‘An Extremely Useful Invention’: Edison’s electric pen and the unravelling of old and new media

Using Edison’s electric pen as a case study, this article examines the role of media narratives in determining the ways in which a new medium is finally judged a success or failure. By challenging the narrative of the electric pen as a failed technology, it maintains that oppositional criteria such as new/old, winner/loser and successful/obsolete are counterproductive to a meaningful understanding of technical media. Instead, this article seeks to reposition and reappraise the electric pen, not as a study in failure and obsolescence, but as a site for the implementation of powerful cultural narratives that helped to define individuality and human agency in the beginnings of the modern age.


Introduction
When Thomas Edison introduced the electric pen to the public in 1876, at no time did it enter the mind of anyone involved in the project to promote the machine as 'new'. Instead, they extolled the virtues of the device in terms carefully measured to meet the office, business and bureaucratic needs for which they presumed the machine had been invented. Today, a few dozen of Edison's original electric pens are known to exist, several of them still operational (The Telegraph, 2009). Despite these surviving machines, or perhaps because of them, the device has assumed canonical status as an example of the failure and obsolescence of old media technology. The Smithsonian.com describes Edison's device as an 'epic fail' and a 'botched idea' (Hendry, 2013). An account of the electric pen at New York University's Dead After such an exhaustive list, it is not clear what the obligatory 'etc.' could possibly stand for. With its dauntingly dense text, the advertisement's list of paper-based forms constitutes a visual representation of textual control mechanisms that range from the office to the school, from the church to the lawyer's office, from the trading floor to the postal station, with perhaps a hint of the bedroom suggested in 'Manuscripts' and 'Journals'. Edison would employ such a wide-net approach several years later when it came to marketing his phonograph. Again, he would preemptively and speculatively define a vast area of need that would now be serviced by the marketing of his new machine. These suddenly necessary services ranged from the teaching of elocution to phonographic books for the blind. Rather like the comprehensive catalogue of what the electric pen could be used for, this list, according to Jonathan Sterne 'appears as nothing more than a product of brainstorming ' (2003: 202).
Whether aware of it or not, what Edison was envisioning here with his electric pen was not merely the quick and cheap duplication of office documents, but the marketing of a technology that would become central to how society negotiated itself, how it established, maintained and furthered its very structures. Elizabeth Eisenstein has made a similar and compelling argument for Gutenberg 's press (1979). Indeed, one of the more audacious if not extraordinary components of Edison's autographic system was that, in design and manufacture, it resembled a DIY desktop version of the printing press. Consisting of a batterydriven reciprocating needle that drove in and out of a hollow stylus at high speed, the electric pen made a series of minute perforations on the paper, producing a stencil made of very small punctures. Once the stencil had been cut by the needle, the writer then placed the stencil on top of a blank sheet of paper on a flat iron bed and inked the stencil with a roller. From this point on, Edison's 'invention' would have been instantly comprehensible to Gutenberg and Fust and any pressman or typesetter from the late 15th century. More than comprehensible, the non-electrical end of the electric pen would have been immediately recognizable for what it was -a miniature printing press: With such an obvious borrowing from a technology invented centuries earlier, it is hardly surprising that Edison and his agents expressed no interest in marketing the electric pen technology within a discourse of the 'new'. Practically, however, Edison's device appeared at an historical moment when it seems that the obligation for a technology to be 'new' did not exist. In today's environment of constant and obligatory newness, of expected newness, of what Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has aptly termed the 'habitual new' (2017) and Gitelman the 'already new ' (2008), it has become difficult to imagine an environment that does not employ the required rhetoric of newness.  Instead, the patent caveat for the electric pen stressed 'improvement(s)' on what already existed and 'methods' by which 'improvements' were to be implemented. A year after the pen patent, Edison would again write, 'Be it known that I THOMAS EDISON have invented an improvement in phonograph or speaking machines . . . . I claim as my invention the method herein . . . '. (italics mine, 1878).
