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Edison's
wife, Mary, died on August 9, 1884, possibly from a brain tumor. Edison
remarried to Mina Miller on February 24, 1886, and, with his wife, moved
into a large mansion named Glenmont in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison's
children from his first marriage were distanced from their father's new
life, as Edison and Mina had their own family: Madeleine, born on 1888;
Charles on 1890; and Theodore on 1898. Unlike Mary, who was sickly and
often remained at home, and was also deferential to her husband's wishes,
Mina was an active woman, devoting much time to community groups, social
functions, and charities, as well as trying to improve her husband's often
careless personal habits.
In 1887, Edison had built a new,
larger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. The facility included a machine
shop, phonograph and photograph departments, a library, and ancillary buildings
for metallurgy, chemistry, woodworking, and galvanometer testings.
While Edison had neglected further
work on the phonograph, others had
moved forward to improve it. In particular, Chichester Bell and Charles
Sumner Tainter developed an improved machine that used a wax cylinder and
a floating stylus, which they called a graphophone. They sent representatives
to Edison to discuss a possible partnership on the machine, but Edison
refused to collaborate with them, feeling that the phonograph was his invention
alone. With this competition, Edison was stirred into action and resumed
his work on the phonograph in 1887. Edison eventually adopted methods similar
to Bell and Tainter's in his own phonograph.
The phonograph was initially marketed
as a business dictation machine. Entrepreneur Jesse H. Lippincott acquired
control of most of the phonograph companies, including Edison's, and set
up the North American Phonograph Co. in 1888. The business did not prove
profitable, and when Lippincott fell ill, Edison took over the management.
In 1894, the North American Phonograph Co. went into bankruptcy, a move
which allowed Edison to buy back the rights to his invention. In 1896,
Edison started the National Phonograph Co. with the intent of making phonographs
for home amusement. Over the years, Edison made improvements to the phonograph
and to the cylinders which were played on them, the early ones being made
of wax. Edison introduced an unbreakable cylinder record, named the Blue
Amberol, at roughly the same time he entered the disc
phonograph market in 1912. The introduction of an Edison disc was in
reaction to the overwhelming popularity of discs on the market in contrast
to cylinders. Touted as being superior to the competition's records, the
Edison discs were designed to be played only on Edison phonographs, and
were cut laterally as opposed to vertically. The success of the Edison
phonograph business, though, was always hampered by the company's reputation
of choosing lower-quality recording acts. In the 1920s, competition from
radio caused business to sour, and the Edison disc business ceased production
in 1929.
Other Ventures: Ore-milling and
Cement
Another Edison interest was an ore-milling
process that would extract various metals from ore. In 1881, he formed
the Edison Ore-Milling Co., but the venture proved fruitless as there was
no market for it. In 1887, he returned to the project, thinking that his
process could help the mostly depleted Eastern mines compete with the Western
ones. In 1889, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works was
formed, and Edison became absorbed by its operations and began to spend
much time away from home at the mines in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. Although
he invested much money and time into this project, it proved unsuccessful
when the market went down and additional sources of ore in the Midwest
were found.
Edison also became involved in promoting
the use of cement and formed the Edison Portland Cement Co. in 1899. He
tried to promote widespread use of cement for the construction of low-cost
homes and envisioned alternative uses for concrete in the manufacture of
phonographs, furniture, refrigerators, and pianos. Unfortunately, Edison
was ahead of his time with these ideas, as widespread use of concrete proved
economically unfeasible at that time.
Motion Pictures
In 1888, Edison met
Eadweard Muybridge
at West Orange and viewed Muybridge's zoopraxiscope. This machine used
a circular disc with still photographs of the successive phases of movement
around the circumference to recreate the illusion of movement. Edison declined
to work with Muybridge on the device and decided to work on his own motion
picture camera at his laboratory. As Edison put it in a caveat written
the same year, "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the
eye what the phonograph does for the ear."
The task of inventing the machine
fell to Edison's associate William K. L.
Dickson. Dickson initially experimented
with a cylinder-based device for recording images, before turning to a
celluloid strip. In October of 1889, Dickson greeted Edison's return from
Paris with a new device that projected pictures and contained sound. After
more work, patent applications were made in 1891 for a motion picture camera,
called a Kinetograph, and a Kinetoscope, a motion picture peephole viewer.
Kinetoscope parlors opened in New
York and soon spread to other major cities during 1894. In 1893, a motion
picture studio, later dubbed the Black Maria (the slang name for a police
paddy wagon which the studio resembled), was opened at the West Orange
complex. Short films were produced using variety acts of the day. Edison
was reluctant to develop a motion picture projector, feeling that more
profit was to be made with the peephole viewers.
When Dickson aided competitors on
developing another peephole motion picture device and the eidoloscope projection
system, later to develop into the Mutoscope, he was fired. Dickson went
on to form the American Mutoscope Co. along with Harry Marvin, Herman Casler,
and Elias Koopman. Edison subsequently adopted a projector developed by
Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins and re-named it the Vitascope
and marketed it under his name. The Vitascope premiered on April 23, 1896,
to great acclaim.
Competition from other motion picture
companies soon created heated legal battles between them and Edison over
patents. Edison sued many companies for infringement. In 1909, the formation
of the Motion Picture Patents Co. brought a degree of cooperation to the
various companies who were given licenses in 1909, but in 1915, the courts
found the company to be an unfair monopoly.
In 1913, Edison experimented with
synchronizing sound to film. A Kinetophone
was developed by his laboratory which synchronized sound on a phonograph
cylinder to the picture on a screen. Although this initially brought interest,
the system was far from perfect and disappeared by 1915. By 1918, Edison
ended his involvement in the motion picture field.
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page > Thomas
Edison - Later Years
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