Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 11: Edison and the Promise of Universal Progress - Part 1
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Edison and the Promise of Universal Progress
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Beginning with an original conception in 1879, Thomas Edison designed the world’s first system to produce and convey electricity to the general public in homes and workplaces, complete with his newly-invented indoor electric lights.
A sensational scientific breakthrough made the system practicable: his invention of a generator with 90% efficiency in converting input energy from fuel into output electric current, exploding the presumption of the scientific establishment that a 50% efficiency limit was the law of nature.
The inventor then personally supervised the construction of central power stations and the creation of power companies to put the system into effect. He immediately shared these technologies with foreign partners who began bringing them to all corners of the planet.
Thomas Edison’s introduction of electric power to the world opened the way to undreamed-of capabilities for curing poverty, disease, ignorance, and other impediments to fruitful and long human lives.
A development of this magnitude should certainly be familiar to everybody, and celebrated everywhere. But this is not the case. Though the world knows his name, Edison is not widely understood as a man who reshaped our society for all future time.
Historians of technology credit the origin of electricity for general public use to Edison; and archival materials now available online demonstrate in detail how Edison achieved these things.
Yet a strange fog shrouds the public memory of Edison and his work. A profound gulf separates us today from the culture and national identity of his time, engendering ignorance and even hostility for what Edison, America, and the whole world of the past have done for us.
This chapter presents aspects of the Edison story which help explain him, and his USA. Hopefully, this report may blow away some of the fog separating us from our own past.
What Inspired National Thinking --- ?
General William J. Palmer and his friends and partners created the Automatic Telegraph Company, hired Thomas Edison, and sponsored his startup as an independent inventor. The Philadelphians would be at Edison’s side as he fought to empower mankind.
The Civil War had given a generation of Americans a chance to see something on a nobler plane – something beyond even the military heroism possible in all wars.
Lincoln had taught that government should elevate the people’s well-being. Palmer and his partners had been with Lincoln and the Union, through to emancipation, through to national salvation, and through the grief of the President’s martyrdom. Victory and peace brought the chance to fulfill Lincoln’s stirring national idea with new scientific powers.
Having seen the triumph of their just cause, Americans confidently expected transformative technological advances that would broadly improve living standards.
This idea of progress was stunningly exemplified by Edison, who was known worldwide as the greatest inventor of the modern age.
In recent decades, many Americans have been led to believe that their country’s former concept of general improvement was illogical and dangerous. When today’s aspiring world looks to powerful technologies to end poverty, Western leaders work against such technology diffusion. They claim it would empower potential military enemies. They teach their children that advanced industry would be unnatural for less-developed countries – and that it poses a danger to wildlife.
People who have learned to think this way would have reason to hold contemptuous opinions of Thomas Edison.
In an earlier day, everyone knew Edison as “the wizard,” for the astonishing contrivances he gave the public. There was seeming magic, too, in his creation of an “invention factory,” the first industrial research laboratory, staffed by his trainees. Such a facility for systematic innovation became generalized in American industry, and in other nations then aspiring to rise.
These achievements so enhanced the potential for universal improvement, that much of the world lauded this American inventor as a benefactor and liberator.
--- And What Changed?
As we will show in this chapter, Edison and his supporters had to fight for the right to proceed with his pioneering work, against the opposition of the imperial faction then fastening their tyranny over U.S. industry. This element feared the unlimited spread of America’s influence, its breathtaking new industries and its nation-building ideals, as potentially fatal to a world order based on hierarchy and imperial trade-power.
Despite the growing influence of the transatlantic financiers, America and other sovereign nations sailed ahead with electricity, and with the many technologies spawned by electricity’s sudden appearance.
It was only after the 1960s decapitation of U.S. leadership that the imperial element was able to radically shift the country’s strategy. Capital-intensive industry was offshored or simply demolished. This deprived Americans of the knowledge and dignity associated with skilled, productive work. People were taught they should despise their revolutionary heritage; and Edison’s memory was reviled.
BUT -- a great part of the world has never renounced the aspiration to a better life that America once inspired. As a result, world leadership in science and industry has been passing from the Anglo-Americans to non-Westerners.
This switch-around has created an awkward situation for the “globalist” Anglo-Americans who crusade against industrial civilization, but fear the potential power of other countries who don’t agree with such a decline for themselves. This predicament, properly observed, may be useful in setting the stage for the Edison story.
