Get Me G.P. Lathrop: Thomas Edison and Modern Consumer Culture
This is a screen grab from an 1881 invoice billed to Thomas Edison from George Van
Ness, a Newark, New Jersey book dealer who sold magazines, journals and books to the Edison
household since at least 1878.1 CU INVOICE SLIDE As you can see, Van Ness sold weekly and monthly journals and magazines for both Thomas and his wife Mary. This and other
invoices like it found in the Thomas Edison Papers show us that similar to many middle-class
and upper-middle-class households in the post-American Civil War years, the magazines
subscribed to by the Edison household addressed different reading publics and interests.
Edison’s subscription list includes the weekly Scientific American, the leading American
magazine that covered scientific innovations and industrial progress, as well as Popular Science
Monthly and American Chemistry. From Edison’s subscription to Scientific American to Mary
Edison’s subscriptions to Puck, Harpers Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and Harper’s
Young People the Edison family was typical of American households who subscribed en masse
to a range of literary, popular, and scientific magazines in the 1880s and 1890s, continuing until
the early 1900s.
During the American Gilded Age magazines were the sole national communications
medium. With their advertisements, halftone images and photographs, and publication of fiction
and nonfiction essays, they are one of the major organs in which to consider both the beginnings
of modern consumer culture and the beginning of modern visual culture.2 While magazines were
1
Van Ness to TAE, Nov.1881 [D8111N; TAEM 57:473].
2
marketed across classes and catered to a variety of specialized interests they were primarily the
voice of the vast American middle class that grew alongside the industrialization and
modernization of the country. As a mass-medium, periodicals are a unique site in which to see
how motion pictures were written about in a medium united by reading habits rather than
location and to see how motion pictures were a part of early modern consumer culture.
GLPSLIDE Today, I want to reintroduce novelist and essayist George Parsons Lathrop to our understanding of how Thomas Edison was able to market himself and his inventions to the
readers of lifestyle and literary periodicals particularly focusing on the phonograph, kinetograph,
and the vitascope. Reintroducing Lathrop to our history of Edison’s development of motion
pictures and his persona in late-nineteenth century culture does three things. First, it chronicles
how Edison was able to leverage a professional and personal relationship to access a
middle-class readership of means, expanding and solidifying his place in the popular imagination.
Second, it reasserts Lathrop’s essays of the 1890s as public documents that establish what will
become familiar rhetoric about the invention of motion picture technology. Third, it provides a
case study for contemporary film historians to consider how a network of personal relationships,
which are now more than ever easier to map with the proliferation of digital archives, produce or
contribute to public texts.
Lathrop was a member of the press but he also becomes a collaborator and a friend to
both the Edison family and to Edison’s personal secretary A.O. Tate who hosted Lathrop and his
wife Rose for weeks at a time when GP was in West Orange gathering material for written
projects. As a member of the press, his early relationship with Edison also allows us to see how
the press was able to access Edison’s works and how Edison and Tate were able to use members
of the press to Edison’s advantage. By marriage, GP was a New England man of letters. He
married Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose in 1871 and subsequently was recognized as the
executor of his literary estate, editing the 1883 definitive edition of Hawthorne’s works and
writing a well-received literary and biographical portrait, A Study of Hawthorne in 1876. He was
also a respected playwright, poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, one of which, SLIDE “In the Deep of Time,”was advertised as a collaboration with Thomas Edison and syndicated via
the Bacheller newspaper syndicate beginning in 1896 in eastern and midwestern urban and
regional areas. AUTHORS CLUB SLIDE. Finally, Lathrop was the assistant editor of the Boston-based literary magazine the Atlantic Monthly under William D. Howells from 1875 to
1877; following this he edited the The Boston Courier for two years after which he intermittently
was the literary editor of the New York Star. In 1883 he founded the American Copyright League
advocating for copyright protection for foreign writers. NOTE IF ON SCREEN
A sizable body of correspondences exists between Edison, often represented by Tate, and
Lathrop. It’s likely that Edison and Lathrop first became acquainted in 1885 when Lathrop
approached the inventor for an interview subsequently published in the Hartford Courant.
PHONO TELEGRAM SLIDE Two years later, Ezra Gilliland, the Edison Phonograph Co’s then general agent, telegraphs Edison from New York advising him that he would like to “get out
a descriptive pamphlet”on the phonograph and suggests Lathrop may be the man for the job.3
At this early stage in Lathrop’s relationship with Edison and his employees, the line between
journalist and employee is blurred, as it might be for a freelance writer. Lathrop’s work for
Edison is then similar to the personal relationship Edison had with Edwin Fox of the New York
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Herald who contributed most of the Herald’s articles about Edison during the 1870s and 1880s.
