ABSTRACT
As a boy in Ohio Edison gained a reputation
for being odd, asking so many questions
which infuriated his teachers that his mother,
a teacher herself, decided to educate him at
home. He read quickly and memorized
easily; at twelve, only Newton’s Principia
seems to have floored him. To afford chemi-
cals for his home laboratory he worked as a
newsboy on the railroad between Port Huron
and Detroit, and then, graduating to a print-
ing press, issued his own newspaper, the first
to be printed and published on a train. After
his baggage coach laboratory caught fire, he
and his gear were thrown off. In 1862, a sta-
tion agent, father of a boy he had rescued
from train rails, offered to teach Edison to be
a telegrapher. He became the fastest in
America; with the earnings he reinforced his
technological knowledge, buying (amongst
others) Faraday’s writings. During the Civil
War years he wandered the central states, one
of those tramp operators – skilled, in demand
and intellectually alert – who were trans-
forming American communications and
thereby the structure of society. He liked
Othello and copied plays for a Cincinnati
theatre. In 1868 in Boston he patented his
first invention – a mechanical vote-recorder,
which failed because Congress did not particu-
larly want voting procedures speeded up –
lesson number one for the young inventor:
only invent what is needed. Waiting to be
interviewed in New York City in 1869, he
repaired a telegraph machine (basic for specu-
lation) and immediately got a job. During the
speculation burst that year, the president of a
Wall Street firm paid him $40,000 for a stock
ticker. So, at the age of twenty-three, he
could found the first firm of consulting tech-
nologists, and for six years in Newark, New
Jersey, invented continuously – practical
quadruplex telegraphy in 1874, the mimeo-
graph, telegraphic improvements, waxed
paper, etc., always basing invention on social
justification and commerciality. In 1876 he
founded Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first
industrial research factory – to produce, he
planned, an invention every ten days, from a
technological and scientific team. This
method was a major advance on the tradition
of chance individual cleverness. Before his
death ‘the wizard of Menlo Park’ had issued
nearly 1,300 inventions including radio aer-
ials (purchased by Marconi), the dictaphone
and gummed paper. In one four-year period
the rate became one invention every five
days. He had converted the lonely study,
partly resulting from his deafness, into a
group industry.