The Last Days of Night(11)

And so, Paul learned from the old newspapers he’d pored over in his office, Edison had held a series of private demonstrations. Only a select few reporters and potential investors were invited. The men who would fund this enterprise—to be called the Edison General Electric Company—were let in to see the lit bulbs for only a few minutes at a time. They were never shown the blueprints. And yet these men were stunned by what they saw in a guarded back room. For the first time in their lives, they witnessed a new kind of light. They described it breathlessly in their papers, their magazines, their journals, their stockholder reports. Paul had read them all that spring, ten years later. The men wrote as if they’d discovered a new color. And they had named it Edison.

On November 4, 1879, over a year after announcing his device in the press, Thomas Edison finally filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb. Paul kept a copy of that patent application atop his desk and stared at it every day. Within it rested the fate of his whole case. If the patent held, no one but Edison could manufacture and sell incandescent bulbs within the United States. If Paul could not break the patent claim, Thomas Edison would have a monopoly on light itself.

The story of Edison’s invention had been laid out plainly and the patent awarded easily. But in Paul’s profession, no story was ever this simple. With only the slightest change of perspective, the subtlest of reframings, Edison’s story might be made to yield the most contrary of impressions.

So, who invented the light bulb?

First: “who.” Edison was far from a lone wolf in his lab. How many others helped him? If the work of others had been used to create Edison’s lamp, was their work his property? Or might another man lay claim to part of Edison’s supposed breakthrough? Moreover, a thousand other laboratories across the United States and Europe had been at work on this very problem—might Edison have used ideas that were first developed elsewhere and published in one of the many popular engineering journals? Theft was theft, whether it was intentional or not.

Second: “invented.” Was Edison’s incandescent lamp a fundamentally new invention, or was it simply an improved version of an earlier device? The law stated that for a patent to be valid, the invention described must constitute a major breakthrough. A man can’t simply tweak another’s device and call the resulting machine his own. It must be a truly new thing. Hadn’t Joseph Swan already taken out patents on incandescent lamps? Hadn’t Sawyer and Man? What made Edison’s incandescent bulb different from the others? What made it an invention?

Third: “the.” Perhaps the trickiest word of them all. Even if Edison was the one who did the inventing, and even if inventing is what occurred, did he actually invent “the” light bulb—or just “a” light bulb? Why the definite article? There could be as many varietals of light bulb as roses blooming in the gardens of Central Park. What made Edison’s preeminent? The lawyers for the Edison General Electric Company were not claiming that Edison held a patent on one specific design of one light bulb; they claimed that the patent covered all designs of all light bulbs. They argued that no other company had a legal right to manufacture incandescent bulbs, because incandescent light itself was covered by Edison’s patent.

This was the very heart of the matter. George Westinghouse and Eugene Lynch and Elihu Thomson and the dozens of other competitors were each selling different lamps. Westinghouse’s were shorter and featured straight, unwound filaments, not coiled ones. Eugene Lynch’s had featured a wider base, before the unfortunate incident of the flaming workman had lurched his company toward insolvency. Were not all these things members of the infinite and diverse variety of objects we might refer to as “light bulbs”? Paul could suggest, carefully and with great logic, that Thomas Edison might have patented a specific light bulb, but he could not patent the entire idea of a light bulb. He might be able to prevent Westinghouse from selling one particular design of bulb, but he could not stop his competitors from manufacturing any kind of bulb at all.

And finally that magical new term itself: “light bulb.” No one even knew where it came from, or who had coined it. “Light” had only been coming from “bulbs” for a few years now, since…well, since Thomas Edison. The term had caught on and become commonplace. Yet a lawyer in Paul’s position was duty-bound to ask: To what did the words truly refer? What made something a light bulb? The law stated that for a device to be patentable, it must be “non-obvious.” A man couldn’t take out a patent on something that already existed—a turkey sandwich, for instance. Hungry Americans had been lunching on such sandwiches for generations. But more important, you also couldn’t patent a turkey sandwich with sauerkraut on top, even if you might in fact be the first person in America to put together a combination that disgusting. Any drunken chef might have done it by accident.

And so the question needed to be asked: If Thomas Edison and his phalanx of attorneys claimed that his patent covered the whole idea of a light bulb, well, wasn’t the idea of a light bulb in the air already? Had men not been frantically working to build such a thing for decades? Hadn’t engineers and scientists been discussing the possibility of this light bulb concept since 1809? The idea of a light bulb was hardly “non-obvious”—only Edison’s one particular schematic, admittedly quite clever, was. Paul was simply offering that Edison’s work on the light bulb was the tallest evergreen in the Appalachian Mountains. Magnificent and noteworthy, laudable even, but also a single sprout amid a much larger growth.