At his graduation party, his much older cousin, ‘Squire’ James Roosevelt, met a haughty young woman, Sara Delano, daughter of a rich China trader, whom he married. Soon afterwards she gave birth to a son, Franklin, whose life would be inspired by the career of cousin Teddy. Squire Roosevelt had made his fortune in railways and coal in a booming America personified by the Wizard of Menlo Park, who in later years would record Teddy’s voice and support his politics.
In 1882, Thomas Alva Edison, a half-deaf teachers’ son from Ohio who had started as a telegraphist during the civil war and aged twenty-two registered his first patent, threw a switch in the office of his banker, J. P. Morgan, which started generating electrical power for use in the lighting of fifty-nine homes in Manhattan, launching the utility that became Edison Illuminating Company.
Edison, who patented 1,093 inventions, was a one-man hub of scientific ingenuity at the moment when the technical improvements of the last century really began to improve the daily lives of ordinary people. Ruthlessly competitive and intolerant of any opposition,* he was registering an average of one patent every four days, playing with his inventions in his crumpled, soiled suit, a vegetarian who lived on milk, sometimes working for seventy-two hours and often sleeping four hours a night. His family took second place. His first wife died of an accidental morphine overdose, after which he married a twenty-year-old. But he neglected his children and was exasperated by his alcoholic huckster sons, whom he refused to employ in his labs.
Edison personified the convergence of scientific invention and practical application that had been missing before. ‘We’ve got to keep working up things of commercial value,’ he said. ‘We can’t be like the old German professor content to spend his whole life studying the fuzz on a bee!’ He created a new environment for thinking creatively: using profits from one of his inventions, a multiplex telegraphic system, he founded a laboratory in Menlo, New Jersey, dreaming up the concept of research and development. ‘I never made a single discovery,’ he said, and joked that ‘Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’
Edison’s electrical company was not based on a sudden discovery. Only recently electricity had been regarded as a form of entertainment, but he was just one of a phalanx of inventers who were experimenting with light bulbs that could illuminate houses and streets, competing with oil lamps.* Then he worked on the technology to generate and distribute the electricity. He did not get everything right. He insisted that direct current was the safe way to distribute electricity, but he employed a talented young Serb, Nikola Tesla, who left to work for his rival, George Westinghouse, to develop alternating current. Tesla was right. Edison was overtaken by Westinghouse and his bankers merged his businesses with others to create Con Edison and General Electric. But he was also experimenting with recording sounds (the phonograph that launched the music business) and transmitting voices (the carbon telephonic transmitter that became the telephone), the rechargeable battery and the movie camera (the Kinetograph, which created the film industry). He even founded Black Maria, the first movie studio, which made 1,200 silent movies.
Later he toyed with a contraption for speaking to the dead. Perhaps he was joking, but it was only a matter of time before other electrically powered gadgets would radically change life. The refrigerator so improved nutrition that in the next decades the height of the average American increased by 5.1 per cent. Across the world, at almost the same time, in February 1882, a New Zealander pioneered a refrigerator ship that conveyed frozen lamb from Dunedin to London which was edible after ninety-eight days at sea.* All of these became so ever present that their ubiquity was almost invisible; the skills to live without them were lost. Yet without them, modern life would collapse in a second. These improvements in nutrition coincided with advances in healthcare and agricultural productivity that together unleashed the biggest surge in population in world history.
Light bulbs made kerosene obsolete – just as Rockefeller won control of the US kerosene market. It looked as if Rockefeller would become a synonym for an impoverished businessman who had taken over a worthless industry, but the chief engineer of Edison Illuminating in Detroit had a vision that would change all this, resigning to work on a vehicle that used a gasoline by-product to power the combustion engine of a horseless carriage.