An American academic reported on his 1984 trip to China, where he had been flustered by that country’s stubborn admiration for America’s rise to industrial leadership.
At that time the announced goal of the People’s Republic was to carry out . . . “Four Modernizations” – agriculture, science and technology, industry, and the military. What particularly struck our group of Americans was the seemingly unbounded, largely uncritical ardor with which the Chinese were conducting their love affair with Western-style modernization . . . .
Most of the Chinese we came to know best . . . explicitly associated the kind of progress [they sought] with the United States. This respect for American wealth and power was flattering but disconcerting, for we often found ourselves reminding the Chinese of serious shortcomings, even some terrible dangers, inherent in the Western mode of industrial development . . . [Many] of the Chinese seemed to be extravagantly, almost blindly, credulous and optimistic.[1]
These Chinese have felt, much as Thomas Edison did, that they could innovate and build their way to a higher and better life, even if the Western rule-makers thought it unwise, if not impossible.
Who Was Edison?
Thomas Edison was 23 years old and brimming with the self-confidence of his generation when Palmer’s Automatic Telegraph Company hired him in 1870.
The young man had learned to treasure America’s revolutionary heritage from his father, who had escaped to the USA from imperial tyranny.
Samuel Edison had been an innkeeper in the town of Vienna, in the province of Upper Canada (called Ontario after 1841), on the north shore of Lake Erie. Under the British Crown, the land and government were largely controlled by a permanent unelected oligarchy of families intertwined with transatlantic corporations.
The Canadian provinces rebelled against British authority in 1837. Samuel Edison plunged into action, recruiting and training insurgents for the Upper Canada rebel chief William Lyon Mackenzie.[2] Their movement drafted a constitution modeled on the founding document that the revolutionary United States had adopted only 49 years earlier.[3]
The British crushed the Canadian rebellion. Local rebel leader Samuel Edison was among those charged with treason. Before his punishment could be exacted, he fled westward on foot through the forest.[4] He crossed the St. Clair River, taking refuge in the U.S. state of Michigan. There he married, and later moved to Milan, Ohio, where his son Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847.
Sam, skilled in several lines of mechanical labor, introduced his son to the power of machines, and taught him to read serious literature.[5] Sam's favorite historical figure was Thomas Paine, General George Washington's pamphleteer in the American Revolution. Reading with his father, Thomas Edison made Tom Paine a sort of model for his own life;[6] for Paine was an inventor as well as a statesman.
Taught at home by his mother, Edison carried out his own sometimes explosive chemical experiments. The boy took a job riding trains and selling newspapers and snacks to passengers. A stationmaster, rewarding Edison for saving his infant son from an oncoming train, taught him Morse code and the skills of a telegraph operator.
Edison began working that trade at age 15; he gained exceptional speed and accuracy. At age 18 he was a founding member of the Cincinnati District of the operators’ labor organization, the National Telegraphic Union.[7]
By his early 20s, Edison had made a name for himself developing telegraphic devices, as an employee or contractor for Wall Street companies.[8] His most advanced experimental work was in simultaneous multiple transmissions over a single wire, and in the electrical-chemical-mechanical automated printing of received telegraph messages.
The Western Union Company acquired a virtual monopoly over the telegraph business by 1866; and railroad stock manipulator Cornelius Vanderbilt soon gained control over Western Union.[9] The common practice of such giant firms in the New York-London money kingdom was to buy inventions in order to silence potential challenges to their particular monopoly, and then to suppress or make use of them as necessary.
Sponsoring Edison
William J. Palmer and George Harrington[10] founded the Automatic Telegraph Company to compete with the Western Union Company.
Palmer’s secretary and telegraphy expert out west, Edward H. Johnson, who was to become Edison’s business manager and “his most intimate friend,”[11] explained years later exactly how their firm came to hire Edison and start him on his way to his independent inventing career:
Gen. W. J. Palmer and some New York associates had taken up the Little automatic system[12] and had expended quite a sum in its development, when, thinking they had reduced it to practice, they got Tom Scott, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to send his superintendent of telegraph over to look into and report upon it. Of course he turned it down.
The syndicate[13] was appalled at this report, and in this extremity General Palmer thought of the man who had impressed him as knowing it all by the telling of telegraphic tales as a means of whiling away lonesome hours on the plains of Colorado, where they were associated in railroad-building. So this man — it was I — was sent for to come to New York and assuage their grief if possible. My report was that the system was sound fundamentally, that it contained the germ of a good thing, but needed working out.