The decades-long application of the word 'new' to 'media' has become, as Simone Natale observes, 'one of the most widely debated notions for the field of media studies ' (2016: 586). The question of when 'newness' became an obligatory attribute of communications technology, or when media went from being simply 'media' to 'new media' is given some examination by Jonathan Sterne (2007). 'Telephony', for example, as Sterne notes, is frequently dated to 1876, but 'by 1916 commentators were no longer calling the telephone a "new" medium ' (2007: 19). That technologies such as the telephone, the radio, the movie projector and even the television fit rather uncomfortably, if at all, within a rhetoric of 'new media', remind us again of what Carolyn Marvin convincingly argued, that '[n]ew technologies is a historically relative term ' (emphasis in original, 1988: 3). Newness itself often appears to have less to do with a device, but rather, as Tom Gunning puts it, 'is always in some sense the product of discourses surrounding it ' (1998: 6-7). Media archeologist, Jussi Parikka, has urged scholars to become increasingly aware of 'the hegemony of the new' (2012: 11), while Paul Duguid cautions against the new as a 'marketing ploy' and an unquestioned acceptance of supersession, the yielding of the old to the new, the past to the future (1996: 68). 'Digital media technologies', writes Terry Flew, 'are now so pervasive in our work, our home lives, and the myriad social interactions we have with each other . . . that they are ceasing to be "new" in any meaningful sense of that term ' (2008: 2).
Increasingly, the new has become an ideology to which machines and the human actants who use them are expected to adhere. However, 'new' as an obligatory rhetorical device in the marketing and domestication of technology did not exist in the years of Edison's electric pen. There was no fetish of newness that required its immediate appellation. Instead, as a booklet for the device (and other advertisements) made clear, the story of the electric pen was one of an emergent modern America epitomized by the 'economizing [of] time and money . . . ' (Wheeler, cited in Burns, 2019) in a way that was 'cheap and rapid' (Davidson George, 2005). What is on display as new in these ads is not so much 'new media' but the attributes of speed, range, cheapness, ease and even cleanliness. Whether a failure or success, new or old, Edison's electric pen was intended to locate itself within an increasingly urbanized and monetized culture that saw itself as effective, versatile, fast and economical.
The electrical wonder: Performing the modern Despite Edison's lack of interest in marketing the electric pen within a discourse of the new, his invention nonetheless represented an instantly recognizable performance of the speedbased and efficiency-oriented modern world. This world, like the electric pen itself, at least according to claims made by its makers, could be 'easily mastered by any person of ordinary intelligence' (cited in Coll, 2009). Thanks to technology, one did not have to be Thomas Paine or even Thomas Edison to partake fully in the benefits of American democracy. Such benefits were now implied by the machine itself. With this device, the person of ordinary intelligence becomes a 'master' or is at least granted the democratic right to master. Told in press releases, advertising booklets and public endorsements, the 'story' of the electric pen represents the early exposition of a narrative fundamental to 'new media:' that of increased self-expression and efficiency, of an increase in individuality, freedom and power, of mastery -a narrative that Paul Duguid has eloquently termed 'liberation technology ' (1996: 73), and what James Carey and John J. Quirk refer to as 'mythos ' (2009: 87). As Fiona Coll suggests, the ordinary user of the electric pen became 'an ideal citizen of the modern age', performing the right to belong in the 'modern, efficiency-oriented world'. She further suggests that in doing so this ideal citizen included herself in 'broader expectations for individual accomplishment in an age where technology can obliterate the limits of the body as the Pen does' (Coll, 2009).
Edison's advertising booklet for the device adamantly aligned the technology to the very essence of modernity itself: 'Like the gun, sewing machine, etc. the parts of this apparatus are made by the modern methods . . . ' (Thomas Edison Papers, Advertising booklet, 1876: 12). This insistence on the modern takes place regardless of whether the sales figures for the electric pen met its inventor's expectations or not. Pundits and media writers who frame the apparatus as an 'epic fail' and a 'botched idea' invariably neglect the epic of apparent empowerment that the technology unfolded. In success or failure Edison's device, like many of his other devices, heralded the individual through the gateways of the present and into the future. In this light, emphases on the newness, oldness, success or failure of the device serve rather to obscure the cultural implications of the technology and its role in both American society and media history.
