The Tinkerers Read online

  Edison had little or no understanding initially about the phonograph’s potential as a home entertainment device for adults. He had poor hearing and was not a lover of music. He envisioned its primary commercial use as a dictation machine for business. But when a group of venture capitalists—which included newspaper man Uriah C. Painter and Alexander Bell’s father-in-law, Gardner G. Hubbard—approached Edison in January 1878, he agreed to the establishment of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, whose primary initial purpose was to distribute a line of cheap toys including dolls, trains, and birds, which would all generate sound via a hidden phonograph. Edison farmed out the manufacturing and sales of these cheap machines, with the intention of funding future inventions with the royalty checks.

  The investors provided Edison with an initial payment of $10,000 to refine his invention for the marketplace. Once it was on sale, he would receive a 20 percent royalty on net proceeds. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was well aware that the other commercial uses for its product had yet to be established, so it hired the Redpath Lyceum Bureau of Boston, a well-known lecture service, to arrange a tour of exhibitions of the phonograph around the country. For the next year, Redpath shuttled five hundred phonographs to entertainment halls and amusement centers, where visitors were charged a small admission fee to watch barkers demonstrate the machines by playing short tunes or comedians’ jokes from tinfoil records that lasted about a minute and a half. At first, crowds swarmed to these exhibitions; Edison’s royalty from one such event in Boston totaled $1,800. But after a number of months, the excitement died down, and the novelty of the clever phonograph waned.

  Meanwhile, Edison continued to tinker with his invention. By linking the cylinder to a steam engine, he was able to improve its fidelity and volume significantly. Of course, the average consumer was unlikely to have a steam engine at home. So Edison experimented with powering the cylinder with a crankable clockwork mechanism. The clock mechanism solved the consistent revolution problem, but the user still had to crank it 120 turns per minute to achieve a decent playback. Through a process of trial and error he also discovered that using copper sheets instead of tinfoil helped increase the volume of the records.

  Edison and his underlings continued to tinker with the machine, intent upon improving it for what Edison remained convinced was its future use, as a dictation machine. Realizing that the shouting required to make a good recording was not practical for an office setting, he sought for other ways to improve playback volume. One idea involved a valve that issued steam or compressed air to resonate a large diaphragm that made the sound of the recording much louder.

  But the investors in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, wishing to see a return on their money, began pressuring him to get a commercial phonograph ready for the business market. To placate them, he agreed to produce five hundred smaller, cheaper models that could record no more than forty words. The smaller model, to be released in April 1878, would be nothing more than a novelty, intended simply to demonstrate how the phonograph worked, until the bigger model was ready.

  It was just before the release of the small model that Edison agreed to an interview with a reporter from the New York Sun named Amos Cummings. Cummings had requested the interview at least a month earlier, clearly interested in exploiting Edison’s growing celebrity, and the inventor promised he would grant it. After putting it off repeatedly, Edison finally relented and allowed Cummings to interview him at Menlo Park. The resulting profile, which ran on February 22, 1878, identified Edison as “A Man of Thirty One Revolutionizing the Whole World.” And it would change his life. The story described Edison in nearly mythic terms. The general public’s understanding of technology was limited when it came to something as complex as Edison’s phonograph. As a consequence, he was portrayed as someone akin to a Broadway personality. Edison may have been partly to blame, eager as he was to please a now adoring public.

  But Edison’s newfound fame did little to help his phonograph business’s prospects. All of the free publicity and excitement surrounding the phonograph seemed to guarantee its commercial success. But the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was ill-prepared for the wildfire interest in its yet unreleased product.

  There were no serious competitors at the time for his phonograph. He had all the resources he needed to develop it, both financial and material, and an admiring public awaiting his final product. But even with all these advantages, Edison somehow could not deliver on his promise.

  The smaller versions of the phonograph were not particularly reliable or useful, and did not produce the sales Edison’s investors had anticipated. In May 1878, the company sold forty-six of the exhibition model; in July, only three. September’s sales surged to sixteen units, earning Edison $461 in royalties. Meanwhile, a staff of five labored in Edison’s lab, rushing to develop the full-size model the inventor had promised. But the men struggled to come up with one that was suitably reliable and affordable.

  Edison continued to investigate various improvements to his phonograph over the next few months, including an idea for a wax record shaped like a plate. But new discoveries created new problems: a stylus on a flat disk distorted the performance as it spiraled closer to the center of the circle; then there was the matter of how to produce affordable copies of records. The more he learned, the more Edison came to believe that his dream of his phonograph as the ultimate business machine was futile.

  There were plenty of distractions that added to the difficulty of the task. After all, the invention of the phonograph had been nothing more than a detour from Edison’s work in the telegraphic industry. His work in Menlo Park continued as it had before, with his scattershot approach to tinkering becoming ever more frenetic. By the middle of 1878, Edison switched his focus to a prototype for a commercial hearing aid. From there, he delved into work on a microphone he designed to replace a medical stethoscope. Neither of these inventions ever came to market. At the end of the year, Edison’s royalty payments for the phonograph totaled $1,031.91, mostly from exhibitions. He also had a new prime interest: electric light.

