Edison as the first tech-celeb

AMERICANS disdain abstraction, but they adore practical genius. Hence the long and reverential infatuation with Thomas Edison.

There is no shortage of Edison biographies, and at least 10 adult accounts of his life are in print, along with a nearly equal number of children’s versions. That makes Randall Stross a pretty audacious guy, but in “The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World,” he makes a fascinating and altogether contemporary contribution to our understanding of an iconic American figure.

Stross is a Stanford-trained historian, a professor of business who writes the New York Times’ Digital Domain column from Silicon Valley. His principal contribution to our understanding of Edison is to see in him a prototype for the businessman-celebrity hybrid that has become such an influential fixture of our time. In particular, Stross discerns in the “inventor” of the phonograph, incandescent lightbulb and moving pictures the forerunner of such high-tech entrepreneurs as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison -- the cutting-edge technologist as rock star. Stross understands that, in the alchemy that transmutes invention into consumable product, publicity is the philosopher’s stone.

“The Wizard of Menlo Park” does a meticulous job of charting Edison’s well-documented journey from penniless young telegrapher to international technical celebrity and, as a journalist himself, Stross does a particularly adroit job of showing how Edison used his era’s nascent popular press and popularizing magazines, such as Scientific American, to transform himself from tinkerer into inventor and sage. Stross’ account of this iconic life is rendered with great clarity, if somewhat excessive detail, and one of its greatest strengths is a liberation from the hagiography of previous biographies.

Whatever his other achievements, for example, Edison was utterly conventional in his prejudices, which were drearily common to his time and class.

One of the book’s more interesting sections deals with the close relationship between Edison and Henry Ford, who once told reporters, “I think Mr. Edison is the greatest man in the world, and I guess everyone does.” Edison reciprocated because he found in Ford a kindred spirit, an immensely successful man who was suspicious of formal education and had a supremely practical bent. Though the two initially were brought together by the employee who ran Edison’s storage battery company -- for obvious reasons -- their friendship blossomed in the years following Ford’s success with the Model T. Ford was then the country’s most successful businessman and quite at home with his newfound friend’s lack of commercial acumen. In fact, he once described Edison as “the world’s worst businessman,” a man who “knows almost nothing about business.”

As Stross points out, the two had something besides a forgiving mutual admiration binding them together: “No major business figure detested Wall Street as much as Thomas Edison -- except Henry Ford. The two men had this in common. ‘Wall Street’ was less a geographic place than a shorthand for grasping Jews. The two men had lots of things to say about Jews, Ford doing so publicly and Edison, privately. If Jews ‘are as wise as they claim to be,’ Ford wrote in his autobiography, ‘they will labor to make Jews Americans, instead of laboring to make Americans Jewish.’ Edison sent Ford [annotated and underlined] clippings to add to his file on ‘The Jewish Question.’ ”

According to Stross, “The men’s anti-Semitism shaped their business plans. Henry Ford would not permit ‘Wall Street’ to get hold of his revered Edison. He stepped forward to offer Edison forgivable loans at 5% annual interest to finance the development work” on a new battery.

America was awash in crank theories of social organization, health and diet during the years surrounding the turn of the 19th into the 20th century -- and of meta-crank schemes that linked all three. (Edison was a great believer in “liver pills” and a milk diet.) Ford’s factory workers were the highest paid in the world, but he also wanted to control every aspect of their lives and to modify their behavior according to his own predilections -- one of which was an antipathy to cigarette smoking. Eager to find a scientific rational for forbidding his factory hands to smoke cigarettes, he sought a supportive written opinion from Edison that could be circulated.

The inventor -- himself a heavy cigar smoker and a habitual user of chewing tobacco -- obliged with a letter claiming that “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.”

In fact, Edison never had banned cigarettes from his lab or factories, but after writing the letter, he “hurriedly had signs posted at his plants: ‘Cigarettes Not Tolerated. They Dull The Brain.’ ”

Controversy ensued, as the tobacco companies -- even then a potent lobby -- fired back with their own scientific guns. Edison insisted that cigarette papers contained mind-numbing toxins, “and that is why Mexicans, whom he had heard were heavy smokers, ‘as a race were not clear headed.’ ”

Bigotry of the sort Ford and Edison dispensed was common enough in their era as not to dull their celebrity. But the automaker was right about the inventor’s commercial sense. When he died in 1931, Edison left an estate valued at $12 million -- probably an inflated figure, since the trustee’s accounting six years later put its total worth at $1.5 million. Ford, by contrast, left a foundation endowed with $109 million and a personal estate of $70 million.

Edison kept another kind of score. Shortly before his death, he registered a mind-boggling 1,093 patents. If the work that had gone into them often was done by his uncredited and essentially unrewarded assistants -- and Stross makes a convincing case that it was -- the Wizard of Menlo Park had a keen sense of the patent score’s importance to his legend. As Stross points out, when a 1998 poll asked Chinese to list the “best known Americans,” they put Edison first, ahead of Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein and Mark Twain.

The author shrewdly notes that Edison arrived at his celebrity at precisely the right moment, just as the modern entertainment industry and its electrical infrastructure were coming into existence, but far enough back that the 19th century ideal of the solitary inventive genius remained plausible. “Edison’s fame acquired an indestructible shine because he worked in technical areas the public sensed were going to shape that historical moment.... Once he chanced upon the phonograph and, overnight, the press anointed him the Wizard of Menlo Park, he occupied a space different from everywhere else: He, and anyone working with him, were perceived as standing at the very outer edge of the present, where it abuts the future.”

And, since then -- as the Chinese poll shows -- America has exported its fondness for practical genius, right along with the consumer society it serves.

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