What can today be seen as 'new' in Edison's device is not the technology -stencil technology is thought to be almost 40,000 years old (Aubert et al., 2014) -but the determined effort to bring the handwritten word under the control of an emerging electrical network, as well as the introduction of an emerging class of new and self-described 'professionals'. It is perhaps here the electric pen achieves its unqualified success, and even its unsought qualification as new with the creation of a new heroic male, divorced from the arts, but right at home with electricity: 'Mr. Edison has taught the lightning how to write', observed a fawning 1879 biography of Edison, 'in more ways than by chemistry' (McClure, 1879: 95). Regardless of its commercial success or failure, the narrative accompanying Edison's electric pen, and even the young Edison himself, was one of evangelical enthusiasm provoked by the promise that electricity held for unlocking human potential (Marvin, 1988).
In heralding the new proximity between the written word and the electrical, Edison's first biographer strikes a note of rhetorical excitement in which the old and antiquated is swept away by the emerging presence of electrical technologies. As McClure put it, Electrical Science has suddenly flashed into general utility, and is now rapidly lifting, not only the veritable darkness from the earth, but everywhere in home and office, field and mine, on land and on sea, is demonstrating a scope of usefulness commensurate with the loftiest aspirations of man. (McClure, 1879: 4) Thanks to Edison, lightning itself had received an education. In the process, the written word was now improved and modernized -by becoming a phenomenon of electricity.
In his description of the device, Charles Barnard, the technical editor of Scribner's Monthly, was quick to call Edison's invention a 'wonder of electricity' (cited in Cooper, 1996: 132). The evident satisfaction in having an American inventor teach writing to lightning through the wonder of electricity expressed an eagerness to usher in the electrical future, to be an active player today in the action that was coming. Because of this 'omnipotent agent', as the New York Times (1881) defined electricity, people would soon be able to 'drink, build our houses, plow our fields and manure them, sail our yachts, propel our steamers and trains, print our books and perhaps write them by the aid of electricity' (italics mine, 3). Edison's electric pen was one of the technologies that made this observation both compelling and plausible. With the device's appearance, it became tenable that electricity was applicable to the technology of the written word. Furthermore, as the swift dominance of today's digital textuality has demonstrated, there would be no shortage of interest in subsuming mechanical and handwritten text within an emerging technological order in which electricity was the 'omnipotent agent'.
At the time that Edison's electric pen was introduced to the public electricity was far from a common feature of the business office, or of business machinery in general. Narratives that highlight the technology's apparent failure to take hold in this environment largely ignore what the electric pen signified in this regard. By electrifying handwriting for the purpose of creating stencils, Edison's autographic system is now often singled out (incorrectly) as the first attempt to attach an electric motor to a consumer item. 2 More significantly, it represents a watershed historical moment when the American office was about to fling open its doors to the 'wonders' of electricity. Not only the office door, but the household door was opening wide for a process that has since witnessed the attachment of electrical motors to every conceivable form of appliance. From toothbrushes to can openers, from pencil sharpeners to adult toys, to the smart phone of today, the miniature handheld electric device is now a ubiquitous reality in the practice of everyday living, both in the working and domestic environments. Viewing Edison's device within binary perspectives of failure or success, past or future and old or new tends to obscure these low-lying but pertinent cultural significations. As Kenneth Lipartito has observed of another supposedly 'failed' technology, the Picturephone, there are deep cultural paradigms shaping technological inventions, and 'failures are not inherent in hardware but constructed by contingent social conditions '. (2003: 52) Such a perspective of winners and losers also serves to reinforce an unexamined and epochal 'big-four' understanding of evolutionary media change -the inexorable transition from the spoken word, to the scribal word, to the printed word and finally to the digital word. This narrative, leapfrogging directly from Gutenberg's press to the digital age, renders invisible other potentially epochal and revolutionary moments in the history of media, particularly the ground-changing decades of the late 19th and early 20th century (Gitelman, 1999;Gunning, 1998;). In today's environment, when a plethora of invasive communications technologies have forcefully made their way into the practices of daily living, crucial insights can be gained from studying old and dated communications technology that just as forcefully made their ways into the practices of daily life in the 1880s. As Duguid has observed, by 'disinheriting the present from the past' we run the risk of eliding the contributions of entire generations of media, 'just as we are trying to build new ones' (Duguid, 1996: 71).