Fox was also a telegraph operator and friend of Edison’s who wrote about Edison’s telegraphy
work for Scribner’s magazine. He eventually served as the secretary for the Edison’s American
Electric Co where he was one of three men to swindle the company in 1882.
STOCKSLIDE Lathrop too desired to profit from his association with Edison. He was a small stockholder in Edison’s Consolidated International Railway Telegraphy Company when
it was organized in 1887, and via his acquaintance with Sylvester Baxter, who wrote for the
Boston Herald, Lathrop acted as a liaison between Edison’s phonograph concerns and Boston
philanthropist and American Phonograph Co. investor Mary Hemenway. During this time, he
tries to incorporate with others to license and market the phonograph for entertainment purposes,
but his proposed partnership with Edison comes undone with the formation of Lippincott’s North
American Phonograph Co. During the 1880s, then, Lathrop’s involvement with Edison begins
with an interview which is parlayed into a financial relationship via the International Railway
Telegraph Co.. that ultimately manifests as Lathrop’s own attempt to incorporate with others to
market the phonograph for entertainment purposes.
LETTERSLIDE Over time, Lathrop became Edison and Tate’s essayist and journalist of choice, Edison requested him for instance over Stephen Crane when Irving Bacheller wrote
Edison in June 1897 asking that a regular interview be scheduled so the syndicate could publish
information on Edison’s regular scientific developments.4 Lathrop provided Edison with a
liaison to the mass-market periodicals that desired to write about Edison and that Edison saw as a
significant venue to advertise his inventions to a broad middle class. Unique among the
journalists Edison was in regular contact with, Lathrop could be a conduit to the New
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based popular press as well as use his standing among the Brahmins of the Boston literary and
financial world for access to the Atlantic Group of periodicals such as North American Review
that were among the literary and cultural tastemakers of the day. As Edison was both a reader of
mass-market periodicals and scientific journals and married to an avid reader of magazines, it is
likely that he and his employees saw the value in marketing himself and his inventions in this
medium. Furthermore, by working with Lathrop and by allowing him access to his work in West
Orange, Edison’s persona grows from being an inventor or wizard, a title bestowed on him in a
July 1879 NY Graphic Mirror article to include being a man of ideas.
There is an extensive archival record of correspondences between newspapermen, both
editors and reporters, and Edison and his employees, including Tate. As would be expected, this
includes editors and writers who worked for what I’ll call technical periodicals such as Nature or
Scientific American. Paul Israel documents Edison’s longstanding relationships with journalists
from urban, daily newspapers and technical periodicals that were aimed at marketing his
inventions, staking his claim in technical arenas, and publicizing his work over rival inventors
and manufacturers. At times these relationships took the form of exclusive interviews or press
releases reprinted verbatim. Sometimes his relationship with the press took the form of paid,
planted essays, used to discredit a rival and to promote Edison.5 They also trespassed on
plagiarism: “They copy us!”writes Sherbourne Eaton, president of the Edison Electric Co., to
Edison on the 21 July 1882 about a recent editorial published in Scientific American reprinted
from an article first published in the Edison Electric Light Co. Bulletin.6
Edison saw value enough in specialized journals that he regularly submitted articles about
his work on the telegraph to Telegrapher and Operator while he was living in Port Huron,
5
Eaton, Sherbourne to TAE, 29 June and undated 1882, TAED D8226ZAI, D8224ZDE.
6
Cincinnati, and Boston earlier in his career, and he financially backed the journal Science in
1880. A January 1894 contract between the New England Phonograph Co., and American
Phonograph stipulates that the former must spend at least $5,000 per year “in advertising its
business throughout the United States..., including, among others, The Century, Harper’s
Monthly, Scribner’s, North American Review, and Youth’s Companion.”7 In their advertisements
and editorial content the literary and middle-class lifestyle magazines, particularly those Lathrop
was associated with, were the perfect site for an inventor as prolific and interested in marketing
his work as Thomas Edison to assert his ownership of new machines and industrial processes in
the popular imagination and in the imagination of the writers, intellectuals, and members of
middle-class households who were their reading public.
