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  If Edison sought to emulate any professor, however, it was a man no longer living. Michael Faraday, chemist and physicist at Britain’s Royal Institution, had transformed scientific understanding of electricity and magnetism by showing that those two natural forces, seemingly distinct, are bound up as one. During years of clever, meticulous study, largely in the 1830s, Faraday demonstrated that magnets could induce electric currents and electric currents could produce magnetism, and he thereby invented the basic elements of the electric motor and the electric generator. A humble, hands-on investigator who was not above placing electrodes on his tongue to test for electricity, Faraday believed a true scientist should question everything, including oneself. “The man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong, and he has the additional misfortune of inevitably remaining so,” he once said. “All our theories are fixed upon uncertain data, and all of them want alteration and support.”

  Faraday published detailed accounts of his investigations in a massive, three-volume work called Experimental Researches in Electricity. Thomas Edison bought and studied it. “I think I must have tried about everything in those books,” Edison commented. “His explanations were simple. He used no mathematics. He was the Master Experimenter.” By autumn 1875, Edison was modeling his scientific work after Faraday—in fact, Edison labeled his laboratory notebook “Experimental Researches”—and he immediately believed he had made a discovery worthy of his scientific idol.

  In late November of that year, while experimenting with new modes of telegraphy, Edison constructed a device that vibrated rapidly by means of an electromagnet. The contraption clicked like a hyperactive telegraph key, and as it did so, it threw off a burst of bright sparks, including from metal objects near the device yet disconnected from it. Intrigued, Edison performed tests on those sparks. He and his assistants touched their tongues to metal but could feel no electric shock. The men tried to measure electric current by means of a galvanoscopic frog—an amputated frog’s leg with its sciatic nerve exposed, a sensitive detector also used by Faraday—but again the sparks triggered no response. Edison concluded that these sparks did not display the properties of electricity and must therefore represent something entirely new. Far less circumspect than his British hero, Edison quickly announced his findings to the newspapers.

  “Mr. Edison . . . promises to become famous as the discoverer of a new natural force,” blared The New York Herald. The New-York Tribune expounded, “Mr. Edison has named the new principle ‘etheric force,’ ” which The Daily Graphic described as “a sort of first cousin to electricity” and which The Boston Globe opined “may prove of great value to the science of telegraphy.” Indeed, Edison believed he had made a fundamental discovery in physics, one that might also revolutionize communications, for it seemed that his etheric force was transmitted more easily than electric currents.

  Edison had, in fact, stumbled on something revolutionary—without realizing it, he had discovered radio waves more than a decade before German physicist Heinrich Hertz would reveal their true nature—but Edison was wrong to assume that what he had observed was a new natural force, and his hasty conclusion soon drew the scorn of scientists and engineers. William Sawyer, an electrical inventor and one of Edison’s chief rivals, wrote harshly, “I do not hesitate to pronounce the whole thing, both as concerns the public and in a scientific point of view, as one of the flimsiest of illusions.” Scientific American concluded that Edison’s declaration of a new force had been “simply gratuitous.”

  The humiliation dogged Edison even after he moved to Menlo Park. James Ashley, editor of a professional journal called The Telegrapher, had at one time been a business partner of Edison’s, but the partnership did not end well, and Ashley often retaliated in his journal; he printed snide articles that disparaged Edison’s ethics and belittled his inventions, including the quadruplex telegraph. In July of 1876, now that Edison’s foray into scientific research had become an embarrassment, Ashley wrote another article drenched in sarcasm:

  Edison About to Astonishthe World Again.—Stand from Under!

