Late Great Engineers: Thomas Alva Edison - Bright ideas from Menlo Park

What Albert Einstein was to theoretical physics, Thomas Alva Edison was to invention, innovation and technology discovery. That’s according to armchair technologists who have accorded both men the dubious honour of household name status. Even heads of state have got in on the act. On 18 October 1931 – the day Edison died – US President Herbert Hoover, eulogised him as the nation’s ‘greatest inventor’ and ‘a rare genius’.

While Hoover remembered his friend as doing “more than any other American to place invention on an organised basis”, other analyses of Edison’s legacy are more guarded. In 1947 (16 years after his death), the journal Nature published Edison’s obituary, closing its first paragraph in cautionary, coded and euphemistic language: “all that he did has to be studied with a knowledge of what had been and was done by others, for he always made fullest use of contemporary discoveries.”

As with Einstein, when it comes to Edison there exists a tangled web of publicly-owned myth that has little to do with the facts. Which means it’s hardly surprising that almost a century after his death Edison still divides opinion. To some, he was the greatest engineer ever to have walked the earth: a modern Leonardo da Vinci, who invented the lightbulb, electrical power generation, audio recording, moving pictures, the telegraph. To others he was an opportunistic charlatan who “lied, cheated and scammed his way to the top”, tortured animals, stole ideas, bullied competitors and destroyed their legacies.

Somewhere in between these extremes there’s the founder of the world’s first industrial research and development laboratory – the so-called ‘invention factory’ at Menlo Park – as well as a canny entrepreneur with a keen understanding of the concept of multiple discovery, and holder of more than a thousand patents. Working with his team of scientists and engineers at Menlo Park, the American businessman nudged existing scientific ideas into the orbit of commercialisation. As an article in the New Yorker puts it: “The inventor did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.”

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1847 at a time of burgeoning American innovation. In the same year Richard Hoe literally revolutionised newspaper printing with the introduction of his rotary printing press, Samuel Colt started selling his first revolver, while the US issued its inaugural postage stamps. Descended from Dutch immigrants, the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison, the young Thomas was home-schooled by his mother. His only formal tuition was a course in chemistry at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Beyond that, the sickly child who suffered hearing problems from the age of 12, relied on his own reading and experiments in his largely silent world. As an adult he said that deafness worked to his advantage as it reduced distractions. 

Edison’s first job was as a ‘news butcher’ selling newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, a position he was removed from after white phosphorous in his illicit chemistry set caused a fire on board. At some point he saved a three-year-old child from being hit by a runaway train. The infant’s father was a station agent who, in gratitude for Edison saving his son’s life, trained the young inventor as a telegraph operator. Edison went on to work in telegraphy on the Grand Trunk Railway, but resigned before he could be dismissed for his involvement in a near collision of two trains.

This was when Edison discovered his flair for business, obtaining the rights to sell newspapers on the line; the first of his commercial ventures that would culminate in the formation of General Electric, once the largest publicly traded company in the world. In Edison: Inventing the Century, Edison’s biographer Neil Baldwin describes an erratic period in Edison’s youth in which (among many other incidents) he was fired from the Associated Press for spilling sulphuric acid on his boss’s desk. Shortly after, Edison filed his first patent – for an electric vote recorder (U.S. Patent 90,646) – before moving to New York in the late 1860s, where he joined forces with electrical expert Franklin Pope to develop a multiplex telegraphic system. In the first half of the 1870s Edison worked in a communications industry dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company. As a freelancer, he offered his services to the highest bidder and often worked for Western Union’s competitors.

While stringing for Western Union, he devised the quadruplex telegraph that was acquired by Wall Street financier Jay Gould, who paid Edison $100,000. At the time it was one of the largest sums ever paid for an invention. This capital allowed Edison to buy a laboratory and machine workshop in rural Menlo Park where, along with Charles Batchelor and John Kruesi, he started work on underwater automatic telegraph cabling and devised a carbon pressure relay that improved the audibility of the telephone that was to be patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. By 1877, Edison had developed his carbon-button transmitter that would be used in telephone speakers and microphones for the following century. His work on acoustic telegraphy led to the accidental discovery of phonography, and on the unveiling of his ‘tinfoil phonograph’ – that could, with a stylus, reproduce sound from a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil – he was dubbed ‘the Wizard of Menlo Park.’ It would take a further decade to transform his discovery from a laboratory curiosity to a commercial product.

During his experiments at Menlo Park, Edison refined the technology that would enter the language as a byword for a bright idea. And yet, in one of the neatest twists of technological fate, the invention of the light bulb never had a classic ‘light bulb moment’, largely due to the fact that it was the product of a prolonged series of independent and incremental breakthroughs by engineers and scientists separated by both time and geography. Curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, Bernard S. Finn, says that for all the elements of multiple discovery, it was Edison “who came up with a commercially viable solution”. Meanwhile, in Edison’s Electric Light: The Art of Invention, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent technology prior to Edison, and yet still regard him as the primary innovator in the field. This is due to the combination of three critical factors Edison got right simultaneously: the incandescent material, high vacuum levels and high resistance. On New Year’s Eve 1879, Edison illuminated Menlo Park with a display that could be seen from 20 miles away. Always ready with a memorable sound bite, Edison predicted that electric light would become “so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”

Edison realised that electric light needed an electrical supply utility, and during the 1880s under the banner of the Edison Illuminating Company, he patented a system for electrical distribution. His first installation – that provided 110 volts of direct current (DC) to 59 customers in Lower Manhattan in 1882 – was met with strong opposition from companies installing alternating current (AC) systems, arguably initiating the ‘war of currents’. Edison’s low voltage system had the drawback that power could only be supplied over short distances, while competing AC technology from Westinghouse Electric used higher voltages that Edison saw as dangerous, leading him to declare in 1886: “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size.”

Losing the ‘war’, to counter market share loses, Edison colluded in an anti-AC PR offensive that included the public electrocution of animals, as well as becoming involved in the development of the electric chair method of execution – strategies pitched at highlighting AC’s alleged lethal potential while smearing Westinghouse. Edison’s stockholders took a dim view and forced Edison to relinquish control of his own company that eventually emerged as General Electric.

Edison moved from Menlo Park after the death of his first wife to West Orange in New Jersey where he lived with his second. He later bought property in Fort Myers, Florida where he established another research laboratory to conduct research into rubber with investment from Henry Ford (who had once worked as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit) and Harvey Firestone. He died at West Orange in 1931 of diabetes-related complications, his last breath reportedly captured in a test tube and kept at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit. In his statement on Edison’s death, President Hoover remarked that Edison “multiplied light and dissolved darkness; he added to whole wealth of nations.”

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