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[RRE]The Languages of Edison's Electric Light
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[Chuck Bazerman
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Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 11:20:32 -0400
From: Jud Wolfskill
The Languages of Edison's Electric Light
by Charles Bazerman
MIT Press, 1999.
ISBN 0-262-02456-X 434 pp., 58 illus. $39.50 (cloth)
Table of contents, which can also be found at http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-table-of-contents.tcl?isbn=026202456X
Introduction
I The Opening Scene
1 Edison's Front-Page Story
II Establishing Meanings in Evolving Systems
2 The Public Stage of News
3 Finances for Technological Enterprises
4 Menlo Park: The Place of Invention
5 Patents as Speech Acts and Legal Objects
6 Professional Presence: Edison in the Technical Press
7 A Place in the Market
III Making It Real: The Rhetoric of Material Presence
8 Boasts, Deceptions, and Promises
9 The Menlo Park Demonstrations
10 Fairs and Exhibitions: Museums of the Future
11 Lighting New York: Urban Politics and Pedestrian Appearances
IV Establishing Enduring Values
12 Patent Realities: Legal Stabilization of Indeterminate Texts
13 Charisma and Communication in Edison's Oeganizations
14 Rhetoric of Capital Investment: Solvency, Profits, and Dividends
15 The Language of Flowers: Domesticating Electric Light
Conclusion
Notes Bibliography Index
Chapter 1
Edison's Front-Page Story
Edison's first announcement of interest in electric lighting was a front-page newspaper story, and electric light became the most prominent technological story of a technological age. Many other specialized dramas were played out in other discursive venues -- finances, law, corporations, the laboratory, the technological press -- but these were energized and supported by public attention in the press and were then reflected back onto the journalistic stage -- until the United States saw itself as a society powered by electricity, and electricity flowed through all activities of daily life.
Electric Light before Edison
By 1878, when Edison entered the field of electric lighting, arc lighting (produced by a spark in the gap between two carbon electrodes) was already an established technology. Humphrey Davy had demonstrated the possibility of electric arc lighting in 1801, and in the 1840s means were invented to maintain appropriate distance between quickly consumed electrodes. In 1862 the Dungeness Lighthouse in Kent, England, was converted to arc lighting in the first successful application of the technology. By the late 1870s Paul Jablochkoff in Europe and Charles Brush in the United States had produced commercially viable arc systems for lighting streets and large public spaces. In 1878 arc lighting illuminated Paris and London streets and John Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia. In 1880 arc lights were mounted on large towers to illuminate the entire city of Wabash, Indiana. Arc lighting, however, was too bright for homes or offices. The gentler incandescent electric lighting, produced by a glowing filament, promised to compete with gas lighting, which was in place in almost every city in Europe and the United States in the 1870s. No viable system of incandescent lighting existed, however, before Edison took interest in the problem, despite more than 30 patents by various inventors dating back to 1841.1 Finding a filament that would reach sufficient temperature to glow without burning or melting was the main challenge.
Edison's Entry into Lighting
Until August of 1878, Edison had taken no more than passing interest in arc or incandescent lighting. Only a few passing experiments were recorded in his notebooks, among many other preliminary explorations.2 Edison's early career as an inventor was primarily devoted to telegraphy, but in 1876 his interests turned to telephony. The telephonic investigations led serendipitously to the invention of the phonograph in late 1877. This startling invention brought Edison fame, news attention, and a hectic demonstration schedule.
In July of 1878, Edison took a break from his work to accompany a scientific expedition to the Rocky Mountains to measure a solar eclipse. On August 26 he returned to his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, talking of producing electricity from the great western falls. The next day he began preliminary investigations into lighting while still pursuing other projects. On September 8 he took a day trip to Ansonia, Connecticut, to see William Wallace's new arc lighting system, with its powerful generator. According to a September 10 account, which appeared in both the Sun and the New York Mail, he was "enraptured."3
Back at Menlo Park on Monday, September 9, Edison excitedly began a series of experiments. He immediately wrote his first electrical lighting patent caveat4 and wired Wallace to send one of his generators.5 Shortly thereafter he granted an interview to a Sun reporter in which he claimed to have solved the problem of the incandescent lamp. The story ran on Monday, September 16, under the headline "Edison's Newest Marvel. Sending Cheap Light, Heat, and Power by Electricity."6 By Tuesday, Edison's lawyer, Grosvenor Lowrey, had begun financial negotiations for what was to be the Edison Electric Light Company. A preliminary agreement, reached within a month, granted Edison a $50,000 advance for research and development. Gas stocks took a tumble, and newspaper stories about Edison's marvels proliferated. Edison's mail over the next few months was filled with letters that took his claims as a fact.
