Free The Wizard of Menlo Park by Randall E. Stross

dramatis personae. The laboratory was depicted with imagery anticipating Henry Adams’s later twin images of the Virgin and the Dynamo: the long wooden structure was likened to “an old-fashioned Baptist tabernacle,” but on its roof were nine lightning rods, and on its side were the twelve telegraph lines.
    Cummings walked in the front door and found himself stepping into an office, in which an unidentified man was studying a drawing. Having asked for Edison, he was told, “Go right upstairs, and you’ll find him singing into some instrument.” The rarity of a visitor such as Cummings is underlined by Edison’s availability, uninsulated by a personal secretary or other gatekeeper. Up the stairs, and there “Prof. Edison” was, seated at a table. Grimy hands, uncombed hair, dirty shirt, muddy shoes, “he looked like anything but a professor,” Cummings would write, forgetting that his subject was not, in fact, a professor. Edison was also described as utterly lacking pretentiousness. “A man of common sense would feel at home with him in a minute,” Cummings reported, “but a nob or prig would be sadly out of place.” This motif—the genius who spoke plainly—proved so irresistible that it became the one used in almost every profile of Edison for the rest of his life.
    Edison had virtually no prior experience with a reporter who was about to make him the subject of a long profile, but he was naturally adept at steering the conversation in the direction he wished, which was to describe the future commercial possibilities of the phonograph. Even though he was privately focused on its use as a dictation machine in the office, he sensed that the general readership of a newspaper would be interested in other applications. The arias of opera soprano Adelina Patti could be recorded, Edison suggested, and enjoyed in the parlors anywhere, selling “millions.” He lamented the lost opportunity to record the last benediction of just-deceased Pope Pius IX; the recording could have been easily duplicated for every Roman Catholic in the world. A great public service, and a great business opportunity, too. He did the arithmetic: at $5 each, “there was a fortune in it.”
    The more he talked, the more he looked out to the future. He was prescient in some cases: audiobooks (“Say I hire a good elocutionist to read
David Copperfield
”); Nixon’s Oval Office recordings (“I could fix a machine in a wall…. Political secrets…might be brought tolight”); movies with sound (“The pictures and gestures of the orator, as well his voice, could be exactly reproduced, and the eyes and ears of the audience charmed by the voice and manner of the speaker”). Edison also thought parents would hide recorders so that they could in the comfort of their own bed listen to “all the spooney courtship of their daughters and lovers.”
    Edison’s talking foghorn, the aerophone, which conveniently remained unfinished, provided still more incredible possibilities. He suggested installing one inside the mouth of “the Goddess of Liberty that the Frenchmen are going to put upon Bedloe’s Island that would make her talk so loud that she could be heard by every soul on Manhattan Island.”
    Cummings meekly took it all in, unquestioningly, and was so eager to depict Edison as a genius that he reported as fact details that were empirical impossibilities. In front of Cummings, Edison recorded his favorite ditty for a phonograph demonstration, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” played it normally, and then reversed the cylinder, which Cummings claimed then yielded the words in reverse order and distinctly: “Lamb little a had Mary.”
    When Cummings, the polite guest, asked Edison how he had discovered the phonograph, Edison concocted a great drama in the wrong place, not when he and his assistants had first tried to record on a strip of paper, but later, when he directed his chief machinist to build the first cylinder model, the successful