  The professor of duplicity and quadruplicity has been suspiciously quiet for some time. Since his great discovery of the new moonshine, which he christened “etheric force,” he has apparently subsided. . . . Satisfied that some great purpose was concealed under this reticence, and determined that the world, and especially the telegraphic world, should not remain in ignorance of the doings of the most remarkable genius of this or any other age and country, THE TELEGRAPHER has taken the trouble to penetrate the mystery which enshrouds his purpose. It has been discovered that the professor is about to astonish the world, and confound the ignoramuses who are engaged in the improvement of telegraphic apparatus, by the production of an invention which has taxed his massive intellect and unparalleled inventive genius to the utmost. . . . The establishment at Menlo Park has not been created for nothing.

  That secluded precinct is yet to become famous throughout the earth as the spot where this invention was conceived and brought to light!

  Edison had attempted to prove himself a respected scientific investigator, in the mold of Michael Faraday. He had, instead, been taken for a fraud and a fool.

  Yet the “professor of duplicity and quadruplicity” was not easily dissuaded. Tapping a deep reservoir of persistence and self-confidence, he would indeed try again to astonish the world, to demonstrate that he was a scientist and no mere tinkerer.

  CHAPTER 3

  NEMESIS

  WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 27, 1876—

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  JAMES CRAIG WATSON, THE ASTRONOMER WHO HAD JUDGED Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone at the Centennial Exhibition, lived and worked in his own pastoral setting, at the University of Michigan’s Detroit Observatory. Set on a grassy ridge a half mile northeast of campus, the building was named not for its location—Ann Arbor—but to honor the city in which its benefactors lived. The edifice stood as a monument to philanthropy and science. Its bracketed cornice and Doric portico lent a Greek Revival elegance to the exterior, while its all-seeing eye lay beneath the domed roof. From the observatory atop the hill, one could look down to the Huron River and up toward eternity.

  OBSERVATORY OF MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY.

  It was a Wednesday night at the start of the school year, and Watson was at the great refracting telescope, an instrument so large it dwarfed even a man of such generous proportions. The wooden tube, more than seventeen feet in length, was connected to a clockwork that kept it aligned with the heavens. The telescope was mounted equatorially—along the plane of the equator—and as the earth slowly turned, it remained fixed against the stars. The whole contraption sat on its own pier, a masonry foundation that descended forty feet through the center of the building and another fifteen feet underground, isolating the telescope from footsteps and other sources of vibration. Watson pulled a thick rope to rotate the dome, which rolled on cannonballs, and he aimed the large telescope through the narrow, shuttered opening. Cool autumn air rushed in along with the sounds of the night.

  These were Watson’s prime working hours. While his wife slept in the expansive residence next door, he scoured the Michigan sky. “He knew the stars as one knows the faces of his friends,” a colleague recalled, but what Watson most sought were strangers, and he displayed a great talent for finding them. As a newspaper described it: “Two or three or four times a year he turns up with a pocket full of new planets that he has picked up as a boy does marbles.”

  Indeed, Watson was, in the parlance of the day, a planet hunter, and on this night he found his quarry—a dim, shining object in Pisces. Almost immediately, he telegraphed his discovery to Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian, who then wired the news to Europe. It was, remarkably, Watson’s nineteenth planet, and he would name it Sibylla.

  IN WATSON’S ERA, the term planet commonly denoted two very different classes of objects. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the other large bodies that orbit the sun at widely spaced intervals bore
the label major planets, while vastly smaller objects—“so small that a good walker could easily make the circuit of one of these microscopic globes in a single day,” as one scientist put it—were minor planets, a term still used, in fact, among astronomers. Rarely visible to the naked eye and mostly clustered in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, these tiny worlds are better known as asteroids.

  So many asteroids have now been identified that they have been famously disparaged as “vermin of the skies,” but in the 1870s they were still relatively novel, and a heated international race was underway to see which country could claim the largest share. Astronomers found the first minor planet at the very inception of the nineteenth century, and fifty years later—when the rate of discovery accelerated—just a dozen had been added to the list. Finding these diminutive worlds required mind-numbing labor: concentrating on a small patch of sky, mapping all stars visible through one’s telescope, and reexamining that same region night after night until a new starlike object appeared that moved almost imperceptibly across the field. The discoverer then had to record the asteroid’s exact coordinates and calculate its orbit so it could be tracked and verified as a new object, not simply a rediscovered old one. Hunting planets mandated machinelike precision and an obsessive drive—traits exhibited by James Craig Watson even at the beginning of his career.

