Thomas Edison : The Wizard of Menlo Park

Thomas Edison’s name is synonymous with electric light, electricity, nay, even invention itself. But what is the actual story of the invention of the light bulb? Why didn’t Faraday or Maxwell or some other Alessandro Volta invent the light bulb? How did a self-educated school dropout succeed where more brilliant men didn’t – and how did he invent it?

Yes, Edison invented the light bulb. But more than twenty others had different patents on the electric light before Edison, over the preceding eighty years. Do we know their names? Also, we know he had a thousand patents, but can you name any of them?

Edison also designed, built and sold electric cars and even trains. We never hear of these! Why? Because they failed in the long term, though they were popular for several years. Petrol cars and diesel trains were far more efficient and economic. Think about this – Edison’s “failures” were more fantastic than most inventors’ successes.

Young Edison learnt, not from school, but from practical experience. (Sometimes too practical: he once tried to hatch eggs by sitting on them). He was forced to drop out of school, as a dullard. But he was incredibly curious and relentlessly enterprising. In his teens, chemistry fascinated him, and he stocked many of them in a home lab. He sold newspapers on trains, to earn a living, and even published a newspaper : he was never just a tinkerer, he was a businessman, who tried to sell his inventions.

Edison's phonograph

Edison’s fascination with electricity started as an apprentice in telegraphy. He saved the life a child on the rail tracks, and a grateful stationmaster taught him telegraphy. Telegraphers were in constant demand, especially by the railways. Insatiably curious, a relentless tinkerer, he taught himself how telegraphy and electricity worked. For nearly fifteen years he made several inventions that improved telegraphy. Among these were a dupleix and quadripleix devices, which could send two and four messages over the same wire simultaneously. 

Some experiments cost him dearly – he once spilt battery acid which destroyed his manager’s desk and carpet; he was fired. His early life was full of adventures; once carrying a load of books at midnight, a policeman fired bullets, mistaking Edison for a burglar! “You’re lucky I’m a bad shot,” the policeman commiserated. 

Edison traveled the southern US, after America’s Civil War, and almost sailed to Brazil, abandoning America. Would a Brazilian Edison have been an equally famous inventor? Eventually, he ended up working for Western Union, moving from Louisville to Cincinnati to Boston. He bought Faraday’s books on electricity. “Faraday was a Master Experimenter,” Edison said in admiration. “His explanations were simple. He used no mathematics. I must have tried every experiment in those books.” In Boston, he published papers on his inventions in a journal called The Telegrapher. Then he quit his job to become a partner in some companies, and to spend more time inventing.

 His first major success was a “Universal ticker”, which he hoped to sell to General Lefferts, president of Gold & Stock Telegraph Co, New York. Edison expected to sell for $5000. When Lefferts offered $40,000 he nearly fainted! But he accepted the money, and with it, started his famous Menlo Park laboratory.

 

The Menlo Park laboratory

In 1876, Edison set up a research laboratory at Menlo Park, with several assistants to help him explore new inventions. In June, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone and revolutionized communication. Edison spent the next year making experimenting with various components of the telephone. He first added a battery to it, to improve its performance. In January 1887, he invented a transmitter in which carbon pressure changed the resistance. In the following months, he developed a electromotograph receiver, a telephone message recorder, a handheld telephone and an induction coil circuit. Companies in Canada, England and USA showed interest in Edison’s telephones. Western Union established the American Speaking Telephone Company, whose customers were supplied the Edison designed telephones.

At the age of 30, in 1877 he invented the phonograph, based on a recording device he had designed for the telegraph. A machine that could record sound, as needle marks on a metal cylinder, and replay it seemed simply magical and he earned the moniker Wizard of Menlo Park. But the phonograph did not succeed commercially for several years. It had certain limitations : only one cylinder could be recorded at a time; there were no technologies to copy a recording; the electronic amplifier wouldn’t be invented for another twenty years.

After seeing a demonstration of an incandescent electric light bulb, Edison decalred he would make a cheap and long lasting electric lightbulb. He bought a patent from Canadians Woodward and Evans. He hired more scientists and engineers and organized them to work collaboratively at Menlo Park, primarily for electric light. But some of them also worked on telephones, phonographs, mining devices etc. His laboratory was equipped with a tremendous variety of resources mechanical, electrical, chemical and organic.

