He Made Science Serve
Thomas A. Edison has been characterized as a lone
wolf in post-Civil War America's technological revolution. Popular
literature of his day tended to paint him in the colors of the rugged
loner, sort of proto-Tom Swift, a frontiersman of science. In fact, this
dramatic portrait is nonsense.
As Josephson suggests, mathematician Norbert Wiener's
description of Edison as a "transitional figure" in American science is
much closer to the truth. Edison's organization of artisans,
technicians, and trained scientific theoreticians became a model for the
complex research laboratories of the 20th century. The development of
the Edison inventions depended not on high insights alone but on the
brainpower, sweat, and imagination of a highly motivated team. The team
at the invention factory helped make the Edison name the popular and
real equal of a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Grant, a Pershing, a Ford, a
Cobb, a Fairbanks.
In his later years, Edison many times closed his mind
to constructive criticism from his assistants. Edison got so he would
not accept much of the advice he received from his employees and even
his sons. He became more crusty and withdrawn. The result was that the
invention factory lost much of its relevance and fell back from the
vanguard of American technology during the 20th century. Creativity
decreased as his visionary scope narrowed.
Edison examines the Projecting Kinetoscope, or movie projector, in the
library of his West Orange laboratory.
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Edison was no social reformer, but his concept of
invention for useful and practical purposes, assisting in the
alleviation of human labor and boredom, was a humanizing influence on
American science. In subordinating invention to commercial and popular
need, Edison advanced his own for tunes and the quality of life in a
nation of men, women, and children barely liberated from dawn-to-dusk
labor in field, sweatshop, and kitchen.
The needs of a people and a nation and his own almost
mystical unquenchable obsession to create, to improve, and to build were
Edison's taskmasters. Few men have ever worked harder and longer for any
master anywhere. If he did not share the virginal and pristine ethics of
a Faraday or Henry in his approach to invention, he did worlds more than
both men to bring increased pleasure and comfort to the people of his
day. He made the business of inventing both productive and less
hazardous through both the genius he debunked and through the hard work
and sweat he claimed.
And he put to rest forever the assertion of an
earlier day that invention was a "divine accident."
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