Edison and science: a curious result

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009) 157–166

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Edison and science: a curious result Ian Wills Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, F07 Carslaw Building, The University of Sydney, 2006, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 26 November 2007 Received in revised form 9 September 2008

Keywords: Thomas Edison Invention Artefact Experiment Etheric force Failure

a b s t r a c t In November 1875, Thomas Edison made the sensational announcement that he had discovered a new force of nature, etheric force. It was to emerge some years later that the phenomenon Edison described was a form of wireless transmission, but Edison failed both to advance his theory and to exploit his discovery in new inventions. I contrast Edison’s approach to doing science with what he did when inventing, and also with the approach used by his principal scientific opponents. This contrast reveals that he failed, not so much because he was an inventor who did science badly, but because when he ventured into scientific theory-making he abandoned key techniques that made him America’s most successful inventor. From this I argue that we can identify artefact creation processes in science that parallel the process of invention, and that Edison failed because his opponents created better artefacts. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

1. Introduction In part, this is an exploration of why Thomas Edison, holder of 1085 patents for inventions ranging from electric lighting to preserving fruit, was not the inventor of wireless telegraphy. It is also an exploration of why Edison, who financed the establishment of the journal Science, should have had his claim that he had made an important scientific discovery rejected by the scientific community of his day. The controversy over his discovery began in November 1875, with Edison’s startling public announcement that he had discovered etheric force, an ‘entirely unknown force [of nature], subject to laws different from those of heat, light, electricity or magnetism’ (TAEB D678).1 Interest in etheric force burned brightly in public and in Edison’s laboratory over the following five weeks, then waned. Edison’s venture into public scientific theorymaking eventually ended the following July, when he privately accepted his opponents’ explanation of the phenomenon he had ob-

served. Edison not only failed to have his theory accepted, but also failed to exploit a phenomenon that fell within an area in which he was an acknowledged expert, communication technologies, for the phenomenon he observed was wireless transmission. A number of historians have addressed the etheric force controversy. Süsskind (1964) refers to it in his survey of the many observations of wireless phenomena before Hertz, while Hounshell (1980) examines it in his exploration of the relationships between Edison and scientists. Carlson (1991, p. 63) and Israel (1998, p. 114), have attributed Edison’s failure in the etheric force debate to his scientific naïvety, particularly his use of the popular, rather than scientific, press to publish his claims. I will argue that while this may have been a factor, Edison failed because of something more fundamental. It lay in his beliefs about how to do science. This, in turn, reveals that he failed, not so much because he was an inventor who did science badly, but because he was an inventor who abandoned successful invention techniques when he engaged

E-mail address: [email protected] TAEB citations refer to documents in the Edison Papers book edition. Fifteen volumes of the book edition are planned, of which six have been published. Documents in the book edition are numbered consecutively across the volumes and it is the document number, rather than page number, that I have used in the citations. For example, in the citation ‘(TAEB D679n5)’, ‘TAEB’ indicates the Edison Papers book edition and ‘D679n5’ document number 679, note 5. Documents cited herein can be located from the following key: Documents 1 to 340: Edison Papers book edition, Vol. 1 (Edison, 1989a). 1

Documents 341 to 737: Edison Papers book edition, Vol. 2 (Edison, 1989b). Documents 738 to 1163: Edison Papers book edition, Vol. 3 (Edison, 1989c). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2009.03.006

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in scientific research. While Hounshell considers Edison’s relationship with scientists, I use the incident to examine his relationship with science. This, in turn, leads me to examine aspects of the relationship between science and technology and, in particular, technology as manifested in inventing.2 As an inventor, Edison was primarily in business of making artefacts, things created to serve a purpose or function.3 Many of the artefacts Edison created were physical, like the incandescent electric lamp and the phonograph, but others were non-physical, like patent applications and companies he created to exploit his inventions. It is being created for a purpose that makes something an artefact, rather than whether or not it has a physical existence. Artefacts are the product of art in the older sense of the word: that is, skill in doing something that comes from acquired knowledge.4 (Elsewhere I have highlighted the ways in which Edison built knowledge, notably knowledge that came from failures, as he created artefacts (Wills, 2007)). In examining Edison’s relationship with science and artefacts I will argue that the etheric force controversy was a contest of artefacts in which Edison, the iconic inventor and creator of artefacts, was beaten by scientist opponents who created more successful artefacts. It is irrelevant that in later years both Edison’s theory and that of his principal opponents, Edwin Houston and Elihu Thomson, were judged to be erroneous. In 1875–1876, Houston and Thomson’s theory was more successful because it was more convincing. While it is unusual to view science and the work of scientists as directed towards making artefacts, I will argue that in science artefacts have a key role in the acceptance of theories, and that there are close parallels to that unquestionable artefact creation process, invention. 2. The etheric force debate The search for a new force of nature began within days of Edison’s meeting Dr George Miller Beard, a New York physician and editor of the journal Archives of Electrology and Neurology (TAED SB1677:126).5 Edison was introduced to Beard in October 1874 in connection with one of Edison’s inventions, the Inductorium, a device that employed induction coils to deliver electric shocks, and which Edison advertised as ‘a specific cure for rheumatism and an inexhaustible font of amusement’ (TAEB D434, D435).6 Beard was an influential figure in late nineteenth-century psychiatry, who had had just published the second edition of his book on the medical and surgical uses of electricity (Beard & Rockwell, 1875). He introduced the term ‘neurasthenia’, and later published American nervousness: Its causes and consequences (Beard, 1881), which was read by, and influenced, Freud (Weiner, 1956). As a pioneer of electrotherapies, Beard hoped to use Edison’s Inductorium to treat nervous conditions.

Figure 1. The apparatus (notation added) on which Edison first noticed etheric force sparks (TAED NE1691:15). When the contact C closes, completing the circuit, the iron rod R is pulled towards the electromagnet M opening the contact C, and causing the rod to return to its original position. The process is cyclic, causing the rod to vibrate. In operating principle it is identical to an electric bell.