Remember, giants of science like Alessandro Volta, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Thomas Henry, Samuel Morse etc had invented many electrical devices before Edison. Ohm, Ampere, Maxwell and others had researched or explained its science. Telegraphy, electro-magnets for lifting heavy loads, arc lights were popular industrial applications.

Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun and Joseph Swan of England also developed incandescent lights. What did Edison do that these men didn’t?

Edison’s rigor, method and scale, set him apart. He set himself a target of making a long lasting electric bulb. Edison not only set up his lab with resources and people, he scattered notebooks for everyone. An enormous amount of information was discovered and shared among the researchers. 

There was a choice before Edison: he could have improved the arc lamp, or the incandescent lamp. When electricity passes through a metal wire, it gets hot. Some metals glow from the heat – this is called incandescence. Edison chose incandescence. He bought a patent for an incandescent light bulb from two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans.

Early experiments with platinum showed the filament melted at lower temperatures, because of oxidation. So Edison decided to vacuum air out of the bulbs, to prevent oxidiation. Experiments with two existing vaccum pumps, the Geissler pump and the Sprengel pump showed promise. He hired chemists, especially Ludwig Boehm, to device an improved vaccum pump.

He hunted worldwide for nearly forty thousand materials including jute from India and silk and bamboo from China, for his filament. In October 1879, they discovered that carbon-coated cotton thread lasted really long. A few months later, they found out that bamboo worked ever better.

Edison personally designed both the screw base and the socket that most manufacturers used for a century!

Some historians consider the Research Laboratory his greatest invention! Today, there is no major university or company in the world, without a research lab. Governments have started organizations, departments, companies etc to fund and research science and technology, in a systematic method, undreamed of before Edison’s success.

Edison's Insights 

While other inventors focused on low resistance, Edison focused on high resistance. This seems obvious on hindsight, but none of the others – Hiram Maxim, Westinghouse, Joseph Swan, Warren de la Rue, Alexander Lodygin, etc seem to have stumbled upon it. Which is suprising because electric power is proportional to resistance but also to the square of the current. A high natural resistance, meant low current would be good enough to heat the filament and make it glow.

These stem fro Ohms’ Law V= IR

and the equation for power W = VI

which meant, W = I*I*R,

where R is the resistance, I is the current and V is the voltage.

Also, as per Vaclav Smil, alone among other inventors, Edison understood that these lights must operate in parallel circuits than in series circuits. This way the voltage could be stable and each light bulb could be turned on or off with a switch, which is not possible with serial lights. The entire electrical system is designed on this principle.

His lab designed switches, fuses and meters. Edison designed an electro-chemical meter, with metal electrodes in acid. Power consumption was measured by the weight of the zinc deposited on the electrodes. The electro-magnetic meters based on a revolving wheel and meter, were invented later by someone else.

A Complete System

While others were trying to invent a better light bulb, Edison planned and designed a complete electrical system. For small units, acid based batteries, following the designs of Alessandro Volta and Humphrey Davy might have sufficed. But for lighting up streets, they were inadequate. Only steam engine powered dynamos could light up companies, factories, towns and cities.

He bought and tested dynamos designed by Zenobe-Theophile Gramme and Siemens, of Germany, then improved their performance. 

The first power generator station was set up in Pearl Street, in New York. It generated 3.4 MW and served ten thousand light bulbs. Pearl Street began with losses, but produced profits of $35,000 in 1884, five years later. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in a fire accident in 1885. By 1891, 1300 power plants like Pearl Street produced electricity and powered homes and businesses in the USA alone.

Edison thought not just like an inventor, who wanted to make something new, but as businessman, who wanted to lower costs for both his company and customers. His electrical system had to be cheaper, safer and more convenient than the gas lights and oil lamps of the day.

Notebooks and bulb designs

Patents

Bulb holder designs

Business Acumen

He founded several companies over the next few years:

·         1878 Edison Electric Light Co  -  Invent Bulb

·         1880 Edison Illuminating Co  - Power station

·         1880 Edison Lamp Co  - Manufacture Bulbs

·         1881 Edison Machine Works – Manufacture Generators

·         1881 Edison Tube Works – Underground wires and pipes

·         1884 Edison Company for Isolated Lighting  - private generators for companies

 

Investors included admirers of his telegraph and phonograph; the general public via the stock market; and later, the very rich American banker JP Morgan. 