  At age nineteen, while serving as an assistant at the Detroit Observatory, Watson had espied a tiny dot moving through the heavens. By that time—the fall of 1857—fifty minor planets had been found, yet only two by Americans. News of Watson’s asteroid reached Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters, an older astronomer of Danish birth and German heritage who had recently immigrated to the United States and would soon head the observatory at Hamilton College in the upstate town of Clinton, New York. “[W]e have great hope that yours is a new one,” Peters wrote to Watson about his planet. “[E]very discovery in this country must be of double interest to us, in order to teach old-foggy [sic] Europe to look a little more around towards this side of the Atlantic.” Alas, it turned out that Watson’s planet had been seen a few weeks earlier in Düsseldorf, so credit for the discovery was assigned, disappointingly, to the Old World. Watson wrote back to Peters, his new compatriot. “I wish they would stop awhile in Europe, and we would have a better chance of bringing up the rear, and of commanding the advance.”

  C. H. F. Peters

  Before long, C. H. F. Peters and James Craig Watson did command the advance. The American public at the time was absorbed in more pressing matters—armed conflict had severed the nation—but in 1861, just a month after the Civil War began, Peters found his first asteroid. He called it Feronia, for the Roman goddess of groves and freedmen. (Like the major planets, minor ones received names, customarily those of mythological figures.) The following year, in the autumn, shortly after the horror that was the Battle of Antietam, Peters found two more minor planets, Eurydice and Frigga. Watson entered the race in 1863 with Eurynome.

  Come 1865, with the war finally over but the nation now grieving its assassinated president and the loss of a generation of young men, the two scientists continued to collect planets, and they occasionally stepped on each other’s toes. In October, Watson announced that he had discovered an asteroid only to learn that Peters had noticed the same object a few weeks earlier. “I can surrender my claims to this one with becoming grace,” Watson wrote with uncharacteristic humility. Later, when Peters inadvertently claimed one of Watson’s recent discoveries, the Hamilton College student newspaper reported, “Dr. PETERS gracefully yields the palm.” It was all very cordial. Together, these men reflected glory on their now reunified country, and Peters, the more experienced of the pair, maintained a respectable lead over Watson, his younger colleague.

  Then came Watson’s annus mirabilis.

  Up through 1867, no astronomer—let alone an American—had discovered more than four asteroids in a single year, yet in 1868, Watson found Hecate, Helena, Hera, Clymene, Artemis, and Dione, a yield of half a dozen. “I congratulate you upon the discovery of your new asteroids,” Peters wrote to Watson, “it seems you have fallen upon a nest of them.” Watson’s home institution, the University of Michigan, was less magnanimous in its response. “The score stands . . . Watson 9, and Peters 8,” a student magazine gloated. “The fact is, that Prof. Watson has discovered more asteroids than any other man in America.” What began as a friendly team sport—the United States against Europe—became a personal competition between the two men, a battle that grew increasingly bitter and divisive.

  That these two astronomers would clash was probably inevitable. If Watson was headstrong, Peters was irascible. “Of his personality it may be said that it was extremely agreeable so long as no important differences arose,” Simon Newcomb recalled. And when differences did arise, Peters relished tweaking his adversaries. Such was the story behind one of Peters’s asteroids, Miriam. He named the planet not after a Roman or Greek goddess, but after the sister of Moses, and he did it, a fellow astronomer complained, “in defiance of rule, and of malice aforethought; so that he could tell a theological professor, whom he thought to be too pious, that Miriam, also, was ‘a mythological personage.’ ” Peters vehemently disliked pomposity. It is no surprise then that he came to dislike Watson.