Beard was also a crusading proponent of science and an opponent of supernatural explanations of phenomena. At the time he met Edison, Beard was engaged in a bitter public debate with Helena Blavatsky, spiritualist and founder of the Theosophical Society (Meade, 1980, p. 127).7 A few days after his introduction to Beard, Edison made the first notebook entry describing a series of experiments on ‘Odic magnetism’ (TAED NS7401:43–46). It is likely that Beard’s current public opposition to spiritualism may have led him to discuss with Edison the Odic force theories of the German chemist, Karl von Reichenbach. In the 1820s and 1830s, Reichenbach (1788–1869) had built a credible reputation in chemistry, mineralogy, and antiseptics.8 In the 1840s, Reichenbach turned to investigating the effect of magnets and crystals on humans. His experiments led him to claim to have discovered Od (or Odic force), a mysterious force in nature that he believed pervaded all things and could explain phenomena as diverse as the Aurora Borealis and clairvoyance. Reichenbach’s works on Od were translated into English and became popular in the United States.9 Although Reichenbach’s theories received some scientific support initially, this effectively came to an end in 1862 when seven Berlin professors, including the physicist Heinrich Magnus, published a letter repudiating Odic theory (Farrah, 1992). The lack of support among professional scientists did not deter Edison, who conducted more experiments in search of a new force in May and June 1875. On 31 May 1875, Edison drew up a list of potential research topics, including ‘A New force for Telegraphic communication’ (TAEB D570, D579, D581). The search for a new force was clearly on Edison’s agenda. During the night of 22 November 1875, while experimenting with the device in Figure 1, Edison and his assistant, Charles Batchelor, noticed sparks at S, a point at which no current should have been flowing (TAEB D665).10 On investigating further, they found that they could also draw sparks from other parts of the vibrating bar R and from the end of a wire connected to X. When they connected the wire to a gas pipe, they found they could draw sparks

2 A number of authors have argued that science is a form of technology. Radder (2003) divides these arguments into those based either on the experimental dependence of modern science (for example Janich, 1978, and Lelas, 1993) and those based on the similarities between science and technology under actor network theory (Latour, 1987). Radder dismisses both approaches and it is not my objective to revive them. 3 Hilpinen (1995) defines an artefact as ‘an object which has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose’ and argues that the term can not only refer to physical objects but can also be applied to non-physical objects, including works of art and belief systems (Hilpinen, 1992, 1995). 4 Indeed, a patent application can be rejected if it relies on previously public knowledge, referred to in the legal sense as ‘prior art’ (US Department of Commerce, 2001). 5 TAED citations refer to documents in the Edison Papers digital edition using the notation recommended by the Edison Papers editors (Edison Papers, 2008a). For example, in the citation, ‘(TAED SB1677:126)’, ‘TAED’ indicates the Edison Papers digital edition, ‘SB1677’ is the ‘Folder/Volume ID’ and ‘126’ the image number in the Folder/Volume. Document images can be accessed through the Edison Papers website (Edison Papers, 2008b) using the Folder/Volume ID to locate the folder, then the image number within the folder. 6 Edison was fond of practical jokes that involved giving electric shocks to unsuspecting subjects for the amusement of initiated onlookers (Conot, 1979, pp. 25–26). 7 Beard’s skirmish with Blavatsky followed his public claim that two of her favoured mediums were frauds. Edison later had considerable contact with Blavatsky and her deputy, Henry Olcott. Despite his friendship with Beard, and Beard’s support for him during the etheric force debate, Edison joined the Theosophical Society in 1878 but appears to have taken no part in its activities (TAED D7802:1, D8912:1–3). 8 Absolon (1999) claims that Reichenbach used carbolic acid (phenyl) as an antiseptic in 1833, three decades before Lister. 9 Reichenbach’s theories where reported in The American Whig Review (Researches of Baron Reichenbach on the ‘Mesmeric’, now called the Odic force, 1852) and an American edition of his book on Od was published (Reichenbach, 1853). Willis and Wynne (2006) have documented many literary references to Odic force and mesmerism, including some in the works of Edgar Alan Poe. It is likely that Edison knew of Reichenbach before he met Beard. 10 Charles Batchelor (1845–1910) was an English-born textile mechanic, who joined Edison in 1873 and became his primary associate in invention for twenty years.

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throughout the room by touching metal objects to the gas jets and, to their amazement, they could even get sparks by bending the wire into a loop and touching it back onto itself. Although they had seen similar sparks often before and had previously attributed them to electrical induction, Batchelor commented that these sparks ‘seemed so strong that it struck us forcibly there might be something more than induction’ (TAED MBN002:4). Edison went further and declared on this surprising but limited evidence that ‘This is simply wonderful & a good proof that the cause of the spark is a true unknown force’ (TAEB D665). While this might seem to be an extraordinarily grand claim to make on such little evidence, it was not spontaneous. As Israel (1998, p. 111) observes, the reason why Edison thought he had found a new force was simply that he had been searching for one for the past year. Encouraged by his apparent success, he and Batchelor experimented during the following nights and, less than a week later, Edison announced his discovery to the press. Newspaper reports began appearing on 29 November 1875, most being positive, describing Edison’s announcement as a, ‘Wonderful Invention’ and ‘Startling Discovery’, and proclaiming that it would lead to a new era in communication (TAEB D678n3, n5). The New York Herald carried a lengthy article on Edison’s discovery that included his prediction that it would put and end to ‘The cumbersome appliances of transmitting ordinary electricity, such as telegraph poles, insulating knobs, cable sheathings’, resulting in ‘a great saving of time and labor’. The article also summarised Edison’s etheric force theory. After describing how heat, electricity, and magnetism could be converted into each other, Edison continued: It follows that if electric energy under certain conditions is transformed into that of magnetism under other conditions it might be transformed into an entirely unknown force, subject to laws different from those of heat, light, electricity or magnetism. There is every reason to suppose that etheric energy is this new form. The only manifestation of its presence previously recorded with scientific accuracy is that of the German chemist Ruchenbach [sic] . . . This phenomenon, inexplicable to Ruchenbach, is easily to be accounted for on the etheric theory. (TAEB D678) Edison’s reference to Reichenbach was to prove injudicious. The New York Times seized on it, publishing a highly critical report in which it parodied his gas pipe demonstrations, described the discoverer of Od as ‘the maligned and discredited Reichenbach’, and emphasised the connection between Od (and by inference, Edison’s etheric force) and ‘supernatural wonders’ such as clairvoyance. The article concluded with the ironic observation that Edison was wasting his time with gas pipes and should instead ‘begin the manufacture of ghosts and establish direct communication with the other world’ (Etheric force, 1875).11 Between 22 November and the middle of December, Edison attacked etheric force with his characteristic enthusiasm, for once Edison’s attention was drawn to a problem, it tended to consume him to the exclusion of all else: sleep, home life, and personal comfort included. He and his associates worked on it literally night and day, conducting an extensive array of experiments. One strand of his experimental program was directed towards excluding electricity as the source of the sparks, Edison concluding that ‘these sparks or force . . . do not follow the laws of either voltaic or Static electricity’ (TAED NE1691:15). (The reason why Edison did not detect electricity was that he was dealing with high-frequency alternating current and the tests used were sensitive only to the direct current and static electricity.)

