On March 25, 1878, in an unsigned editorial, The New York Times spent a few column inches dragging a public figure through the mud. “Something ought to be done,” about this person, they began, “and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.” Their subject, they alleged, was a public figure “of the most deleterious character,” hell-bent on “the destruction of human society”—all words fit for a true enemy. But the Times wasn’t skewering a corrupt politician, or even a rival newsmaker. Their target was Thomas Edison, and the provoking incident was his recent invention of the phonograph.
Looking back on Edison now, it’s easy to see him as a perpetual hero. Although he had his fair share of scandals—the War of Currents, the Great Phenol Plot, the patent disputes—his modern reputation paints him as a man who single-handedly invented the 20th century with an electric-light halo around his head. But a trip back into the archives reveals that he was not always so revered. Although Edison elicited reams of fawning and excited coverage, the publications of his time also occasionally painted the great man and his inventions as creepy and dangerous—or, more often, just plain laughable.
The late 1870s marked a time of great inventiveness. In 1878 alone, the world was introduced to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photography, and Gustav Kessel’s espresso machine, to name just a few world-changing examples. In such a competitive atmosphere, novelty, more than usefulness, was the order of the day. Inventors were expected to prove how revolutionary their new gizmos were, and in turn, publications rewarded them with breathless coverage. At times, to the layperson, “progress seemed like an onslaught of newness for its own sake,” writes the media scholar Ivy Roberts in a new paper in Early Popular Visual Culture.
Edison was a big player in this era of discovery. Throughout the winter of 1877 and the spring of 1878, he traveled the world demonstrating his newest invention, the phonograph. Scientific American describes a typical show: Edison put the machine on a table and turned the crank, and the phonograph proceeded to “talk,” introducing itself and exchanging various pleasantries with gaping onlookers.
