In 1884, at the height of his success, Tom suffered a terrible loss. His wife Mary died of an illness. She was only twenty-nine years old.
Tom had his children stay in New York City. His electricity business was there. He wanted to spend as much time as possible with Marion, now twelve; Thomas, now eight; and little William, who was only five.
Then, in 1885, Tom met a young woman named Mina Miller. Her family was from Ohio. Mina’s father was a millionaire businessman and inventor who had developed a very successful machine for harvesting grain. He himself received ninety-two patents in his lifetime.
Tom fell in love with Mina almost at once. She was interesting and educated. He even taught her Morse code so that they could “talk” to each other secretly, even among friends. It is said that Tom tapped out, “Will you marry me?” on the palm of her hand, and Mina tapped back, “Yes.”
Mina and Tom were married in 1886 and moved to a grand home, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey. “It is a great deal too nice for me, but it isn’t half nice enough for my little wife here,” Tom said.
Tom and Mina were happy together. He was still at work as much as he had been when Mary was alive. But since Mina’s father was also an inventor, perhaps she understood Tom’s world better.
Still, it wasn’t so easy for twenty-year-old Mina to become the young mother of three children. Nor was it easy for Marion, who was now fourteen and had become a companion to her father. Years later she said Mina “was too young to be a mother to me, but too old to be a chum.”
Mina and Tom had three children, Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore. Holidays above all were a time when Tom loved being at home with his large family. Mina planned lavish parties for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, but the Fourth of July was all Tom’s. Everyone had to go outside very early—even before breakfast—for the fireworks that Tom had made himself. After breakfast and naps for the younger children, they rushed out for more activities, like picnics of watermelon and ice cream, and so it went on into the evening, ending with another enormous display of fireworks.
Unlike Mary, Mina loved having company. She gave large dinner parties, which Tom often tried to avoid by pretending to be sick. Their guest book was filled with the names of famous people—airplane pioneer Orville Wright, author and lecturer Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from the age of two, and automobile maker Henry Ford. He wrote at the end of his stay, “Two of the best days I ever spent.”
Moving to Glenmont made Tom decide to leave his Menlo Park laboratory. He built a new laboratory complex a mile from his home in West Orange. He wanted it to be the best in the world. “I will have the best-equipped and largest facility . . . for rapid and cheap development of an invention,” Tom declared.
Tom had never forgotten his wish to give people what they wanted. Because of his great success with the electric light, he had the money, the power, and the influence to do it.
The West Orange complex opened in November 1887. It had a laboratory building three stories high. There was a physics lab, a chemistry lab, and a private lab just for Tom where he could focus and think without interruption.
But, for Tom, the center of West Orange was a large library with two galleries, a forty-foot ceiling, walls full of photographs and plaques, and shelves filled with ten thousand books and magazines from all around the world. Here Tom had his desk and a conference table. And it was here that Tom met the public—friends, investors, inventors, reporters, and editors.
West Orange was ten times larger than Menlo Park and at one time had as many as ten thousand workers. At any one time as many as thirty “companies” worked on projects, run by teams directed by Tom.
Along with new ideas, Tom never lost interest in improving his “baby,” the phonograph. He might wander away from it and work on other inventions, but he always came back to it.
Not everything was a success. One of the things the “Boys” talked Tom into making was a talking doll for a Boston company. A small cylinder was put inside the two-foot-tall doll. A handle to turn the cylinder came out of her back. The talking doll worked fine in the factory, reciting poems and popular nursery rhymes. But when she reached the stores—nothing. All the thumping and bumping along the way had disturbed the mechanism. Most of the dolls never said a word.
In August 1889, Mina and Tom sailed to Paris for the Universal Exhibition. This was like a big fair for showing new products from many countries. There was a huge Edison display. His phonograph was the most popular attraction. Only the new Eiffel Tower, the highest structure in the world at that time, had more visitors.
During this trip, Tom visited a Frenchman whose “photographic gun” had captured animals in motion, such as birds in flight.