Associated with General Palmer was one Col. Josiah C. Reiff,[14] then Eastern bond agent for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The Colonel was always resourceful, and didn't fail in this case. He knew of a young fellow who was doing some good work for Marshall Lefferts,[15] and who it was said was a genius at invention, and a very fiend for work.
His name was Edison, and he had a shop out at Newark, New Jersey. He came and was put in my care for the purpose of a mutual exchange of ideas and for a report by me as to his competency in the matter. This was my introduction to Edison. He confirmed my views of the automatic system. He saw its possibilities, as well as the chief obstacles to be overcome — viz., the sluggishness of the wire, together with the need of mechanical betterment of the apparatus; and he agreed to take the job on one condition — namely, that Johnson would stay and help, as “he was a man with ideas.” Mr. Johnson was accordingly given three months’ leave from Colorado railroad-building, and has never seen Colorado since.[16]
The Palmer-Reiff-Harrington group funded Edison’s research and development to solve the problems of automatic telegraphy, in such a generous fashion as to boost Edison towards an independent inventing career.
Surviving records, available to the public in the Thomas Edison Papers, show that Josiah Reiff was the leading investor in the enterprise, repeatedly putting in tens of thousands of dollars, totaling to the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s money. George Harrington and William J. Palmer also personally invested. They brought in Pennsylvania industrialists Simon Seyfert and John McManus, iron producers and railroad builders.[17]
Josiah Reiff personally provided Edison a regular salary, guaranteed him a share in the proceeds from patents the company might sell, loaned him money, and donated funds for other Edison projects. Edison and Reiff became lifelong friends.[18]
With this Philadelphia sponsorship,
Edison had grand designs. He rented a huge building . . . for $1000 a year. He bought the finest machines and the best tools -- some of them by the score. He spent more than $30,000 the first week, and sent the bills to Harrington . . . All his life, Edison had had to scratch for money; never had he had enough to buy even a small portion of the things he wanted for experimentation. Suddenly he had discovered his genie … [19]
Over the next few years Edison solved the automatic telegraph problem so that his system could transmit and print out 1,000 words per minute, compared to manual transmission at 40-50 words per minute. And Edison had dramatically reduced the operating cost for an automatic system.[20]
Edison now entered into deeper investigation of electrical science, machine design and chemistry. While perfecting the automatic printing telegraph, he invented the quadruplex, doubling (compared with the duplex of J. B. Stearns) the number of messages that could be simultaneously sent on a single wire.
Edward Johnson, executive of the Automatic company and Edisons business manager, described the inventor's probe of everything ever done before on the automatic telegraph problem:
I came in one night and there sat Edison with a pile of chemistries and chemical books that were five feet high when they stood on the floor and laid one upon the other. He had ordered them from New York, London and Paris. He studied them night and day. He ate at his desk and slept in his chair. In six weeks he had gone through the books, written a volume of abstracts, made two thousand experiments on the formulas and had produced a solution — the only one in the world — that would do the very thing he wanted done, — record over two hundred words a minute on a wire two hundred and fifty miles long. He has since succeeded in recording thirty-one hundred words a minute.[21]
The depression beginning in 1873 shriveled the financial resources of the Philadelphia industrialists, and the Automatic Telegraph Company was sold to financial shark Jay Gould early in 1875. Edison sold the rights to his quadruplex invention. Gould wanted the technology only for leverage in his commercial war with Western union.[22]
But the support Edison had received from the Philadelphia group had put him in a position to bargain with both sides for sponsorship of projects in the mid-1870s.
It was under these conditions that, in the Spring of 1876, Edison established a laboratory and residential complex at Menlo Park, New Jersey, built by his father. The “invention factory” there would give birth to marvels that promised a better life for mankind.
Edison, Bell, and America’s Reputation
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone device. Bell’s design was impractical for mass communications, conveying only a weak sound over a distance limited to a few miles.
Edison soon invented the carbon transmitter, or microphone, to boost the signal and transmit it over hundreds of miles. Edison’s microphone became a standard features on all telephones. It was also the prototype for the modern microphone, later used for radio broadcasting, public address systems, and other audio pickups.
Bell was backed on Wall Street by Boston's John Murray Forbes with his opium fortune; Forbes's son Hathaway would be Bell Telephone's first president. Edison, Edward Johnson, and the Automatic company’s European agent Colonel Gouraud[23] created a rival telephone company and fought it out for preeminence in England itself against the Bell forces; these rival British companies, Edison vs. Bell, eventually merged.
