American Eclipse Read online

  Machinery Hall from the Jury Pavilion

  Inside the vast building, fairgoers gazed at the exhibition’s most impressive sight: a colossal steam engine—the world’s largest—that through a massive network of shafts and gears, belts and pulleys powered eight hundred machines. With a thwack and thrum, and a whir and hiss, those machines did everything at lightning speed: spinning silk, cutting cloth, knitting socks, fashioning pins, slicing stone, planing lumber, pumping water, blending chocolate, printing and folding newspapers (at the impressive rate of 35,000 copies per hour), even weaving portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The pulsating movements awed the crowds. The scene looked and sounded like progress, like modernity, like the nation America strove to be.

  Only a decade’s remove from the Civil War, the United States seemed galvanized by a surge of energy. The country was industrializing and urbanizing, laying railways and telegraph lines, settling western lands and displacing native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny, creating a maelstrom of growth that was exhilarating for many, unsettling for everyone. It was also a time marked by the acquisition of wealth and the perceived decay of public morals, when the country’s chief aim had become getting rich—“Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must,” in the words of Mark Twain. His 1873 novel The Gilded Age, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner, would lend its title to the era, yet that name, which has acquired a glow over time, was intended not as praise but as insult. It suggested a veneer of wealth that masked a worthless interior. Others called this period of American postwar affluence-without-culture by another pejorative: the Reign of Shoddy.

  Boorish ostentation was amply on display at the Centennial, where visitors paraded in bustles and top hats while elbowing each other to view exhibits and purchase trinkets. Japan’s commissioner to the exhibition described the frenzied commotion in colorful and succinct fashion. “The first day crowds come like sheep; run here, run there, run every where,” he complained in Harper’s Weekly. “All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say damn great many times, get very tired, and go home.”

  ON THIS SWELTERING MONDAY at the end of June, the boisterous crowds finally did go home—chased off, as always, by a foghorn that signaled closing as the sun and temperature began to descend. In Machinery Hall, the Corliss steam engine and all that it animated now lay idle. Out the east door of the building and across a leafy quadrangle, a man as large in girth as he was in ego was about to conduct a historic test.

  James Craig Watson had journeyed to the Centennial from Michigan, where he served as a professor of astronomy. A man keenly representative of his era, Watson seemed innately competitive, craving wealth and shunning scruples. He bragged of shrewd business dealings that, one fellow astronomer reflected, “seemed to me to transcend the bounds of ‘sharp practice,’ & run very close to fraud.” He cut corners academically, failing to credit the work of colleagues—including his mentor, who complained that his former student “does not shrink from adorning himself with the merit of others.” Once charged with plagiarism, Watson called the claims “trumped up” and goaded his accusers: “[A]ll I can say is they may ‘fire away’ for they might as well ‘throw mud at a rhinoceros.’ ”

  JAMES CRAIG WATSON

  Watson’s vanity was not without foundation, however. He had risen from an impoverished childhood of factory work and apple peddling to enter the University of Michigan as a mathematical prodigy at age fifteen. Six years later, he was on the faculty, where he proved popular with students. Among the reasons, undoubtedly, was his lax grading. One year he reportedly gave passing grades on a final exam to his entire class, including a student who had died toward the beginning of the course. For his ample achievements in astronomy, Watson had earned a gold medal from the French Academy of Sciences. For his considerable rotundity, he had earned the nickname “Tubby” from his students.

  In 1876, now in his late thirties, Watson received another honor, an invitation to serve as a judge at the Centennial. The great fair in Philadelphia was not just an exhibition; it was a competition in which exhibitors vied for medals bestowed by juried panels in thirty-six categories. Watson joined the jurors of Group 25—“Instruments of Precision, Research, Experiment, and Illustration, Including Telegraphy and Music”—an elite assemblage that comprised, among others, Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry and Britain’s Sir William Thomson, a leading physicist who would later be known as Lord Kelvin.

  On the previous day, June 25, Watson and his fellow judges had conducted preliminary tests of an improbable invention that purportedly could transmit the human voice by wire. Now, on this Monday evening after the fairgrounds had closed, the judges would perform a second, more thorough evaluation.

