The Essence of Edison: Inventor and Innovator

Here is a paper I wrote for a class entitled Invention, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. This class is all about creativity, managing creativity, and the entrepreneurial mind. This paper is a little more "book report" than the stuff we normally do, still it was great to take some time to learn about a legend like Thomas Edison. I've always thought he was an interesting character. If you have a chance, take a look at the old Harper's magazine article from 1932 about Edison. It's really great and surprisingly, an easy read.

What distinguishes those people in our population who rise from obscurity to the lofty heights of achievement, fame, and fortune, ultimately to have a large impact on our world? This is a persistent question of interest to our human race, which has been asked and answered many times before, yielding a variety of answers. We examine the question in this report through the lens of creativity, choosing the inventor Thomas Edison as an exemplar, and looking to understand who he was and what made him the great inventor and innovator of his day. We seek to understand his background, his thought processes, his methods, his inner motivations and the outward expressions of that energy which inspired him to build the new things which changed the world and propelled him into the great renown for which he is now known.

Biography

To understand the man, we must first understand his history. Thomas Edison was born in a small Midwestern city in the middle of the 19th century. As a young boy, he began home schooling after the headmaster at the one-room school he had been attending found Thomas to be too distracted and “addled”. From then on he was taught by his mother, a respected teacher herself. Before long though, his father’s investments failed and the family fell into poverty. At age 12, he was forced to take a job with the railroad to help keep the family afloat. Here he engaged his interest in science by setting up a chemistry set in one of the baggage compartments. He also embarked on some of his first entrepreneurial ventures, selling fruit to the passengers, and printing a newspaper with railroad updates, which included any up-to-the-minute news of the civil war he could to gather from the telegraph operators at each train station. This job ended abruptly, however, when his chemistry set caught fire, and he was forced to take a job in the local train station instead. Working there, he managed to rescue a young child from getting hit by a runaway train, and as a reward was taught the telegrapher’s trade by the boy’s father. (Wachhorst, 1981)
Riding the rails and working the telegraph, he found and was fired from many jobs throughout the Midwest and Northeast. During this time, he toyed with improvements and additions to the telegraph, including one that allowed him to sleep on the job. (Wachhorst, 1981) Eventually he landed in Boston where the idea that he could make money from his inventions really got into his head. Not long after that, he landed in New York, where he had his first big break. While walking on the street, he came across a man who was very distressed that his stock ticker was not working. Edison fixed the machine, and as a show of gratitude was given an ongoing job making sure that things stayed in good repair. This put him in a position to develop an improved stock ticker, and later the quadriplex telegraph, which allowed one to transmit four telegraph messages over one line at the same time. An important addition to urban telegraphy, this latter invention proved to be a strong commercial success as well. He reinvested the proceeds from this into another innovative venture, his New Jersey lab, which many consider to be the world’s first industrial research laboratory, set up to systematically transform ideas into innovations.

This was the beginning of Thomas Edison’s well know career as inventor, innovator, and industrialist. Ultimately, this New Jersey lab was also the beginning of General Electric, a company that is today, over 100 years later, one of the largest companies in the world. (Fortune Magazine, 2008). After the development of this lab, and through the work of his many assistants and employees, he went on to create many things, including the world’s first commercially viable light bulb, the phonograph, a system for electricity distribution, important improvements to the early motion picture industry, and numerous home appliances. By the end of his life he had received 1,093 patents, both through his own work and the assistance of his laboratory staff. His record has only recently been broken, and hardly with the same far reaching cultural effect. (Maney, 2005)

Methods and Inspiration

Early in his life Edison became disenchanted with theoretical matters. After reading Isaac Newton’s Principa Mathematica “He was so disillusioned by how Newton's sensational theories were written in classical aristocratic terms -which he felt were unnecessarily confusing to the average person -he overreacted and developed a hearty dislike for all such ‘high-tone’ language and mathematics.” (Beals, 1997) Despite this, he was enormously fascinated by science from the beginning, and drawn to its application. His direction in the scientific community, led by his curiosity about the world, became clear.

Ever the entrepreneur, Edison realized early in his adulthood that “… becoming an inventor in a world of corporations required more than perseverance or creative genius. Financing, marketing, and manufacturing were essential additions to invention, and often demanded as much imagination as the creative process itself. ” (Melosi, 2008) This implies that much of his creativity was applied not just to his inventions but to the effective means of bringing them to the market. An example of this can be seen in the partnership he set up with prominent financier JP Morgan and other industrial leaders to build the first electric generation and transmission infrastructure in downtown Manhattan. Additionally, both the idea of an industrial laboratory itself, as well as his effective use of public relations methods represent substantially creative business practices.

