to be the happy recreation of his late years.

His own methods of experimentation, he pointed out, were similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. “He plants an acre and when it is in bloom he inspects it and picks out a single plant, of which he saves the seed. He has a sharp eye and can pick out of thousands a plant that has promise of what he wants.” From this Burbank could propagate an improved variety with fair certainty of success. That was the essence of Edison’s empirical method in chemical research.

During the California trip, Edison, who found touring the countryside in an open automobile a splendid distraction, made plans with Ford, Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone, Ford’s supplier of rubber tires, to go on a long camping trip by automobile through New England and New York State during the following summer. Edison himself made all the logistic arrangements for their trip, providing for a “six” touring car to carry the party and a T-model Ford truck to follow it, bearing tents and camping equipment, camp servants and drivers. At the last moment, owing to the pressure of business affairs, Ford found himself unable to join that first expedition, which was a fairly short and simple affair. Edison, accompanied by Firestone, left West Orange on August 28, 1916, and stopped overnight in the Catskill Mountains, after covering eighty-two miles of unpaved country road; then, joining Burroughs the next day at his homestead in Roxbury, New York, he went on with him along the shore of Lake George, over the Adirondacks, to upper Vermont, and then returned home after ten days on the road. Edison always sat up in front with the driver. No matter how rough the road or how deep the holes, he enjoyed bouncing along at speeds up to forty miles an hour, and never showed fatigue. The “shaking out” was good for him, he believed. Burroughs, who was seventy-nine and very bony, pointed out that Edison could bear the jolts because he was “well-cushioned.”

Burroughs had suffered from the bad roads and the vibrations of the automobile, but thanks to Edison’s stories, he said, he had enjoyed “vibrations and convulsions … in the diaphragm around the campfire at night.” He gives a diverting picture of Edison in the Adirondack Mountains playing prospector, puttering about with a little hammer with which he broke up pieces of granite and feldspar. Ah! there was a possible source of potash, if only it could be extracted economically! Burroughs continues:
It was a great pleasure to see Edison relax and turn vagabond so easily, sleeping in his clothes and dropping off to sleep like a baby, getting up to replenish the fire at daylight or before, making his toilet at the wayside creek or pool. … One cold night, you remember, he hit on a new way of folding his blankets; he made them interlock so and so, got into them, “made one revolution” and the thing was done. Do you remember with what boyish delight he would throw up his arms when he came upon some particularly striking view? I laugh when I think of the big car two girls were driving on a slippery street in Saranac … and when they put on the brakes suddenly, how the car suddenly changed ends and stopped, leaving the amazed girls looking up the street instead of down. Mr. Edison remarked: “Organized matter sometimes behaves in a strange manner.”

The next “gypsy” tour took place two years later, in the summer of 1918, after the war had taken a favorable turn. This time Ford made it his business to join Edison, Burroughs, and Firestone, and was very much present at all their subsequent trips to what they called “Nature’s laboratory.”

Unfortunately the newspapers, with hue and cry, soon followed the wanderings of “America’s Most Useful Citizen” and his friend, the flivver king, from one campsite to another, on that second trip. To Edison’s annoyance, reporters persistently intruded themselves between him and the panorama of mountains and valleys to press their queries about his war machines, or to describe or photograph him as he cooked potatoes over the fire or took a siesta.

That second camping tour had been organized by Ford and Firestone on a much more elaborate scale than the first, and its itinerary had been publicly announced in advance. The “irrepressible boy of seventyone,” eager for his annual “shaking out,” hurried off to pick up John Burroughs in the Catskills, then sped on to Pittsburgh to meet Ford and Firestone. The itinerary for this journey was longer and took them through the Great Smoky Mountains.

Clad in linen dusters and soft caps, they roared along in their motor caravan, startling the sleepy mountain hamlets of West Virginia and North Carolina. Soon they were in deep forgotten valleys where the country people sometimes gathered in little knots to stare at them as they stopped. Some of these people had never seen an electric light, but they knew and recognized Edison as “Mr. Phonograph.” On one occasion Henry Ford was evidently discomfited when no one seemed to have heard of him or even to have seen any motorcars before. “Good,” said Edison, “we shall have a good time here.”

