Thomas Edison

On Sunday 2 October 1910 the magazine section of the New York Times carried an interview with the most famous inventor in the world. The headline said: "'No Immortality of the Soul' Says Thomas A. Edison. In Fact, He Doesn't Believe There Is a Soul." Human beings, the standfirst explained, were "only an aggregate of cells and the brain only a wonderful machine".¹ Within weeks the magazines were calling him "heretical" and a sign of a wave of "materialism", and a New York physician told the Times that people who did not believe in immortality were "abnormal, if not pathological".²³⁴

Edison never called himself an atheist, and in the same year he told his biographers that he could no more doubt "an Intelligence that is running things" than his own existence.⁵⁶ This chapter follows a man who did not lose a faith so much as grow up beside one, and asks what he denied in 1910, what he kept, and how, ten years later, he came back to the question of death by way of the laboratory.

A minister's daughter and a rebel's books

He was born at Milan, Ohio, on 11 February 1847.⁷ His father, Samuel Edison, had been a captain among the Canadian rebels of 1837 and had left Canada for good; the family reached Milan in 1842.⁸ His mother, Nancy Elliott, was a former teacher and the daughter of a Baptist minister; two of her uncles and two of her brothers were Baptist ministers too, and his early biographers called the family one "of considerable culture and deep religious feeling".⁹ Some accounts call the household Presbyterian; no source found for this chapter supports that.¹⁰

In 1854 the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan.¹¹ His mother taught him at home, and before he was twelve, with her help, he had read Gibbon, Hume's History of England, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a dictionary of the sciences.¹² Paine is not on that list. He comes from Edison's own memory, written sixty-five years later: "I discovered a set of the writings of Paine on my father's bookshelves when I was thirteen." It was, he said, "a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects", and he went back to the books "time and again".^13141516 He remembered thinking even then: "What a pity these works are not today the school-books for all children!"¹⁷ On the timeline, Paine is the first mark, and he is the only thing like a crack that the record shows; there is no account of a boyhood faith given up.

His mother spent her last years an invalid and died in 1871.¹⁸ He married Mary Stillwell in 1873; after her death in 1884 he married Mina Miller, daughter of one of the founders of the Methodist summer assembly at Chautauqua.¹⁹ According to Wikipedia she kept a strict Methodist faith all her life.²⁰ The man who would deny the soul in print lived with a believer for forty-five years.

The Intelligence and the cells

By 1910, at West Orange, New Jersey, Edison was the image of practical science. His authorised biographers, Dyer and Martin, wrote that year that he was "slow to discuss the great mysteries of life", "ever tolerant of others' beliefs", and "not a religious man in the sense of turning to forms and creeds".²¹ They printed his own words on design, drawn from watching how ice freezes: "After years of watching the processes of nature, I can no more doubt the existence of an Intelligence that is running things than I do of the existence of myself."⁵⁶

The interview with Edward Marshall that October went further than the biography, and on the belief timeline it is his declaration. The text of the Times itself was not reached for this chapter, so his words here are as the magazine Current Literature reprinted them. "Nature is what we know," he said. "We do not know the gods of the religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving."²²²³ "Nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions."²⁴ A person was a colony: "I am not I—I am not an individual—I am an aggregate of cells, as, for instance, New York City is an aggregate of individuals. Will New York City go to heaven?"²⁵ Asked whether anything of the brain was immortal, he said, "Absolutely no," and reached for his own invention: "There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal than there is to think that one of my phonographic cylinders will be immortal."²⁶²⁷ He did not dread death, he added, but "Personally I cannot see any use of a future life."²⁸

So he denied the personal God of the churches, the soul and personal survival, and in the same year spoke of an Intelligence behind nature. Whether that adds up to atheism, accounts differ; the magazines of 1910 read it as heresy and materialism.³

The doctor's reply

In the interview Edison had recommended a book, Brain and Personality, by the neurologist Dr William Hanna Thomson. The Times asked Thomson what he thought, and he "took direct issue".²⁹² "Mr. Edison's view is unscientific," he said. "The fact that he is prominent in one branch of science does not entitle him to pass on other branches of science."³⁰ He turned the inventor's own metaphor round: "The phonograph is no more responsible for the sound from its record than the brain is for speech that is uttered."³¹ Others called Edison's statements "dogmatic and contradictory".³²

He did not retreat. In July 1911, according to a later biographer, the Century Magazine quoted him as saying that "Science cannot reach any other conclusion than that there is a great intelligence manifested everywhere", which was the biographers' Intelligence again, not the gods of the religions.³³³⁴

Life entities

The revision came ten years later, and it came as an experiment. In 1920 newspapers in America and Europe reported that Edison was building a machine to talk to the dead. On 30 October Scientific American printed his own account. He was making, he said, an apparatus that might help psychic investigators in their work; he made no claims for the survival of personality, and if the apparatus revealed nothing he would lose all faith in the survival of personality as we know it.³⁵³⁶³⁷ He wanted a test, not a séance.

What he now believed was stranger than the cells of 1910. "I believe that life, like matter, is indestructible," he said. The body was built by "myriads of infinitesimal entities, each in itself a unit of life", which band together to make a man and leave him at death.³⁸³⁹ When a burned thumb grew back with the same print, he said, "I firmly believe that the life entities rebuild that thumb with consummate care, drawing upon their remarkable memory for all the details."⁴⁰⁴¹ The entities, he said, live forever. That is not the soul of the churches and not a promise of personal survival, but it is not the plain "Absolutely no" of 1910 either; a biographer writing in 1926 said that the student would have a hard job reconciling the two.⁴² It is a revision in form rather than a conversion.

Paine again

In the 1920s he took sides in public. Of the battle between Fundamentalists and Modernists he said in 1924 that it marked "the transition from myth to facts".⁴³⁴⁴ In 1925 he wrote the introduction to a new edition of Paine and served as first vice-president of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.⁴⁵⁴⁶ Paine, he wrote, was "one of the greatest of all Americans"; "Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic." He recalled that for The Age of Reason Paine had been "burnt in effigy, and was vilified outrageously".⁴⁵⁴⁷ An essay credited to him and dated 7 June 1925 says that Paine was no atheist but believed in a supreme intelligence; its first printing has not been found, so it is paraphrased here.⁴⁸ It reads like a description of himself.

He died at West Orange on 18 October 1931.⁴⁹ His unbelief was the inventor's kind: no gods of the religions, no soul that a phonograph could not match, an Intelligence he would not name, and in old age an experiment rather than a prayer. The boy who found Paine on his father's shelf ended by defending him. Luther Burbank, another American who spoke of a great power in the universe while denying a life after death, has his own chapter in this book.