He also established collaborative companies in other countries, most famously with Joseph Swan in Britain (who also invented a working electric bulb, but perhaps not the entire electrical system).

Publicity

He also had a flair for promotion and marketing. When he finally made a long burning light-bulb, he invited journalists to Menlo Park, on December 31, 1979 and dazzled them, by lighting not only the lab and the house but the entire street with electric lamps ! The Wizard who had made a machine produce human sound, had now turned night into day. 

Special trains were run for the general public, who wanted to visit Menlo Park and see this new miracle.

Edison also invited artists and smiths to design electroliers, to hold electric bulbs, similar to chandeliers which held candles. He set up showrooms where potential customers could see the bulbs in person. He hired artist to portray living rooms with electric bulbs, as tastefully as aesthetic as the flame based lighting, to which the rich and fashionable classes were accustomed.

A chance opportunity came along when the owner of the ship SS Columbia, wanted to install Edison’ lights on the ship. Edison obliged. The ship sailed from New York, down the US east coast, along Mexico and South America, and back up along the coast of the Pacific ocean, ending up in San Francisco, California. It ended up publicising Edison’s invention along the coastal cities of the two American continents, in a way unmatched by newspapers.

Solving other problems

There were engineering and cost problems – mainly of transmission and distribution losses. Edison designed a distribution system, which was both electrically efficient and used far less copper. It saved two thirds of the electricity in copper losses (power wasted by the resistance of transmission wires). Edison’s patented feeder circuit system, based on a three wire system, where two outer wires carried current, and one inner wire was neutral and served as common to both circuits, was a product of his ingenuity. When asked why no one else came up with this brilliant design, the great genius Lord Kelvin himself remarked,  “Because none of us is Edison.”

Edison feeder system

Not only did Edison come up with this design, he insisted that all the wires be insulated and buried underground to avoid electrocution of human beings. Uninsulated telegraph and telephone wires crisscrossed the sky above the streets of major cities, and were a deadly hazard to pedestrians and repairmen alike. Few historians seem to mention or even realized Edison’s great regard for human life and safety.

Electric wires on a New York street

But things did not always go well. There were patent battles fought in courts for a decade over the light-bulb. His Edison Electric went into partnership with Swan in the UK and with Thompson-Houston company in the US. The latter company became General Electric, the largest company in the world for most of the twentieth century.

Edison vs Tesla

The Serbian genius Nikola Tesla, who first joined Edison’s company in France, later joined Edison in the USA. Tesla tried to persuade Edison to abandon Direct Current for Alternating Current, but Edison could not be persuaded. Fundamentally, he seemed to have feared the deadly power of Alternating Current, which electrocuted people; he could not see the efficiencies of generating power at a distance and the efficiencies that came with stepping up and stepping down voltage. Tesla joined Westinghouse and implemented AC there. Their rivalry was so fierce, the narrative goes, that neither would accept a Nobel prize if the other was awarded. But stories of Edison electrocuting elephants and cheating Nikola Tesla seem to be popular urban legends, spread by a legion of Tesla fanatics.

Westinghouse’s eventual economic success later convinced Edison of AC’s virtues. But it was too late and came at a great cost. JP Morgan was frustrated with Edison’s stubborn refusal to accept AC, and the subsequent lower profits of the electricity business. Meanwhile Edison was selling his shares of the companies he founded, to finance new research and inventions. Edison wanted to venture into other areas of invention, like industrial mining, making cement, making electric cars and trains, turning his phonograph into a nickolodeon, inventing a movie camera etc. JP Morgan eventually bought enough shares to throw Edison out of the Edison General Electric company, and dropped Edison’s name from it.

Edison never rested on his success. He spent the rest of his life a workaholic, running factories and labs, twelve hours a day. He hired Ambrose Fleming to investigate what was called the Edison effect; this would later result in the invention of the vacuum tube diode, and the foundation of electronics. Fleming is now considered the Father of Electronics.

Later, Edison hired Henry Ford, who rose quickly through the ranks and became Chief Engineer. But Henry Ford had dreams of building a petrol-based car, while Edison tried to make a better electric car. Ford finally quit, and his petrol car triumphed over Edison’s electric car. But Edison and Ford remained lifelong friends.