When they pitched their camp in an open meadow, Firestone and the bustling Ford would sometimes engage in a scything match or a “cradling” contest. Edison, however, as Burroughs recalled, was content to settle down in his car and read or meditate, while Ford swung an axe to cut wood for their campfire. To be sure, there were numerous attendants about them now, a luxurious kitchen truck and several supply trucks, providing a sybaritic fare which poor John Burroughs had never known on his own camping trips.

Like many another philosopher Edison could be found acting in complete contradiction to his own professed doctrines. In his journal for the 1919 camping trip, Burroughs wrote:
O Consistency, thy name is not Edison! Ten A.M. Edison not up yet—the man of little sleep! He inveighs against canesugar, yet puts two heaping teaspoonfuls into each cup of coffee, and he takes three or four cups a day. He eats more than I do, yet calls me a gourmand. He eats pie by the yard and bolts his food.

While Henry Ford pretended to flee “the artificial life of commercialism” in a motor caravan out in the open country, a spirit of crass commercialism day by day pervaded his well-advertised camping tours. Movie news cameras and publicity agents, who carried on promotion stunts of all sorts, gathered in the train of the Edison-Ford-Firestone motor caravan, which by 1919 boasted fifty cars. Politicians arrived—on one occasion even a President of the United States, Warren Harding—to bask in the limelight of its campfire. Trucks followed behind, bearing large placards reading: “Buy Firestone Tires.” When the caravan arrived in a community, the festive occasion was exploited by dealers as an opportunity to sell more Ford cars. Henry Ford and Firestone seemed to enjoy it all. But in 1921 John Burroughs died; after that Edison, who was greatly bothered by the crowds, the dust, and all the ballyhoo, decided to come no more.

In those last years the white-haired Edison might have been found more often than not in the gardens of his Florida home, Seminole Lodge, where he remained for a much longer season than formerly. In addition to the thousands of tropical plants set out in the grounds around, there was a special botanical laboratory filled with potted plants that he and a staff of botanists were developing from crossbred strains. He too was botanizing; but as always there was a practical object in view.

Rubber had recently become one of the most important commodities for the modern industrial world, thanks to the automobile. It was produced in distant tropical regions, and in wartime became scarce and extremely dear; during the First World War its price had risen from about twenty cents to more than two dollars a pound. While visiting Burbank’s plantation in California together with Ford and Firestone in 1915, Edison had remarked that if the United States entered the war rubber would be the first product to be cut off. Ford had asked him to do something about creating a domestic supply or a substitute, to which Edison replied: “I will—some day.”

When rubber became costly again toward 1924-25, owing to the British Far Eastern rubber restriction scheme, Ford and Firestone renewed their pleas that Edison undertake a serious investigation of domestic sources of rubber, which they offered to finance. The Edison Botanic Research Company was thereupon organized in 1927, with the Ford Motor Company and the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company each advancing $93,500 to cover the costs of research, while Edison agreed to contribute his labor. Thus he was engaged in one of his famous “drag-hunts” for some plant, either existing or to be developed by crossbreeding, which contained sufficient rubber latex to be processed for rubber on a large scale.

Of the period that followed, Mrs. Edison said afterward: “Everything turned to rubber in the family. We talked rubber, thought rubber, dreamed rubber. Mr. Edison refused to let us do anything else.” Now he was busily “ransacking the world,” as his associates reported, gathering and dissecting every class of weed, vine, shrub, and bush that grew.

Prior to a severe illness in 1929 his mental powers showed no perceptible decline. He “got the whole subject of rubber into his head” so he could see every phase of his problem. The main source of supply was the Hevea brasiliensis, a tree native to Brazil but successfully transplanted on a large scale to Malaya, Ceylon, and Africa. Coolie labor in the moist equatorial lands had made rubber cheap and abundant, though the rubber tree required five years to mature.

It was well known to scientists that numerous other plants, even those common to the North Temperate Zone, contained caoutchouc latex in varying quantities; the giant milkweed, the southern honeysuckle vine, and shrubs such as the Mexican guayule, already being cultivated in southern California. But the rubber extracted from the guayule was unsatisfactory, being of a highly resinous quality. What Edison hoped to find was a “sowable and mowable” crop native to the United States and capable of being cultivated, harvested, and processed within twelve to eighteen months, so as to provide a source of supply in the event of war or other emergency.