In this way, consigning the electric pen to an insignificant and predigital past in which wacky machines sputtered and disappeared on their way to the present is to ignore the profound technological, social and economic anxiety that confronted the inscription of text in the late 19th century. Friedrich Kittler, Gitelman and others have identified the 1870s to 1880s and beyond as an era of intense destabilization centred around concern for the supposed fixity of text and the nature of the written word. Piano rolls, the phonograph, the electric pen, the X-ray machine and even the transatlantic cable were all technologies seeking to present reading and writing as something that could be, and even should be, both mechanized and electrified. In this context, Edison's electric pen is something more than merely a failed and forgotten contraption, but a remarkable case study of an historical moment that witnessed the electrification of just about everything. Suddenly the phenomenon of electricity, 'ubiquitous yet inscrutable', as David Nye neatly puts it (1990: 138), was now 'inextricably bound up with ideas of social progress' (p. 147). Electricity, rather like the electric pen, itself provided 'persuasive images for the progress of society, the operation of the mind, and the nature of the body' (Nye, 1990: 157).
Framed this way the electric pen can be seen as a forerunner in a model that would be repeated a century later with the coming of the digital turn. Despite the seeming and well-rehearsed 'revolutionary' and epochal nature of the computer and its digital regime, Edison's electric pen epitomizes an earlier and equally revolutionary period, a period of constant 'rupture and transformation' (Gitelman, 1999: 220). For it was in this earlier age, before the 20th century that, to use Kittler's dramatic term, Gutenberg's monopoly on the storage of data was first 'exploded ' (1999: 16). This explosion did not occur out of thin air, but in a climate of growing enthusiasm for electricity, its practical applications, and a thickening plenitude of inscription technologies, including the electric pen, each vying for favour in a rich field of commercial pressure and technical inventiveness.
Finally, it appears the very richness of this field, the thickness of the technical flora itself, exerted its downward tug on the sales figures of the electric pen. Edison may have believed that '[t]here is more money in this than telegraphy' (cited in Stross, 2007: 19), but the office workers, who were the ones to be operating and maintaining the device, were decidedly unimpressed. According to Edison's chief New York sales agent 'the thing is highly praised everywhere but it will be harder to sell than you anticipate . . . the chief objection comes from clerks who do not want to have to use it -others offer such trifling objections as the noise' (cited in Cooper: 134). By 1880, Edison's perceptive London agent solemnly observed in a letter; the day of the electric pen is over . . . it is too late to make any headway with the E.P. against a field born of its own seed . . . Had it been launched in a different manner it could have held its own -but there are now a multitude of new devices for transferring letters ad lib, many of them simple, effective & cheap.
(Johnson cited in Burns, 2019) This letter, with its frank appraisal of the economic and technical problems facing the electric pen, was part of an emerging narrative in American business; that of the 'business agent'. The appearance of this new occupation in the 1870s and its role in the marketing of the electric pen has been examined by Jill Cooper, who carefully delineates the extent to which Edison and others 'relied upon a growing corps of business agents to gather and interpret customer feedback to ensure the success of their inventions on the new national market ' (1996: 130). To the extent that a narrative of failure is discernible with regard to the electric pen, it can be found first here in the feedback of this new storyteller. The letter from Edison's London agent, replete with its intimacy and insider knowledge, employs a range of literary techniques to explain how American individualism and the ingenuity of its own 'seed' has been brought low by the imposters who sprang from it. The letter employs a biographical narrative for the electric pen -a device that, like a human life, 'had its day in the sun', that tried to hold its own, and now is fading away into a vast field. If the letter described the failure of anything, it described the failure of the narrative surrounding the electric pen, a flaw in the story by which people were meant to comprehend new technologies and to integrate them into the practices of their daily lives . It would appear that from this agent's admission, the narrative of the electric pen was wrong from the beginning -'had it been launched in a different manner it could have held its own'.
