I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty, as perhaps you know, was in constructing the carbon filament, the incandescence of which is the source of the light. Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials were used, until finally the shred of bamboo now utilized was settled upon. Even now…, I am still at work nearly every day on the lamp, and quite lately I have devised a method of supplying sufficient current to fifteen lamps with one horse-power. Formerly ten lamps per horse-power was the extreme limit.31
At just thirty-three years old, Edison had revolutionized lighting and was now the most famous inventor in all the world. With the bulb technology established, Edison turned to creating a centralized power plant in Manhattan. Lighting, after all, could be used only by people with electricity, and the race was now on to determine supremacy in electrification. By the time Edison’s company began placing electrical lines underground based on direct current, Charles Brush, another Ohio-born inventor, already had a head start installing lines based on alternating current (the technology invented by Nikola Tesla) that powered the arc lighting systems he was providing to several parts of the city. Although Edison was offered many opportunities to build isolated lighting systems for particular businesses that would operate their own onsite power plants, he turned most of them down and instead focused on developing a centralized system that could power an entire city.
Edison successfully began lighting districts of Manhattan by 1882, but growth of the installations inside and beyond the city was slower than he had expected, and the thirty-five-year-old “Wizard of Menlo Park” began to get bored and impatient. Although he could not bring himself to relinquish managerial control over Edison Electric, he began searching for some new intellectual challenge to stimulate him. Friends encouraged him to return to completing the phonograph, but Edison did not consider the phonograph to be either important or exciting. It was not until the threat of competition emerged—in the form of a company called American Graphophone that marketed a product invented by his rival Alexander Graham Bell—that Edison was inspired to return to the phonograph.
Edison’s competitive nature was brought out in an interview with the New York Tribune: “I don’t care so much for a fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”32 The idea that Bell would steal the limelight for the phonograph—an invention he had referred to as “his baby”—was infuriating. Unfortunately, Edison’s deafness meant that he did not see the phonograph from the perspective of a typical consumer. Edison was convinced that the phonograph’s best purpose was for recording the human voice (as in recording speeches or as a dictation machine for businesses); he could not imagine the mass appeal of music played for entertainment purposes. This is understandable when one considers his impairment. After all, as Edison’s daughter Madeleine noted, Edison often had to resort to putting his teeth on a piano—literally biting it—in order to hear the music by having it vibrate through his skull bones!33 (Phonographs currently displayed in the Edison Museum in Fort Myers, Florida, show Edison’s teeth marks.) Unfortunately, the machine’s ability to play back intelligible speech was limited, and most of the early devices were scrapped. It would be several years until Edison introduced his “improved” phonograph and built manufacturing facilities next to his new laboratory (now in Orange, New Jersey) to produce both phonographs and recorded cylinders.34
Edison’s personal life also took an unexpected turn. Mary, now mother of Edison’s three children, was having unexplained health problems: constant headaches, panic attacks, and fatigue. She died in 1884 at the age of twenty-nine. Her exact cause of death is unknown, but her death certificate states that she died from “congestion of the brain,” a description often given by doctors of the time for morphine overdose (morphine was readily available without prescription and was widely taken for a range of ailments). Edison was distraught and floundered briefly, but by the summer of 1885 he had become infatuated with nineteen-year-old Mina Miller, and they were married the next year. Unlike Mary, Mina came from a wealthy family and was educated and cultured. Whereas Mary likely suffered from being left alone so often by Edison, Mina excelled in her role of managing Edison’s life (she even referred to herself as the “home executive”) and was also busy serving leadership roles with the Chautauqua Association and the Daughters of the Revolution. Edison adored Mina, and she brought great comfort to his life, which he would need in the hard years to come.
By this time the “current wars,” a public battle between supporters of AC versus DC, were well under way. Alternating current had the advantage of being capable of transmitting much larger amounts of power greater distances, making it much more economical. Direct current had the advantage of being perceived as safer—an attribute that Edison vigorously reinforced by comparing the length of time it took to electrocute dogs with AC versus DC. Ultimately, however, economy won out: AC was the overwhelming winner. Thus, in 1890 Edison was willing to sell his stake in the electric light business and his various manufacturing businesses to a group of investors led by Henry Villard, who formed the Edison General Electric Company. Edison, who received shares worth $3.5 million, was eager to have more ready access to cash and to focus more on his work in the laboratory, which he assumed would continue to be funded by Edison General Electric. He quickly sold 90 percent of his shares. Much to his dismay, however, the new company, now free from Edison’s controlling hand, slashed the budget it would pay to the laboratory and demanded that Edison’s laboratory develop an alternating-current system. J. P. Morgan also arranged for the company to be merged with longtime competitor Thomson-Houston, and its executives filled out nearly all of the new company’s leadership positions. The new company also shed Edison’s name—in 1892 it became General Electric Company.