George Bernard Shaw, then aged 23, happened to be hired by the Edison company in its race to install British telephones. Shaw wrote with a mixture of awe and mockery about the invasion of Edison's technical cadres:
These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States.... They worked with a ferocious energy which was all out of proportion to the result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tallhatted Englishman [with] his conviction that they were ... inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British workman who did as little for his wages as he possibly could ... [but who] had a deep reverence for anyone whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time ... in science, art and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell ... as his Satanic adversary.... They were free-souled creatures ... with an air of making old England hum which never left them....[24]
How Edison Became Famous
When Bell’s telephone emerged, Edison immediately sought to devise means to record the speech received over the wire. He had long been interested in acoustical phenomena of telegraphy -- especially since he had been nearly deaf since childhood.
Edison developed the phonograph simultaneously with the telephone microphone. The new device was introduced to the world late in 1877 and patented in February, 1878. It was an instant sensation, causing many, at first, to proclaim it a hoax.[25]
It was the phonograph which gave Edison the worldwide notoriety as a “wizard.” The path to this public recognition was to some extent carefully guided, by an eminent physicist and research strategist: George F. Barker.
Barker represented that Philadelphia complex of science, industry and the promotion of technology that had bred genius since the days of Benjamin Franklin’s “junto.” Barker was chief scientist at the Franklin Institute, resuming Alexander D. Bache's role. Professor Barker became Edison's scientific "angel" and dear friend.
A University of Pennsylvania physics professor (1872-1900), a chemist and medical doctor, Barker had met Edison in 1874.[26] Professor was to serve the inventor as a go-between for the academic and research community, and above all as publicist.
A little bit of the confluence between technology and national strategy may be seen in a message from Professor Barker to Edison, saying he wanted to hook up a direct telephone line from Menlo Park into the University of Pennsylvania for his forthcoming lecture. Barker inquired,
Would it be too much of a favor to ask that you allow someone at your shop to give me occasionally a little time for experiment? For example I am to have at the University on Wednesday next, some of our most prominent men, Mr. Henry C. Carey, Mr. Morton McMichael[27], Mr. Geo. H. Boker[28] etc. to see the telephone, [I will show them] the Bell [device and those invented by two other men] and I should be very glad to use that opportunity to show them the greatest of the telephones, Mr. Edison's. Could you let someone do some talking about 4 p.m. on that day [emphasis added] [29]
A poignant message came from General Palmer, who was then embroiled in the Philadelphians’ western railroad war with the Boston financiers. Palmer wrote to his former assistant, Edward Johnson, who was now Edison’s business manager:
. . . Edison's last developments beat Aladdin completely. I always declared he could invent anything he wanted to. Give him my compliments and tell him I wish he would discover for me some mode of building a railroad to Mexico without money.[30]
Professor Barker arranged for Edison to be invited to the April 18, 1878 Washington, D.C. meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.[31] Barker and his friends made sure that the hall was packed with a warmed-up audience. The meeting was opened by the device itself:
“The Speaking Phonograph has the honor of presenting itself to the Academy of Sciences.”
Following that introduction, [Edison’s laboratory assistant Charles] Batchelor shouted, sang, whistled and crowed like a rooster into the diaphragm. When the machine repeated the sounds, two or three girls in the audience fainted.[32]
That night, a demonstration was held for the press in the Washington bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer.[33] Bureau chief Uriah Painter, a Pennsylvania Quaker, was a politically well-connected lobbyist for the Philadelphia interests around PRR leader Tom Scott. He promoted and invested in Edison’s phonograph.[34]
The next day, with the cooperation of economic nationalist Senator James Blaine, the phonograph was demonstrated in the home of a Blaine family member. Edison wrote that
members of Congress and notable people of that city came all day long until late in the evening . . . About 11 o'clock at night word was received from President Hayes that he would be very much pleased if I would come up to the White House. I was taken there, and found Mr. Hayes and several others waiting . . . The exhibition continued till about 12.30 a.m. . . .I left at 3.30 a.m.[35]
The Philadelphia team, that had originated with Palmer -- business manager Johnson, Professor Barker, financier Reiff, European agent Gouraud, lobbyist Painter – were thus helping Edison to gain global fame from his astonishing talking machine. They would remain by his side, against the “principalities and powers,” as he began designing the means to move world civilization forward.