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Another set of tests sought to eliminate electrical induction as the cause, since, in his 22 November notes, Edison had commented that when he had seen similar sparks before he had always attributed them to induction. Removing the iron core from the electromagnet (M in Figure 1) had no effect, Edison noting that he still got ‘sparks just the same’ (TAED NE1691:18). (Although Edison believed he had eliminated the magnetic fields by removing the iron cores, he failed to recognise that the wire spools were also inductances.) Other sets of experiments involved altering the circuit and adding components to it, while observing the effect on the etheric force sparks (TAEB D666–D669). The largest group of tests was directed towards determining the effect of etheric force sparks on various metals, liquid solutions, and powders (TAEB D666, D669, D673, D680). Edison patented a number of inventions that exploited electrically initiated chemical reactions, including his recording telegraph and electrochemical telephone receiver (Edison, 1872, 1879). It is likely that this series of experiments was directed towards identifying such potential applications. A primary interest of Edison’s was the potential application of etheric force to communications and, to this end, on 24 November, he connected the etheric force apparatus to a telegraph line running from his Newark, New Jersey, laboratory to New York, and back. When he found he could draw sparks from the return end of this line Edison concluded that ‘This force can be transmitted over long telegraph wires [and] may be transmitted over uninsulated iron wires buried in the earth for instance the sheathing of the Atlantic Cable’ (TAED NE1691:17). This entry, like many other records of the etheric force experiments, is in Batchelor’s handwriting. It appears that Batchelor was acting as Edison’s scribe for he also kept his own notes that, in this instance, contradicted the official laboratory notebook entry. Privately, Batchelor wrote that, ‘it might be that the force travels across the table instead of going out on the line’ (TAED MBN002:4). If Batchelor’s speculation was correct and the signal crossed the table without a conducting medium, it was evidence of wireless communication. The result of the Newark-to-New York telegraph experiments was just one of many remarkable characteristics of the new force. On 30 November Edison found that by holding the gas pipe in one hand he could draw sparks from metal objects using a metal rod held in the other, ‘showing that the force passed through his body’ (TAEB D673). Batchelor’s notebook includes a further experiment in which the same result was achieved with three people holding hands in a chain (TAED MBN002:6). (As with the Newark-to-New York telegraph experiment, this was due to wireless transmission, not conduction through humans.) The very fact that Edison and his associates became fascinated with this aspect of etheric force phenomena points to some critical limitations of his theory. During this period of intense experimentation, Edison developed his etheric force theory beyond that he announced to the press at the end of November, but the theory as he developed it was limited. Firstly, his experiments concentrated primarily on the narrow objective of building systems of regularities (repeatable patterns). The second limitation in his approach was more fundamental because it lay in Edison’s assumptions about the character of etheric force. Up to this point in his career Edison had primarily worked in the electrical field, so he conceived etheric force in terms with which he was familiar: direct current, static electricity, and, most significantly, electrical conduction. This latter assumption is apparent in the conclusion he drew from the Newark-to-New York telegraph line experiment and his belief that etheric force passed through his body. Further, since he mentioned Reichenbach in his announcement to the press,

Four decades later, it was reported that Edison was working on a machine to do exactly that—communicate with the dead (Forbes, 1920).

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Reichenbach’s Odic force theory appears to have influenced his theory and some of the experiments. Reichenbach had, for example, claimed that Od ‘is conductible through all other bodies; it is capable of being either directly accumulated on, or transferred by distribution to other bodies’ (Reichenbach, 1853, p. 116). On 3 December, George Beard, the man who prompted Edison’s interest in Reichenbach’s Odic force, visited Edison’s laboratory. Beard was accompanied by another professional inventor, John E. Smith, who expressed the opinion, shared by many others, that etheric force was merely a consequence of electrical induction. Beard also brought with him some live frogs. Killing these, they proceeded to test the effect of etheric force sparks on the frogs’ legs, as Galvani had done with electrical discharges. Although the frogs’ legs were sensitive to static electrical impulses, there was no movement when etheric force was applied, further confirming to Edison that etheric force was not a form of electricity. When they left, Smith and Beard took with them a diagram of Edison’s apparatus, using it to experiment independently on etheric force (TAEB D679n5). Beard later published a favourable account of these experiments and those witnessed at Edison’s laboratory (Beard, 1876). Beard energetically supported Edison’s etheric force theory through his own journal, Archives of Electrology and Neurology, and by countering its critics (Baldwin, 2001, p. 65). Unfortunately for Edison, Beard’s was a minority view. There is no record of Edison’s reaction to criticisms such as those in the New York Times, but etheric force soon drew attention from a quarter that he could not ignore. On 10 December Edison’s agent, Norman Miller, wrote inviting him to a meeting with William Orton, president of the telegraph giant, Western Union. Miller’s letter concluded: I think that you had better bring in a Statement of expenditures and such vouchers as you have ready, also drawings, etc, and any thing that shows work done and progress made. The papers are so full of ‘new force’ that I want you to show that it has not taken up too much of your time (TAEB D687). Edison hoped to secure Western Union’s financial backing to establish his purpose-built laboratory at Menlo Park. In return, Orton wanted Edison to develop and patent alternatives to Elisha Gray’s acoustic telegraph system and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, both of which threatened Western Union’s near monopoly of the telegraph. The implication of Miller’s letter was that Western Union might finance Edison to produce inventions of commercial value to it, but not to pursue a questionable new force. Edison must have allayed these concerns, because four days later he and Western Union signed the agreement (TAEB D891). Edison acted in the spirit of his agreement and, except for one more experiment, stopped his own research on etheric force. On 26 December 1875, Edison’s laboratory notebook noted that, ‘an experiment tried tonight gives a curious result’. Figure 2 is the sketch that accompanied the entry. The left-hand side of the sketch shows the apparatus Edison used on 22 November (Figure 1). Objects B, C, D, and E are sheets of tinfoil hung on insulating supports, and the object in the lower right is Edison’s Etheriscope, a darkened box containing two carbon points separated by a small gap, used to observe etheric force sparks. One side of the Etheriscope is earthed to a gas pipe, the other connected to E. Although B and E are 100 inches (2.5 m) apart and there is no wire or other conducting medium between them, the accompanying entry notes that Edison and Batchelor ‘received sparks at intervals although insulated by such space’ (TAED NE1691:29). This was, indeed, a curious result. What Edison observed was wireless transmission,