The letter also reveals, rather intimately, one of the numerous ways 'that technology is enmeshed within textuality' (Gitelman, 1999: 8). In the case of the electric pen, this entanglement is visible in the countless redesigns, modifications and tinkerings that took place and that were documented by the correspondence between Edison's lab and his numerous business agents. After only 3 years on the market, the weight of the perforating pen had been reduced by half, and structural changes had taken place with both the batteries and the pen itself (Cooper, 1996). The letter also trumpets a new coda by which technologies and inventiveness will be judged as successful: that is, 'simple, effective & cheap'. Arguably, Edison's machine was all of these things, but it was not the only machine to be all of these things. It was, finally, merely one inscription technology in a wildly fertile ecology of inscription technologies. 3 By harnessing the electrical power of the lightning bolt, Edison may have taught nature how to write, he may have brought handwriting itself into the electrical era, but the clerks and office administrators of the age were indifferent to this achievement. It was the clerks' 'reading' of the electric pen and the batteries in particular -two voltaic wet cell batteries capped with a removable lid and filled with caustic chemicals -along with the rather fussy maintenance they required, that had a role to play in keeping sales low. Publicly, Edison and his team insisted on the somewhat different narrative of unqualified and even stunning success. To this end, they routinely inflated sales numbers. Charles Batchelor, Edison's right hand man and business partner, wrote letters claiming their New York agent was selling eight pens a day when it appears he was selling less than an average of one. 'No difficulty at all is experienced in selling them', he wrote (cited in Cooper, 1996: 7). The American press, already narrating Edison as a living symbol of American ingenuity and success, was invested in ensuring that their narrative flourished. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Edison's pen, against some stiff competition, was awarded the bronze prize. Such exhibitions had an extensive history as sites from which to market and publicize new inventions, and also provided technical credibility to both the invention, and the inventor (Bazerman, 1999). Competing alongside Edison's electric pen were numerous examples of massproduced and mass-producing technologies, including the Remington typewriter, the sewing machine and a machine that allowed for the daily manufacture of 100,000 screws and bolts -an improvement on the previous daily figure of 8000. Alexander Graham Bell gave his first public demonstration of a machine that he called the 'telephone'. Amid such lofty demonstrations of technical ingenuity and awards-giving, the electric pen, regardless of whether the clerks wished to use the machine or not, was to be 'written' as a part of an exhilarating future based on the 'wonders of electricity' as personified by Thomas A Edison, soon to be branded 'the Wizard of Menlo Park'. Within this narrative, failure was not an option. JB McClure's deifying 1879 book Edison and his Inventions insisted that 60,000 units of the electric pen had been sold (McClure, 1879: 95). This number, seemingly pulled out of a hat, is repeated in the first volume of Francis Jehl's (1937) Menlo Park Reminiscences (Jehl, 1937: 99). The same number appears today in online publications, including Wikipedia, and can found in technology blogs and similar online sites. However, determined research by electric pen enthusiast and historian Bill Burns puts the number at significantly less than 10,000. According to Burns, no serial number on any surviving electric pen exceeds 8739 (Burns, 2019).
Nonetheless, a decade after its introduction, Edison's electric pen had demonstrated a system of writing performed electrically. It offered a narrative of advancement and improvement through technology, and in particular, electricity, and revealed a deepening penetration of the 'electrical wonder' into the practices of everyday life. The electric pen also served to further blur the difference between the handmade and the machinemade, destabilizing the distance between human activity and technology, between script and type. Unlike the typewriter (on which Edison held a patent), the electric pen inscribed and duplicated handwriting. It made mass that most individual and personal production: the author's own script. It was suddenly possible to endlessly duplicate what has always been understood to be entirely singular; the unique ductas of strokes, repetitions, shadings and pressure points visible in any writer's handwriting, and historically invested with a plethora of cultural assumptions regarding individuality, personhood and the uniqueness of the self. Edison's device rather dramatically challenged these assumptions. By electro-mechanically rendering the individual uniqueness of a person's handwriting, Edison's electric pen exposed the tension and emerging threats that existed between the self-written individual and the machine-made product. A century later, Kittler would insist it was such technological threats, made manifest in these years, that transformed man into 'so-called man', life into 'so-called life' and the world itself into 'the so-called world ' (1999: 204, 115, 229).
