The Wizard of Menlo Park (32 page)

Then Ford arrived at the primary reason for writing: to make a request. During the recent vacation, the two men happened to talk about the harmful effects of cigarette smoking. Ford recalled Edison’s remark that the damage it caused was incurable. Would Edison be kind enough to write a letter that explained the nature of the harm and why it was irreversible? With Edison’s permission, Ford planned to use the letter in his antismoking campaign among workers. In asking Edison to serve as a quotable authority on the subject, Ford reveals his understanding of how celebrity—his, Edison’s, anybody’s—confers, in the eyes of the not-famous, expertise on all manner of subjects. Edison could speak about the deleterious effects of smoking not because of a background in respiratory disease or epidemiology, but because he was Edison. If Ford’s fame alone could not persuade his employees to quit smoking, perhaps the combination with Edison’s would be persuasive.

Edison sent off the requested letter in his best handwriting. He did not pause to first have it proofread, so Ford had his secretary, Ernest Liebold, write Edison’s underling, William Bee, about the delicate matter of two misspelled words. “I know Mr. Edison would prefer to have it correct if given publicity,” Liebold wrote, sending along a sheet that Edison could use to recopy the letter. Edison complied without complaint.

The injurious agent in Cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called “Acrolein.” It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes. Yours, Thomas A. Edison

Edison had not, in fact, excluded smokers from his employee rolls. After the letter had been drafted, he hurriedly had signs posted at his plants: “Cigarettes Not Tolerated. They Dull The Brain.”

If Ford anticipated the firestorm of criticism from the tobacco interests that would surely follow, he did not warn Edison, who appears to have been completely unprepared. Edison was accustomed to having his own tobacco habits treated by the press as a subject of amusement, such as when he was vacationing in Florida and sent word to the laboratory in New Jersey that he needed a replenished supply of chewing tobacco from one of his employees, Red Kelly in Building 18, who “knows a good chew,” to be sent “in a hurry.” He did not have to answer questions from the press about his fondness of cigars. Reporters had listened respectfully when he criticized only one form of tobacco consumption, cigarette smoking, which happened to be the one form that he disliked. He explained, with the tone of a world-renowned expert addressing a lay audience, that poisonous cigarette papers dulled the mind, and that is why Mexicans, whom he had heard were heavy smokers, “as a race are not clear headed.”

Then, with the arrival of the controversy when Ford published Edison’s letter, the same press turned on Edison, treating his disquisitions about cigarettes derisively. A
New York Times
editorial, “An Inventor out of His Field,” wondered aloud about his lack of scientific authority on this subject. If, as Edison claimed, cigarettes dulled the mind, so, too, did a good dinner and a good sleep. Edison’s own habits were examined. Should not Edison consider the effects on the mind of “irregular meals and excessive hours of continuous work”?

Percival Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, led his industry’s counterattack with a devastatingly polite response to Edison’s letter. Hill publicly dared Edison to repeat his charges while naming in particular any of the brands of American Tobacco. Should he do so, Hill promised to initiate legal proceedings to obtain damages. Whatever sums Hill recovered, he would donate to charity. Edison elected not to accept the challenge.

Following Hill, James Zobian, the advertising representative of Philip Morris & Company, published in the New York newspapers full-page open letters addressed to Edison that were reprinted and quoted at length elsewhere. Zobian had sent cigarette papers used by Philip Morris to an independent laboratory and now brandished the certificates attesting to the lack of “any poisonous ingredients therein.” Granting that Edison had acquired his “prominence and fame” in an honest and deserving way, Zobian said, “When it comes to analytical chemistry, I believe Mr. Edison himself will admit that supremacy in that branch of science belongs to others!”

The last time Edison had been the subject of widespread criticism had been three years earlier, when he had casually announced that he planned to offer furniture made of concrete, providing a full line to complement the concrete cabinet for his phonograph that he had already made. Claiming that the surface could be stained to resemble any kind of wood desired, he said his concrete furniture would “make it possible for the laboring man to put furniture in his home more artistic and more durable than is now to be found in the most palatial residences in Paris.”

