The Spark of Genius
Thomas Edison created the first light bulb 125 years ago. But he was not only America's greatest inventor. He was also a master entrepreneur
Thomas Edison was America's most productive inventor in the 19th century and remains so into the 21st. His 1,093 patents are by no means the proper measure of the man. To Edison, the patents were the easy part, before "the long, laborious trouble of working them out and producing apparatus which is commercial" --and then fighting off the pirates. Edison's greatness lies not in any single invention, not even in the whole panoply, but in what he did with his own and other men's cleverness.
The invention for which he is most remembered, the incandescent bulb, is emblematic. The technology was a marked advance over the work of other inventors, but the piercing vision--and it was Edison's alone--was how he would bring light and power to millions of homes and offices. The historian Ruth Cowan writes that Edison from the beginning wanted to build a technological system and a series of businesses to manage that system. By the time he applied for any patent, Edison had already envisaged how he could translate the invention into a tangible, commercial product; indeed, he would not begin the research otherwise. Still, he was a classic innovator. "Only Leonardo da Vinci evokes the inventive spirit as impressively," writes the historian Thomas Hughes, "but, unlike Edison, Leonardo actually constructed only a few of his brilliant conceptions." Purists might respond that Leonardo was on his own whereas Edison had clever men at his beck and call--but what a sensible notion that was! One man could hardly hope to keep up with the efflorescence of knowledge in the sciences and the profusion of new techniques and new materials. In the decades after 1870, when industrialization in manufacturing superseded the machine-shop culture, it was quite brilliant to finance and focus multidisciplinary research in an organized manner with the deliberate intention of manufacturing the results. The momentum by which the United States surpassed Britain as the greatest industrial power near the turn of the century was in significant part due to the culture of research and development. In the year Edison was born, 1847, only 495 inventors won patents; in the year of his 40th birthday, he had more than 20,000 lesser mortals for company.
Little Al, as he was called then, did not do well at school. At the age of 8, in 1855, Edison was described by a teacher as "a little addled." Edison himself recalled, "I was always at the foot of the class. I used to feel that the teachers did not sympathize with me." Part of the trouble was that he missed years of lessons because of a series of infections, one of which seriously damaged his hearing. He was also ill-suited to rote learning; he could reach understanding only by doing and making.
His father, Sam, was a handsome jack-of-all-trades of Dutch extraction who became a lighthouse keeper on moving his family to Port Huron, Mich., in 1854. He had endless schemes for getting rich that never quite came off, but the little family was comfortable by the standards of the day, if erratically in debt. But it was Al's very protective mother, Nancy, a devout Presbyterian (who always dressed in black in memory of three children dead in infancy), who would be the boy's salvation. She divined that Al had a visual imagination and unusual powers of reasoning, and made it her business to take him out of the school that found him defective. She read him classics like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Sear's History of the World, and when he kept asking questions she could not answer ( What is electricity? What is pitch made of? ) she put into his hands, at the age of 9, R. G. Parker's A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy . It illustrated simple home experiments in chemistry and electricity, and Al attempted every one of them. When he left school for good at 13, a boy with a large head and jutting jaw, Alva was "dead set on being an engineer of a locomotive."
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