By Stuart Mitchner
All of the world can taste his glory…
—from “Edison,” by the Bee Gees
In David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf 1994), Thomas Edison is a “grinch” who “always seemed grim, suspicious, and costive…. There’s an eerie contradiction between his own humorlessness and the way so many of his inventions made more fun for more people more of the time.”
Edison is taken more seriously but no less negatively in Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal’s Hollywood:The Pioneers (Knopf 1979), wherein he “may not have invented the motion picture, but he did commercialize it, and in business terms that is almost more important.” In the end he “had an influence on the moving picture out of all proportion to his real contribution.” For example: “On April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, New York, Edison demonstrated the Vitascope, a projector actually invented by Thomas Armat, who obligingly stood in the background operating the projector, allowing for the sake of commerce, all the credit to go to Edison.”
What If No Edison?
It’s not easy to find kind words on or offline for Thomas Edison, who was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. If, however, you undertake a magnificently oversimplified consideration of Edison the phenomenon, whose genius gave the world, among other things, recorded music, film, and electricity (imagine one man flipping a switch and lighting up New York City), today, February 11, should be a national holiday in his name, rather than the current default “National Inventors’ Day.”
Imagine anything without this avatar looming somewhere in the mists of the primal creation. YouTube with no Edison? The internet? The Manhattan skyline in its glory days? Chaplin’s masterpiece, City Lights, released in 1931 seven months after Edison’s death? The first recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in 1924? And if Edison gave us the phonograph, he also gave us the Beatles, a group unknown in America when they made their first album Please, Please Me at London’s Abbey Road studios on the Wizard of Menlo Park’s birthday, February 11, 1963.
The Magician
The unlikely notion of Edison somehow watching over the recording of Please Please Me is even harder to credit given the image of the 70-year-old man at the top of Edison’s Wikipedia page, who could pass for any American businessman or industrialist of the early 1920s. Scroll down to the section headed “Phonograph” and the Matthew Brady photo of the sternly focused 31-year-old inventor seated beside the sleek, shiny “second model of his phonograph,” and you can almost imagine him peering over producer George Martin’s shoulder. Pictured in 1878, this immediately more interesting individual has been busy demonstrating his new invention to a public so in awe of it as to speak of its inventor as a magician, this being around the time he began to be known as the Wizard of Menlo Park. As I look at the man in the picture, I’m also reminded of the photographs of gunfighter legends who were alive at the same time, like Doc Holiday and Bat Masterson.
The Poet?
Still more conducive to fantasy is the photograph from 1889 near the bottom of the Wikipedia page showing the inventor looking even younger at 42. At first I imagined a British poet of the late Victorian period who might have been cruised by Oscar Wilde. The way his head is tilted, the deceptively dreamy expression, as if he were listening to something in the air. No way. Stop thinking of poets and muses. The gunfighter idea is actually more appropriate to a man fresh from his “War of the Currents” with George Westinghouse (Edison DC, Westinghouse AC), during which Edison was firing shots like this: “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size.”
Edison and Movies
Thomas Edison occupies President’s Month with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Another birth month President, Ronald Reagan (February 6), is the only movie star (albeit of the second rank) ever elected to the nation’s highest office. As for presidents on film, George Washington was admirably played by Jeff Daniels (born February 19, 1955) in Howard Fast’s television play The Crossing, four years after the same actor was commandeered and ravished in a New Jersey motel by Melanie Griffith in Something Wild.
Contemporary actors who have played Edison include two stars best known as detectives, Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes) in the aforementioned The Current War (2017) and Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper) in Tesla (2020), both films based on Edison’s rivalries with Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) and Tesla (Ethan Hawke). In 1940, MGM released Edison, the Man (1940), with Spencer Tracy in the title role. While my guess is Edison would approve of Tracy’s “thoughtful, impetuous, affectionate and always a bit enigmatic” performance, as reviewed by the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, it’s harder to imagine his response to Mickey Rooney in Young Tom Edison, which was released earlier in 1940. Crowther began his piece on the Rooney version with reference to the fact that Edison “thought none too highly of his movie machine, the Kinetoscope, and still more dubiously of the later gadget by which pictures in motion were flashed on a screen.” Crowther goes on to note that there are moments in the film when “the late Mr. Edison’s dubiety of things cinematic seems amply justified, if not actually understated,” and that Rooney’s young Tom is “to be regarded with awe and a little terror … so fascinating a by-product of the Kinetoscope as to make one … recall the case of Herr Frankenstein, who generally is obscured by the impression his monster created; but, if there is a parallel, it is one we dare not follow.”
Last Words
“It’s very beautiful over there.” I once read an Evangelical doctoring of Edison’s last words that resembled an ecstatic variation on a line from the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (“They are all gone into the world of light”). But given the date of his death, October 18, 1931, the beauty he saw may have been merely autumnal, like the golden tree shown outside his home on Llewellyn Park’s Wikipedia page. Earlier the same day, after his wife Mina asked if he was suffering, Edison had said, “No, just waiting,” as if death were a bus or a train. His allegedly “actual last breath” was preserved in a test tube, sealed with paraffin wax, sent to his friend Henry Ford, and is currently on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.
June 11 Valentine’s Day
Born three days before February 14, Edison had a favorite song that fits the occasion, “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” which was featured in NBC’s October 19 memorial broadcast. At the close of the musical program, the announcer Milton Cross read from Edison’s June 11 address to the National Electric Light Association during its Atlantic City convention: “My message to you is to be courageous. I have lived a long time. I have seen history repeat itself again and again. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has come out strong and more prosperous. Be as brave as your fathers were before you. Have faith-go forward.”
Black History Month
It was my June 2003 Village Voice celebration of the great tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, who was born on February 13, in 1921, that led to this job. Born a slave, Frederick Douglass didn’t know his exact birth, but because his mother used to call him her valentine, he settled on February 14, 1818. Douglass Day, Friday, February 13, will be marked at the Princeton Public Library with a transcribe-a-thon from noon to 3 p.m. and a cake cutting at 1 p.m. Between 2 and 4 p.m. that day Firestone Library on the Princeton University campus is presenting a pop-up Special Collections Showcase, featuring objects by and about Frederick Douglass and “other significant works featuring African American perspectives.”