The Wizard of Menlo Park (52 page)

“genius” was credited:
Ibid.

The governor of New Jersey:
“10,000 Mourners Pass Edison’s Bier in Day; Nation Plans Tribute at Burial Tomorrow,”
NYT,
20 October 1931.

was told of Edison’s death:
Jehl,
Reminiscences,
318–319. Sources differ on the reason Ott had been confined to a wheelchair. Either he had suffered a stroke (“Retired Edison Aide Dies,”
NYT,
20 October 1931) or had fallen down an empty elevator shaft at Bergmann’s shop (Nerney,
Edison,
299).

When Mary Childs Nerney:
Nerney,
Edison,
64–65.

Declining the offer:
“10,000 Mourners Pass Edison’s Bier in Day.”

forty thousand the second:
“Nation to Be Dark One Minute Tonight After Edison Burial,”
NYT,
21 October 1931.

President Hoover asked:
Ibid.

Edison really had been privileged to hear:
“Edison Is Buried on 52nd Anniversary of Electric Light,”
NYT,
22 October 1931.

That night, the two radio networks:
“Lights of City Dimmed in Homage to Edison; the Nation Joins in the Brief Silent Tribute,”
NYT,
22 October 1931.

Thomas Edison Jr.:
“T. A. Edison Jr. Dies; Son of Inventor, 59,”
NYT,
26 August 1936.

maintained a laboratory:
“Older Son to Sue to Void Edison Will,”
NYT,
31 October 1931.

died in 1937:
“William Leslie Edison,” biography prepared for memorial service, n.d., HFM & GVRC, Box 8, Folder 37.

died in 1969:
“Charles Edison, 78, Ex-Governor of Jersey and U.S. Aide, Is Dead,”
NYT,
1 August 1969.

died in 1992:
“Theodore M. Edison; An Illustrious Father Guided Inventor, 94,”
NYT,
26 November 1992.

reference to the “Illustrious Father”:
Ibid.

both sons gave away:
Charles Edison established the Charles Edison Fund when he was fifty-eight, to which he donated the bulk of his estate. See Charles Edison Fund, http://www.charlesedisonfund.org/edison.htm. Theodore Edison donated half of his inheritance to the employees of Thomas A. Edison Industries. Josephson,
Edison,
469n. Theodore also was a major supporter of efforts in the 1950s to preserve an endangered stand of bald cypress trees in southwest Florida. See “Theodore M. Edison; An Illustrious Father Guided Inventor, 94.”

His scholarship program:
Four years after Edison’s death, the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation, formed to “perpetuate the name of the inventor,” was incorporated in an attempt to raise funds for an endowment that would provide permanent support of a resuscitated scholarship program in Edison’s name. “Edison’s Aid Carried On,”
NYT,
24 June 1935. The fund-raisers apparently did not succeed, however. When the very first scholarship had been awarded in 1929, New York mayor Jimmy Walker had offered a grand oration: “When we are dead, when our children and grandchildren are no more, his name will remain as one of the greatest in the country. The present fine scholarship contest is the sort of thing one would almost expect from a Thomas A. Edison.” See “Boy, 16, Bishop’s Son, Is Winner of First Edison Scholarship,”
NYT,
3 August 1929.

valued at $12 million:
“Edison Left 2 Sons Bulk of $12,000,000,”
NYT,
30 October 1931.

Ford Foundation’s endowment:
“Ford Foundation Owns $108,913,234,”
NYT,
22 April 1947.

$70 million estate:
“Ford Tax Indicates $70,000,000 Estate,”
NYT,
29 October 1948.

Four years later:
“Edison’s Estate Is Valued at $2,871,758,”
NYT,
27 June 1935.

reduced by 50 percent:
“Edison Estate $1,500,432,”
NYT,
21 April 1937.

This arrangement spared her:
Mina’s stepson William Edison threatened publicly to sue his younger half brothers, Charles and Theodore, but was persuaded to drop the idea. “Older Son to Sue to Void Edison Will”; “Edison Sons Avoid Fight over Estate,”
NYT,
26 February 1932.

Four years after Edison’s death:
“Widow of Edison to Be Wed Today,”
NYT,
30 October 1935.

She was widowed again:
“Mrs. Edison Dead; Inventor’s Widow,”
NYT,
25 August 1947. The obituary noted that she had “stirred up a minor squabble” in a radio speech given in 1930 when she urged women “to return to home-making and pay less attention to business.” She had made similar remarks in preceding years, but “times had changed” and she drew many “replies” that clearly took a dissenting view.

Charles Edison arranged:
“Edison-McGraw Merger Forms Electrical Giant,”
NYT,
3 January 1957.