  As biographer Matthew Josephson observed of the inventor’s failure to capitalize on his telegraph innovation, “What Edison did not then realize, except dimly, was that the decision as to the commercial acceptance or refusal of inventions, and much of the control of industrial technology, turned not upon the question of merit or usefulness, but upon the outcome of intermittent wars or peace negotiations between the rival ‘barons’ in the railroad and telegraph fields, such as the Goulds and Vanderbilts.”

  Indeed it was an offer of $50,000 to develop a practical electrical light from the industrialist William Vanderbilt and his friends in late 1878 that rather firmly shifted Edison’s focus away from the phonograph.

  Edison had attempted some experiments with electric light a few years earlier in Newark, he claimed, over his frustrations with the local gas utility, which had threatened to remove their meter and cut off his gas supply when he had trouble paying his bills. But it was a visit he took in September 1878 to the workshop of William Wallace, the owner of the famed Wallace & Sons brass and copper factory in Ansonia, Connecticut, that reignited his interest in incandescent light. Wallace and inventor Moses Farmer had developed a powerful electromagnetic generator that could illuminate eight electric arc lamps, an early, less sustainable form of electric light.

  The visit inspired Edison to imagine something much larger than a single electric light source. Though he had yet to invent the incandescent lightbulb, he quickly envisioned a network of energy sources that would allow the introduction of electric lighting into private homes, much in the same way that Thomas Harris MacDonald would later conceive of the interstate highway system.

  In the process of broadening his outlook to envision a radically changed modern infrastructure, Edison also reinvented the process of tinkering for the contemporary era. Unlike the phonograph, the lightbulb was not invented by Edison alone in his lab but rather through a s
eries of inventions generated by one of the first true corporate research organizations.

  Up to that point, Edison, though more ingenious than most inventors, had operated in a fairly traditional way. He employed two or three trusted assistants and a couple of skilled machinists who together labored make the ideas in Edison’s head a reality. But in the year that followed, he began adding to his staff some different kinds of employees to aid in his experiments with electric light. These new employees were not merely competent lackeys who followed their boss’s instructions to the letter, but rather skilled professionals who brought their own ideas and methods of experimentation to the workshop. Among the new staffers were chemists, glassblowers, and a mathematician with graduate training in physics. And at the helm was Edison as director of research.

  While Edison continued to tinker in some of the same ways he always had, he understood that creating an electric lighting infrastructure would require more brainpower and coordination than one man, no matter how brilliant, could muster.

  It would be another ten years before Thomas Edison would have another shot at marketing a version of his phonograph. In the years between 1878 and 1887, while Edison had focused on other inventions, the phonograph had evolved beyond his original tinfoil cylinder model. Edison had waited too long to file the patents for his original tinfoil machine, and this allowed others to further develop the technology without paying him royalties. Among them was none other than Alexander Graham Bell, whose Volta Laboratory developed a wax cylinder technology that improved the accuracy of the sound reproduction.

  In 1887, the American Graphophone Company launched a machine that used durable wax-coated cylinders instead of fragile tinfoil. The fact that one of its three inventors was Bell, who had beat Edison to market with his telephone years earlier, prompted the always competitive inventor to return to the invention that had been his calling card and, once again, begin tinkering with it.

  In March 1888, American Graphophone approached Edison, offering to merge his phonograph company with theirs and giving him full control of the graphophone and any improvements to it he saw fit. The company’s ploy was clear, however, since it dubbed Edison the true inventor of the phonograph: it wanted to use Edison’s name on the graphophone as a way to boost sales. But Edison would have none of it, writing to an associate, “Under no circumstances will I have anything to do with Graham Bell [or] with his phonograph pronounced backward.”

  Edison hastily constructed his own wax cylinder phonograph with the help of his development team and set out to convince investors to finance its manufacturing and distribution. But an early demonstration in the spring of 1888 failed after an Edison assistant mistakenly replaced the original diaphragm with one that he believed to be an improvement. He also exchanged the recording stylus for a more refined one. Unfortunately, he forgot to change the reproducing stylus, which was broader and blunter. The effect was that the reproducing stylus was too wide to enter the groove created by the recording stylus and as a result produced nothing more than a extended hissing sound.

  Edison would never again have the opportunity to start his own phonograph company.

  The owner of the North American Phonograph Company, Jesse Lippincott, rescued Edison’s newfangled phonograph by agreeing to distribute it; Lippincott also distributed the Graphophone. Edison loathed the arrangement but had run out of choices. He did, however, insist on retaining manufacturing rights.

  Unfortunately, the arrangement only ended in financial trouble for Edison. First, many of the phonographs manufactured in a trial run proved to be defective, forcing them to be recalled. Then Edison discovered that Lippincott had made a deal with one of his employees, Ezra Gilliland, to purchase Gilliland’s agency contract in exchange for $250,000 in stock in a new company he was establishing to sell both the phonograph and the graphophone. Gilliland split the stock with Edison’s attorney. After the deal was done, Lippincott mentioned the deal to Edison, unaware that he had not been told of the arrangement.

