August 1, 2010

The Edison of 1879

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE

The cover of the July 5 special History Issue of TIME magazine features Thomas Edison holding a glowing bulb. A series of articles celebrate Edison’s many inventions and closes with this: “Edison’s laboratories were the forerunners of the interactive technological think tanks of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.” Though the sentiment lauds Edison, I think it’s an overstatement.

The September 1924 issue of Electrical World (a then-sister magazine of POWER that began in 1874 and solidly supported Edison until his death in 1931) published a “retrospective glance” by Francis Jehl, an early Edison associate, titled “The Edison of 1879.” (You can download the article from the online version of this story at http://www.powermag.com.) Jehl notes that “When Edison conducted those epoch-making researches which revolutionized the world he had six laboratory assistants who carried out the experiments under his direction and supervision.” His point is that though others were at work in the lab, the ideas were Edison’s alone.

Come to think of it, even many of our more recent achievements, like those coming from the companies TIME lists, have been largely shaped by individuals. As a recent Fast Company article notes, “Apple’s engineers spend 100% of their time making products planned by a small club of senior managers—and sometimes entirely by Jobs himself. The CEO appoints himself the de facto product manager for every important release.” And then there’s Google, the brainchild of a duo—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—even though their enterprise now consists of many other technology experts.

Perhaps the real lesson is that though individuals may come up with brilliant breakthroughs, they depend upon the hands of many others to bring those breakthroughs to the masses and carry them forward.

The TIME stories couldn’t possibly cover everything interesting about Edison, so here are a few more tidbits related to our industry.