All this belief and all this activity hung on one man's premature and optimistic projection of success for an improvement on the unsuccessful work of many others. Although at this point Edison had likely conceived an overall approach that would lead to incandescent lighting and central power,7 he would soon abandon the specific approach of thermal regulation of the lamp upon which he had based his immediate claim. It was to be more than a year before he had a working light, and an additional year before a full system was ready. Yet Edison's announcement was taken as credible. His correspondence from this period shows how the meanings people attributed to him were embedded in specific and well-developed systems of communication that made his work seem credible.8
Scientific Friends and the Public Culture of Science
The earliest correspondence concerning Edison's new interest in light and power9 was an exchange with George Barker dated September 5 and 6, the purpose of which was to arrange the aforementioned visit to Ansonia.10 Barker was a physicist friend who had been part of the summers' solar-eclipse expedition.
Edison's announcement of his perceived breakthrough changed Barker's relationship to him. Barker, who previously had written as a peer requesting aid or discussing possibilities, became a supplicant. On September 16 Barker enclosed a clipping of the Sun article in a letter asking whether Edison had any new items available to display at a lecture Barker was to give in January.11 On October 23 Barker wrote expressing disappointment and upset at not being able to exhibit lamps, as though he assumed the lamps were already working and available for exhibit.12 In early November Barker renewed the request for the lamps and offered to postpone the lecture if he could have them.13 He later wrote Edison with an account of the lecture, which he said had gone well despite the lack of the demonstration of the Edison light.14 This sequence of letters bespeaks the existence of a well-established genre of public lecture, dating back to colonial times.15 These lectures as education and entertainment depended on the exhibit of the latest wonders. In the nineteenth century there was some move to institutionalize such lectures and to ensure that speakers were legitimate authorities. Barker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a public figure, was clearly part of this system of public edification.16 Lecturers had to keep in touch with inventors in order to gather material on the wonders that held public attention.
The dependent relationship between the lecturer and the inventor is revealed in Barker's letter of October 23, 1878. Barker begins by addressing Edison as Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (referring to Edison's recent award) and thanking him for some information. Then he describes his consternation at Edison's denial of a demonstration lamp. The petition for aid goes on for two handwritten pages and ends plaintively: Not to have one of your lights there at my lecture after all I have promised, places me in a position before this community which I would rather lose my right-hand than occupy. Only two weeks ago and you wrote that you would try and come over to the lecture. Now you dont know whether you can loan me even a light for the occasion. I beg of you not to desert me now. Do let me show something that represents your new invention.17 Other letters expressing interest in lectures on or by Edison came from a Professor Morton of the Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey), from John Blattau, the superintendent of German Catholic schools in Philadelphia, from a Professor Charles Suley of New York, and from one David Olegar.18
Throughout the development of incandescent light Edison was under pressure from the press, lecturers, and financial backers to have something demonstrable, and the Christmas 1879 spectacular light show, illuminating the entire grounds of the Menlo Park laboratory, became a major public moment. Such demonstrations create an aura of the spectacular and celebrity surrounding inventors and their work, an aura that Edison both exploited and had to live up to.
Patents, Finances, Corporations, and Cities
Another letter dated September 16, 1878, also mentioning the Sun article of that day, suggests another document-circulation system that pervades Edison's correspondence: the patent system. (Patents tie the inventor's projection of a workable object into the legal system, providing the inventor ownership rights in courts and contractual actions.) This letter, from one A. B. Williams, introduces Charles A. Shaw as a potential patent manager for Edison's consideration.19 The letter is accompanied by a publicity brochure for Shaw based largely on a biographical article that had appeared in Frank Leslie's Magazine. In addition to the formal legal correspondence concerning the filing of patents and caveats, Edison received a number of letters offering to buy, sell, manage, or otherwise trade in patents by Edison or the correspondent.20
Patents, as valuable intellectual properties have potential meaning within financial markets, which have their own networks of document circulation. A letter from Hugh Craig, a schemer and developer who Edison knew from the telegraph industry, provides a window on this world, where any suggestion of a new Edison invention promised wealth. Craig's letter, dated September 23, 1878, consists only of a clipping of the Sun article and this note:
Tom, Is this a true bill? Write me about it.21
This was the first of many letters Edison received (including one from the broker J.G. Kidder and one from the telegraph executive George Walker22) asking about investment or directly making offers. Another, from one W. C. Miller, describes a meeting Miller had with "several men of ample means" at which "a desire was expressed on the part of two or three of the best of them that they might know at an early day as to your business plans on the light."23 N. Stucker and Gerrit Smith, whom Edison knew from the telegraphy business, wonder "Do you think telegraphers will be given the inside track?"24 By this time, however, negotiations had been almost completed with the group of favored and high-powered investors who had been given the inside track the day after the first announcement in the Sun.