Edison was shocked. The “sharps” had maneuvered him right out of his central role in the industry, much as they would later do to Nikola Tesla. In an unusual moment of personal candor and humility, he admitted “I am not business man enough to spend time” in the power and lighting business.35
However, letting go of lighting allowed Edison to do what he did best: throw himself completely into something entirely new. He was convinced that he had conceived of a novel way to extract iron from ore by magnets. New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had large repositories of low-grade iron ore, but mining it by conventional means was too expensive to attract investors. Edison believed that he could develop a system of magnetic concentration that would make mining low-grade ore much easier and thus economically competitive. Determined that this would be “so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before,”36 he committed himself fully to his new venture. Rather than enjoy the comfortable life that the proceeds from his sale of the electric company would have afforded, Edison now spent most of his time in stark conditions at the Ogden mine he had purchased in northern New Jersey. He couldn’t ask Mina to move up to the mine, so instead he would take the train up on Monday mornings and return on the last train on Saturday nights. For five years Edison continued in this way, working in freezing winters, scorching summers, and air that was heavy with dust. Despite such hard conditions, Edison’s letters to his wife paint the picture of a man who was having fun. Edison enjoyed hard work, and even as his money ran out and his colleagues became dejected, Edison thrived with the pleasure of novel technical problems to solve. The mining venture was a failure, and soon Edison had spent all of the money he had made in the sale of his lighting business. When told his shares in General Electric would have been worth $4 million if he had kept them (over $108 million in 2017 dollars), he paused and then responded, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a good time spending it.”37
While Edison was busy at the mine, W. K. L. Dickson was working on a kinetoscope—the precursor to moder
n movie projection—back at Edison’s laboratory. As with the phonograph, Edison did not see the enormous potential value of the kinetoscope as an entertainment device and did little to advance or promote the product. However, others did see its potential, and soon inventors were developing machines that would enable viewers to watch short films by peering into a tiny box. Luckily for Edison, when C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat invented a machine that would enable projecting films onto a large screen, the distributors that Armat approached (Raff & Gammon, which distributed Edison’s kinetoscope) insisted that it would be very beneficial to convince Edison to lend his name to the venture. Edison agreed, and the “Vitascope” was widely attributed to Edison’s genius, even though he contributed almost nothing to its creation. Edison’s company went on to develop numerous improvements to motion picture projectors and to produce a large number of films until Edison left the business in 1918.
In 1900, after having conceded defeat in the mining operation and shutting down the ore-milling plant, Edison decided to set about inventing a better storage battery. Automobiles had recently been introduced, and most were steam powered or electric. However, the lead-acid batteries used by electric cars were very heavy and short lived because the acid inside them corroded the metalwork. Edison believed it would be possible to develop batteries that were lighter, less expensive, and powerful enough to be the foundation of a successful electric car. As he noted to a friend, R. H. Beach of General Electric, “Beach, I don’t think Nature would be so unkind as to withhold the secret of a GOOD storage battery if a real earnest hunt for it is made. I’m going to hunt.”38 Edison set about searching for a better battery design with characteristic zeal and multitudes of experiments. As Edison’s friend and associate Walter S. Mallory recounted,
About 7 or 7:30 A.M. he would go down to the laboratory and experiment, only stopping for a short time at noon to eat a lunch sent down from the house. About 6 o’clock the carriage would call to take him to dinner, from which he would return by 7:30 or 8 o’clock to resume work. The carriage came again at midnight to take him home, but frequently had to wait until 2 or 3 o’clock, and sometimes return without him, as he had decided to continue all night. This had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him. I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?” Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”39
Edison would never succeed in developing a reliable and economical battery for automobiles, despite being given several loans from Henry Ford, who saw Edison as a hero and a close friend. Ford famously wrote in his autobiography that Edison was “the world’s worst businessman” and that he “knows almost nothing of business,” although it is clear that Ford’s respect and affection for Edison never wavered.40 Most of Edison’s businesses struggled, and other people would profit much more from his inventions than he did himself (as happened also to Tesla), but in general he expressed little remorse or discouragement about unprofitable projects. The work itself was his primary joy. “I never intend to retire,” he stated. “Work made the Earth a paradise for me.”41 Furthermore, despite the spotty nature of Edison’s commercial success, his name would be indelibly associated with a remarkable array of technologies. In 1928 Congress estimated the value of his contribution to the world at $15.6 billion (about $220 billion in 2017 dollars) when it awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal. Edison’s personal estate at his death in 1931 was worth $12 million ($180 million in 2017 dollars).42