  The men gathered at the Judges’ Pavilion, a handsome structure capped by an arched roof and ornate towers. A wire was strung from a point outside the building to a distant room inside, the locations far enough separated that words spoken at one end of the wire could not be picked up at the other through the air. Sir William Thomson stood at the receiving end of the wire. James Craig Watson was outside, at the transmitter.

  Watson clutched a copy of that day’s New-York Tribune. He leaned in toward a vibrating membrane attached to the wire and read snippets of news items. “S. S. Cox has arrived,” Watson enunciated loudly, testing sibilance. At the other end of the wire, William Thomson pressed the receiver to his ear. He discerned “has arrived” but had trouble hearing the s’s and x of “S. S. Cox.” Watson tried other combinations of consonants and vowels. “City of New York.” “Senator Morton.” These phrases Thomson heard distinctly. Watson then tested longer strings of words. He read from an article datelined Washington: “The Senate has passed a resolution to print one thousand extra copies. . . .” Then an item from England: “The Americans of London have made arrangements to celebrate the Fourth of July. . . .” Watson and Thomson compared the words spoken to those heard. Amazingly, the phrases matched.

  These men instantly perceived that this crude device—the “speaking telephone” of one Alexander Graham Bell—would rapidly transform communications. “The results convinced both of us that Prof. Bell had made a wonderful discovery, and that its complete development would follow in the near future,” Watson would later recall.

  James Craig Watson marveled at other inventions at the Centennial. He and the judges of Group 25 bestowed medals on calculating machines, fire alarms, burglar alarms, gas meters, electric generators, railway signals, and a clever device being demonstrated in the exhibition’s Main Building, near the Gatling gun display. This was the electric pen, an aid to the businessman that enabled quick production and reproduction of written documents. The tip of the battery-powered “pen” consisted of a fine needle that darted up and down, fifty times per second, leaving a trail of perforations when traced across paper. “It is very much like holding,” one journalist wrote, “the ‘business end’ of a wasp on a sheet of paper and letting the insect sting small holes into the sheet while you move him back and forward.” In this way, the electric pen created a stencil, which—when placed in a duplicating press and inked by a roller—could generate hundreds of copies. “The simplicity of the whole apparatus, and the results obtained by it, entitle it to a place among the really useful inventions of the age,” the judges wrote in their report—lifting the language verbatim from the company’s marketing materials. “The apparatus is the invention of Thomas A. Edison.”

  THOMAS ALVA EDISON, AGE twenty-nine in June of 1876, was not the celebrity he would soon become, but he had already achieved considerable success as an inventor, holding more than one hundred patents. Though born in Ohio, Edison, like James Craig Watson, grew up humbly in Michigan. Unlike the astronomer, however, Edison did not seek a better life through academia. He was home-schooled and self-taught. As a boy, he sold newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad between his home, Port Huron, and Detroit, then spent his early adulthood not in college but as an itinerant “lightning jerker”—a telegraph opera
tor—an occupation that took him to six states in as many years. When not sending or receiving messages down the wire, he dreamed up ways to improve the telegraph equipment and honed his inventive skills by rigging devices to deliver mild shocks (as a joke) to his fellow telegraphers, and lethal ones to the rats and insects that infested the squalid offices. “[A] flash of light and the cockroach went into gas,” he recalled proudly of an early invention.

  As he grew older, Edison retained his boyishness—among his most conspicuous qualities were a folksy demeanor and disheveled hair—but he matured professionally. From his base of operations in Newark, New Jersey, he invented not only the newfangled electric pen but also an improved stock ticker, which would be widely used by Wall Street, and devices that boosted the efficiency and profits of the telegraph industry. One such invention, the quadruplex, enabled four telegrams to be sent simultaneously over a single wire. Another, the automatic telegraph, increased the speed at which messages could be sent. Edison received handsome royalties for these devices, and he earned praise from the judges at the Centennial, who called his automatic telegraph “a very important step in land-telegraphy.”