This intense activity betokens the financial markets and network of financial information that had been developing over the nineteenth century, as well as the particular link that had been made between financial markets and technological developments in the latter half of the century, beginning with the development of railroads and gas companies. These enterprises had the added characteristic of being large and dispersed endeavors, creating new kinds of corporate management and massive financial backing with tremendous rewards to be earned. Communications within the financial markets reflected these new realities.
One poignant example from Edison's correspondence of the way technological intelligence interacted with distant and widespread financial markets was a letter from a self-described "elderly woman in feeble health." She wrote on November 5, after gas stock prices had fallen in response to Edison's confidence in electricity. After a number of financial reverses, this woman had invested her small inheritance, upon which she depended, in gas. In desperation she implores: "I write this letter to beg you will write to me immediately, that you are sure, if you are sure of the electric light superseding the use of Gas and consequently lessening the value of Gas stock. So that I can dispose of my stock."25 As in the financial markets of our time, everyone wanted the inside word.
The new, large corporations also meant that anyone wishing to be part of industrial activity had to become attached to a large organization. Edison received letters from small businessmen who offered to become local representatives or managers for electrical power franchises in Clarksville, Tennessee; Savannah, Georgia; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Buffalo, New York; and Chelmsford, Massachusetts.26 They wished to step out of the limited and weak networks of small business and into the powerful network they assumed Edison would form. Clinton Ball, a former clothes wringer manufacturer from Troy, New York, wrote a six-page letter on his bankrupt company's stationery. Ball had made a special trip to Menlo Park to offer his services, but Edison had been busy, so Ball had returned home and decided to tell his story in a letter. Having been cheated by his former partner, he was now out of work, and he wished to become Edison's agent.27
The new technology also had important meanings for municipalities that wanted to be in the forefront of development. Within two months of the Sun article, Edison had inquiries from the Louisville's board of aldermen,28 from the mayor of San Francisco,29 and from the city fathers of Innsbruck.30 An inquiry about the possible use of electric light in mines as a safer alternative to gas was in a similar vein.31
Narrative Heroism and Material Accomplishment
Although the generally brief letters to Edison largely conform to the conventions of letter writing in nineteenth-century America, they suggest networks of texts to which the writers hope to connect Edison and his new invention. In each of those networks Edison is projected as a potentially larger-than-life figure who will shape the future. The writer hopes to gain some benefit from playing an intermediary role, or even from merely touching the hems of greatness.32 One larger textual cultural context for all these attempted linkages is the narrative of heroic achievement, particularly scientific heroic achievement, especially as advanced in newspapers, periodicals and books of the period.33 Indeed, several amusing parodies of this heroic story appeared in the press, as Edison was at various times proclaimed to have invented cures for most of the world's ills. A note from George Barker included a clipping from a California newspaper reporting that Edison was "said to be at work on an invention to keep Pantaloons from bagging."34
Edison understood how to publicize his projects in the changing press of the day -- that is why the Sun story created such a splash. Edison's fame was not an accident; it was the consequence of many historical forces, which Edison had come to appreciate. In later chapters I will examine other cultural stories, the document systems by which they were fostered, and the human networks through which they were circulated, so we can gain a detailed view of how representations spread from one domain to another and translate power within one network to power in another and of how Edison and his colleagues actively fostered the meanings that would make incandescent light and central power everyday realities. Ultimately, Edison's ability to take an enduring place within each of these social narratives was dependent on his being able to produce a viable material technology, thereby giving solidity and functional support to the discourse. But during the years when he was working to make good on his promises, Edison's presence in the relevant discursive systems won him the credit, the support, and the leeway he needed to bring the work to completion. Edison's communications also began to build the social structures and relationships that would bring incandescent light into being, even as those same relationships made Edison responsible and accountable for producing the technology. Promises, hopes, projections of desire, and pressures for fulfillment all depend on imaginable narratives framed within recognizable social meanings. Edison's promises made a lot of sense because people had the terms to attribute sense to those words and to attribute to Edison the man the power to make things happen.
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