I am writing to protest Peter Baida’s slur against Thomas Edison (June/July), namely, that Edison himself thought his phonograph “not of any commercial value.”
Once when I was at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey, the tour guide showed us the first phonograph and described what happened when Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” squeaked back from the rolled band of tinfoil. Not one but several of Edison’s employees fell to their knees and wept openly at this miracle.
Further, Edison vowed early in his career never to invent anything that was not marketable. He decided this after his first patented invention, an automated vote-tallying machine, was rejected by politicians who preferred the manual tallying method as politically advantageous. Edison, in fact, originally envisioned the phonograph as primarily a business machine for recording correspondence.
Much of Edison’s Menlo Park equipment and material from his Florida workshop has been moved to Dearborn by Henry Ford. Tour guides there confirmed that Edison invented solely where there was a market for the product. Witness his electronic pen (the first office copier), as well as his struggle to extract rubber from goldenrod, an attempt he abandoned when synthetic rubber developments rendered goldenrod rubber unprofitable. Edison, in fact, viewed the phonograph as the means to provide for his old age.
Doug Glover
Roselle, N.J.
No Slur Intended
Peter Baida replies: I don’t quite understand why Mr. Glover thinks that my comment was a “slur.” If I read his letter correctly, Mr. Glover would consider it a slur if I suggested that Edison lacked a commercial motive. But I did not make that suggestion; all I said was that Edison did not perfectly foresee how large a success the phonograph would turn out to be.
Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. His first recordings took the form of indentations in a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder that rotated as the sounds were recorded. The quality of the sound was poor, and Edison neglected the invention for several years. In the early 188Os, according to Robert Conot’s Edison biography, A Streak of Luck, Edison said to his assistant Samuel Insull, “Sammy, they never will try to steal the phonograph. It is not of any commercial value.”
Poison Gas
Barton J. Bernstein’s “Why We Didn’t Use Poison Gas in World War II” (August/September 1985) was a lucid and enlightening account of the principal factors that led both sides to abstain from the use of chemical and biological warfare.
I was somewhat surprised, however, that he did not mention the practical problems involved in the delivery of chemical and biological agents. I do not profess to be an expert in chemical and biological warfare, but I have talked to people who are, among them my instructors at the Naval Chemical and Biological Warfare School at Fort McClellan, Alabama, which I attended in 1958.
Such weapons must be delivered not only during reasonably clear weather, but also at times when there is virtually no wind. As both sides discovered in World War I, chlorine or mustard gas used in preparation for an attack often backfired with sudden shifts of wind, thereby creating more problems for the attackers than for their enemies. And even if all went well with the initial barrage, there could be trouble later. Pockets of chlorine and mustard gas were often encountered in World War I by advancing troops days after a chemical barrage had been delivered. As late as twenty years after World War I, factory sites that had produced mustard gas were found to be dangerously contaminated. If anthrax or other communicable biological weapons had been delivered against Japan, the American occupation forces would have had to control or eradicate the epidemics that they had created.
In a word, chemical and biological warfare was really practical only if used against a target that the victor did not intend to occupy.
John S. Pancake, Professor of History
University of Alabama
University, Ala.
Poison Gas
Barton Bernstein replies: John Pancake is correct: there are serious problems in how to use both chemical and biological weapons. Perhaps such concerns subtly influenced Churchill’s advisers, who resisted gas warfare and ultimately rejected anthrax, and possibly these concerns also deterred some American military leaders from wanting to use gas. But by 1945 Generals George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur did want to use gas in the Pacific and they did not seem to worry about the problems that Professor Pancake mentions. Perhaps it was because they planned to drop the gas from the air—well before an American attack by ground troops. Undoubtedly they were more optimistic than Professor Pancake’s instructors at Fort McClellan and probably they were more optimistic than the rank-and-file chemical-warfare people. But Marshall and MacArthur, as well as Gen. Joseph Stilwell, were not any more optimistic than the generals who directed America’s Chemical Warfare Service during the war. Those top CWS officers pushed frequently—indeed, with a sense of zealous mission—for American use of gas against the enemy. There is, then, a lurking but important unanswered question raised by Professor Pancake’s letter: Why were the top officers in CWS so enthusiastic but others, lower in rank, quite wary?
Daring Daft
In the August/September issue, you noted that August 10 would be the one-hundredth anniversary of the first commercially operated streetcars, which started running in Baltimore. It is interesting to note that the designer and builder of the Baltimore system was named Daft, and an eminent scientist of that time declared him a “knave or a fool” for thinking it possible to undertake such a project. The system used an exposed third rail in the center to power little electric locomotives that pulled one horsecar each. At cross streets, however, power was taken from an overhead electrified pipe by means of a crude copper collector. The system wore out after four years, and the line reverted to “oat power.”
Meanwhile, in January 1888 and 145 miles south of Baltimore, Frank Julian Sprague completed the first entirely successful installation of electric streetcars in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague’s system used the now familiar trolley pole and overhead wire system that eventually became universal, along with reduction gears to enable the electric motors to drive heavy cars up steep grades.
It nevertheless remains a fact that the first commercially operated system was the result of the efforts and persistence of British-born inventor Leo Daft.
L. Howard Reagan
Potomac, Md.
Odd Naturalist
Peggy Robbins’s article “The Oddest of Characters” on Constantine Rafinesque (June/July 1985) summed up the life of the man sensitively and delightfully. At Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where his bones are entombed, Rafinesque is an enigma, and therefore intriguing. He has become a part of campus tradition and rumor. Regrettably it was here that his belongings were cast out into a hallway and he was asked to leave the campus. Today his eccentric genius would be welcomed.
The portrait which you somewhat tentatively identify as Rafinesque is a reproduction of an enamel miniature painted by William Birch (1735–1834). It was purchased by Transylvania University in 1938 and definitely is Rafinesque’s likeness.
Carolyn D. Palmgreen
Transylvania University
Lexington, Ky.
Early Gridiron
In the June/July issue the article “Britain’s Yankee Whaling Town” mentioned that Milford Haven’s street plan might have been adopted from New York. Although New York City had some streets at right angles in 1793 when Milford Haven was first laid out, the gridiron street plan of New York above Houston Street was commissioned in 1807 and completed in 1811. It is referred to as the Commissioners’ Map and was based on a survey by the engineer John Randel, Jr. It is on display at the Museum of the City of New York.