Figure 2. Sketch from Edison’s laboratory notebook of the wireless experiment conducted on 26 December 1875 (TAED NE1691:29).

confirming Batchelor’s speculation of 24 November that etheric force travelled through space without a conductor. Only one word, ‘curious’, hints at the exceptional nature of what they witnessed. Edison may have stopped his etheric force experiments but the criticism of his theory continued. On 8 January 1876, Scientific American published a generally favourable account of the demonstrations by Edison and Beard to the Polytechnic Club of America. In the same and later issues it also printed letters disputing Edison’s theory and, on 5 February, reprinted an article from the Journal of the Franklin Institute (Houston, 1876) opposing Edison’s theory and proposing, as others had done, that the phenomenon could be explained by induction. Its author, Philadelphia Central High School teacher Edwin Houston, not only disputed Edison’s theory and claimed to have reported a similar phenomenon previously (Houston, 1871), but also implied that Edison was ignorant of current electrical science. As Carlson (1991, p. 64) notes in his biography of Houston’s partner Elihu Thomson, he and Houston had chosen to build their scientific reputations, in part, by attacking the credibility and reputations of others. The populist Edison and his etheric force, linked as it was to Reichenbach’s marginalised Odic force, was another opportunity. Houston’s paper seems to have stung Edison because he responded with a letter to Scientific American in which he demanded that his critics ‘back up their assertions by experiment, and give me an equal chance as a critic’ (TAEB D726). It was not to silence Houston, who possessed more than rhetoric. Both he and his associate, Elihu Thomson, were competent experimenters and inventors in their own right.12 Houston accepted the challenge and, with Thomson, published a more detailed paper in the April Journal of the Franklin Institute (Houston, & Thomson, 1876). Scientific American reprinted the paper on 20 May. The second paper continued the derisive tone of the first, claiming that their explanation, unlike Edison’s, was ‘in accordance with the known laws of electricity’, (of which, by implication, Edison was ignorant). The second paper repeated the claim of the first, that ‘all the manifestations classed as ‘etheric’ are due solely to inverse currents of induced electricity’, but now provided an ingenious demonstration in support. In it, Houston and Thomson split the electromagnet (M in Edison’s apparatus in Figure 1) in two, with the wire in the cores wound in opposite directions. They claimed this produced two ‘charges’ of opposite polarity that cancelled, preventing the spark from appearing. Further, the circuit could be adjusted to make the sparks appear and disappear at will. There was no need, Houston and Thomson argued, to resort to etheric force as an explanation—it was simply an induction effect. (Unknown to Houston and Thomson, the device was a crude tuned radio circuit. The sparks appeared and disappeared as the tuning of the circuit altered.) Houston and Thomson emphasised the need for symmetry, even of the human operator, in the arrangement

12 Thomson was awarded 696 patents over his career and, with Houston, established the Thomson–Houston Electric Company in 1883. Their company merged with the Edison General Electric Company in 1892 to form the General Electric Company.

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Figure 3. Edison’s laboratory notebook sketch of the apparatus he used to replicate Houston and Thomson’s demonstration (TAED NS7601:2).

of the experimental apparatus, but offered no explanation as to why electrical induction and reverse currents should be influenced by non-conducting, non-magnetic humans. (Being a tuned radio circuit, the position of its operator altered the tuning in a similar way that a person near the aerial of a radio may alter its tuning.) By mid 1876, Edison’s enthusiasm for etheric force had waned under the combined pressure of opposition from his financial backers, his move to Menlo Park, and his work on other more pressing projects, notably the telephone and acoustic telegraphy. He had not, however, lost all interest in his etheric force theory, and in July 1876 did as he had threatened and took his turn as critic. On 24 July, Edison replicated Houston and Thomson’s demonstration using the apparatus he sketched in Figure 3. Edison went to considerable effort to reproduce Houston and Thomson’s arrangement, particularly their injunction that it should be well insulated and all parts symmetrical. Edison arranged not only the batteries, coils, and other components symmetrically, but himself: [I] had my body divided so that equal portions should be on a side. [I] removed every object from vicinity of magnet that would give a greater amount of surface or metal on one side or the other = then I closed [the telegraph] key by a glass rod 3 feet long. Despite this care he noted that he still got a brilliant spark, initially concluding that ‘the so called polarity experiments of Houston & Thompson were incorrectly made’ (TAEB D764). Despite this conclusion, Edison persisted and eventually found that he could, indeed, make the etheric force sparks disappear at will, while what he believed to be the cause, the opening and closing of the circuit, continued. Eventually he conceded ‘I think that H & T are confirmed’ (TAED NS7601:14). With this, Edison’s excursion into scientific theory-making effectively came to an end. Edison’s interest in etheric force lingered for some years, and he experimented with it on several occasions. In April 1878 he wrote to Beard, ‘Come out and see me, ‘‘etheric force” is just as much an