Thomas Edison’s approach to creation involved extensive experimentation, iteration, trial and error. One of his most famous quotes, printed in Harper’s Monthly towards the end of his life was "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." (Rosanoff, 1932) This makes his opinion clear: creation is hard work! From this we can infer that in his mind, genius (one can easily assume he relates this to both his genius in product development and business) is not without thought, and in fact is not possible without it, though the vast majority of this creative process is just hard work. As applied to the inventions themselves, he tended to shun highly theoretical approaches to problems in favor of more applied, concrete solutions. In this, he was known for his resilience, even in working through a losing investment to separate iron ore that cost him three million dollars. (Melosi, 2008)

This approach caused him to often be at odds with scientific theorists, and even others in the applied sciences. Nikola Tesla, an inventor and early employee in the New Jersey labs later became one of Edison’s biggest intellectual rivals, stating, Edison’s development process was “inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." (Wikipedia, 2008). Tesla’s adversarial attitude came about because of differences in scientific approach, but also because of Edison’s personality and his haughty attitude towards Tesla. While Edison may have been regarded as a creative genius whose persona was developing into something larger than life, as a man he had his own failings of ego and perspective typical of a celebrity and business leader. It does not seem that Edison was a man primarily motivated by money or power, though through his creations, both came to him, having a drastic impact on his character for both good and ill. While Edison was known to have a sarcastic and even manipulative side, he was also known for his friendliness and informality. In the 1932 Harper’s article, the author tells being hired nearly on the spot, and mentions how Edison had a habit of interacting with all of his researchers directly. (Rosanoff, 1932)

The Wizard

After development of the Phonograph, Edison became known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park” and gained a reputation for the ability to build almost anything. An April Fool’s Day headline in the New York Daily Graphic newspaper claimed “’Edison Invents a Machine that will Feed the Human Race – Manufacturing Biscuits, Meat, Vegetables and Wine out of Air, Water, and Earth.” (Wachhorst, 1981) Additionally, he actually received a patent on a device for communicating with the dead.
His reputation as a wizard stems directly from what seemed to the world at large his unbridled creative mind, and his nearly limitless ability to turn his ideas into real creations. It is this perception that caused his character to develop into something larger than life. It may be noted that much of the biographical information presented shows Edison in an almost mythological light. That, in fact, is the way the information is itself presented in most of his biographies. This is an interesting point, since the myth of Edison plays such strong part in communicating not just who he was – his actual character and persona - but who he came to be in society’s mind - the prototypical American inventor, innovator, creator, and an embodiment of the American dream. As is the case for anyone who has had such a dramatic impact on history, over time it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the man from the myth.

The life and stories of Thomas Edison serve to expose much about the nature creativity to us. We see that habits of curiosity, resilience, and even informality can often lead to greatness in creative endeavors, though this greatness can come with its own costs. Edison can truly be regarded as a creative success, though in fact his greatest successes may not have been in the places we would normally consider: the light bulb, the phonograph, or an electric system. His true creative genius more likely lies in his merging of invention and innovation in such a way as to enable further creation. We remember that it was not just Edison, but to a large extent, his experimental research team that was responsible for the development of those wonders attributed to him. The enduring benefits of these methods can be seen in his early labs, then later at General Electric, and today in all those people and companies that have been inspired by his development methodology. They have systemized and stimulated developments greater than any man, or even any company could have achieved alone. Of those things that distinguish a person to greatness, we can see that habits are important, inspiration also important, hard work crucial, but creating and perpetuating a way of thinking may be most important of all. In this, Thomas Edison’s greatest achievement is still with us today.


Works Cited
Beals, G. (1997, February 1). Thomas Edison Biography. Retrieved 9 12, 2008, from Thomas Alva Edison, American Inventor 1847-1931: http://www.thomasedison.com/biography.html
Fortune Magazine. (2008). Fortune Magazine Global 500. Retrieved September 12, 2008, from CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2008/
Maney, K. (2005, December 6). Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle. Retrieved September 12, 2008, from USA Today - Money: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2005-12-06-top-patent-hoders_x.htm
Melosi, M. V. (2008). Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America. New York: Pearson Longman.
Rosanoff, M. (1932, September). Edison In His Laboratory. Harper's Monthly , pp. 402-417.
Wachhorst, W. (1981). Thomas Alva Edison, An American Myth. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wikipedia. (2008, September 12). Thomas Edison. Retrieved September 12, 2008, from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Edison&oldid=237837762