Next week in part two:
“An Invention That Will Revolutionize the Motive Power of the World”
Edison’s War of Independence
Edison’s Partners
Edsion Steps Down
END PART ONE
[1] Leo Marx, “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?,” Technology Review, January, 1987, pp. 33-34.
[2] Mackenzie’s ally Louis Papineau led the Patriote rebels in Lower Canada (Quebec).
[3] Here is the preamble to Mackenzie's Draft Constitution of November 13, 1837 (italicized words are the same as in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution):
WHEREAS the solemn covenant made with the people of Upper [Ontario] and Lower [Quebec] Canada . . . [during] the reign of King George III, hath been continually violated by the British Government, and our rights usurped; And Whereas our humble petitions, addresses, protests, and remonstrances against this injurious interference have been made in vain—We, the people of the State of Upper Canada, acknowledging with gratitude the grace and beneficence of God, in permitting us to make choice of our form of Government, and in order to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of civil and religious liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do establish this Constitution . . . .
The Canadian rebel document contains many other features in common with the U.S. Constitution, including press freedom, free assembly and the right to bear arms.
Text from https://www.solon.org/Constitutions/Canada/English/PreConfederation/wlm_dc_1837.html
[4] Edison authorized his biography to be written by his long-time business associate and lawyer. It contains this description of Sam’s escape:
A very hurried departure was effected in secret from the scene of trouble, and there are romantic traditions of his thrilling journey of one hundred and eighty-two miles toward safety, made almost entirely without food or sleep . . .
Frank L. Dyer, Edison, His Life and Inventions (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), Volume 1, p. 12.
[5] His father counseled Thomas Edison all through his most productive inventing years; he would supervise construction of the Menlo Park “invention factory.” Sam died in 1896, aged 92. For the construction at Menlo Park, see Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr., entry in Edison, Miller and Affiliated Families, p. 163 in https://studylib.net/doc/8293113/edison--miller--and-affiliated-families.
[6] Edison wrote an Introduction to a biography of Paine, in which he described his love for the great humanitarian:
. . . It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine’s works in my boyhood. I discovered a set of the writings of Paine on my father’s bookshelves when I was thirteen . . . My interest in Paine and his writings was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.
Thomas Edison, Introduction to William M. Van der Weyde, Life of Thomas Paine, in The Life and Works of Thomas Paine: Patriots’ Edition (New Rochelle: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925), Volume 1, p. vii.
[7] Thomas Edison Papers, Chronology, entry for September 17, 1865. https://edison.rutgers.edu/life-of-edison/chronology/1847-1870
[8] Edison developed “stock tickers” for transmitting changes in securities prices. He employed dozens of workers to fill orders for his machines from the Gold and Stock Company and from Western Union.
[9] Vanderbilt’s dominance is described in Joshua D. Wolff, Western Union and the Creation of the American Corporate Order, 1845-1893 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 175.
[10] Harrington, as a Treasury official, had bucked Lincoln’s Wall Street enemies, as seen above in Chapter 4. Harrington was tasked with managing President Lincoln’s personal finances; and was chosen to organize Lincoln’s funeral, in which he was the Grand Marshall. He was afterward U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1865-1869), where he studied the government-sponsored telegraph system.
He was Palmer’s investment and strategy-planning partner in the Automatic Company. As an Edison biographer has pointed out, there were other grounds for the enterprise than merely business considerations:
George Harrington [was a] foe of Western Union . . . He was linked to a group of Philadelphia financiers who were bitter rivals of Wall Street; and since Western Union was controlled by New York bankers and railroad men, the Philadelphians opposed the company almost as a matter of course.
Robert Conot, Thomas A. Edison: A Streak of Luck (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), p. 46.
[11] Dyer, Edison, p. 282.
[12] Englishman George Little’s set of devices for preparing a perforated tape which was fed through a telegraph, and the received message was printed out as dots and dashes. The Little system worked only over short distances.
[13] Meaning principally Palmer, Reiff and Harrington.
[14] Reiff was a Philadelphia-oriented New York capitalist. His obituaries noted Colonel Reiff’s Civil War gallantry while serving under General Palmer, his postwar railroad-building affiliation with Palmer, and his “titanic” battles against Wall Street financiers. The New York Times described Reiff’s Edison connection thusly:
Although Col. Reiff was best known as a railroad financier and market general, he will be longest remembered as the man who “grub-staked” Thomas A. Edison. He supplied funds for the inventor’s early researches into electricity which brought forth the automatic telegraph and duplex [sic] and quadruple telegraphy . . . .