Tom was interested in moving pictures. In October 1888 he had written, “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear. . . . This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope— ‘Moving View.’”
Tom was a pioneer in developing a system for filming and showing moving pictures. His kinetograph was the camera, which took the pictures. His kinetoscope provided a way of looking at them.
In 1893 the first motion picture studio in America was built at West Orange. He named it the Black Maria.
About fifty feet long, the Black Maria was a weird-looking structure. It had a slanted roof that opened up with a pulley to let in the sun. It sat on a round platform with tracks like railroad tracks and moved around in a circle, following the path of the sun.
Filming in the Black Maria started in 1893. An early film showed a man sneezing, “performed” happily by a mechanic who worked at West Orange.
The first boxing match ever filmed starred heavyweight champion “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. Edison also filmed dance groups, acrobats, clowns, jugglers, and even the World’s Strongest Man.
When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show came to town, sharpshooter Annie Oakley was filmed there too. Most were short pieces that lasted about twenty or thirty seconds.
One of the first “stories” filmed at West Orange was about firemen. They are woken up by a fire alarm and rush off from the firehouse to a fire. They save a baby and put out the fire. There wasn’t any sound. Still, people were excited to look at it.
Tom’s main interest in movies was in making better equipment, like his kinetoscope and his kinetograph. But as time went on, he drifted away to work on other ideas. He was not as closely involved as he had been with the phonograph and the lightbulb. He offered suggestions to his team, but he let them do a lot of the ideas and improvements without him. Eventually, he decided to get out of the movie business.
THE EIFFEL TOWER
“LA TOUR EIFFEL” STANDS 984 FEET HIGH OVER THE CITY OF PARIS. IT TOOK THREE HUNDRED MEN TWO YEARS TO BUILD IT. IT IS MADE OF FIFTEEN THOUSAND PIECES OF IRON HELD TOGETHER BY 2.5 MILLION RIVETS. IT CAN SWAY ALMOST FIVE INCHES IN STRONG WINDS. FORTY TONS OF PAINT ARE NEEDED TO COVER THE TOWER, WHICH REMAINED THE TALLEST STRUCTURE IN THE WORLD UNTIL 1930, WHEN THE CHRYSLER BUILDING, SOON FOLLOWED BY THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, WAS ERECTED IN NEW YORK CITY.
THE EIFFEL TOWER WAS COMPLETED IN 1889 FOR THE HUNDRED-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. GUSTAVE EIFFEL’S DESIGN WON THE COMPETITION FROM AMONG THE SEVEN HUNDRED ENTRIES SENT IN. SOME YEARS EARLIER, HE HAD DESIGNED THE IRON SKELETON FOR THE INSIDE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, AND HE SUPERVISED THE RAISING OF THIS FAMOUS LADY IN NEW YORK HARBOR IN 1886.
PHOTOGRAPHY
THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS WAS THE DAGUERREOTYPE, NAMED AFTER FRENCHMAN LOUIS J. M. DAGUERRE, IN 1837. IT PRODUCED A DETAILED BLACK-AND-WHITE PICTURE AND WAS DESCRIBED AS A “MIRROR WITH A MEMORY.”
THE NEXT IMPORTANT BREAKTHROUGH CAME IN 1851 WHEN A BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER, FREDERICK SCOTT ARCHER, DISCOVERED A WAY TO MAKE AS MANY PRINTS AS HE WANTED TO OF AN IMAGE.
THEM, IN 1888, AMERICAN GEORGE EASTMAN INTRODUCED THE KODAK BOX CAMERA. IT WAS EASY TO CARRY AROUND, SO PHOTOGRAPHERS DIDN’T HAVE TO STAY IN AN INDOOR STUDIO WITH A DARKROOM NEARBY. IT WAS CHEAP AND EASY TO OPERATE, AND THE ROLL OF CELLULOID, OR PLASTIC, FILM COULD TAKE ONE HUNDRED BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS. THIS FILM MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR EDISON TO MAKE MOVING PICTURES. |