McGraw-Edison was absorbed:
“Cooper Industries Inc. Purchase,”
Wall Street Journal,
4 June 1985.

poll of Chinese:
“In Beijing Students’ Worldview, Jordan Rules,”
NYT,
16 June 1998. The results of the survey should not be generalized: the survey population was only one thousand respondents.

Shunpei Yamazaki:
Yamazaki’s first patent was filed in 1980, so he passed Edison at a pace that exceeded Edison’s by far. Another prolific inventor, Donald E. Weder, has accumulated more than thirteen hundred without becoming a celebrity. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office provides online access to its patent database at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.htm.

When a young John Lawson:
John Lawson to TAE, 6 January 1879,
PTAED,
D7913B.

One of his employees:
A. E. Johnson and K. Ehricke, Oral History, 29 March 1971, ENHS, 20.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE EDITORS OF
the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project deserve sanctification. They have brought talent, expertise, and patience to a vast project that is not yet complete: making the corpus of documents that Edison collected during his long life easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. The principal repository of Edison’s papers, the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, New Jersey, contains an estimated 5 million documents—a rough guess because a complete inventory even now has yet to be completed. Thanks to the Edison Papers Project, however, many tools are available for excavating nuggets from any portion of the collection.

The first five volumes of the projected fifteen-volume set of
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison
have appeared, and they are modern wonders. I am grateful for the prodigious work that was poured into preparing the introductions, timelines, bibliographies, headnotes, and endnotes, which make them a model of contemporary scholarship.

I also was most fortunate to be able to gain access to nearly 180,000 Edison documents while sitting at home—the Project’s easily searchable Web site came online shortly before I began my research. What a boon!

I would like to singly thank Paul Israel, the current director of the Edison Papers Project; former director Robert Rosenberg; and staff editors Theresa Collins and Brian Shipley, all of whom provided assistance to me in the course of research.

Not all of the Edison papers are yet available online. I would like to thank Leonard DeGraaf, Doug Tarr, and other staff members at the Edison National Historical Site for their help when I paid my visits to the archives at a busy time, during the year before the site was closed for renovation, as well as when I requested assistance with follow-up requests. I also was assisted by the staff of the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford, the new umbrella name encompassing the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan.

The College of Business of San Jose State University gave generous, recurring gifts in the form of reduced teaching assignments, as well as financial support for a full year’s leave. During the book’s seven-year gestation, San Jose State administrators and faculty colleagues displayed imperturbable patience, at least in my presence, for which I am most appreciative.

The scholarly resources of Stanford University contributed much to the project. I am grateful for visiting scholar appointments over two years arranged by James Sheehan, chair of the department of history, and Tim Lenoir, director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. At Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound, Richard Koprowski and Aurora Perez provided cheerful help.

Madeleine Sloane and David Sloane met with me and generously shared memories of their paternal grandmother, Madeleine Sloane, née Edison, and family lore.

My interlibrary loan requests were voluminous and must have created grievously lopsided accounts between borrowing and lending libraries. But Mary Munill, at Stanford, and Kara Fox and Shirley Miguel, at San Jose State, were unstinting in their work on my behalf.

Bonnie Newburg, of the Edison & Ford Winter Estates, and Ruth Ann Nyblod, of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, provided swift help with my queries. Jack Curlin supplied information about his grandfather that tied up a loose end. Martin Sheehan-Stross helped with library research.

The manuscript was much improved by the unsparing critiques supplied by Gail Hershatter and Pamela Basey, who flagged inconsistencies and forced me to look anew at the most basic assumptions embedded in the first draft.

As always, my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, knew what I needed at any given point—a matter of intuition, as I often did not know myself until her assistance appeared.

At Crown, Emily Loose was extremely knowledgeable about Edison and this period of history; her enthusiasm for the project fired my own. Her successor, Luke Dempsey, has unusually sharp ears as well as eyes and gave the manuscript a gloriously old-fashioned close reading. I am grateful to both.

Jim Gullickson made countless corrections in the course of careful copy-editing. Lindsey Moore kept us all on schedule.

This work is dedicated to my most important collaborator, Ellen Stross. Her editorial suggestions made the book immeasurably better—and considerably shorter.

A
LSO BY
R
ANDALL
S
TROSS

eBoys

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Technology and Society in Twentieth-Century America
(ed.)

Copyright © 2007 by Randall E. Stross

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

All photos unless otherwise noted: Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stross, Randall E.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: how Thomas Alva Edison invented the modern world / Randall E. Stross.

1. Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847–1931. 2. Inventors—United States—Biography. 3. Electric engineers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

TK140.E3S76 2007

621.3092—dc22

[B]                                                                                                                                                                  2006028808

eISBN: 978-0-307-39456-9

v3.0