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unknown mode of motion as it ever was. I am going into it again’ (TAED X120B:1). Despite this, after the July 1876 replication of Houston and Thomson’s demonstration Edison never attacked it with the enthusiasm he had had at the end of 1875. Eventually Edison accepted Houston and Thomson’s explanation and abandoned his etheric force theory so that, when he turned to work on wireless telegraphy in 1885, Edison attempted to exploit induction effects and not etheric force.13 Edison later came to regret his acceptance of Houston and Thomson’s explanation when it became apparent that etheric force was a form of electromagnetic radiation and that his 26 December 1875 experiment demonstrated wireless transmission. The loop of wire in Edison’s 22 November experiments was effectively a dipole antenna of the kind used by Hertz to validate Maxwell’s theories a decade later.14 Dyer and Martin (1910, p. 578) quote Edison saying ‘If I had made use of my own work [on etheric force in 1875] I should have had long distance wireless telegraphy’. As Hughes (1977) observes, Edison was constantly looking for such anomalous phenomena as sources of new inventions. In other circumstances, Edison would have seized on the ‘curious result’ as the starting point and, quite possibly, given his record, produced successful inventions from it. In this instance, the 24 July 1876, rather than 26 December 1875, experiment signalled a turning point, an end, rather than a beginning. The sequence of experiments from 22 November 1875 to 24 July 1876 traces Edison’s eight-month path from success to failure. When he started in November 1875, aged only twenty-eight, Edison already held 100 patents, was becoming known to the public, and was in demand by people like Orton who saw potential profit in his inventions. Within two years, Edison had risen in prominence to the point where he was to visit Washington to address the National Academy of Sciences at one meeting, members of the US Senate at another, and to dine with US President Hayes (Baldwin, 2001, p. 98). In the midst of this success, etheric force was a spectacular failure, one that might have ended his plans for Menlo Park and certainly damaged Edison’s credibility among scientists and sections of the wider community. It divided scientists’ opinion of him. Some, like Beard and Joseph Henry, were impressed by his scientific ability and regarded him as a peer. Others, remembering Edison’s etheric force claims, dismissed his scientific ability. Henry Rowland, a vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, described him as having a vulgar mind, and inventors as alien to his ideal of the purity of science (Hounshell, 1980). 3. Science and invention 3.1. Edison the inventor Edison failed to successfully promote his etheric force theory because he failed to use strategies he used when inventing. Elsewhere (Wills, 2007), I analyse the processes Edison used to develop one of his most successful inventions, the carbon microphone, a device used in millions of telephones for over a century. I argue that when Edison was working on an invention, failure was not something to be avoided, it was something he actively pursued, for paradoxically, the success of technological artefacts is a consequence of the thoroughness with which failure is pursued in their creation.

Edison took out patents on a system for signalling between moving trains and stationary wires using induction (Edison, 1885a,b). It was not very effective. Hertz (1962 [1893]), pp. 108–109, described using a piece of wire bent into a circle with a 35 cm radius as a receiver of electromagnetic waves. After Edison’s death, one of his early assistants, Francis Jehl (1937), p. 89, used the similarity between Edison’s and Hertz’s apparatus to claim Edison as a pioneer of wireless. Elihu Thomson’s biographer, Woodbury (1960), made a similar claim for him, yet both Edison and Thomson missed the significance of what they observed. In this they were far from alone. Süsskind (1964) describes many others before Hertz who observed the phenomenon but did not recognise it, including Joseph Henry, Silvanus P. Thompson, and even Luigi Galvani, who noticed that a sparking electrostatic generator caused convulsions in a dead frog at some distance from it. 14

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A large part of the way Edison used failure came through what I refer to as conceive–build–test sequences, a cyclic process that usually started with a sketch. One of the most striking features of Edison’s laboratory notebooks is the number of ideas that he sketched for new inventions and modifications to existing ones. At peak output Edison sketched several hundred of these in a month, a significant proportion of which were built, tested, and had their performance analysed. When he turned to scientific research, Edison did not employ this strategy, and as a result did not develop the knowledge he derived from it when inventing. Some of this knowledge consisted of learning what worked and what did not, but there was more valuable knowledge to be derived. Firstly, Edison identified aspects of the artefact that failed to work as intended and used this knowledge to produce more sketches to be built and tested, repeating the conceive–build–test cycle. Secondly, the analysis of failures enabled Edison to identify those factors that were important to the success of an artefact, and from this to determine criteria that a successful artefact should meet. When Edison started working on his telephone microphone there were no existing microphones to provide models of performance so he needed to develop criteria for success. Since the transmission of articulate speech was his ultimate goal, Edison, in turn, had to develop an understanding of human speech, inventing his own terminology in the process, such as calling sibilants ‘hissing sounds’. Edison’s artefact development process was thus paralleled by development of a definition of the properties a successful artefact should possess. A third, and rarer, kind of knowledge that came from failures was the identification of anomalous phenomena to be exploited in new inventions, the process described by Hughes. Sometimes there was an immediate connection, as when Edison invented the tasimeter, a device for sensing small changes in temperature, out of a failed microphone experiment (TAEB D1095An2). But at other times it was past failures that were exploited. In 1877, Edison used his knowledge of the vibration sensitivity of carbon in his telephone microphone, knowledge that came from the failure of a carbon rheostat he devised in 1873. In 1873, the sensitivity of carbon granules to vibration meant that the rheostat’s resistance constantly changed, an unacceptable effect, but just the behaviour needed in the microphone, a vibration transducer. Edison’s pursuit of etheric force began with such an anomalous result, the strange sparks that he noticed in his device on 22 November 1875. Unlike his laboratory notebook entries relating to the carbon microphone, Edison’s notes on etheric force contain almost no conceive–build–test cycles. Many days of testing separate the apparatus in Figure 1 and Figure 2 but the circuit for generating etheric force sparks is identical. There is a shift of emphasis from Edison’s invention strategy of trying many variations in the device under test, to one of applying many test conditions to essentially the same device. Edison used these etheric force experiments to explore etheric force and build a systematic understanding of the phenomena: potentially useful knowledge but, critically, not directed towards supporting his public claim to have discovered a new force of nature. 3.2. Experiments in science and invention Such a focus on exploration was not new to Edison and was to recur periodically when he encountered phenomena that could not be handled with his existing knowledge. In such situations he approached the new phenomenon by probing it to discover systems of regularities (repeatable patterns), usually the outcome of ‘if . . . then’ questions. Edison undertook a similar period of experimentation on electrical induction in 1873–1874, following an embarrassing failure, due to induction effects, of a critical demonstration in England (TAEB D321–D336). (One outcome of these induction

