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

phonograph, and the others on the telephone. At the same time that Edison was working on a new version of the phonograph that employed a disc rather than foil wrapped around a cylinder, he was also serving as host to increasing numbers of reporters and visitors, performing the same parlor games, answering the same repetitive questions. In the transition from unknown to iconic figure, Edison still felt free to say whatever he wished, so one entertainment he concocted was a variation of the one in which he had heckled himself in an overlay after first recording a serious reading. In the new version, he mimicked a sermon, in a mock-solemn drawl: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have come—before you this evening—to deliver for your—benefit—a discourse on travels—in Bible lands. Allow—me before commencing—to sta-a-ate—” Then he stopped, returned the stylus to the beginning, and recorded a running commentary: “Oh, give us a rest! Oh dry up! Sit down! Put him out! Hire a hall! Oh, that’ll do! Bah!”
    When the
Sun
’s Amos Cummings had visited the Menlo Park laboratory in February, he was the only outsider on the premises. When his competitors followed him, however, they bumped into one another. Edison complained that “the reporters that come down here have already [so] unstrung my nerves that I think of taking to the woods,” but this seems more a handy pretext rather than genuine complaint. He stayed where he was and left the door to his lab wide open. No one had to tell him that the feature stories were the best kind of advertising possible: disseminated for free.
    If anything, the advertising was too effective, creating demand for the phonograph that caught the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company by surprise. Phonograph Company investor Charles Cheever wrote another board member in mid-March that “the tide has started itself so fast that I have been unable in spite of all that I can do to hold it back until we had the small Phonograph ready to sell.” Cheever had helped whip up the public’s interest by holding public exhibitions in New York City, packing in three hundred people each afternoon, and drawing in the influential figures who were concentrated in Manhattan. William Cullen Bryant was so tickled he asked to come again with friends. An Astor, whose interest was piqued by Bryant, would not deign to rub shoulders with hoi polloi in the public exhibition, but she did ask for a private exhibition for herself and forty friends.
    Having received so much attention, gratis, the phonograph seemed poised for a sensational commercial launch. Gardiner Hubbard, the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell and another backer of the Phonograph Company, was so confident that demand would outstrip supply that he developed a plan for maximal exploitation of the imagined shortage. Why not announce that sales agents must place their orders—and pay in full—in advance? Figuring that each unit would only cost $15 to manufacture and would sell for $100, Hubbard gleefully rubbed his hands together, calculating paper profits. “We incur no risk,” he wrote a fellow investor.
    This proposal ran into opposition. Cheever was more concerned that early customers remain happy customers, and wondered aloud whether it would be better to lease the first small phonographs, once they were ready for release, rather than selling them. He knew that the shortcomings of the first-generation models would be a public embarrassment to the company as soon as the next-generation machine was released. Customers would naturally want “the most perfect one going and not a crude model.” If the company put all the machines out on lease, then it could “call them in and smash them up.” This praiseworthy idea disappeared.
    The principals of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company debated various business models, and counted in advance the coming profits, without asking Edison’s opinion. They encouraged Edison to hasten his work on finishing