In less than a year Edison reported to Henry Ford that he had collected 3,227 wild plants and shrubs from points ranging from New Jersey to Key West. After flirting with honeysuckle and milkweed, he fixed on the domestic goldenrod as the most promising plant of all.

Goldenrod yielded about five per cent latex. Edison selected the varieties that seemed most promising, divided the roots, planted them separately, divided them again, and crossbred. It was time-consuming; but a giant goldenrod about fourteen feet tall yielding about twelve per cent latex was ultimately developed. Ford was so greatly encouraged by Edison’s reports that he purchased an extensive acreage in southern Georgia for the raising of goldenrod.

In the late summer of 1929, while at Glenmont, his home in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison fell ill; his whole digestive apparatus seemed affected and there was some indication of kidney malfunction and of diabetes. But he rose from his bed saying: “Give me five years and the United States will have a rubber crop.” But who, now, could give Edison five years?

Oddly enough, not only Edison, but Henry Ford, the Du Pont company, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, after 1925 had received information about the new German chemical process for converting coal or petroleum derivatives into synthetic rubber of the butadiene and sodium type, which was already perfected by the I. G. Farben Gesellschaft around that time. But large-scale operations were not to be carried out until a decade later, prior to World War II. Edison also might have turned his eyes in this direction—which was to be the most profitable for systematic researchbut for the fact that the synthetic process was known to require an enormous investment in special chemical plants, which even our biggest rubber tire and chemical corporations refused to risk at that period. In 1940 federal government subsidies alone would make synthetic rubber production feasible. In that year government scientists thoroughly explored the alternate possibilities of using organic materials available to us, such as Edison’s variety of goldenrod and guayule, but reached the conclusion that processing such plants would be more difficult and costly than making a synthetic, and would yield a product inferior to natural India rubber or the new synthetics.

Edison’s goldenrod rubber project, therefore, was foredoomed. If Henry Ford suspected this, however, the motor king did not move a hand to stop Edison’s dying effort. Where Edison was concerned, the ruthless Ford was all sentiment.

The ninth decade of the inventor’s life was a time for the erection of monuments in his honor, a time for the bestowal of medals, ribbons, decorations, and other honorific ornaments that came to him from all quarters of the world. PIe was touched with bronze; he was as a walking monument himself—in fact, an immortal. People used to come and address him with formal eulogies, generally dilating upon his benefactions to the human race. Solemn little delegations arrived frequently in West Orange, bearing their offerings of plaques or medals, and waited patiently in the library until, as often as not, word came to them that Edison was too busy to accept their gifts in person.

A signal event in Edison’s old age was Henry Ford’s decision to build an immense museum of the history of industry and invention, as a monument not only to himself but also to his friend Edison, in his native town of Dearborn, Michigan. The untutored man who had once declared in a public courtroom that “History is the bunk,” and that he could hire all the historians he wanted, now seemed wholly dominated by his sense of past times, and especially of his own past. He laid out Greenfield Village in Dearborn as a reconstruction of the rural setting of his early life, stuffing it with nineteenth-century farm cottages, churches, and taverns. Here was the jigsaw-styled frame house of a dentist who had been good to him, the original chapel his wife had attended in girlhood, and the little red schoolhouse (probably not authentic) of the lady who had first sung “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Next to the nineteenth-century Americana was the vast museum of industry and invention holding everything in the line of machinery, from ancient looms to the giant locomotives of 1925. But over all this reconstruction of the past there loomed the superhuman figure of Edison, whose glory Ford was bent on preserving in toto.

Hence Ford began to gather up such relics as he could find of the legendary Menlo Park Laboratory, then in ruins, where Edison had developed his incandescent electric lamp. He not only scoured the New Jersey countryside for the very planks that had fallen off Edison’s old sheds, but also gathered together a notable collection of original models of Edison’s inventions, installing them in a section of Greenfield Village that was at first known as the Edison Institute. These models were so well restored—or, in some cases, reproduced—that everything worked as before. Wherever he found the debris of Edison’s life and labor Ford went digging—even in Fort Myers, where he removed the small electrical laboratory of 1887, by then fallen into disuse.

