Thomas Edison and the eccentric nature of genius

The Wizard of Menlo Park invented the modern world, pioneering everything from recorded sound to the light bulb, but he did with an eccentricity inseparable from his unique genius.

If Thomas Alva Edison had invented the phonograph alone, the world’s first device for recording and playing back sound, he would have been considered a genius.  The device itself was heralded as a miracle in 1877, said to capture a little piece of a person’s soul for all eternity.  Poems were written about the stunning achievement, something no one at the time considered possible much less probable:

In me are souls, embalmed.  I am an ear
Flawless as truth, and truth’s own tongue am I.
I am a resurrection; men may hear
The quick and the dead converse, as I reply.

Edison, however, had already moved on to new inventions before the phonograph officially hit the market.  A few years later, the Wizard of Menlo Park, a moniker he loathed, stunned the world by solving another set of problems that were said to be unsolvable, the subdivision of electric energy to power homes and offices, and the development of an incandescent filament that could withstand the energy required to illuminate interior and exterior spaces, the light bulb.  At the time, the idea that electricity could produce light was well known.  Expensive, fast burning, overly bright arc lights were used in industrial applications, and others had experimented with devices resembling modern bulbs.  No one, however, had ever figured out how to efficiently power these bulbs from a central station or how to craft a bulb that would burn for more than a few minutes.  Edison rightly recognized that you cannot have one without the other, and so he designed the entire system himself, developing a radical new generator, dynamos, circuits, wiring, switches, and everything else required to power his equally radical new lightbulb with a carbon filament.  Once he proved it in principle, he personally managed the manufacture and installment of thousands of new electric lights in downtown New York City, at times digging the ditches for the underground cables himself.

Edison’s infatuation with the mechanics of sight and sound did not end with the phonograph or the lightbulb.  Painstakingly, he combined both, first into moving pictures, and ultimately into pictures synchronized with sound, what he affectionately called “talkies” which were played through a device he called the kinetograph.  Once again, he foresaw all of the infrastructure necessary to support these new wonders.  He recorded thousands of artists in one of the world’s first audio studios, and did the same with film on a specialized stage, creating and distributing hundreds of original movies long before anything resembling the modern production system.  Even when Edison failed by almost every measure, he somehow managed to turn what would have destroyed most ordinary people into a future success.  Perhaps his most spectacular disaster was when he turned his skills to mining in the mid-1890s.  Edison was incapable of thinking small, and he conceived a revolutionary new mining technique that would extract ore from ordinary settlement using the magnetic force, believing the could obtain high quality iron from low quality sources in Sparta, New Jersey and do it cheaply enough to compete with mines that had higher quality materials to start with in the western mountains.  To achieve this goal, he realized he would need to invent the world’s first automated mining operation, and he built a breakthrough facility, the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

Across 480 some odd processes, Edison deployed the most ingenious machinery – steam shovels, giant rollers, conveyor belts, crushers, and a mile of magnets, harnessing mechanical, gravitational, and magnetic force on an unheard of scale. Every forty five seconds, steam shovels mounted at the top of the hill loaded six ton slabs of raw materials onto carts that followed a track to the ground below and then returned empty to the top for a new load.  The Traveling Crane lifted the slabs to the top of Crusher House and its giant rollers, capable of breaking down even the largest in three seconds.  Pulled by gravity, the smaller pieces continued downward to another set of rollers and were chewed into smaller stones.  An elevator then lifted them up to a device which grinded them even further, then onto a second elevator and a conveyor belt where the rubble was roasted.  A third elevator and more conveyors carried the smoking mass to even more rollers that beat it into gravel, and forced it through mesh screens arranged in a zigzag so only the finest materials will reach the bottom.  From there, it fell again through the magnets, pulling out the ore.  Another round of heat, and another pass through fifty mesh screens and more magnets, before cleaning and dephosphorization, and then final preparation and storage.   McClure’s magazine described it this way, “The never ending and never resting stream of material constantly circulates through the various buildings…and not once in its course is it arrested or jogged onward by human agency.”  The journalist, Theodore Waters, was also impressed with the efficiency, including a recycling program.  Edison sold the waste products as abrasives and other materials in construction.

Alas, even the world’s greatest inventor could not rewrite the law of supply and demand, and the continued discovery of richer reserves in the west doomed his mine to failure – after he invested about $3,000,000 of his own money into the venture.  As he put it, “I put three million dollars down that hole in the ground, and never heard it hit bottom.” This was true, but not the end of the story:  A few years later, he applied these same automated techniques to the manufacturing of cement, and produced the world’s highest quality products at a tidy profit.  Henry Ford, who idolized Edison, also took note and turned these ideas into the assembly line for the Model T, but Edison still wasn’t done yet.  He turned this attention to chemistry, and succeeded in inventing the first modern batteries.  From there, he pioneered techniques to manufacture synthetic rubber.