experiments was Edison’s invention of the Inductorium, the instrument that led to his introduction to George Beard.) For Edison, such systems of regularities at times took the place of theories, allowing him to work with phenomena before a rigorous theoretical framework existed by providing him with the predictable results he needed to develop inventions. Reminiscing about Edison’s development of the first generator for his electric lighting system, one of his associates, Francis Jehl, described the way in which he applied this kind of knowledge of electromagnetism: ‘he knew then the modern principles of magnetism, long before they were formulated into the rules we use today’ (Jehl, 1937, p. 141). Steinle (2002) refers to such probing of phenomena as exploratory experiments, a term that I will also use. The objective of exploratory experiments is to test many conditions to determine which of them affect the effect being studied, even though, at the time, there may be no adequate explanatory theory. As an inventor, once Edison had developed such systems of regularities from exploratory experiments he could use the knowledge to develop inventions. Experiments in this phase concentrated on improving the artefact and testing it against increasingly arduous criteria rather than expanding the range of criteria tested. Edison’s efforts were directed towards the creation of an artefact—the invention—the success of which he judged against success criteria that were often developed, as with the carbon microphone, along with the artefact. An analogous experimental approach used by scientists and described by Steinle is the theory-driven experiment (ibid.). Like invention, theory-driven experiments are directed towards a purpose, supporting the related theory. As with Edison’s inventions, the success of this kind of experiment can be judged against success criteria, which include refining theory and elimination of alternative explanations through the reduction in the number of conditions required to produce the effect predicted. A common outcome of theory-driven experiments is an artefact: the demonstration experiment. Unlike exploratory and theory-driven experiments, the outcome of the demonstration experiment should be known in advance with considerable certainty. Like theory-driven experiments, success criteria can be defined for demonstration experiments and include eliminating alternative explanations and predictability of results. Gooding (1990) describes how Faraday developed his little electromagnetic motor through many hours of refinement, then shipped it to various locations in Europe, where it not only reliably produced the effect that Faraday described but supported his theory on the conversion of electricity into motion. In demonstration experiments like Faraday’s can be seen a convergence of the epistemological objectives of science and the artefactual objectives of invention. For those who saw it in operation, Faraday’s motor, a physical artefact, and the experimental procedure for using it, a non-physical artefact, convincingly supported both his claims about the phenomena and his theory. Likewise, Edison used demonstrations to convincingly support his inventions. On New Year’s Eve 1879, he demonstrated an artefact to the public, his Menlo Park laboratory complex lit by electricity (Friedel & Israel, 1987, p. 119). In doing so, he was also, by implication, claiming that it demonstrated the validity of the knowledge that went into his electric lighting system. That is, it demonstrated that Edison knew how to produce light from electricity. In both science and invention, an artefact—the demonstration— is used to support the validity of the underlying epistemological claims. Once a successful demonstration has been produced, particularly if others are able to replicate it, objections tend to focus on what knowledge has been demonstrated rather than whether it has been demonstrated. Edison may have demonstrated electric lighting on New Year’s Eve 1879, supporting his epistemological

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claim that he had the knowledge to produce light from electricity, but the exact nature and extent of that knowledge did not go unchallenged. Two weeks after his demonstration, the New York Times, still sceptical of Edison, carried an article that, while it did not dispute the New Year’s Eve demonstration, questioned whether Edison yet knew how to produce lamps in sufficient number, or economically enough to satisfy demand (Thomas A. Edison’s workshop, 1880). Similarly, because Edison could demonstrate, and others replicate, the novel qualities of etheric force, the debate became one of what knowledge his demonstrations supported. To be a successful artefact, Edison’s incandescent lamp (light bulb) had to meet the criterion of producing light from electricity, but it also had to meet other criteria, including giving light for a time acceptable to purchasers and at a price that was competitive with gas lighting. Although Edison produced light from an incandescent lamp almost as soon as he started experimenting, it took well over a year to produce the first lamp that lasted 500 hours (Friedel & Israel, 1987, p. 128). I use the term failure to mean the inability of something to meet one or more criteria for success. While such success criteria may be explicit (Edison determined that to be technically and economically viable, his electric lighting needed to operate at 100 V), they may also be implicit (for example that users will be able to understand how to operate the artefact). Both success and failure are relative to criteria and dependent on the situation. This means, among other things, that criteria can also be applied retrospectively. Edison’s incandescent lamps may still meet the original criteria of producing light and doing so for an acceptable length of time, but do not meet the recently invoked criteria of minimum energy efficiency. As a precursor to developing success criteria, Edison had to identify which factors were important and which could be ignored. Indeed, the key to the success of his incandescent lamp was his realisation that the electrical resistance of the filament was critical. Edison was far from the first to make an incandescent lamp, but his lighting system succeeded commercially because of this added criteria, which led him to seek a resistance of around 100 X, much higher than his predecessors. When working on etheric force three years earlier, Edison failed, in part, because he ignored the need to identify which criteria were critical and hence what counted as success against those criteria. 3.3. Edison’s failure Edison failed in relation to etheric force both as an inventor and as a scientist. He failed as an inventor in not developing the curious result of his 26 December 1875 experiment and so, as he acknowledged later, missed the opportunity to develop wireless telegraphy. As a scientist he failed to convince others of the validity of his theory, and instead was convinced by an alternative and equally problematic theory. Central to this is why Edison became convinced by Houston and Thomson. The simplest but least satisfactory explanation of why Edison abandoned his etheric force theory is that he was persuaded by Houston and Thomson’s superior theory. The difficulty with this is that it is clear from Edison’s notes that even part way through his July 1876 replication he did not accept their theory, and not without reason. Edison was an expert on induction effects, had experimented extensively with them in 1873–1874, and had exploited reverse currents, the basis of Houston and Thomson’s theory, in inventions for automatic telegraphy (TAEB D359, D361). It was not Houston and Thomson’s reverse current theory that convinced Edison, it was the demonstration experiment they created. An alternative, but still unsatisfactory explanation, is implied by the rhetorical thrust of Houston’s two papers: Edison was merely a tinkerer in science, ignorant of current electrical theories. To accept

