Free The Wizard of Menlo Park by Randall E. Stross Page A

testing of which was noted in the lab books with scarcely a yawn. Edison told the reporter that his lab mates “laughed at me” when he proposed making the cylinder, and bets involving cigars and cash showed that his belief in success was matched by his associates’ skepticism that it would work in the first trial, which it did.
    With Cummings faithfully recording his every utterance, Edison showed an impish side, recording serious verse, and then overlaying upon it jeers and gibes (“Oh, cork yourself!”). He saved the best part of the demonstration for the end, when he recorded “Mad dog!” a half dozen times “and then amused himself by turning the crank backward.” Cummings does not spell out the profane result, but it was not, as he claimed to have heard before, the original words merely reversed.
    Cummings headed for the train, leaving his readers with a final charming image of Edison, returning to work on his phonograph “like a delighted boy.” The reporter had obtained materials for a flattering portrait; the inventor had lost only a few hours of work time. But when Cummings’s story appeared in the
New York Sun,
the seemingly intimate portrait of the “genius” in his laboratory created a sensation, setting off a mad rush of reporters to Menlo Park to write their own profiles of the inventor in his lab. And with the reporters came others who wanted to see “the Professor” for themselves. “I find I cannot get away,” Edison wrote one of his attorneys, complaining only semiseriously. “Every day a dozen of the heavy lights of literature and science come here.”
    The Edison stories served to whet readers’ appetites for still more. The result was that Menlo Park became a place known far and wide around the world, and so closely was the place name associated with Edison’s laboratory that it entered the nation’s consciousness and stayed, even though Edison himself would live and work there only three more years, and would spend more than four decades at another location in New Jersey.
    The more that Edison spoke with reporters about his ideas and plans, the more giddy he became. He was untroubled by doubt that he might lack the time and resources to accomplish all of the side projects that he mentioned, seriously or casually. Readers learned that he not only had invented a new painkiller cocktail, but also had invented a hearing aid for his own use. His “telephonoscope” was supposedly inconspicuous, yet enabled Edison to hear “a cow chew a quarter of a mile off.” When letters came pouring in, imploring him to commercialize the invention, he announced that he had assigned two of his assistants to work on tests, and was confident he would have a hearing aid on the market within months.
    His aerophone remained incomplete. But when Vanity Fair Tobacco and Cigarettes wrote “Prof. Edison, Menlo Park,” asking if he could adapt his “airaphone” to proclaim “Smoke Vanity Fair,” Edison wrote back that he could, though it would take him a while to “perfect” it. The aerophone made for wonderful copy, but reporters found it impossible to see it for themselves. “I am very sorry,” Edison apologized to a
New York World
reporter in March 1878, “that I cannot show you the aerophone today. I have just sent the application for a patent to Washington, and have taken the machine I had here to pieces.” The reporter said this was a “great disappointment,” but Edison, “one of the most courteous gentlemen in the world,” covered for the machine’s absence with a detailed explanation of its supposed capabilities.
    The aerophone and the telephonoscope could not materialize because Edison was woefully understaffed. Even though he conveyed to reporters the impression that his laboratory was home to a staff too large to name, in fact it was small. In early March, he hired a few more hands, but that gave him a total of ten or twelve assistants, eight of whom were working on the