“Dear me,” Mrs. Edison said plaintively one day, when she spied him from her window, scouring about her grounds at Seminole Lodge, “I do wish Mr. Ford would keep out of our backyard!”

Millions were thus lavished by Ford upon his collection of Edisonia alone, the total cost of Greenfield Village being more than $10,200,000. When it was all done, the restored Menlo Park Laboratory stood in its native red New Jersey clay (transported thither by train) and even had a heap of old metal junk lying outside. For had not Edison once said that what the good inventor needed was “imagination and a scrap heap”?

The General Electric Company, at the time, still invoked the name of Thomas A. Edison in its advertising as its founding father, even though he was no longer connected with it. In conjunction with the proposed festival celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light, planned for October si, 1929, the great company’s executives therefore undertook to sponsor a “colossal” affair to be known and remembered as the “Golden Jubilee of Light.” The site selected for the staging of this pageant was the headquarters of General Electric at Schenectady.

Owen D. Young, chairman, and Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, were of the generation after Edison’s and had no part in the old controversies of 1892 when the inventor had relinquished the bulk of his holdings in the firm; they knew of no animus he might feel against their corporation. There had been, in fact, almost no business relations with Edison’s company; but such as they were, as in more recent legal disputes over radio patents, General Electric was, in the opinion of Edison’s son Charles, scarcely friendly or helpful. Determined to block General Electric’s plan to take over the Jubilee, Charles communicated with Ford and told him of the scheme to “commercialize” Edison’s fame. Henry Ford said it was a “shameful action” and promised he would do something about it.

The Ford Museum and Greenfield Village were by then nearing completion. Ford therefore decided to combine the formal dedication of his own institution with the celebration in honor of the electric light. He ordered his builders to rush the job on the great museum building, a vast replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, for it was to be the stage setting of the opening-day banquet. Not long after Charles Edison had telephoned him in the early winter of 1929, Ford suddenly appeared in the library of his venerable friend at West Orange and waited for him, walking up and down restlessly, and muttering to himself: “I’ll show ‘em. I’ll kidnap the whole party.” Edison agreed to be “kidnapped.”

It was a spectacle indeed to see one giant of industry snatching the Golden Jubilee of Light and its hero from the other. Messrs. Young and Swope, greatly taken aback, appealed to Edison and to Ford to accept their original plan, or at least to make it a combined publicity operation. But Edison was unmoved, and Ford was adamant in his desire to have all the trouble and as much of the publicity as possible for himself.

When Edison stepped from the train at Dearborn, two days before the Jubilee was to open, he looked, it was noted, “like a benevolent old wreck,” for he had been so gravely ill in August, 1929, with pneumonia, that his life was feared for. Now as he beheld Greenfield Village and the transplanted “Menlo Park,” he smiled his broadest smile. Here were all the old bulbs, telegraph instruments and stock tickers, the “LongWaisted Annie” dynamos, the old generating plant of Pearl Street, New York, and even an old mortar and pestle he had used and thrown away. There was not only the old “tabernacle,” where Edison had carried out his most famous electrical experiments, but also the plain boardinghouse across the road from it; even the old railroad station at Mount Clemens, Michigan, where he had worked as a youth, and beside it a reproduction of a little Grand Trunk Railway train, including the baggage car with Tom Edison’s little laboratory-on wheels!

After Ford had shown him this truly monumental restoration, and asked for his opinion, Edison said: “Well, you’ve got this just about ninety-nine and one half per cent perfect.”

“What is the matter with the other one half per cent?” Ford asked.

“Well, we never kept it as clean as thisl” Edison drawled.

President and Mrs. Hoover, and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, with attendant secret-service men, arrived on the morning of October 21 at the head of a delegation including the nation’s most eminent political and financial personages, among them Owen D. Young, Thomas W. Lamont, J. P. Morgan (the younger), Charles M. Schwab, and Otto H. Kahn; there were also scientists and inventors such as Orville Wright and Madame Curie. As President Hoover approached Detroit in his train, the party was met by Mr. and Mrs. Ford and Mr. and Mrs. Edison at a transfer point, where all changed to a little train out of the Abraham Lincoln era, drawn by a wood-burning locomotive. In this they traveled over a spur line for half a mile to a restored Smith’s Creek Junction, where seventy years before Edison was supposed to have been given the bounce out of his baggage-car laboratory. Here a train boy came on with a basket of merchandise; Edison, the onetime newsboy, took it from him and made an effort to walk about for a few moments, crying: “Candy, apples, sandwiches, newspapers!”- offering them to President Hoover. It was absurd, and yet also sheer symbolic drama: the American Dream re-enacted before the world’s news cameras. But the principal actor was now feeble and his voice weak.