  THOMAS A. EDISON

  Edison, Bell, and other inventors impressed the world with American know-how at the exhibition in Philadelphia. A Swiss watchmaker who served as one of the judges returned home to report on the young nation’s technological prowess. “Up to this very day we have believed America to be dependent upon Europe. We have been mistaken,” he warned his countrymen. “We have believed ourselves masters of the situation, when we really have been on a volcano.” But for all of America’s inventiveness—its “knackiness,” in the words of a British visitor—the Centennial also showed where the nation lagged. The United States was good at making gadgets and money, but what else?

  Foreigners scoffed at displays of American art. American music was held in such low regard that the Women’s Centennial Committee, seeking a composer to write the exhibition’s inaugural march, hired a German—the commanding and megalomaniacal Richard Wagner. (The march proved a disappointment nonetheless.) America’s reputation in the sciences, such as physics and chemistry, also fared poorly (although it fared somewhat better in geology and paleontology, thanks to a surge of discoveries in the newly explored reaches of the trans-Mississippi West). Philadelphia industrialist Joseph Wharton lamented that the Centennial revealed a “rather meagre display of American scientific achievement.”

  This lack of achievement did not, however, reflect a lack of will. By 1876, a generation of American intellectuals, acutely sensing their own inferiority as they gazed across the Atlantic, had striven to elevate their country to scientific greatness. They had founded scientific societies and associations, institutes and academies, schools, lyceums, and libraries. Still, where Europe could boast many scientific luminaries such as Joule and Ampère and Gauss—names so esteemed they would soon be immortalized as units of measurement—the United States could claim a pittance. (One exception was the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry, for whom the henry—a unit of electrical inductance—would later be named.) In the 1870s, American scientists often went to Europe for graduate education, and, once there, they found their homeland disparaged. The French “think we are a mere nation of moneybags and insignificant students,” complained a leading American astronomer, Simon Newcomb. And it was not just Europeans who criticized the precarious condition of science in the United States. Newcomb was among several prominent Americans who engaged in public self-flagellation. At the beginning of 1876, asked to review the progress of American science over the previous century, Newcomb penned a harsh critique, pointing to a “period of apparent intellectual darkness” that had only begun to lift.

  No one, however, articulated the intellectual challenge to America as forcefully as Thomas Henry Huxley. The British naturalist, who was famous—and infamous—for his fierce defense of Darwinism, visited the United States on a lecture tour in 1876. Before stopping at the Centennial, in Philadelphia, he gave the inaugural address at the new Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Huxley stressed the importance of scientific research to the progress of humankind, and he spoke bluntly to this striving, expanding, adolescent nation. “I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such,” he proclaimed in a passage that would be widely quoted. “Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things? What is to be the end to which these are to be the means?”

  IN EARLY JULY 1876, just after the United States celebrated its hundredth birthday and as the Independence Day festivities died down, a London scientific journal published a small item in its astronomical column. The article in Nature observed that in two years’ time, a total solar eclipse would pass over America’s western states and territories. The article provided details of where the moon’s shadow would fall, and it included a statement that might be interpreted as encouragement or challenge. Of the eclipse, the British journal wrote simply, “Our American confrères will no doubt give a good account of it.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PROFESSOR OF QUADRUPLICITY

  JULY 1876—

  Menlo Park, New Jersey

  AFTER SIX HECTIC YEARS IN NEWARK—OPENING FACTORIES, fighting lawsuits, fending off creditors—Thomas Edison sought an escape in the rolling green countryside south of the city. For $5,200 he bought two land parcels, one with a house, the other on which he built a workshop. In a letter to a friend, Edison waxed poetic about the new laboratory at “Menlo Park, Middlesex Co., New Jersey, U. S. A., Western Div. Globe, Planet Earth, 4 miles south of Rahway on Penn R. R. on a High Hill.” He called it “the prettiest spot in N. J.” and added, “will show you round—go strawberrying.”

