Thomas Edison, Failure

If you make your way to the top of a rugged, forested hill in the northwestern corner of New Jersey that the local people call Edison’s mountain, you can still find the remains of what was for a few years a century ago a mammoth industrial complex. Empty cellars, quarry pits, and stone walls under the trees mark the site of what may have been Thomas Alva Edison’s most ambitious but least-known project—and his most spectacular failure.

For all Edison’s creative and commercial success and his prodigious production of inventions, he never earned as much of a fortune as others might have. He fell short as a businessman and spent much of his earnings in legal battles, protecting his patents and fending off unscrupulous competitors. He also lost a great deal on the mountaintop at Ogdensburg.

By 1889 Edison had introduced practical electric lighting to the world and was busy building generating stations and other pieces of the new electrical age. He had so far filed for more than 300 of his 1,093 patents and had revolutionized the tele; graph industry, improved the stock ticker, and invented the : mimeograph, the phonograph, an electric locomotive, and dozens of lesser-known contrivances. That summer he and his inventions were a major attraction at the Universal Exposition in Paris, and he took a triumphal tour of Europe, where he was received by royalty and heads of state.

At this moment of glory he was already well at work on the scheme that would greatly reduce his coverage in America’s newspapers for nearly ten years and leave him deeply in debt. His plan was to revolutionize the struggling iron business, putting himself at the head of the industry, as he once had in the electrical field. The public did not want to know that a man as revered as Edison had stumbled into so immense a failure, and perhaps that is why most of his early biographers paid little attention to the Ogdensburg episode. But the saga is an intriguing and important one; it has proven in retrospect to have been a landmark for certain technologies. When a colleague reminded Edison that the venture had used up several million dollars, the inventor replied, “Yes, but we had a hell of a good time spending it.”

The construction of big electric generators and dynamos demanded large quantities of very high-grade, highpriced steel, and as Edison signed purchase orders for it, he became increasingly concerned about the steep cost. Most of the amount, he discovered, covered shipping, first of ore to the steel mills and then of steel to the customer. If ore could be mined and milled close to Eastern industrial users, Edison reasoned, its price could drop dramatically, and whoever controlled this process would dominate the steel industry.

Edison had become interested in ore separation in 1879, when he was looking for the best filament for his electric light. Platinum had been a promising candidate, and Edison had begun to investigate various mining and mineralprocessing techniques with a view to reducing cost. His interest spread to gold and iron processing, and he devised a magnetic ore-separation technique that was patented in 1880. By then he had organized the Edison Ore-Milling Company, backed by a small band of eager investors, to exploit his advances.

One day in 1881 the inventor was fishing with some friends off the coast of Long Island, and the small group put ashore at an isolated beach to eat their lunch. They found the beach covered with deposits of black sand. Edison, curious, took some home in a bait bucket. Several days later he dropped a magnet from his desktop into the bucket, and the grains drew to it; as he lifted the magnet away, silica and other base materials fell back into the bucket. The black grains turned out to be pure magnetite, a mineral form of iron oxide. Edison jumped at the chance to put his newly developed ore-separation process into practice. He directed his aide William Meadowcroft to purchase the Long Island beachfront and another one in Rhode Island with similar deposits. Meadowcroft was to fabricate model separators and move them to the sites.

Things did not go as planned. When Meadowcroft returned to the beach, after a winter storm, the black sand was gone. In Rhode Island an experimental separator was destroyed by fire, and then the site itself had to be abandoned when it turned out to have too low a concentration of magnetite. The Ore-Milling Company faded into a paper company with Edison’s patent its only asset.

For a long time nothing happened. Despite his many successes, the 1880s were difficult years for Edison. Legal and financial problems beset him; his electrical empire absorbed time, energy, and money, and he became increasingly bored with it as others moved in to take the helm and raise capital. By 1887 he was no longer captain of the industry. His thoughts turned back to ore separation.

Blast furnaces in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania were increasingly being idled as high-grade Eastern ore was depleted. Larger, more modern mills in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, closer to newly discovered high-grade ore deposits in Michigan, were taking more and more of their business. Edison reasoned that his new process could make it possible to use the East’s substantial remaining stocks of low-grade ore. That would revitalize the region’s iron industry—and make enormous profits.

As usual, the inventor’s technical imagination outstripped his business judgment. No matter how much he improved the process, it would always be cheaper to ship high-grade ore from elsewhere than to refine low-grade ore locally. And the newer Midwestern plants’ advantages in size and efficiency were too great for the Eastern plants to overcome, even if competitively priced ore had been available. The naysayers who had been wrong about Edison so often in the past appear to have been right this time.