  Edison sued Gilliland and his attorney for fraud but the defendants were able to prove that they had full permission to act as Edison’s agents and therefore had simply perpetuated a breach of ethics rather than anything legally actionable. And having severed all ties with Gilliland, he also in effect severed ties with his last hope at making a fortune off the phonograph. At the time of the incident, Gilliland was preparing to incorporate a company designed to market the phonograph as an entertainment device.

  By 1892, it was already clear that the phonograph would succeed in the entertainment field rather than the business world, as it became a popular attraction at nickelodeons, where a placing coin in a slot would produce music or comedy routines.

  The relevance of Edison’s failure to successfully market his phonograph and his inability to significantly profit from it is that his laserlike focus on the pure act of innovation was by no means a guarantee, or even a definable asset, in his quest to thrust his invention into the culture at large. No matter his technical brilliance or his rapidly ascending fame: the maverick genius was simply making things up as he went along and figuring out how they might make sense as a business after the fact.

  And that is just as it should have been. After all, that’s how most tinkerers come up with something genuinely new. How can you put a value on curiosity? How can you codify a willingness to experiment? And what toll does a regimented system take on the free flow of ideas?

  Edison’s charismatic creativity, his unschooled smarts, and his stubborn personality all seemed to conspire against the notion that his tinkering, or any tinkering for that matter, could be systematized and mass-produced in the style of his good friend Henry Ford.

  And yet Edison’s Menlo Park lab became an innovation in its own right as the world’s first corporate brain trust. While Edison himself wasn’t always able to capitalize on the merits of his unique research and development operation, its mere existence had a major impact on American corporations going forward.

  In the shadow of the mushroom cloud that launched America’s nuclear era grew the logical next step to Edison’s notion of the tinkering conglomerate. On July 16, 1945, the group of scientists who comprised the Manhattan Project watched with horror and glee as the bomb they had built lit up the skies above Alamogordo, New Mexico. By October of that same year, the United States had dropped two more atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, horribly maiming and killing countless civilians.

  The RAND Corporation, perhaps the best-known think tank ever assembled, was chartered on March 1, 1946. Gaining its name from a conjunction of research and development, its initial purpose was secretive, militaristic, and analytical by design. Established by five-star air force general Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold and former air force test pilot Franklin R. Collbohm, RAND was designed to harness top military minds in the post–World War II era to produce new weapons and strategies to protect the country’s interests internationally.

  But it was the pursuit of peace that produced the RAND Corporation’s most innovative approach to tinkering. In the early throes of the Cold War in 1950, RAND analysts set about to codify human behavior, reducing it to a series of mathematical formulas and equations. Their purpose was to transform warfare from a series of blind attacks into a sophisticated portfolio of tactics and strategies, designed to minimize the destruction of human capital (particularly American human capital).

  Game theory was the start. Developed by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, game theory proposed to apply mathematical probability puzzles to human behavior. Neumann’s primary assumption, which traced its roots back to an eighteenth-century card game, was that players in a game were rational and therefore predisposed to finding a solution, or a rational outcome, to any problem.

  RAND was particularly drawn to game theory and even hired von Neumann to apply his “zero-sum game” principles to the set of problems it had committed itself to solve. The classic game favored by RAND is known as the “pri
soner’s dilemma.”

  Imagine two men are arrested for a crime, such as the theft of a precious diamond. The police separate the men, preventing them from communicating with each other. They tell each man that if he says where the diamond is stashed, he will do only six months in jail. The prisoner who refuses to confess will get ten years in prison. If both of the prisoners confess, they each serve a two-year sentence. Of course, if neither man confesses, and the diamond is not found, then they both go free.

  The prisoner’s dilemma became a stand-in for the arms race that plagued the United States, and the RAND’s researchers became obsessed with what it would take for one prisoner to confess—or, as they called it, defect. Unfortunately, when they queried test subjects regarding the prisoner’s dilemma, answers tended to reveal the political outlook of the person being asked rather than predict the likely outcome of the game.

  Liberals had more faith in their fellow human beings, and were thus more likely to envision a level of trust between the two prisoners. Conservatives more often viewed themselves as defectors, preferring to focus on self-interest and self-reliance as guiding human instincts.

  Alas, by the mid-1950s, RAND had largely abandoned game theory as a guiding tenet of national security policy, having decided that there was no one correct solution to the prisoner’s dilemma. After Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union became substantially less opaque, due to Khrushchev’s efforts to communicate more openly with the West; trying to forecast Soviet military policy was no longer the dark art it had once been thought of as.

  Looking for a new focus, RAND turned in the mid-1940s to an approach to defense strategy that strikes me as one of the first post–World War II examples of tinkering. In the same way that Thomas Edison assembled a team of assistants and engineers to help envision the world not as a series of problems that needed solving but rather as a canvas on which a master tinkerer could project his vision of the future.