  Through the early 1870s, as the nation’s Reconstruction sputtered and its industry began to soar, the rivalry between these men only intensified. At his observatory in upstate New York, Peters claimed Felicitas, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Sirona, Gerda, Brunhilda, Antig-one, Electra. From Ann Arbor, Watson snagged Althaea, Hermione, Aethra, Cyrene, Nemesis.

  A Detroit newspaper, siding predictably with Watson, the local competitor, called the contest a “great planet shooting match, in which [the astronomers] are engaged for the belt (Orion’s) and the championship of the globe.” A daily in Atlanta marveled, “If these fellows go on picking up loose stars in this way they will soon have the planetary system so crowded that a new one will have to be invented.” A New York tabloid was more jaded: “The picking up of asteroids by Watson and Peters is . . . becoming monotonous.”

  By the time Watson found Sibylla in September 1876, only two months after the nation’s hundredth birthday, he and Peters had propelled their upstart country to the front of the international planet-hunting race, the United States having pulled ahead of France by a score of fifty-one to forty-nine. But Watson had conspicuously lost ground to his rival. In the individual rankings, Peters had taken a commanding lead, twenty-six to nineteen. An Ann Arbor newspaper was left to concede that its hometown contestant was losing the race. “Prof. P. is beating Prof. Watson ‘clean out o’ sight.’ ”

  Constitutionally obsessive, Watson would not give up so easily. He was, as a colleague remarked, “extremely self confident” and “selfish and unscrupulous in advancing his own interests.” A clue to his personality can be found in a notebook he kept as a college junior. Within the more than two hundred pages of lecture notes, mathematical formulae, and designs for telescopes, he continually practiced his signature—as if perfecting his autograph—and at one point he seemed to imagine his epitaph. “The Hon. James C. Watson one of the greatest astronomers that this Country has produced to whom unmeasured devotion to science owes some of its greatest blessings,” he scribbled self-referentially. “Astronomy under his patronage has reached a summit rarely attained.”

  Watson pictured a glorious future for himself and, through his achievements, for a grateful nation. Although by 1876 his competitor had bested him, Watson saw a way to regain the edge. He would hunt new and larger game, not only seeking minor planets, but doggedly pursuing a major one.

  CHAPTER 4

  “PETTICOAT PARLIAMENT”

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1876—

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  THE AFFAIRS OF MONEY AND MEN DOMINATED THE HEADLINES of America’s Gilded Age, as was evident in the pages of the Philadelphia dailies on Wednesday, October 4, 1876. Along with the latest stock quotes and
baseball scores and the price of whale oil and molasses, there was ample news of politics, an almost exclusively male domain in the era before women’s suffrage. Colorado had just achieved statehood and held its first elections. “Large Republican Gains in the Centennial State,” crowed the front of The North American. The Press considered another topic governed by men: the ongoing conflict with America’s beleaguered Indians. “I think that the war is practically over now, and that Sitting Bull will never be able to gather such a large force again as that with which he crushed Custer,” it quoted John B. Omohundro, a famous frontiersman better known as “Texas Jack.” Closer to home and considerably less harrowing was news from the Centennial grounds in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “The principal event of yesterday was the Bankers’ Convention, the proceedings of which are herewith appended,” it wrote.

  Elsewhere in the city, another convention aimed to make news of a different sort. As a light rain fell, a crowd entered a white marble building at Thirteenth and Arch, then ascended a broad stairway to an elegant hall of pillars and frescoes. The space was owned and rented out by an English aid society that served as a cultural bridge between Britain and America. Painted medallions of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin gazed down from the ceiling, while a full-length portrait of Queen Victoria, soon to begin the fifth decade of her long reign, graced the far end of the hall. The painting depicted the monarch in her younger, trimmer days, the vermilion background catching the rouge in her cheeks. The image evoked femininity and fortitude—an appropriate symbol for this gathering.