At nightfall, after all the sights had been displayed to the distinguished guests, Edison appeared on the second floor of the restored Menlo Park Laboratory to demonstrate how he had made a carbonized thread and vacuum globe in 1879 and, at a given moment, turned it on. As many of the guests as could be crowded into the laboratory were on hand to watch Edison re-create an event that seemed by now a scientific fable. Millions more throughout the world were sitting at their radios, listening to the announcer reporting the event:

“The lamp is now ready, as it was a half century agol Will it light? Will it burn? Edison touches the wire. Ladies and gentlemen—it lightsl Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax!”

As the model of the old carbon filament lamp was turned up, all over “MenIo Park,” all over Dearborn and Detroit, and in other great cities across the country special lamps blazed up suddenly with an immense yellow refulgence, as the voice on the radio continued:

“And Edison said: Let there be light!”

The excitement had been wearing for the old man. But he had more to come. The festival was to be topped off with a banquet for five hundred guests in that inflated model of Independence Hall, a part of the future Henry Ford Museum; Owen D. Young was to be toastmaster, and President Hoover was to give the principal address in dedication of what was afterward called Ford’s Old Curiosity Shop. But at the door of the banquet hall Edison faltered and all but collapsed. Led to a settee in the corridor, he sat down and wept, overcome with emotion and fatigue.

“I won’t go in,” he said to Mrs. Edison. Only she could have overcome his resistance; they brought him some warm milk; he revived a little, entered the hall, and took his place at the seat of honor. Messages from many nations were read, tributes were offered, while he heard nothing and ate nothing.

At the end of the evening Edison spoke briefly but with feeling. He was happy, he said, that tribute was being paid to scientific work:
… This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are sentimental and this crowning event of Light’s Golden Jubilee fills me with gratitude. As to Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say to you, that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term—he is my friend. Good night.

Then he slumped into his chair and turned as white as death. Mrs. Edison and President Hoover’s physician at once helped him to a room to the rear of the speaker’s table, and laid him on a sofa. Drugs were administered and he came to; then he was taken to the Ford home and put to bed for several days. “I am tired of all the glory, I want to get back to work,” he said.

He absented himself for longer and longer intervals from his laboratory in the two last years that remained. Only his will seemed to keep him alive, for he ate next to nothing. Often he stayed abed or sat in an easy chair at home, but he still kept in close touch with his technical assistants, who daily brought him news of how the goldenrod-rubber experiments were progressing.

His interest in new “campaigns” never flagged. After meeting Colonel Charles Lindbergh, he insisted on being taken to Newark Airport to learn something about the problems of airplane landing and take-off. “The aviators tell me that they must find a means to see through a fog,” he said. “I have an idea about it. I am waiting for a real fog—a water fog—and I will see if I can’t penetrate it.” Perhaps a rocket would do the trick? In almost his last days on earth Tom Edison was thinking earnestly about rockets, a subject that was to become of great moment to the world a quarter of a century later.

At about this period he ventured the prophecy that “There will one day spring from the brain of Science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so will abandon war forever. …” He was greatly interested in the impact of Albert Einstein’s formulations, but admitted he couldn’t understand it. “I am the zero of mathematics,” he conceded. In one of his last interviews, he went on to say: “I am much interested in atomic energy, but so far as I can see we have not yet reached a point where this exhaustless force can be harnessed and utilized.”

On August 1, 1931, he had a sudden sinking spell and lay near death. He could absorb virtu- ally no food at all—but to the astonishment of his physicians, he rallied and tried to rise from bed again. Since the intense summer heat oppressed him, one of the new air-conditioning machines was installed in his bedroom, and he remained indoors, resting and reading. But as soon as he realized the real state of affairs- that he would never be well enough to go back to work—he seemed to lose the desire to live.