TELEGRAMSLIDE Before his early death in 1898, Lathrop contributed essays about Edison and his work to North American Review, Youth’s Companion, Harper’s Weekly,
and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine alongside syndicated stories and articles he wrote about
Edison that appeared in newspapers. Israel suggests that Edison provided Lathrop with exclusive
initial rights to publish a description of the kinetograph in the 13 June 1891 Harper’s Weekly to
alleviate his disappointment after his attemp to market the phonograph for entertainment
purposes was stalled. This may be true, but as we can see from the slide, Scientific American will
publish on the kinetograph soon after Lathrop, yet this is the article that becomes the standard
text about the kinetograph. It shapes future discourse about the invention and is used by Tate on
at least two occasions as the invention’s ‘public record’when he refers inquiries from inventors
and writers to the article. Tate’s use of the article suggests that a certain amount of cooperation
or was given Lathrop to explain the workings of the machine so that the Edison company could
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be sure that the published description supported their own interests. It then points to the
privileged position Lathrop was able to gain as a member of the press, investor, and friend to
Edison.
McCLURE LETER SLIDE This privilege is also supported by the fact that Lathrop acted as a liaison between Edison and other writers, such as Horace Townsend, a
freelance writer who contributed to The Cosmopolitan and North American Review as well as
between S.S. McClure, the publisher of The Century, which Edison’s second wife Mina
subscribed to in the late-1890s continuing until the mid-oughts. McClure commissioned Lathrop
to approach and partner with Edison on a book project. According to a 31 July 1890 letter to
Edison, Lathrop negotiated that both he and Edison would receive “10% on the volume
publication [sic].”8 While it’s true that the novel was never published, LETTERSLIDE even after increasingly exasperated letters and notes from Lathrop to Tate, Edison, and even Edison’s
wife Mina, dated between June 1890 and November 1891 in which GP asks that more notes be
sent to him and that his drafts be returned. The collaboration fueled Lathrop’s syndicated
three-part science fiction story “In The Deep of Time.”
Using Edison’s ideas for future inventions sketched in his notes for Progress, Lathrop’s
story describes how a late-nineteenth century triumvirate form “the society of futurity”to
conduct scientific exploration on “a grand scale.” They endow this society to perpetuate their
own work and appoint successors to carry their experimentations, led, by one of the original
three who has travelled into the future via a process that seems remarkably similar to the time
travel depicted in, of all things, La Jette. Upon waking in the twenty-first Century the time
traveller finds an electric railway that carries him to Wisconsin where he finds huge deposits of
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iron ore with which to construct a giant magnet that he suggests be used to start a conversation
with dwellers of other realms, one of which contains the beauty Electra. Even in this brief
description one can detect Edison’s concerns with mining and electricity, themes that continue
throughout the story. Lathrop’s fantastic narrative uses Edison's ideas and extends his current
manufacturing concerns into the future via popular narrative.
FINAL SLIDE Edison didn’t simply publicize himself, he aligned himself with an agent who burnished his reputation by trading on his own cultural and journalistic position.
Perhaps the most famous description of Edison’s motion picture machines is the Dicksons’
pamphlet published as a stand-alone piece and in The Century, which again emphasizes the
importance of periodicals in staking the narratives on which future early film histories will be
based. Alongside this, however, is Lathrop’s work. His September 1896 essay about the
Vitascope in North American Review previews the relationship between theatre and film that will
be used to legitimate film in its own right later in the early twentieth century. Like those
comparisons, Lathrop claims, “there can be little doubt”that soon the vitascope will take “an
important position in heightening theatrical verisimilitude,”becoming a “valuable adjunct in
certain particulars of scenic effect upon the stage”(378).
The relationship I’ve sketched between George Parsons Lathrop and Thomas Edison
depicts a valued relationship for the two parties. Lathrop gains access to the most important
inventor of the age and Edison gains access to and remains visible to multiple publics as a man
of ideas, nearly a man of letters, given voice by Lathrop who routinely describes Edison’s “love
of reading and learning” (“Talks,” 426), describing him as having “creative musical or poetic or
artistic genius” in his February 1890 Harper’s New Monthly essay “Talks with Edison,” which
Mark Twain (435). If the early history of motion pictures is both that of machines and, as it was
written about in the early twentieth century, of an idea animating “living pictures” (Lathrop,
Vitascope,” 377), we can see how Lathrop’s characterizations of Edison as “a centre of
illumination,” “a story-teller” [sic] and a “thoughtful novelist” (425, 427) would contribute to the
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