In 1983, the US Government declared February 11, Edison’s birthday, as Inventor’s day. 

NOTE A shorter version of this essay was originally published, as part of a series on scientists, in the New Indian Express. The photos are from the Edison exhibit, in the American History Museum, part of the Smithsonian, Washington DC, USA

This longer version was prepared for a course I teach called "Inventions and Discoveries", at Saveetha Engineering College, Madras.

References

1.      Edison gallery – Museum of American History, Washington DC, USA

2.      Edison – His Life and Inventions by FL Dyer and TC Martin

3.      Creating the 21^st century by Vaclav Smil

4.      Thomas Edison - Wikipedia

       The Invention of Everything - Matt Ridley

Related Essays

Watt and Edison - crucial breakthroughs

Inventors and Discoverers

Edison vs Tesla - a video by Kathy Joseph

Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz

Bertha and Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler
Portrait : New Indian Express

James Watt watched a tea kettle boil, and built a steam engine. This is what we read in school. But England imported tea from China; the Chinese have boiled tea for a thousand years before the English. Why didn’t some Chinese James Watt invent the steam engine?

Karl Benz built the first petrol engine car in Germany, a hundred years after Watt. Nobody boils tea in petrol, so what inspired Karl Benz?

From Steam to Petrol

James Watt’s steam engine, was NOT inspired by a tea kettle, but by earlier steam engines by Thomas Savery and William Newcomen. But theirs were inefficient engines – Watt’s major breakthrough took twenty years of hard work and several incremental improvements, mainly in measuring devices. His crucial breakthrough was an external condenser. Watt’s stationary engine, powered cotton mills and mechanical presses in the 1780s. The railway steam engine, was invented forty years later by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson in the 1820s. In the intervening period, scientists discovered several laws of  heat and power – the field of thermodynamics. Petroleum was discovered only in the 1850s. But it was primarily used for lighting lamps or stoves.

But some tinkering engineers saw great potential in petrol, as a substitute for steam engines. Coal was hard to mine, slow to ignite, difficult and dirty to handle and caused a lot of smoke and grime; petrol on the other hand, flowed from oil wells, could be stored in tanks, flowed through pipes and had a much lower ignition point.

The Engine

The petrol engine was invented by Nikolaus Otto, a travelling salesman for a food company! He had been inspired by an engine designed by Lenoir that ran on coal gas; Otto experimented with a copy of a Lenoir engine that another skilled mechanic built for him in 1861. He created an engine fueled with an alcohol air mixture. Eugen Langen, owner of a sugar refinery, invested in a new company that  Otto started, and he built an improved engine. At the 1867 Paris exhibition, his engine won the first prize. He expanded this company, reorganized as Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz AG. This was not a car engine, but more like a mechanical power device for workshops, like printing presses.

Otto hired Gottlieb Daimler and William Maybach to improve it; they made it smaller, quieter, more efficient. But when Daimler proposed fitting Otto’s engine to power a horseless carriage, Otto showed no interest.

Horseless Carriages

So Daimler and Maybach quit Otto’s company in 1882, rented a house in Canstatt and started a car company. Daimler experimented, first fitting a bicycle with a petrol engine – the world’s first motorbike, called the Motoren Gesselschaft. Daimler’s seventeen year old son Paul test drove it – the ultimate teenager fantasy!

This public demonstration provoked amazement and curiosity. But a local newspaper, Canstatt Zeitung was quite critical, calling it a “repugnant diabolical device, dangerous to citizens.” Paul test drove the bike at nights, in secret. He even replaced the front wheel with a skid, and drove it on a frozen lake!

Offended by media criticism, but not discouraged, Daimler then tested the engine on a boat. He disguised it with wires to pretend it was electric. After it proved successful, he revealed he had used a petrol engine!

In 1886, for his wife Emma’s birthday he ordered a magnificent horse carriage – delivered secretly at night. He planned to build a car, with that carriage.

Ringing in a New Era

Parallely, in Mannheim, a nearby city, Karl Benz tried to build a petrol engine. His earlier business failed. But his wife Bertha had great faith in him and her dowry was useful for his experiments. After many failures, he successfully ran a stationary two stroke petrol engine on the last day of 1879.  In his own words:

After supper my wife said, “Let us go over to the shop and try our luck once more.” My heart was pounding. I turned the crank. The engine started to go “put-put-put”, and the music of the future sounded with regular rhythm. We both listened to it run for a full hour, fascinated, never tiring of the single tone of its song. The longer it played its note, the more sorrow and anxiety it conjured away from the heart. Suddenly the bells began to ring – New Years Eve bells. We felt they were not just ringing in a new year, but a new era.