New York Times, March 2, 1911.
See also the obituary in the National Tribune, April 6, 1911, p. 4.
[15] President of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company.
[16] Edward H. Johnson, referring to himself in the third person, quoted in Dyer, Edison, Vol. 1, pp. 142-144.
[17] See “Memorandum 1874-1875 [W400B279]” evidently a document relating to the Automatic Telegraph Company, in which Reiff is shown as having paid in $176,414; and the contract between George Harrington, William J. Palmer, Palmer’s father-in-law and business partner William P. Mellen, Josiah Reiff, and one Samuel B. Parsons, to fund Edison’s work by participating in the partnership made between Harrington and Edison October, 1870.
Several companies represented the Palmer-Harrington-Reiff syndicate, which funded Edison’s work.
On behalf of Palmer, William P. Mellen, was the first listed incorporator of the Automatic Telegraph Company in November, 1870. The other incorporators were Harrington, Reiff, Associated Press news service president Daniel Craig, and one John Elliott (otherwise unidentified) -- incorporation document dated November 23, 1870, Edison Papers. On the same date, the same five individuals incorporated the Telegraph Construction Company for the stated purpose of manufacturing telegraphic equipment and building or leasing telegraph lines. The previous month, Harrington had created the American Telegraph Works as a manufacturing partnership with Thomas Edison.
[18] Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), pp. 81-83.
[19] Conot, Thomas A. Edison, p. 41.
[20] Dyer, Edison, Vol. 1, p, 144. Dyer summarized the breakthrough:
[Edison observed] that in a line of considerable length electrical impulses become enormously extended, or sluggish, due to a phenomenon known as self-induction, which with ordinary Morse work is in a measure corrected by condensers. But in the automatic the aim was to deal with impulses following each other from twenty-five to one hundred times as rapidly as in Morse lines, and to attempt to receive and record intelligibly such a lightning-like succession of signals would have seemed impossible. But Edison discovered that by utilizing a shunt around the receiving instrument, with a soft iron core, the self-induction would produce a momentary and instantaneous reversal of the current at the end of each impulse, and thereby give an absolutely sharp definition to each signal. This discovery did away entirely with sluggishness, and made it possible to secure high speeds over lines of comparatively great lengths.
[21] Quoted in James Baird McClure, Edison and His Inventions (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, 1879), pp. 17-18.
[22] Edison himself explained the speculator's thinking:
Gould took no pride in building up an enterprise. He was after money, and money only. Whether the company was a success or failure mattered little to him. His conscience seemed to be atrophied, but that may have been due to the fact that he was contending with men [of Western Union] who never had any to be atrophied.
Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (History Book Club, 2003 – first published 1959), p. 126.
[23] Colonel Goerge Gouraud had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery. After the war he had worked for a time with Harrington in the Treasury. He was affiliated with William J. Palmer in several enterprises before Palmer sent him to London for the Automatic company.
[24] George Bernard Shaw, preface to his novel The Irrational Knot (American Edition, 1905), pp. ix-x.https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.18903/page/n13/mode/2up?q=despised
[25] Edison immediately proposed many uses for sound recordings which would, in fact, come about over time:
Dictation for letter writing; audio books for the blind, and others; elocution lessons; reproduction of music – Edison was most concerned about sound quality and accuracy, emphasizing classical music and opera; a “family record” of sayings and reminiscences by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons; toys; preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing; many educational purposes; and a permanent record of telephone conversation. See Library of Congress, online “History of the Cylinder Phonograph,” referring to Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and its Future,” in North American Review, May-June, 1878, pp. 533-534.
[26] Barker was a board member of the Franklin Institute and the editor of its Journal; he had invited Edison to present his telegraphy work at the Institute’s Exhibition Hall. Edward H. Johnson to Barker November 5, 1874, Edison Papers.
[27] McMichael was the leading pro-Carey journalist.
[28] A Careyite, Boker was U.S. ambassador to Russia 1875-1878.
[29] George F. Barker to Thomas Edison, sent March 25, 1878 from the Western Union Office in Philadelphia, Edison Papers, Item D7802ZEK.
