By Teresa Riordan The blackout of 2003 put
into deep relief how radically electricity has
changed daily human life in the past century.
Electric lights allow us to work at night in a way
that would have been inconceivable during most of
the 19th century. Electricity powers not only
Manhattan's traffic lights and elevators but
also all of our computers, cellphones, PDAs,
televisions, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, coffee
makers, and refrigerators. Without this power,
travel as we know it would not be possible, air
conditioning would be inconceivable, and the
Internet would remain the province of fantasy
writers. "It's become so much a part of
our daily lives that we can't even imagine
doing without it anymore," notes Paul B.
Israel, editor of the Edison Papers and author of
Edison: A Life of Invention.
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So it should
come as no surprise that Thomas Edison's patent
for the electric light bulb is one of two patents
identified by National Archives curators as being
symbolic of the importance of invention in American
life. (The other is Eli Whitney's for the
cotton gin.) But Edison's light bulb was
important not because he was the first with the idea
(indeed, perhaps as many as 10 others envisioned
similar schemes) but rather because he envisioned
not just a bulb but an electrified world. According
to Israel, Edison's genius was really the idea
of using high-resistance circuits in what we all
know now as the grid: "If he had used
low-resistance circuits, he would have had to use
thick copper cables and the system would have been
too expensive. It is pretty clear that Edison is the
one who conceptualized this first, and we see that
in this patent."
Thousands of other patents
have since our nation's inception helped to
transform our lives hearthside. Indeed, says Stacey
Bredhoff, senior exhibit curator at the National
Archives, the Edison and Whitney patents should be
thought of as merely "mileposts along the
road" in the great landscape of American
invention. While historians seem nearly unanimous in
applauding electricity as one of the top five such
inventions, beyond that consensus is elusive. Here
are a few of the often-named co-runners:
The
pill. The contraceptive pill not only fomented the
sexual liberation of the '60s; it also helped
call into question the gender-based division of
labor that had been taken for granted for centuries.
Yet the pill was just the culmination of a century
and a half of contraceptive invention, as Andrea
Tone points out in her history Devices and
Desires. Long before the pill, in fact, George
Bernard Shaw called the rubber condom the
"greatest invention of the nineteenth
century." The average birthrate among white
American women dropped from seven children in 1800
to about 3.5 in 1900--thanks not just to the rubber
condom but also to diaphragms and douching syringes
and other prophylactics. (The very popular Lysol,
however, first invented as a contraceptive douche,
was famously ineffective).
The Internet.
"Until about 150 years ago, it was impossible
to communicate with someone in real time unless they
were in the same room," notes Tom Standage,
author of The Victorian Internet. The only way
to send a message to someone far away was by horse
or ship. Telecommunications innovations--first the
telegraph, followed by the telephone, the radio, the
television, and now the Net and E-mail--have
completely collapsed our sense of time and space and
profoundly altered the way humans communicate. Of
course, the Internet stands on the shoulders of many
other inventions, chiefly the computer itself.