Edison's electric pen challenged not only cultural assumptions concerning the printed word and its authority but, in the case of the US postal service, it exploited them as well. Handwritten documents were presumably considered more valuable and were therefore more costly to send through the mail, but the US Post Office maintained significantly reduced rates for promotional flyers. Any text or illustrations produced by an Edison pen was classified as 'third class matter', like print, a form of writing that apparently lacked the cultural capital of the handwritten word, and was allowed to pass through the US mail systems at a reduced price. Without exception, ads for Edison's electric pen were swift to note that '[c]irculars prepared with the Electric Pen pass through the mails as third class matter at one cent per ounce or fraction thereof' (Edison's Electric Pen and Press, n.d.). The electric pen demonstrated that, regardless of its personal nature, handwriting was now just another movement to be 'amplified and optimized' (Coll, 2009) to fit the needs of a mass market. The device convincingly demonstrated that the most personal expression of an individual, his or her handwriting, could now be endlessly duplicated and turned into what today we commonly call junk mail.

The electric pen and the body electric
Despite the documented and self-generated narrative of satisfied customers and solid sales, Edison's writing machine appears to have garnered barely a toehold in the modern office environment and failed to secure any lasting position in the business of duplicating text. Even with Edison's radical, if inevitable, introduction of electricity into mimeographic technologies, the field of document duplication, in the end, remained a decidedly chemical one. Yet at no point could it accurately be said of Edison's electric pen that it actually failed, became outdated, obsolescent or dead media, or even abandoned technology. In the early 1890s, an itinerant tattoo artist, Sam O'Reilly, took up Edison's electric pen and began to ink tattoos with it. With slight modifications, the machine passed easily into Sam O'Reilly's tattoo parlour, with Mr O'Reilly patenting his own self-named apparatus in 1891. After he replaced Edison's single needle with a cluster of five needles to improve shading, definition and ink distribution, the machine decisively left the confines of the business office and assumed its role as the technology for the inscription of tattoos. As the site of the 'last genuine folk art in the United States' (Steward, 1990: 169), the tattoo parlour welcomed the device's electrical capabilities in a way the American business office did not. While traditional hand methods of the tattoo artist permitted two to three 'pokes' per second, the Edison pen's ability to puncture a surface 50 times a second proved revolutionary in the field of inking tattoos, suddenly making the machine what Edison's London agent insisted the electric pen had failed to be, that is, 'simple, effective and cheap'. With this repositioning, Edison's electric pen managed to effectively escape the narrative that has come to largely define it; a narrative of failure and obsolescence.
Whether defined as winner, a loser or an 'epic fail,' it is clear the device played a dominant role in both revitalizing and revolutionizing the art of the American tattoo. By leaving behind its intended purpose, or its presumed purpose, the technology successfully assumed another. The 1891 patent for the SF O'Reilly Tattooing-Machine is virtually indistinguishable from Edison's patent of 17 years earlier. 4 Under its new name, the device unravels what, exactly, Edison's invention was. Now, reimagined outside of its previous association with Property Lists, Manifests, Inventories, Schedules, Shipping Lists and so on, the pen was no longer a failure 'lost in a field of which it was the seed', but rather an instant success that quickly established a monopoly on an inscription technology that rejected paper, and that existed decidedly outside the confines of the modern business office.
Ironically, despite the determination on the part of Edison and his team to envision the electric pen as a device central to the modern office, the electric pen was put to use as a writing machine that protested the very standardization it had been built to duplicate. Instead of Bills of Fare, Lectures and Pastoral Information, Edison's electrical contraption would now be used to inscribe a bohemian individuality, and even what has been called 'freakdom'. By becoming the standard writing machine of the tattoo trade, Edison's device inscribed itself instead exclusively on human  skin. From this new site, it continued to exploit the intimacy and individuality of handwriting while rejecting, outright, the modern cultural demand for duplication.
Although Edison himself had set out to solve the problem of duplicating text, the electric pen, now an electric tattoo pen, inscribed only the singular, original text and employed the individual human body as its inscription surface. In doing so, the device opened up an enormous gulf between the intended use of a technology and the actual use of that technology. In her writing on 'blank books', Gitelman notes that each blank book 'catered to the repetition of a certain kind of writing', aiding people 'to locate themselves or others within or against the site, practices, and institutions that helped to structure daily life' (Gitelman, 2014: 21-22). Edison's electric pen had been invented to fit precisely within this milieu: to generate the forms (including even blank books themselves) and textual shapes that structure and schematically bureaucratize daily life. Instead the electric pen, now patented as the 'SF O'Reilly Tattooing-Machine', was radically renegotiating its use and functions and opening up another textual terrain for American individualism and vitalism. This expression took place outside of the office, by way of the tattoo parlour, the backrooms of barbershops, the ship's berth and the tents of travelling circuses. By significantly reducing the amount of time, and thus the cost, required to 'ink' a tattoo, the electric device thoroughly transformed the trade, making a tattoo an affordable form of selfexpression for an increasing number of US citizens (Nyssen, nd).