He mounted his engine on a three wheel carriage, calling it the Benz Patent Motorwagen. The local newspaper Mannheimer Zeitung attacked Benz’s idea calling it, “useless, ridiculous, indecent. Who would buy it when there are horses for sale?” But in 1885 he drove the Motorwagen on the streets and it became a sensation! But not many people actually bought his Motorwagen.

Bertha’s Benzene Yatra

Bertha, Karl’s wife is the great romantic heroine of what followed. In August 1888, one morning, she asked her fifteen year old son Eugen “Can you drive it?” 

The right answer was “No, mother, my Dad put an engine with a steering rod on a horse carriage. Nobody knows how to drive it.” 

But Eugen said, “Of course!” 

With Eugen’s brother Richard, the family drove to visit Bertha’s family in Pforzheim. There were no petrol bunks then. So they refueled with benzene, sold at apothecaries (pharmacies!). Bertha fixed a short circuit in the engine, with her hairpin. Eugen repaired the chains when they slipped. Karl was annoyed, but when Germans realized that a mother and children could safely drive a car a hundred km, they became national celebrities. Bertha’s drive is as famous in Germany as Gandhi’s Dandi yatra is in India.

Teenage drivers, dowry money, media critics, a daring cross country journey, ushering in a new era – sounds like a mega serial, but this is real history!

Shoulders of Giants

Darwin and Wallace, independently discovered evolution while living on different continents; Wallace’s letter to Darwin forced the latter to publish; after this they became friends and mutual admirers. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler independently invented the petrol based car, but never met each other, even though they lived in the same country! Oddly, several years after Daimler died, the companies they started would merge as Daimler-Benz.

But they shared history, by standing on the shoulders of giants who came before them. Otto’s engine, was inspired by Lenoir, who  was inspired by James Watt, who was inspired by Newcomen and Savery!

Note Today, March 17 is Gottlieb Daimler's birthday. This essay was originally published in New Indian Express under the title Changing History's Gears as part of a series about scientists.

If you liked this essay, you might also like reading these

How Diesel and Benz changed agriculture

The Art and Aesthetic of Driving 

"Indians are such wonderful drivers"

Emile Levassor - architect of the car

Essays on Scientists in New Indian Express

In December, VR Devika of Aseema recommended my name to the editor of The Week,  to write an article on Aryabhata for their anniversary special issue "History of India through 25 people."

A week back, Venkatasubramanian Ramamurthy asked me to begin a series of weekly essays for the online edition of New Indian Express. The series is titled, "Shoulders of Giants". The first essay is on Alfred Russel Wallace, the great biologist, who discovered Evolution and it's primary mechanism, Natural Selection,  almost simultaneously with Charles Darwin, but sadly remains in the latter's shadow.

My blog is titled Ajivaka Wallacian, partly after Wallace.  When I wrote about the Wallace Line in an email a few years back, Badri Seshadri urged me to start a blog and not confine myself to emails.

I start a different blog in 2007 but only wrote a few articles, then gave it up. I decided to start this blog in 2012, on the day the Mayan calendar reset itself. I didn't know then that the two hundredth birthday of Wallace followed shortly on January 2013. What a sad state of affairs, that it was not celebrated by biologists with great fanfare. It would be a while before I wrote of Wallace and the Birds of Paradise, in Tamil.

My first public essay in my blog was about Haber and Bosch and their invention of a brilliant process to extract nitrogen from the air and make artificial fertilizer. It will be my second essay in the Express series, next week.

I'm grateful to Venkatasubramanian (RVS) for the opportunity to write for the Express! That too on science!

Links

1. Shoulders of Giants - New Indian Express Series Page
2. New Indian Express Esssay on Alfred Russel Wallace
3. On Aryabhata - essay in The Week
4. ஆல்ஃப்ரெட் ரஸ்ஸல்  வாலஸ் - தமிழ் கட்டுரை
5. A year of my blog
6. What Avvai didn't say - my older blog