As hard as it is to believe, this summary only scratches the surface of his major achievements.  Throughout his adult life, Edison averaged one patent every twelve days, sometimes filing more than a hundred in a single year. Among these marvels are the electric pen, the carbon telephone transmitter, the X-ray fluoroscopy, earbuds, voice-activated motors, audio mail, a mechanism to measure the temperature of the stars, a safety lamp for minors, a specialized telescope, tornado proof houses, quadruplex telegraphy, and hundreds of others, large and small.  Overall, it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t dream up and nothing he didn’t consider, up to and including recording audio on magnetic tape, what would ultimately be used in cassettes, videotapes, and computers.  To say that we live in the world of Edison’s imagination is still something of an understatement, a phrase that can be interpreted quite literally rather than merely figuratively:  The circuits, wiring, and even the process of metering electricity in your house remains much the same as his original vision.  It is only the sheer volume and ubiquitous nature of his inventions over one hundred years later that has resulted in us taking many of them for granted.  Today, it is difficult to imagine a world without electric light and recorded sight and sound, but the same was not true when Edison died in 1931, about fifty years after he changed the world.  Many in that era remembered a world of darkness and silence that was forever changed by Edison, and in the wake of his death it is no exaggeration to say the country went dark in honor of his passing.  

Genius, however, rarely comes without a cost.  The kind of mind that changes the world is not the kind that conforms easily to the norms most of us live by, a fact typified by Edison throughout his life.  Even at a young age, he was markedly different.  He struggled in school and had little formal education beyond the absolute basics, not completing any schooling at all after the age of thirteen, if not earlier.  Those who knew him at the time describe a socially outcast dreamer unable to connect with the average person.  One person described him as “a child that was always doing funny things different from other children, [who] loved to be by himself.”  Another said he “seemed to Be thinking of something all the time & not Playing much,” though he had as “dirty [a] nose & face as the other boys,” likely from conducting endless experiments rather than roughhousing.   Even his father, Sam Edison, claimed that “Thomas Alva never had any boyhood days.”  He continued, “Was he a remarkable smart boy?  Why, no.  Some folks thought he was a little addled, I believe.  Teacher told us to keep him in the streets, for he would never make a scholar.”  Edison’s social struggles were exacerbated by an illness or other calamity that struck when he was twelve or thirteen years old, leaving him mostly deaf for the rest of life, a disability that got progressively worse as he got older.  Incredibly, Edison claimed he could hear by pressing a wire in his mouth and holding it up against a speaker.  The irony of a deaf man inventing recorded music and recording the world’s greatest singers, composers, and more should not be underestimated.

Edison began experimenting at a young age, setting up his first lab in his parent’s basement, but the world would have to wait for him to begin inventing things.  He was a serial entrepreneur first, taking advantage of train service between Port Huron, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan to sell food, dry goods, and newspapers, even hiring other teenagers and paying them a commission for their services.  When he realized a portion of the baggage car wasn’t being utilized, Edison set up a print shop on the train itself and sold subscriptions to his personal newspaper.   Fortunately or unfortunately, he began conducting experiments on the train and almost destroyed the baggage car, prompting a change in career that ultimately led him to the burgeoning telegraphy industry and the forefront of technology, the perch from which he would become the most famous and influential man alive.  Some things about him never changed, however.  He was careless of his clothes and, even as a wealthy man, was said to dress practically in rags which were frequently dirty.  He was married twice and widowed once.  In some sense, he doted over both wives, writing them notes and poems proclaiming his unending love and showing what might best be described as a saucier side.  In his notebook, he would doodle sketches of their faces emblazoned on his inventions, but work always came first and when it came to his career as an inventor, Edison was an addict.  He would regularly put in over 18 hours a day, go days without sleeping, and sleep wherever he found it convenient at the time.  There are photos of him taking a nap on the ground in front of Presidents and other business titans.  He had six children, and yet remained variously estranged from them, unable to connect on any kind of emotional level.  When his oldest daughter was close to death from an illness in Europe, he declined to send her so much as a “get well soon” though he did send money.  Money was something else he had trouble with; he earned a lot and was obsessed with being rich to some extent while jealousy guardian his inventions to the fullest extent, but spent more and there were points even after he was successful when he had less than $20 in his bank account.

He also showed little to no connection with material things in general, spending most of his money on his laboratory and research.  When his industrial complex burned to the ground late in his life, destroying years of work, he remarked to a colleague, “Yes, Maxell, a big fortune has gone up in flames tonight, but isn’t it a beautiful sight?” At the same time, he was said to be personable in small groups with a sense of humor which was at times inscrutable.  He was, however, deathly afraid of public speaking and rare was the appearance when he said a single word to a large group, going half a century without doing so.  More than anything else, it appears Edison lived in his own head and whatever was on his varied mind commanded his full attention, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  My favorite anecdote in this regard concerns a meeting of the chairmen of the Democrat Party at the Biltmore Hotel along with Henry Ford.  Edison was a lifelong Republican and wasn’t thrilled about the meeting.  An attendee, Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, described the scene:  “I do not suppose anything so strange ever occurred at a luncheon in New York or elsewhere…after the first course, Edison pointed to a large chandelier with many globes, in the middle of the room.  ‘Henry, I’ll bet you anything you want that I can kick the globe off that chandelier.’  It hung high toward the ceiling.  Ford said he would take the bet.  Edison rose, pushed the table to one side of the room, took his stand in the center and with his eye fixed on the globe, made the highest kick I have ever seen a man make and smashed the globe into smithereens.  He then said, ‘Henry, let me see what you can do.’  The automobile manufacturer took careful aim, but his foot missed the chandelier by a fraction of an inch.  Edison had won and for the balance of the meal or until ice-cream was served, he was crowing over Ford.  ‘You are a younger man than I, but I can out-kick you.’  He seemed prouder of that high kick than if he had invented a means of ending the U-boat warfare.”

Rarely, does a single, short episode sum up the eccentricity of genius, all of which Thomas Alva Edison had in spades, even as he changed the world.