At least the hoots that followed were brought upon Edison entirely by his own misconceived plans. Some commentators were not even certain that Edison was serious (he was). Cartoonists had no difficulty extracting humor from Edison’s announcement (sample: Edison tells two moving men straining under a concrete sofa, “Don’t be afraid of hurting it, boys, but look out for your feet”).

The cartoons and jokes soon passed, and the controversy came and went without challenging Edison’s authority as a technical expert. The cigarette flap, however, was hurtful because his technical expertise was directly questioned—his critics paid no attention to his claims that his extensive research on paper filaments for the lightbulb had acquainted him with the poisonous substances in cigarettes. And the criticism was harder to bear because the controversy had been incited by someone else, and Edison had been pulled in without anticipating what would follow. He would never repeat the mistake of publicly following Ford into new campaigns and controversy.

Once past the cigarettes episode, Edison derived nothing but benefits from his association with Henry Ford. Edison and his family members were the recipients of gifts personally selected by Ford. Some were expensive: Tom and Mina Edison received so many Ford cars that it is not possible to tally exactly how many. Other gifts showed great expenditure of that most scarce resource, Ford’s attention. Edison would receive from him a birthday telegram; Mina, a birdhouse. The adult children were not neglected, either. In 1914, thirty-eight-year-old Tom Edison Jr., now living on a farm his father had bought for him in Burlington, New Jersey, and tinkering with carburetors, received from Henry Ford a Model T engine that he had requested for experimenting, followed by a new car. Twenty-four-year-old Charles Edison received one of Ford’s prized rifles in a custom-built case. When Theodore Edison, the youngest of Edison’s six children, turned sixteen in 1914, he found a new car waiting for him, sent by Ford.

On one occasion, in 1916, when Ford heard from his dealer in Fort Myers that Edison had just paid for a new Ford touring car to be readied for delivery the next day, Ford had the dealer present the car to Edison with Ford’s compliments and a refund of the purchase price. (The dealer turned out to be quite vexed when he learned afterward that no one in Henry Ford’s office had given thought to the commission he lost because of the gift; much correspondence went back and forth between Michigan and Florida about this single transaction.)

The gifts flowed almost totally in one direction, from Ford’s family to Edison’s. It was not in Edison’s nature to come up with gift ideas, but he was responsive if a suggestion was placed in front of him. When Ford first visited Fort Myers, he noticed a steam engine on the property that Edison had decommissioned upon the arrival of a gas engine. When he returned to Michigan, he wrote Edison explaining that it had sentimental value to him. Could he purchase it for the price Edison had paid for his new engine? Edison instructed his secretary to ship it to Ford as a present.

It was business that engaged Edison more than personal matters, and he found a number of Edison products to sell to Ford Motor Company that had nothing to do with automotive electrical systems. Movies made with Edison equipment were to be used to train new hands on the Ford assembly line, at least according to Henry Ford in January 1914, speaking without having tried using the medium for this purpose. Edison dictating machines were installed in Ford shops and were utterly useless (they lacked sufficient volume to be audible). Cement made by the Edison Portland Cement Company would be the sole source in all construction at Ford Motor Company. Ford Motor’s chief architect could not believe initially that Henry Ford would have agreed to an exclusive arrangement with a single supplier and had to be sternly instructed by Ford’s personal secretary to follow Ford’s wishes in the matter.

The evidence suggests that Henry Ford made all of these accommodations gladly. He was not doing business with Edison so much as he was indulging his idol, and there was no limit to Ford’s generosity. In December 1914, when Edison’s works were devastated by fire, Ford happened to be in New York and could rush over that night to offer comfort. Another $100,000 loan arrived the next week. Ford’s willingness to assist Edison in whatever way he could was put to the most severe test two months after the fire when Edison was finalizing plans for the layout of his rebuilt factory and wanted to use the services of one of Ford’s “Efficiency Engineers.” Edison was not asking for a gift and kept the matter on a purely business footing. He wrote Ernest Liebold to ask if “Mr. Ford could loan me one of his Efficiency Engineers for a little while, and if so, what would be the cost per week.” This simple request turned out to be more complicated than it first appeared.

