Edison, Thomas (1847–1931)

U.S. inventor and entrepreneur

Thomas Alva Edison was the greatest inventor in modern history. Since his rise to fame in the 1870s he has been one of history's most mythologized figures. The richness and complexity of his work, combined with the legends that have surrounded it, make Edison's career an especially challenging puzzle for those who seek to recover the “real” Edison. However, because of the availability of millions of pages of Edison laboratory notebooks, correspondence, and other documents, historians now have a much clearer understanding of Edison's life and work. If anything, writings based on the Edison papers have only reinforced the remarkable nature of his career; Edison remains a towering figure in the history of modern technological and business development. At the same time, the “new” Edison differs in several significant ways from the Edison of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hagiography (a worshipful or idealized biography). How he established and operated scores of businesses; how he recruited, motivated, and collaborated with other technologists; how he organized and supervised employees; and how he cultivated and leveraged his own public image—in short, how Edison functioned as a leader—have emerged as central themes of his career.

Edison was issued 1,093 U.S. patents and made major contributions to the development of several of the modern world's most important industries—telegraphy, telephony, electric light and power, recorded sound (the phonograph), motion pictures, chemical energy storage (batteries)—as well as less sweeping but still notable contributions to the fields [Page 391]of mimeography, railroads, cement, automobiles, ore separation, and others. His discovery of the socalled Edison effect laid the groundwork for the development of radio. However, Edison was as much an entrepreneur and innovator as he was an inventor. That is, he was centrally occupied not only with creating but also with commercializing. According to many historians of technology, the process of innovation entails both invention and commercial application. This process typically involves applying new ideas to build working prototypes, then (with continual modification) scaling up production for sales. In this way theories, concepts, and designs are first embodied in the physical world, as technology, and then launched in the marketplace, as products. Edison devoted considerable attention to all stages of this process—conceptualization, design, model building, and commercialization—which involved him with a variety of individuals, including scientists and mathematicians, craftsmen and mechanics, investors, politicians, and customers. In his interactions with each kind of stakeholder (a person having an interest in an outcome), Edison exhibited a distinctive and usually quite effective leadership style.

Thomas Alva Edison in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Bettmann/Corbis; used with permission.

Born on a farm in Milan, Ohio, Edison began his professional career as a telegrapher, which gave him a decent income and plenty of mobility. He hung out his shingle as an inventor and began to attract modest corporate capital in Boston during a stint there in 1868–1869. His initial work focused on improving telegraph, fire alarm, and facsimile telegraph systems. Edison soon moved to New York City, expanded his work into new areas, and achieved some notable success—along with additional venture capital. In 1876 he opened what he called an “invention factory” in the northeastern New Jersey farm community of Menlo Park. It was a predecessor of the twentieth-century research and development laboratory, an institution devoted to controlling the pace and direction of technological development.

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