Thomas Alva Edison Junior could never get a break.
Born in 1876, he was the son and namesake of the world's foremost inventor and was fully expected to follow in his illustrious father's footsteps. Given the nickname of "Dash" (his older sister Marion was "Dot" after the Morse Code signals), his early childhood was idyllic enough although their father left his children's upbringing almost exclusively to their mother, Mary. Devastated by the death of Mary Edison when he was seven years old (likely due to a brain tumour), Thomas Junior and his sister had little to do with their emotionally distant father who was more at home in the laboratory than anywhere else. He spent much of his remaining childhood at boarding school where, by all accounts, he was a poor student. When Edison Senior remarried in 1886 and moved his family to Glenmont in New Jersey, his second wife Mina attempted to form an emotional bond with her stepchildren but Thomas Junior became increasingly isolated from his father's second family. The fact that his new stepmother was only a few years older than he was may have contributed to his feeling like an outsider. After having spent his entire life in his father's shadow, the gap between father and son had become insurmountable.
Despite his father's urging, Thomas Junior dropped out of preparatory school at the age of seventeen without his diploma. With the Edison name behind him, he was determined to become a great inventor himself. While his father found a job for his errant son at his West Orange laboratory, Thomas Junior proved too restless and eventually ended up working at one of his father's mines in Ogden, New Jersey. In a letter that he wrote to his stepmother in 1897, he said that, "I will probably never be able to please him as I'm afraid it's not in me. But I shall never give up trying....I have many ideas of my own, which sometimes-yes I may say on all occasions I would like to ask him or tell him about but they never leave my mouth".
After leaving his mine job, he drifted to New York where he became the focus of an overly enthusiastic news story titled, "Edison Jr., Wizard". The article provided a list of the young Edison's accomplishments and suggested that he was "developing a formidable rivalry to his illustrious parent in his own line". The reporter who wrote the story didn't appear to do any actual research and took all of Thomas Junior's claims about his inventions on faith alone. The publicity landed Thomas Jr. a job at an exhibition at Madison Square Garden which mainly involved his talking to reporters about his ambitious plans while lending his name to the various electrical appliances being marketed (he sipped tea prepared on an electric range and ate biscuits prepared in an "electrically heated oven"). After the exhibition ended, Thomas quickly fell under the influence of numerous opportunity seekers who wanted to exploit him and his famous name.
The Edison Junior Steel and Iron Process Company was formed with Thomas Junior as a principal stockholder (he was only 20 at the time). Thomas Senior was outraged at how his name was being used and ordered his son to stop. Thomas Junior wrote in reply that he would "go on just as I have been doing". He also accused his father of holding him back and added that "If my name was Smith, I would be a rich man today". Thomas Junior's secret wedding to actress Mary Touhey in 1899 scandalized his father even further. Whatever happened on their honeymoon, the marriage collapsed shortly afterward (despite their divorce, Mary would continue to trade on the Edison name until her death in 1906). It also became apparent that Thomas Junior was broke. All of the companies that Thomas Junior started or became involved with quickly folded and he fled New York to avoid being arrested for his mountain of debts and numerous bad cheques. The would-be wizard had become a laughing stock.
As Edison Senior himself would later complain, "My son's head is now so engorged, that I can do nothing at all with him, he is being used by morbid acerbic individuals for their own personal ends! I could never get him to go to school nor work in the Laboratory! He is therefore, absolutely illiterate scientifically or otherwise!" Still, the precious Edison name made Thomas Junior a marketable commodity. The Edison Chemical Company, which had already been sued by Thomas Senior for the use of the Edison name, recruited Thomas Junior to give them legitimacy. After renaming itself the "Thomas A. Edison Junior Chemical Company", Thomas Junior became vice-president and began adding his own inventions to the company's already dubious offerings. His "Magno-electric vitalizer" was advertised as curing paralysis, rheumatism, locomotor ataxia and other "incurable complaints". The company also sold "Wizard's Ink Tablets" and advertising played up the Edison name by describing their product line as coming from the "young brain of Thomas Edison, Junior" with each new product being billed as "the latest Edison discovery".
Thomas Senior was naturally furious and wrote to his errant son to halt any association with the company. In 1902, Thomas Junior agreed "to give up all future rights to the name Edison for the purpose of obtaining money". In return for a monthly allowance, Thomas Junior signed over all commercial rights to the Edison name which left Thomas Senior free to proceed against the various "Edison Junior" companies. As he told one reporter in 1904, "I'll protect my name if it costs me every dollar in the world I possess". His attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Thomas A. Edison Junior Chemical Company over the use of the Edison name (and the "Wizard" label). In filing the lawsuit, Edison's lawyers argued that the company was misleading customers into believing that Thomas Edison Senior had invented the various quack products being sold under his name. To bolster their case, Edison's lawyers also included an affidavit from Thomas Senior stating that his son was no inventor, had no occupation, and "was incapable of making any invention or discovery of merit". Thomas Junior's reaction can only be guessed.
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