  Edison’s new laboratory stood conveniently two blocks west of the railroad tracks. Twenty-five feet wide by one hundred long, the building “in size and external appearance, resembles a country church,” one visitor commented. “The interior, however, is not so church-like.” The downstairs machine shop recalled the Centennial’s Machinery Hall: aproned men at steam-powered lathes and drills sculpted raw metal into whatever Edison envisioned. The large upstairs room looked more like an apothecary, its floor-to-ceiling shelves presenting more than a thousand glass jars labeled with their contents: acids, salts, oils, and plant extracts, including a red sap called “dragon’s blood.” From the laboratory’s second-floor balcony, on a clear day, one could make out the towers of the new bridge rising across the East River, twenty miles away, that would eventually link New York to Brooklyn.

  GENERAL VIEW OF MENLO PARK AND EDISON’S LABORATORY.

  INTERIOR OF EDISON’S MACHINE SHOP WHERE HIS EXPERIMENTS ARE CONDUCTED.

  Just down the hill, in a gabled dwelling trimmed an earthy red, Edison’s young wife presided. Mary Edison decorated the family home with bronzes and busts and a pianoforte. She threw parties and tended to the children: Thomas Alva Jr., born in January 1876, and three-year-old Marion Estelle, the pair nicknamed Dot and Dash by their telegrapher father. The Edisons’ marriage was typical of a certain class of the era. She took care of domestic affairs, albeit with the help of servants. He looked after business. “My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent,” he scribbled in a technical notebook one Valentine’s Day.

  Edison spent all hours with his fraternity of workmen up at the laboratory, covered in grease, and often did not return home until dawn. “I like it first-rate out here in the green country and can study, work and think,” he said. Mary felt neglected. She feared burglars. She slept with a revolver under her pillow.

  EDISON’S MENLO PARK “INVENTION FACTORY” would become legendary. It was here that, during a few years of frantic activity, he would conceive his most famous inventions, in addition to a host of others long since forgotten. For each of Edison’s celebrated triumphs, he experienced many defeats, and this has led some to co
nclude that Edison’s accomplishments stemmed not from intelligence but from sheer persistence, perhaps mania—that he was a lucky tinkerer who succeeded simply by trial and error.

  EDISON’S HOME, MENLO PARK, NEW JERSEY.

  Indeed, Edison promoted this myth. He publicly disdained intellectualism. “I wouldn’t give a penny for the ordinary college graduate, except those from the institutes of technology,” he harrumphed. “They aren’t filled up with Latin, philosophy, and the rest of that ninny stuff.” Once, when a news article referred to Edison as a “scientist,” he protested. “That’s wrong! I’m not a scientist,” he insisted. “I’m an inventor.” But Edison made these comments later in life, after a divide, indeed a chasm, had opened between him and the scientific establishment. The Thomas Edison who moved to Menlo Park was not dismissive of scientists. In fact, he aspired to be one.

  Edison may have lacked formal schooling, but he did not lack science education. He had read Isaac Newton, albeit with difficulty, by age twelve; devoured physics books throughout his teens; and, in his twenties, employed a Brooklyn high school teacher to tutor him in chemistry and acoustics. At Menlo Park, Edison’s library included the latest scientific journals (as well as the poetry of Poe and the ever-popular Longfellow). Edison also befriended some of the era’s top academic scientists. Sir William Thomson, after serving as a judge at the Centennial, stopped at Menlo Park before returning to England. Professors from Princeton were frequent visitors.

  GEORGE F. BARKER

  Edison’s closest associate from academia was George F. Barker. “I am the Professor of Physics in the University of Pennsylvania,” Barker wrote with formality in 1874, inviting Edison to Philadelphia. “[I] shall be glad to see you [at the university] when you come; or at my house.” Edison obliged, and the men struck up a lasting relationship. Barker, a bespectacled man with the whiskers of a schnauzer, gave popular lectures that wowed audiences with demonstrations of electrical science, often presented from the same Philadelphia stage that featured Italian opera and hosted lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson. During the Centennial, Barker had helped arrange the first demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and he was now keenly interested in Edison’s attempts to build a rival telephone. The distinguished physics professor would become one of Edison’s greatest champions.