The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison
Contrary to public perception, he almost never worked on any invention that wasn’t already being pursued by several other people. What set him apart from his peers was his knack for transforming those ideas into practical results.
The Edison Papers team has been able to find little evidence to support the view that inspiration again and again struck Edison like lightning bolts out of the blue.
.. Yet the project team can identify only a few Eureka! moments that actually had valuable results over Edison’s long and illustrious career, and only one–the discovery of the principles behind the phonograph–that deserves the mythic importance with which the public invests such events.
.. Why, given that major inventions seldom emerge as revelations, was Edison so effective? The Edison Papers Project scholars can point to attitudes, work habits, and methods of reasoning that clearly contributed to his prolific output.
.. Edison could not conceive of any experiment as a flop. As Israel puts it, “He saw every failure as a success, because it channeled his thinking in a more fruitful direction.”
.. Edison viewed even disasters as an opportunity for learning. On one occasion his lab stove went out in the dead of winter, causing an assortment of expensive chemicals to freeze. On another occasion unprotected chemicals were damaged by sunlight. Instead of bemoaning the losses, Edison put aside all other projects to catalogue changes in the properties of the bottled substances. Keith Nier observes, “He knew how to turn lemons into lemonade.”
.. A closely related observation of the scholars–one with exciting implications for school-based programs aimed at cultivating innovative minds–is that Edison employed similar problem-solving strategies across numerous technologies. Notably, he reasoned by analogy, with a distinctive repertoire of forms, models, and design solutions that he applied to invention after invention. Reese Jenkins, who assembled and until last year headed the Edison Papers Project staff, calls these repeating motifs in Edison’s work “theme and variations.”
.. Edison the private man is not nearly as scintillating as Edison the inventor and self-promoter. “He had few of the endearing eccentricities commonly associated with genius,”
.. It had been prompted by the news that teenagers were turning up the speed of his cylinder phonograph to make the music faster. Instead of capitalizing on this trend, Edison complained, “This change of speed is far worse than any loss due to having dance records too slow. . . . They are absolutely right time but young folks of the family want this fast time & like stunts & I dont want it & wont have it.” To make sure his will was obeyed, he ordered his machinists to make a governor for the motor.