[30] William J. Palmer to Edward H. Johnson, March 8, 1878, Edison Papers, Item D7802ZCW.
[31] The N. A. S. had been founded by Philadelphia’s Alexander Dallas Bache for loyal scientists to advise President Lincoln during the Civil War. Professor Barker had been elected a member of the organization in 1876.
[32] Conot, Thomas A. Edison, p. 109.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Raymond R. Wile, “Uriah Hunt Painter A Preliminary Biographical Exploration,” Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collection, Volume XV (1983), No. 1, pp. 5-14.
https://www.arsc-audio.org/journals/v15/v15n1p5-14.pdf
[35] Dyer, Edison, p. 210.
Note by the author:
If you enjoy the articles, please consider supporting my work by being a paid subscriber to my substack.
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Free subscription: weekly posting of articles, videos of interviews, classes, or text of interchange with readers, who may post comments or questions to the author.
Paid subscription: as above, plus a PDF of Who We Are, Volume 1; admission to live Zoom discussions; selected posting of drafted chapters for Volume 2.
Regular subscription: $5 per month/ $50/year.
“Founders”: $300 or $1000/year, or the subscriber may designate any amount higher than the regular subscription
Your research on the American industrialist spirit is phenomenal; I watched half of your "The British Empire Wants You To Be Stupid" lecture at YouTube, and also picked up your EIR articles on the Garfield/Blaine nationalist agenda for America.
What do you know about the Anglo-Jesuit connection? I believe British Masonry was always a "back" puppet organization for Jesuitry, especially considering "Protestant" England's increasing amicability with the Vatican during the second half of the 20th century. It would appear that the Jesuits have used Masonry, Anglo-Fabian societies, and Marxism as "backdoors" puppets (Hegelian thesis) while employing Nazi-Fascism as "front organizations" (Hegelian antithesis) to achieve broader objectives; if you consider the impact of the 1920s-era Second Klan -- a highly Masonic structure -- its long-term impact notably reduced anti-Catholicism in the U.S. from a once-mainstream opinion to an increasingly fringe taboo, paving the way for the 1950s-era ecumenical movement hatched by the Masonic "Judeo-Christian" front, whose top young spokesperson Billy Graham -- a Masonic initiate -- got the media empire backing of Nazi sympathizer and Illuminist Anglophile mogul William Randolph Hearst. And Eisenhower Republicanism -- with its eugenicist connections via the Dulles brothers and Bush crime syndicate -- paved the way for the subsequent "Conservative Revolution" in later years.
Having read your outline of Edison I find it very enlightening. He, while very intelligent was adept into inspiring others to expand their creative levels. his shortcoming's, one he was using was to take credit for others inventions. While not all bad in itself because it is done within most corporations today, I feel he could have recorded the names of the people who did most of the grunt work in bringing inventions to the people. Many will never see which inventions were set aside because they didnt have potential. In his estimation. One I can mention was the use of alternating current as suggested by Tesla who worked for Edison. Tesla's talent was great and as I understand that Edison had one direction in his thought. Opposition to his direction wasn't tolerated. it was only his direction for experiments that went forward. Tesla left and found his own funding and developed many things that are used today. Edison did set us on the path that showed many industrialists on the path to support such inventors. People today see the rich as greedy and not wanting to "share" their money. I do hope that in the next section you will share with us the part that government has played in actually holding us back with regulations that serve no purpose than to stifle our minds of young and potential creators of innovation. segregating us and directing our thoughts to hate and envy because we are told that only a selected few are able to create and govern. Yes a bit off topic but as we read about people who create I find that most are created with need and abilities to make that need easer to endure. corporation that once focused upon innovations that improves our lives are now using us for profit only and actual inventions removed from a market that threaten the industry and profits they reap Government that once promoted excellence now control schools by controlling the funds they gave to improve education. if schools dont follow their path funding is cut off. We the people have allowed our nation to be transferred into a gov. run by oligarchy's. People are as innovative as ever before. the problem comes when innovation will cut into the profits of investors. the innovation is purchased and shelved so it cant compete with products they make. Keep this in mind as you read the history of Edison and others. people must move forward. it is natures way. As many who believe themselves as guardians of our future will fail eventually but not before harming mankind chances of moving forward with the flow that benefit's all mankind not just the ones at the top. remember when government tells us that the rich must pay their fair share, remember who wrote the rules these rich follow. Edison and others can and will take man to the stars if Government just gets out of the way.-------------I, Grampa