In October, when the sharp-thrusting hills of New Jersey’s Orange Valley were daubed in orange, he sank again. In the great library below the hill everyone spoke in hushed tones; the big chair at the huge old roll-top desk was empty; the great carved clock ticked on.

Gloom hung over the mansion in Lewellyn Park. Edison slept, waked a little, and drowsed again, he who had resented every moment lost. As a patient he was both difficult and courageous. There were several eminent medical men attending him, and he persisted in discussing their method of treatment, demanding to know what medicines they were trying and how his body was reacting—and why. His interest in applied science, one might say, never flagged, and ended only with the termination of this “last experiment.”

One who ministered to him asked if “he had thought of a life hereafter.”

“It does not matter,” he replied; “no one knows.”

Newspaper reporters maintained a deathwatch in the vicinity of Glenmont day and night. The room upstairs was kept dark at night, with a nurse sitting beside the patient; if the lights went on—then all the world must be told. In the last hours, many of Edison’s laboratory associates waited in the hall downstairs, while Charles Edison would go up the great stairway, then down to make his report.

Fifty-two years earlier almost to a day, the men associated with Edison were sitting up with him at night to see how many hours his carbon filament lamp would live. Now his son Charles, after his periodic visits to the sickroom, used the same phrase spoken long ago by the watchers at the Menlo Park Laboratory in October, 1879: “The light still burns.”

On October 17 his pulse dropped steeply; in the early morning hours of Sunday the eighteenth, at 3:24A.M., the lights of his room went on, and the doctors and the nurse came out to announce the end. The electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, the radio, with all of which his life had been in some way linked, flashed the news to all the corners of the world.

Some thought was given in high places to the idea of honoring his passing in a manner worthy of such a hero’s death; the President of the United States, it was proposed, should order all electric current to be turned off for a minute or two in streets, factories, public places, and homes throughout the nation. But no sooner was the thought uttered than it was realized that such action was unthinkable. Because of the very nature of Edison’s contribution to the technical organization of modern society, his nowso-vital system of electric power distribution—the blood circulation of the community as it were—would have been arrested; there was risk of incalculable disaster in halting, even for an instant, the great webs of transmission lines and the whole monster mechanism of power that had grown in a half century out of his discoveries. The idea of a momentary “blackout” was therefore abandoned as entirely impracticable. Instead, the President suggested that lights be dimmed voluntarily in private residences, where possible, for a few minutes at 10 P.M. of the day of Thomas A. Edison’s funeral. Many paid this last tribute silently, and then the lights were turned on again.

Drawings from Culver Service and Bettmann Archive. Photographs on the following pages from Ford Motor Company, Edison Laboratory National Monument, Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, and Brown Brothers.

It was not surprising that Edison, as the acknowledged patron saint of American industry, numbered among his intimates two leading apostles of the machine age, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. On summer jaunts, the three often sought the company of John Burroughs, the naturalist and friend of Walt Whitman. Somehow they never found it incongruous to seek the pleasures of the simple, rustic life that mass production had so much undermined.

The nation eagerly followed the camping trips Edison took with Ford, Firestone, and Burroughs from 1914 to 1921. To Edison, these idyls in remote rural areas were a chance to experiment in “Nature’s laboratory,” away from “fictitious civilization.” Unfortunately, Ford and Firestone also recognized their publicity value. The once-small caravans grew to mammoth size —the 1919 expedition had 50 cars—and the great men found themselves besieged by an overzealous press. As the ballyhoo got out of hand, and the trips became more circuslike, Edison decided he would come no longer.

In his declining years, Edison seemed an almost legendary figure. Newspaper polls voted him “America’s most useful citizen”; monuments were erected in his honor, and he was awarded medals by the dozen. Such Edisonian remarks as—“Genius is two per cent inspiration and ninety-eight perspiration” became popular maxims. But no man revered Edison more than Henry Ford. The motor king, who busily collected the past for his vast museum at Dearborn, Michigan, spent millions on a reconstruction of the Menlo Park laboratories where Edison had developed the incandescent electric lamp. Ford organized the “Golden Jubilee of Light” celebration at Dearborn, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s great achievement. On October 21, 1929, dignitaries from all over the world gathered to honor the octogenarian inventor who was, more than any other man, responsible for the age of electricity.

© 1959 BY MATTHEW JOSEPHSON