Nevertheless, in 1887 he applied for five new patents improving on the original concept, and he spelled out his ideas in an article in the magazine Iron Age . Mining-industry experts dismissed the plans as too ambitious, too radical, and too expensive. Equipment big and powerful enough to pulverize sufficient quantities of stone did not exist, and anyway, the cost of mining the low-grade ores to feed the separator would be prohibitive; at least ten tons of ore would be needed to produce one ton of usable iron. A follow-up editorial in the magazine labeled the concept “Edison’s Folly.” That jab may have helped propel Edison onward.

Edison wrote to the stockholders of his foundered Edison Ore-Milling Company—not a happy group—proposing a massive reorganization and recapitalization that would allow the company to launch its own mining and milling operations rather than simply lease the separation process, as originally planned. If no one else believed in magnetic separation, Edison would do it himself. To reassure the stockholders, he offered his personal signature on any future notes, loans, and debts the company might accumulate, and he invested more than a million dollars of his own in buying just over half the stock in a new company the reorganization produced, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Iron Ore Concentrating Company. This act of pride would later prove very costly indeed.

The first thing the new company did was sell all licensing rights for the Midwest to a Chicago boilerplate manufacturer named Walter S. Mallory, for $200,000 plus royalties. Mallory, whom Edison had met some years before, turned out to be one of the few who stood by the project to the end, perhaps because he too was ruined by it. Edison decided to let Mallory build the first full-scale separator based on the new patents, in Humboldt, Michigan. The separator failed to function at a fraction of the volume needed to break even, and it produced unacceptably low-grade ore that was high in phosphorus, a troublesome impurity. Mallory was broke in less than two years.

Edison then took on Mallory as superintendent of his mining company, in anticipation of a successful effort in the East. Meanwhile, the firm’s attorney, Alexander Elliot, leased every Eastern mine he could. This was expensive, but if the separator could be made to work, the company would hold a virtual monopoly on Eastern iron-ore supplies.

Edison had been following the stories of a new magnetic prospecting tool called the Tieberg instrument. Unable to find the inventor, he built one himself, and he and Mallory set off with the toylike device—a magnetic needle on a string in a wooden box—into the New Jersey hills. The area had once been a major source of high-grade iron ore, but its vertical-shaft mines had been depleted. For several weeks the two men criss-crossed the terrain, one driving a wagon, the other holding the box in his lap, waiting for the needle to dip.

They found a deposit on a mountaintop in Sussex County, just above the rural village of Ogdensburg. Subsequent surveys throughout the Appalachians by company employees would convince Edison that he had here found the best of all locations. He told his stockholders that “the sixteen thousand acres of land [at Ogdensburg] will supply the world with all of its ore requirements for seventeen years and the U.S. for seventy years!” And he boasted that he would make the mountain the “Yosemite of the East.”

In 1889 he and the stockholders gave Mallory and Elliot a green light to buy the land and construct the first separator and mill. Carpenters from New York City were hired; hundreds of laborers, mostly Italian immigrants, were recruited to do the hard and dangerous work, and experienced mine and mill foremen were lured away from the nearby New Jersey Zinc Mining Company. A shabby mill town known as Summerville grew up. Edison added a hotel, offices, a post office, and a store and later renamed the village Edison (it is not the Edison, New Jersey, that exists today).

Edison soon became a regular boarder at the hotel, personally supervising the construction of the separators. These machines would be the key to the entire process, having to extract relatively pure iron from the stone passed through them in quantities great enough to bring a profit. Some days Edison sat alone for hours on the hotel porch, deep in thought; others, he mixed with the laborers, chatting with and encouraging them.

The separating process would begin at a quarry mine, where the world’s largest steam shovel scooped low-tomedium-grade ore off the ground and fed it into hoppers that took it to the mill. There a steel conveyor belt would carry the chunks of ore to the top of the tall crushing house, where the ore would be emptied above four sets of giant rollers. The main rollers, six feet in diameter and covered with sharp teeth, were set about a foot apart. Their power source—first a Corliss steam engine and later an Edison electric motor—set them spinning to 700 rpm. As the hopper tipped its load, a friction clutch disengaged the motor to protect it from the shock. The boulders, as heavy as nine tons, were crashed together by the four tiers of rollers and progressively broken into pieces only a half-inch in diameter at the bottom of the crusher.

These pieces went to the top of a fifty-foot-tall “free-fall” drying furnace, to spill past an electric heater and a series of upward blowers. The small pellets would then be further pulverized by smooth rollers, each three feet in diameter. By the time the ore left the last of these rollers, no fragment would be larger than a grain of sand.