In 1910 Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin, the biographers who knew Edison well, speculated about the characteristics that had led to his inordinate success as an inventor. They concluded that in addition to his clarity of thought, well-developed imagination, and physical vigor and stoicism, he had
an intense, not to say courageous, optimism in which no thought of failure can enter, an optimism born of self-confidence, and becoming—after forty or fifty years of experience—more and more a sense of certainty in the accomplishment of success. In the overcoming of difficulties he has the same intellectual pleasure as the chess-master when confronted with a problem requiring all the efforts of his skill and experience to solve. To advance along smooth and pleasant paths, to encounter no obstacles, to wrestle with no difficulties and hardships—such has absolutely no fascination to him. He meets obstruction with the keen delight of a strong man battling with the waves and opposing them in sheer enjoyment, and the greater and more apparently overwhelming the forces that may tend to sweep him back, the more vigorous his own efforts to forge through them.43
In a 1921 interview Edison would aptly illustrate his self-efficacy and tenacity when he described his attitude toward failure:
I never allow myself to become discouraged under any circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed “to find out anything.” I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of.44
In Edison we see a man who worked incredibly hard, not because he was driven by the zealous idealism of Franklin (or, for that matter, Musk, Kamen, Curie, Jobs, or Tesla) but rather because he had a strong working ethos, had a high need for achievement, and found the work rewarding in and of itself. He enjoyed the process of achieving things, he was competitive by nature, and the physical and mental activity of work gave him pleasure.
Working Ethos
THE STRONG BELIEF IN the importance of working hard is a characteristic running through the lives of all of the innovators who are examined here. For example, Franklin valued industriousness as one of his most important ideals. Edison, according to Dyer and Martin, was “conscientiously afraid of appearing indolent, and in consequence subjects himself regularly to unnecessary hardship.”45
This working ethos was readily visible in the parents of the innovators and the values with which they were raised. Although all were from families with sufficient resources so that food and adequate housing were not concerns, there was never so much as to foster complacency. The innovators were encouraged to work and earn money relatively early in life. For example, Franklin was indentured at the age of twelve. Edison was also working by age twelve and owned his own business within the year. Kamen was making $60,000 per year on his inventions before he finished high school. Nearly all had working mothers, and both Edison and Tesla described being strongly influenced by their mothers in their work habits. Edison said that “My mother was the making of me.” Tesla similarly attributed his work habits—and his mechanical ingenuity—to the influence of his mother. In his autobiography, Tesla states, “My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibres herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home were the product of h
er hands.”46
Tesla would follow his mother’s example when he started at the Polytechnic in Graz. He worked tirelessly, from 3 A.M. to 11 P.M. seven days per week, and successfully completed nine final examinations—more than any other former student. As noted previously, Tesla worked so obsessively at his studies that his teachers wrote to his father warning him that Nikola was at risk of injuring his health by his long and intense hours of study. He did not graduate from the Polytechnic, having become as obsessive about gambling as he had been about studying, but later, after getting his first patent in 1887, he began an intense period of invention that would last for decades. As noted by biographer Marc Seifer, “Tesla began a vigorous schedule that frightened those around him. On many occasions, he drove himself until he collapsed, working around the clock with few breaks.”47 Alone or with one or two assistants in his laboratory on South Fifth Avenue (now Laguardia Street) in Greenwich Village in New York City, he worked seven days per week, often stopping only for occasional dinners or to freshen up. During this period he developed three complete systems of AC machinery (for single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase currents) with dynamos, motors, transformers, and devices for automatically controlling them. An 1893 New York Herald article observed that “Mr. Tesla is such a hard worker that he has little time for social pleasures, if indeed he has any taste in that direction.” Seifer adds, “Monastic by choice and compelled by an all-consuming desire to be a major player in the burgeoning new age, the wizard preferred working through the night, when distractions could be minimized and concentration could be intensified.”48
Part of Tesla’s motivation to adopt such an aggressive work schedule was his desire to obtain patent priority on his electrical and communication systems, highlighting the need for achievement, another driver that motivated Tesla and all the other innovators. The need for achievement is a personality trait associated with a strong and consistent concern about setting and meeting high standards and accomplishing difficult tasks. Early work by psychology researchers Henry Murray and David McClelland on motivation and personality identified a set of human psychic needs related to achievement: a need for power over people or things, a need for recognition and approval, and a need to overcome obstacles or achieve something difficult as well and as quickly as possible.49 McClelland observed that some people have higher needs for achievement than others and that this is reflected in their approach to goal-directed activities. McClelland also noted that children often exhibit meaningful differences in need for achievement very early—often as young as five years of age.50
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