Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 254

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Edison," by Edmund Morris.

In his sixty-third year, Edison presided over an industrial complex so vast that only he knew what was going on in all its departments. “Say, I have been mixed up in a whole lot of things, haven’t I?” he said, awed in spite of himself by the constellation of invention that swirled around his rolltop desk in the laboratory at West Orange. From its farthest reaches nationwide—41 million Edison lightbulbs powered by six thousand municipal stations and one hundred thousand isolated plants—down to the pigeonhole in front of him, stuffed with notes of “new things” he meant to develop when he had time, the revolving mass had but one center of gravity. 

Edison was so driven, in both senses of the word, that when he had dry cleaning to drop off at the Armenian laundry on Valley Road, he would order his chauffeur to maintain speed and, en passant, hurl out his dirty suits. Rose Tarzian, the young immigrant inside the shop, got used to hearing the thump of the bundle on her screen door.

Affable to every stranger who waylaid him, generous with advice even to competitors, Edison was unaware of how often he hurt the feelings of intimates. He was at once gregarious and distant, willing to admit that “I live in a great, moving world of my own,” like the flickering figures seen through the peephole of his Kinetoscope machine. Even when alerted to the pain, or loneliness, or shame, or other neuroses of people who were less successful than himself, he seemed puzzled that they did not cheer themselves up by embarking on some bold venture, as he was about to do.

If Edison had been remarkable through his twenties for industriousness and executive will, he now became freakish in both respects—to his employees, an Übermensch; to his financial backers, an uncontrollable fantasist, half-genius, half-fool; to rivals, a publicity whore of no especial originality; to his wife and children, increasingly a stranger; to Patent Office examiners, a tireless nuisance, filing sixty applications in 1880 alone.

Her husband’s irreverence bothered her. Having knelt beside him before a white altar in her father’s house and heard him vow “to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance,” she hoped that he might be receptive to the Methodist Episcopal Church’s 223-page Doctrines and Discipline, a copy of which Lewis Miller had stuck in his coat pocket for light reading on the train. “He intends to study it well,” Mina wrote her mother, sounding doubtful. “He wanted to know the other day if I married him to convert him.”

Edison tried to make her understand that he needed hard evidence, or at least logical argument, to believe anything, and that religion was deficient in both respects. He had no wish to convert her to agnosticism and was willing to admit that he might be wrong to shrug at faith. But he could not help the way he felt: “Everyday life must be the convincing power.” On that, at least, they agreed.