It turned out that there was no such thing as a free-floating “Efficiency Engineer” at Ford Motor. Every department had specialists who knew only their one corner of operations. Ford did not know of anyone who would fit the description of the engineer Edison wanted. In a situation such as this, when complications arose, the titans used their minions to do the communicating. Ford’s secretary wrote Edison’s, explaining that it was Mr. Ford’s suggestion to have two or three of Edison’s best hands come to Detroit to look over the factory and learn directly from the various department managers who had contributed to the Ford plant’s efficiency.

Edison would have none of this. Speaking through his secretary, who again addressed Ford’s, he said he could not spare anyone at his end and reiterated his request: just send me one person for one week. Ford relayed that he was “at a loss to know who he should send.” He did have one more suggestion, which was unintentionally comical: Edison should send one person to Detroit who would select the one person at Ford who would go to West Orange to assist. Never mind, Edison telegraphed back. He would “not need your efficiency men as I have got all information wanted from eight articles on Ford factory published in engineering magazine.”

In October 1915, Edison and his wife were invited officially by the city of San Francisco to be present for the celebration of “Edison Day,” which would coincide with the city’s hosting of a world’s fair, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He decided he could not go on a three-week-long trip and had his secretary write a lengthy letter explaining that his personal attention was needed at his factories. If the work was not completed, “a great many employees connected with the various industries would be thrown out of work.”

The next week, however, Edison changed his mind and decided to go to San Francisco after all and ignore the specter of shuttered factories at home. He may have been persuaded to make the trip because of a personal appeal by Henry Ford. In any case, the Edisons and the Fords made plans together. When they arrived in San Francisco, press coverage was exhaustive. The conjunction of Edison and Ford, reclusive figures who had assumed larger-than-life dimensions, brought attention to their every move and casual utterance. The two men spent one day walking around the exposition together without their wives, though they were accompanied by a police officer who had been detailed to protect them (Edison had been threatened with death were he to make “any invention which would make war more terrible”). Curious members of the public were also in tow. At one point, a young man stepped up to Ford to introduce himself and ask for Ford’s recipe for success. “Work” was Ford’s not-so-helpful answer.

That terse exchange shows that the presence of these two celebrities was not to be mistaken for a statement of their availability for conversation with strangers. This was not the case at all. They could not avoid being surrounded by the crowd, however, close enough to have their own conversation overheard. “Great Scott, Ford, we were to meet our wives at one o’clock—here it is now two,” Edison supposedly said to his companion. The two men “almost sprinted” to the teahouse, where Mina Edison had remained when her husband did not show; Clara Ford, not as forbearing, had returned to her hotel long before. “Noted Pair Keep Walking Eight Hours” ran the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s headline; a subheadline was “Wives Have Long Wait.” The story offered a comforting universal moral to readers who were not themselves rich and famous: Husbands, even celebrity husbands, are forgetful by nature, and upon occasion neglect their good wives, proving Celebrities Are Just Like Us.

While in San Francisco, Edison and Ford also were feted at San Francisco’s Commercial Club. The overflow crowd of attendees begged Ford to stand and say a few words, but he demurred. Edison laughed at Ford’s discomfort, and was spared being asked himself only because he had long before established that he did not make speeches in public. From San Francisco, the Edisons and Fords traveled by private train to Santa Rosa, where they visited Luther Burbank, the country’s best known horticulturalist, then headed south via train and automobile to San Diego.

Press coverage of their joint California trip served to make more well known Edison’s association with Ford, and this brought some complications. Strangers wrote Edison trying to reach Ford through his intercession. Some of Edison’s own associates and distant acquaintances made similar requests, assuming that they could count on Edison’s introduction to gain entrée to Ford’s office, in order to make a business pitch of one kind or another. Edison shunned all such requests.