Even before it had ceased operating as stencil cutting technology, the electric pen, now a 'tattoo machine', began generating an ongoing body of scriptural work, a corpus comprised of human skin, and one that insisted on the expressive potentialities, not of the office, but of the individual. In nervous times of mass replication, mass technology and increasing bureaucratization, Figure 6. Singing the body electric: generating a different textuality (McComb, 2015: 78-79). electrical tattooing, because of its newfound speed and affordability, provided a flourishing, intensely personal and provocatively un-businesslike genre of inscription. As a writing machine of the human body, the technology made possible a reaffirmation of the uniqueness of the individual in a time of increasing uniformity and mass technologies. By maintaining its connection to the scribal, the electric pen, as both a paper and skin-based technology, confirmed many cherished notions regarding the uniqueness of handwriting itself, while alarmingly linking those notions to the suddenly ubiquitous electrical fluid and the potential for mass duplication. In the face of these tensions, Edison's pen, echoing Whitman's celebrated opening to Leaves of Grass, would 'sing the body electric', not on paper, but on the actual body of the modern American male and, it turned out, the American female as well. And it would do so with a vengeance: It is estimated that this particular form of inscription can be read on the bodies of more than one in five Americans (Crum, 2017).

Instruments to be operated by electricity
In hindsight, it is clear that the conception and the narrative of the electric pen as a stencilling technology meant to meet the needs of a paper-based office belonged to Edison alone. As the sewing machine of Edison's era indicates, there was nothing inherent in a perforating technology that directed it toward the duplication of text or, for that matter, paper. Indeed, Edison's pen, now employed as technology for inking tattoos, predicts a generation of inscription technologies, including Edison's soon-to-be-marketed phonograph, which would be divorced from paper as an inscription surface. Sam O'Reilly, the American tattoo artist, was apparently not the first to see Edison's electric pen and think at once of applying it, not to paper, but to human skin. That idea, some say, belongs to 'Clarence Smith, a young sailor who claimed to have seen an Edison pen in a shop window and adapted it for tattooing' (Boyd, 2017). As early as 1878, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had identified the tattooing potential of Edison's electric pen and published an article urging Edison to 'lessen the sufferings of humanity and extend the glories of the American name by devising some modification of the electric pen in combination with some hints taken from the guillotine and the sewing machine' (Phresh, 1878: 3). The article further suggested, the 'anguish' of sitting for a tattoo could even be 'mitigated . . . by a fine selection of story and song ground out from a phonograph by a polite assistant'. To the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, there was no doubt that Edison's device not only fit intuitively into the tattoo business, but that such a device fell naturally within a constellation of Edisonic inventions, whether it be the electric pen, the talking book or the phonograph. That Edison's perforating device could be employed as technology for the human body had already been imagined, and even successfully implemented, by the dentist and inventor, William Bonwill. In 1875, Bonwill received a patent for his 'Dentists' Electromagnetic Mallet', or dental plugger; an electrical device for pounding metallic fillings into cavities. Although Edison stated that his idea for the electric pen came to him during telegraphic experiments, his pen's exact resemblance to Bonwill's invention strongly suggests otherwise. Bonwill himself had no doubt that Edison had modelled the electric pen upon his own invention. In fact, Bonwill's electromagnetic dental mallet, successfully patented a year before Edison's electric pen, was already in practical use and had been displayed at electrical and dental exhibitions since 1871. The patent application, filed 21 July 1873, was granted 16 November 1875, nearly 10 months prior to Edison being issued his patent for the electric pen. It is difficult to imagine Edison was unaware of this device, particularly as it had been awarded the Franklin Institute's highest honour: the 1875 Elliot Cresson Medal (Nyssen, 2015).