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this is to grossly underestimate Edison. He may have had a limited formal education but he filled the gaps by voraciously reading the current scientific literature and employing well-educated experts to give him personal tuition in areas in which he believed his knowledge was deficient. Further, Edison experimented night and day and had one of the best equipped electromechanical laboratories in the USA. In terms of effort, scientific knowledge, experimental expertise, and facilities, he was in no way inferior to Houston and Thomson. Carlson (1991, pp. 56–65) offers a social-constructivist explanation of the etheric force incident in his biography of Thomson. He attributes Houston and Thomson’s success to their exploitation of the unwritten rules of the scientific community and their use of an explanation that drew on conventional and widely accepted theories. Houston and Thomson were also at pains to portray themselves as respectable scientific men, in contrast to Edison, who chose the path of populist self-promoter. As Pettit (2006) points out, the epistemological ascendency of science was still tenuous in this period, so American scientists sought to define their position, in part, by distancing their science from anything tainted with humbug or pseudoscience. By discrediting the upstart Edison (and, by association, Reichenbach), Houston and Thomson enhanced the prestige of institutional science by distinguishing it from pseudoscience, and, in the process, enhanced their own. Carlson also argues that Houston and Thomson gained an advantage from publishing in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, rather than in newspapers, because of the scientific prestige the Journal brought. While this has merit, it represents only part of the advantage Houston and Thomson gained through publication in the Journal. By using the Journal, particularly given their prominent positions in the Franklin Institute, they could exert far greater control over what was published. As an inventor, Edison sought to exert as much control as possible over the invention process, and this was one reason for moving to his Menlo Park laboratory, freed from the sometimes conflicting demands of the manufacturing business in which he was a partner in Newark. When it came to making his claims public, Edison chose breadth of audience over control of content and so had to rely on newspaper reporters and editors to convey his argument. In part, his use of newspapers was motivated by self promotion, but it also served to attract potential investors and helped establish priority under US patent law. It was a strategy that normally was to Edison’s advantage but the loss of control carried the risk of unintentional misrepresentation or, in the case of the New York Times article, complete distortion. Houston and Thomson suffered no such disadvantage, and had the opportunity carefully to construct and revise their arguments for greatest impact. Their positions in the Franklin Institute meant they could also prompt favourable editorial comment so that Houston’s first paper was strengthened through an apparently independent editorial note that asserted that ‘whatever there may be remarkable in the phenomena of so called Etheric Force, was described by Prof. Houston [in 1871], previous to the discovery of Mr. Edison’ (Houston, 1876; emphases in original). Despite these advantages, the Journal of the Franklin Institute was read by few, and, critically, not by Edison. From the press clippings in Edison’s papers it appears that he followed the progress of etheric force debate, not through the Journal of the Franklin Institute, but in newspapers and Scientific American. The prestige of publication in the Journal of the Franklin Institute may have influenced some scientists as Carlson claims, but there is no evidence to suggest that it swayed Edison. Houston and Thomson’s use of the social structures of science and their efforts to discredit marginal science may have helped convince some scientists, but they do not adequately account for

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Edison’s change of mind. To understand what changed his mind we must look elsewhere. 3.4. Artefacts in science Houston and Thomson convinced Edison to abandon his own theory and to accept theirs because they produced a more convincing demonstration and a second paper that resisted alternative explanations. Both of these are artefacts, intentionally made to fulfil a purpose. Their demonstration minimised conditions that could have given rise to alternative explanations, making it an artefact that was stronger (in the sense of better resisting attack) than Edison’s demonstration. There lay behind these artefacts another: Houston and Thomson’s induction theory, for it, like their scientific papers and demonstration experiment, was intentionally created for a purpose. The theory began as a speculation on the cause of the anomalous sparks that Houston had observed in 1871, and in Houston’s first paper is little more than an assertion. Houston did not leave it at this and, with Thomson, developed the theory, refining it to resist criticism. Additionally, just as better inventions are built from stronger materials, Houston and Thomson’s theory was built it on a stronger base than Edison’s: knowledge of electricity and induction that Edison and others working in the electrical field already accepted. Edison’s theory, in contrast, was seriously weakened both theoretically and rhetorically by its reference to Reichenbach’s discredited Odic force theory. Houston and Thomson’s theory was more successful because it was more convincing and, in this case, being convincing was a crucial criterion for its success as an artefact. Like inventions, these scientific artefacts were produced over time by processes that were directed towards identifying criteria for success and strengthening them to resist identified potential sources of failure. When inventing, Edison was persistent and not deterred by failures. In a letter written during the early days of his work on electric lighting he observed: I have the right principle and am on the right track, but time, hard work and some good luck are necessary too—It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition and comes with a burst—Then difficulties arise. This thing gives out then that. ‘Bugs’ as such little faults and difficulties are called, show themselves—Months of intense watching, study and labor are required before commercial success—or failure— is certainly reached. (TAEB D1570) When he turned to developing his etheric force theory, Edison failed to follow his own principles and acted as though initial inspiration was all that was needed, neglecting the ‘intense watching, study and labor’ needed to develop his theory. Like his experimental apparatus, which also did not develop, his etheric force went no further than the accumulation of systems of regularities and a few insights. Critically, Edison did not publish even these developments, so public knowledge of his theory remained as he had developed it in the first few days after his 22 November discovery. In confining himself to an initial theoretical insight and exploratory experiments, Edison succumbed to the cultural allure of science, which is often publicly portrayed as heroic exploration and flash of insight while privately the scientist in the laboratory does something different: something that is systematic, unspectacular, and, at times, tedious. Such systematic, unspectacular, and tedious research is also what Edison, the inventor, spent much of his inventive effort on. Published scientific accounts, for the most