Edison’s magnetic ore separator, for which the powder would now be ready, was sheer simplicity. The ore was poured in a steady and even stream from the top of a narrow, hollow tower and fell past 480 electromagnets, each twelve inches wide and six feet long, which tugged at the iron granules just enough so that they fell to one side of a partition at the bottom. This was repeated in three successive towers, each sorting out progressively purer material. If all went well, the final batch would be nearly 70 percent pure iron—enough to make it competitive with Midwestern ore. The unwanted residue would be sold to local contractors for use as sand in concrete. Watching them, Edison began to evolve the ideas that would lead to a later, more successful venture in Portland cement.

By the fall of 1891 Edison felt he was ready to test the process in actual operation. It didn’t work. The mill and its machinery simply weren’t up to the task. The crushing rollers were not heavy or strong enough and often broke loose, endangering workers. Ore dust penetrated everything. The bulky steel conveyor system constantly jammed. In the following years nine workers were killed and many more seriously injured by loose, catapulting machinery. Some bearings were so overloaded that they failed within hours, despite constant oiling. And the finished dust blew all over the countryside.

The inventor, undeterred, insisted that operations continue, in spite of protests and then resignations from most of his foremen. He knew the process would require a great deal of improvement, and on the bright side, the first ore samples that he shipped to smelters were of such high quality that Bethlehem Iron eagerly signed an order for Edison ore.

The inventor tinkered and redesigned, and the company hemorrhaged money. The mill was down more often than running. Morale plummeted. Things hadn’t improved much when the 1893 depression shut down the steel industry and Edison’s experiments with it.

During this idle time Edison applied himself to solving each of the mill’s problems, one by one. By the end of 1895 he felt satisfied, and the demand for iron was beginning to grow. As the last snows of winter faded, he made a heralded appearance in Ogdensburg armed with $250,000 and a box of new patents, drawings, and blueprints.

Edison unveiled his plans to a jubilant skeleton crew. A total overhaul of the mill and separator was to begin at once. Giant new crushing rollers had been designed and ordered, and a new kind of bearing, sealed against the abrasive dust, was to be used throughout the plant. New sealed electric motors would also be installed.

Still the operation didn’t run smoothly. A new crushing building, hastily thrown together with wood framing, was so shaken by the heavy rollers that it began to lean dangerously on the first day of operation. Months were lost in putting up a new building with solid-concrete footings.

On the next try four disasters struck. First, a long-lost iron mine was abruptly rediscovered when the blacksmith shop plummeted eighty feet into a hidden shaft, killing three men. Two months later four more men were killed when a new millhouse they were framing collapsed on top of them. The third incident nearly killed Mallory and Edison: after entering the bottom of the screening tower to see why the material above was clogged, they were buried under sixteen tons of ore dust. The final, most demoralizing blow was an announcement by Henry Frick, of Carnegie Steel, that he would no longer buy the ore: “What doesn’t blow away in the railroad cars,” he wrote Edison, “blows out the chimney as soon as the furnace is fired.”

The high phosphorus content of the refined ore continued to be a problem, because even small amounts of phosphorus make Bessemer-process iron and steel brittle. Since phosphorus compounds in the ore made a finer dust than the magnetite, Edison tried using a gentle air current to blow them into a separate receptacle, where they were collected and sold for use in paints. This improved matters some-what, but Edison still could not consistently match the low phosphorus content of most commercial ore.

The only cause for optimism was a visit by a young rubber salesman named Thomas Robins. He and Edison became good friends when it emerged that Robins was an amateur inventor, and as they toured the plant, Robins suggested that the troublesome and expensive steel conveyor system be replaced with flat drive belts made of rubber. Edison loved the idea, hired Robins, and gave him a mandate to perfect rubber belts for the Ogdensburg machinery. Robins’s new belt solved one of Edison’s main problems with the mill and led to the creation of a new industrial giant, the Hewitt-Robins Corporation.

The remaining big problem was the ore dust. Edison knew he would have no market if the stuff could not be made to hold together until it reached the furnaces. In the winter of 1896 he experimented with a host of gluelike materials to try to find the best way of bonding the dust. He relied on a process of elimination, selecting and individually testing any promising compound. A man who would patiently try eighteen hundred different materials to find the best filament for an electric light bulb would have no problem with two hundred glue compounds.

A formula was patented that winter and was ready to test at the mill in the spring. The powdered ore was mixed with water, and then a glue was stirred in; the result, which looked like modeling clay, was injected under pressure into small round molds and fired to a rock-hard consistency. The briquettes proved easy to handle (though smelting problems persisted). By World War II the research that had created them would be a crucial feature in the iron-mining industry and in formulating the taconite process.