The striking similarities between the two devices, and to other devices that followed, disrupts a central theme within media historiography. Who invented it? Who 'authored' it? What is the proprietary link between inventor and invention, between text and author? These considerations are often central to narratives that enshrine each new medium. Gutenberg's invention may well have been a 'sobered-up wine press', as Kittler described it, but it is decidedly not named after the inventor of the wine press (Kittler, 2002: 38). The rather cluttered technical environment in which Edison's electric pen can be unravelled to become S.F. O'Reilly's tattooing machine, or Bonwill's dental mallet, confounds a central tenant of media narratives that there is a discernible proprietary link between the human inventor(s) and the mechanical invention. Instead, Bonwill's electric dental mallet suggests that Edison's electric pen is not the story of a discrete individual device invented by a single individual, that was born, grew old and became obsolescent, but belonged instead to what Parikka has usefully termed a 'machinic ecology' (Parikka, 2015: 11). Within this particular ecology, the machines were so similar that it is difficult to tell one 'species' from another. This situation, not of individual inventions associated with individual male inventors, but of shifting pluralisms and objectives, is hinted at in the dentist Bonwill's own patent application. In it, Bonwill provides a useful description not only of his own invention, but those other near Figure 7. Bonwill-type dental mallet shown without wire and batteries (Ingram, 1876). identical technologies that would follow, including Edison's Electric Pen, O'Reilly's tattoo machine and several other similar machines that appeared in these years. 'My invention' wrote Bonwill, 'relates to dental instruments to be operated by electricity' (emphasis mine, cited in Nyssen, 2015). These instruments, dental or textual, describe an ecology of media in which, for different reasons, each technology had been conceived to perforate, to hammer, to indent a surface and all of which were continuously borrowing from each other and from previous technologies. Collectively these technologies achieve their status as 'new', not so much as technical commodities but in a new relationship to human beings, a working relationship in which electricity made possible a previously unknown technology, and one that the modern citizen was learning to eagerly embrace in the form of a handheld, electrical device.

Conclusion: The machine in the hand
By placing the electric pen equally alongside its less-storied variants, this article has foregrounded how similar machines, through modification and borrowing, established a genus of nearly identical devices that announced an increasingly intimate, at least physically closer relationship between people and technology. These machines shared key characteristics; all were miniaturized, electrically driven and all involved the attachment of an electromagnetic motor to a handheld mechanical device. This alliance represented a class of technology that had not yet existed, an emerging category of machines that both anticipated and fostered an increasing proximity between technology and the human body. The electric pen made clear that the machine was no longer a smoking dynamo that haunted the gardens of pastoral America (Marx, 1964). The machine was now in the hand. In the commonplace epithet of today, it had become 'mobile;' the machine was now moving, out of the laboratory, into the office and, increasingly, into the home. In the case of the electric dental drill and cavity hammer, these machines were also in the mouth, just as Edison's pen, now a tattoo technology, was on the skin, even under the skin. In their daily use, these perforating devices represented a performance of modern society and the performance of the modern individual as she or he attempted to navigate an environment increasingly based on electricity and the electromagnetic motor.
Rather than being elucidated in any meaningful way through a framework of the 'new' or the 'obsolescent', the contributions and cultural impacts of these machines are revealed within the larger discursive context of their histories. Such narrative patterns substantially inform the ways in which new media are rendered palatable for widespread use, and ultimately incorporated into everyday living (Natale, 2016). This domestication, as we have seen here, included a founding narrative in which nature, in the form of electricity, had been tamed by American ingenuity, and inaugurated a future of which these machines became visual manifestations. Through devices such as the electric pen, the tattoo machine and the electric dental mallet, the modern was made visible. These machines established electrification and miniaturization as a defining ethos of the modern age and instituted the new and soon-to-be common practice of holding an electrical machine in the hand.
Like all communications technology, the electric pen, from the beginning, was inextricably dependent on the practices of textuality. Not only do such technologies exist to generate texts, they are themselves, as we have seen here, generated by textuality. From office memos to word of mouth, product endorsements and press articles and science fair prizes, they are technologies that come to be understood and domesticated through the narratives in which they are imbedded. That a technology such as Edison's pen appears in the 'Dead Media Archive' of the NYU's Culture and office menace'. Spillage from one of the machine's two batteries could result in the 'swift removal of a layer or two of shellac from the user's desk ' (1996: 134).