part, omit descriptions of failures, and the experimenters involved even find it hard to recall why past difficulties were even difficulties.15 Indeed, part of the persuasiveness of published scientific papers lies in the way that they omit shortcomings that were overcome. The demonstration experiment in Houston and Thomson’s second paper represents the end of a development process, a refined artefact, strengthened to resist attack. Edison could not know what had been done to create it or what failures had been overcome, but to replicate it he had to engage with Houston and Thomson’s delicate experimental apparatus and, to a degree, to think like them in order to master it. Some years later Edison offered a comparison between science and invention. In the late nineteenth-century era of heroic exploration and colonial expansion, he chose to do this by drawing parallels between scientists, inventors, and explorers. A Chicago newspaper quoted him as saying There is as much difference between an inventor and a scientist as there is between an explorer and a geographer . . . Of course scientists may be inventors and inventors may be scientists. And explorers may write geographies, but they seldom do. The inventor discovers things and then the scientist steps in and tells or tries to tell what it is that has been discovered. (Arrival of Thomas A. Edison, 1891) At this point in his life Edison had come to identify his work as an inventor with that of explorers, but his view was somewhat myopic. To be an inventor is to create artefacts, and geographers, like inventors, also create artefacts such as maps. Edison’s success as an inventor may have been due to his initial insights and exploratory experiments but, as he acknowledged himself, success at inventing required more than an initial flash of inspiration and came from much labour. In this, Edison and associates like Charles Batchelor acted like Edison’s metaphorical geographers. Edison’s view of science was erroneous, not because it was fundamentally wrong, but because it was too narrow. As a consequence of this narrow view, the conceive–build–test sequences that were a characteristic of his approach to inventing were absent from his etheric force experiments. Further, he did not use failure analysis to seek the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of his theory, knowledge that could have been used to build a set of relevant success criteria and thus direct his efforts towards strengthening and refining his theory. Significantly, although he seems to have convinced himself that etheric force sparks were not due to induction, he did not develop his theory or a demonstration experiment to counter the induction argument. Despite many others with expertise in the electrical field asserting that it was an induction effect, a view that Edison himself had initially held, he provided no better demonstration to counter the induction argument than repeating the few tests he had devised on 24 November 1874, two days after first observing etheric force (TAED NE1691:18). His demonstration, as an artefact, was weak and vulnerable to the failure that it met. Although he was more than capable of doing so, Edison failed to produce a demonstration experiment equivalent to Houston and Thomson’s to show that etheric force was not induction. Instead, his demonstrations concentrated on the more spectacular aspects of etheric force, an approach that may have amazed his audience but failed to meet the criteria for a successful scientific artefact, that is convincing to knowledgeable observers like the inventor, John E. Smith. Demonstrations of the spectacular aspects of etheric force were artefacts with different functions, notably to publicise Edison, and in this they succeeded. They did little to enhance Edison’s reputation among scientists but they contributed to

15 An advantage of following processes through laboratory notebooks, such as Edison’s, is that what is recorded is what is observed and believed at the time, untainted by knowledge of subsequent events. As such, it reveals the erroneous theories, failures, and blind alleys that tend to be omitted from retrospective accounts.

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building Edison’s public image as the creator of remarkable things and to his subsequent labelling by journalist William Croffut as ‘the wizard of Menlo Park’ (Croffut, 1878). Edison’s demonstrations supported his claims about the phenomena but not his theory. Because he produced no demonstration to support his theory, Houston and Thomson’s demonstration not only supported theirs, but became a de facto criterion for success. In the absence of a counter-demonstration from Edison, theirs filled the vacuum and so was even more convincing. Houston and Thomson’s success also had its negative side. While Edison emphasised exploratory experiments and neglected theory development, they neglected exploration in favour of developing their theory and demonstration experiment. As noted previously, Houston and Thomson did not explore the reason for nonmetallic humans affecting electrical induction, but, more significantly, they did not explore the more spectacular aspects of etheric force. Forty-five years later, Monroe B. Snyder, a fellow teacher at the Philadelphia Central High School, described the twenty-twoyear-old Elihu Thomson excitedly running through their school building and onto the roof, drawing sparks from all manner of metal objects (Snyder, 1920). Despite this remarkable observation, Houston and Thomson failed to explore why the basis for their theory, induction, which was previously observed to act at very short range (much less than a metre), caused sparks at such great distances. In not exploring these anomalous phenomena, Houston and Thomson, like Edison, missed the opportunity to pioneer wireless communication.

4. Conclusion The etheric force controversy reveals the importance of artefacts in convincing others to accept a scientific theory. Edison’s artefacts were weak and did not convince, while Houston and Thomson’s were stronger and, crucially, convinced Edison. Edison failed to advance his claim that he had discovered a new force of nature, not so much because of defects in his theory, but because he succumbed to a cultural myth of science, a myth that portrays science as fundamentally different from inventing. In so doing he acted as though science, unlike inventing, did not involve building artefacts, perhaps because the artefacts of science were not physical like invention artefacts. If this is so, it is surprising, since Edison also created non-physical artefacts, including patent applications, crafted to resist challenges from rival inventors and patent attorneys. These, like scientific papers, were documents carefully constructed to resist failure under attack. The etheric force incident suggests that in 1875 Edison believed that it was the scientist who was the explorer, but by 1891 had come to believe that inventing required an explorer’s drive and skill. Despite the fact that he thought explorers (i.e. inventors) were rarely geographers (i.e. scientists), had he looked at the history of science he would have noticed that many scientists were also inventors, including Galileo; Newton; Kelvin; and his own hero, Faraday. That they did both should not have come as a surprise to Edison, since they would have used the same processes to create physical artefacts, like inventions, as they did when creating the artefacts of science, including papers, demonstrations, and theories. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ofer Gal and Jason Grossman for their many and detailed comments on this paper, and those people who commented on earlier versions presented at the 2007 Conference of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy,

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