With everything ready, the mine and the new mill began production again in the summer of 1897. Edison personally escorted the first shipment of sample briquettes to the Crane Iron Works, of Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. The president of Crane reported that the briquettes produced nearly a third more steel per ton than other ores he was buying, and he placed an order for “all the ore you can send us.”

But it would be another year before Edison was satisfied enough with the system to start a full commercial run. The briquette oven was hopelessly inefficient and costly to operate, and the hot briquettes tended to start fires in the stock house or on the railroad cars as they were pulled away down the hill. A new baking furnace had to be designed and built, and big fans had to be erected to cool the briquettes as they moved to the shipping area.

By the summer of 1898 the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Ore Concentrating Company was producing briquettes on two shifts, and a night crew was working in the quarry under the glow of Edison electric lights. The machinery was at last running dependably. A thousand tons of ore a day were being shipped out; if this volume could be continued and ore prices remained stable, the first operating profits might be just around the corner.

When the mill opened for the spring in 1899, optimism filled the air. There was talk of expansion, and other possible sites were being tested. The town of Edison received twenty-five new company houses, all with electricity and plumbing, and a second hotel. Even the company baseball team was enjoying its first winning season. If not for its existing debt load and interest obligations, the company would have now been making a profit.

But Edison was no businessman, genius though he was. Against the advice of many around him, including his own stockholders, he ignored what was happening in the industry. Prices of ore had been plummeting since 1898, and the market was being flooded with high-grade Minnesota ore at prices far below the best Edison could do. Two brothers had stumbled onto the great Mesabi Range in the northern Minnesota wilderness, hundre’ds of square miles of the purest iron ore in the world; it needed only to be scooped from the ground and sent directly to the furnaces. Ore prices had been close to $7.00 a ton and rising when Edison had gotten into the business; the Ogdensburg mill at its most efficient spent $4.75 to produce a ton of ore. By 1899 the Mesabi was shipping ore at prices ranging between $2.75 and $3.00 a ton, delivered.

Edison pushed on alone, using and borrowing against the last of his personal assets to try to save his company. In the final days the lonely figure seemed almost pathetic, abandoned by all but his good friend Mallory. Even the reporters who had once followed him about religiously seemed embarrassed and stopped calling on Ogdensburg or writing about Edison.

In the fall of 1899 the mill closed for what the crew assumed would be its usual winter hiatus and maintenance period. The workers and population of Edison and Ogdensburg looked forward to the arrival of the “old man” next spring. He never came. As the days began to stretch by, the workers drifted away, and Edison’s absence posed a mystery even to some of the management. On May 17 the end came. Mallory appeared just long enough to read a brief statement informing everyone that the mill would not reopen.

The final chapter had been written. Ever a proud man, Edison did return one last time, in August 1900, to produce enough ore at the new Minnesota prices to fulfill a previous contract with Bethlehem. Shortly thereafter the operation was dismantled. It would take Edison years to personally pay back the debts he had accumulated in the last two years. On several occasions he even bought back worthless stock in the company at face value from the widows of original investors.

The press delivered a eulogy. A Newark paper announced to the world that “in just four years Thomas Edison had succeeded in converting an industrial and technological empire into a dusty, temperamental mill complex of little practical or real value.” But history is always subject to reinterpretation, and in retrospect Ogdensburg may have even been a success, bad timing aside. Years later Iron Age magazine would editorialize that Edison’s only mistake at Ogdensburg had been being merely twenty-five years ahead of his time.

The work on the ore separator yielded forty-seven directly and indirectly related patents. Many of the ideas they set forth are still in use in modern industry. Edison had anticipated metal coating with his magnetic techniques, Portland cement with his crushing machinery, and taconite processing with his separation and briquetting techniques. Perhaps the greatest homage paid the project came from Henry Ford, who years later wrote that Ogdensburg had partly inspired his Model T assembly line and his conception of fully automated manufacturing.

Edison eventually packed up his giant rollers and furnaces and moved them a few miles west to a spot from which he and Walter Mallory would revolutionize the cement and commercial-construction industry. The cement business would ultimately make enough money to repay a good portion of the nearly $3 million that Ogdensburg had cost. Meanwhile, Edison headed back to West Orange, New Jersey, heralding his return there with a letter to his staff stating, “I am pretty close to the end of my mill biz, and will soon be able to come back to work.” Shortly thereafter he began developing a new alkaline storage battery.

The mountain property is now in the hands of a development group that plans to fill in the foundations and quarries and put condominiums and a golf course on top. If they succeed—over the objections of local preservationists—the last few traces of Edison’s Ogdensburg project will be obliterated forever. The project has always lain in the shadows of history, even of the history of Thomas Edison, and records of it have always been hard to track down. It was a failure few people wanted to remember. But it was a failure that contained many successes.