EDISON, THOMAS ALVA

Inventor and entrepreneur Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, and became the most prolific inventor in U.S. history, with a record 1,093 patents. Through his technological innovations and companies, "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (in New Jersey, where his laboratory was located) helped found the electric light and power, sound recording, and motion picture industries, and contributed substantially to the telecommunications, battery, and cement industries. He was also close friends with Henry Ford, the pioneer of mass production. Edison established the first industrial laboratories devoted to inventing new technologies and recast invention as part of a larger process of innovation that encompassed manufacturing and marketing. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously credited him with the invention of a method of invention. Edison died in West Orange, New Jersey, on October 18.

The Invention Process and Intellectual Property

After working as a telegraph operator in the mid-1860s, Edison began his inventive career by becoming a contract inventor in the telegraph industry. At a time when general incorporation laws were just beginning to reshape American business, these companies were learning how to deal with technological innovation. Concerns over conflict of interest were also just beginning to emerge, and Edison saw no conflict in working for companies in direct competition with each other.

Perhaps the best-known conflict of interest in Edison's early career arose over his most important telegraph invention—the quadruplex telegraph, which enabled four messages to be sent simultaneously over one wire. Edison worked on this invention under an informal arrangement with Western Union Telegraph. At the same time he was working under more formal contracts with officials of the Automatic Telegraph Company to develop a competing system that used machinery rather than human operators to send messages at high speeds. After successfully demonstrating his quadruplex in the fall of 1874 on Western Union lines, Edison sought payment from the company, but Western Union did not act promptly on what he believed were relatively modest demands for payment. Facing the loss of his house and shop in Newark due to the general economic depression caused by the Panic of 1873, Edison felt free to sell his rights in the invention to railroad financier Jay Gould, who was in the process of creating a competing telegraph network by combining several small competing firms including Automatic Telegraph. Although Western Union had to sue to assert its rights to the invention, the company nonetheless agreed to retain Edison's services to continue work on multiple telegraph systems, but this time under a formal contract. Later Edison signed another agreement with Western Union that secured all his work related to landline telegraphy, including the new telephone technology.

Edison entered into this latter contract in early 1877 in an effort to secure support for his new Menlo park laboratory, the first devoted to the creation and commercialization of new technologies. Edison's invention factory played a key role in the creation not just of specific devices but of methodological research and development leading to market innovation. Indeed, in order to make the incandescent light bulb commercially viable, Edison created a system for the distribution of electricity and designed the manufacturing technology for producing lamps.

As the laboratory and its workforce grew, Edison depended more and more on the assistance of a large staff of experimenters and machinists who made important contributions to his inventive efforts. As a consequence, he was faced with finding ways to give appropriate credit and financial awards for their work. At the time employees entered the laboratory they were made to understand that they were working on Edison's ideas, and that their work on his inventions would be credited to him.

Nonetheless the issue of credit remained a tricky one. While Edison and his assistants perceived their role as working on his ideas, he gave general directions and relied on their abilities to work out important details. Edison thus generally made it a policy to take out the key patents, while permitting assistants to take out ancillary patents he considered to be primarily their contribution. At the time, U.S. patent law gave priority to an employer in disputes with employees and discouraged joint inventions unless a true partnership in the invention could be demonstrated. In lieu of joint patents or other credit for their inventive assistance, Edison gave his chief experimenters an interest in royalties and other profits. He also placed many of them in management positions in his companies, and some became partners. Edison continued these policies at the larger laboratory he opened in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887.

The issue of credit was also a significant one for Edison's competitors, particularly because of the popular image of him as the primary inventor of several new technologies. Edison's reputation was partially a consequence of the fact that he had a much more sophisticated understanding of invention than his contemporaries. Edison saw invention as just the first stage of a larger process of innovation. Thus he took a leading role in marketing the inventions he developed through companies he established and that bore the Edison name. Because his name was associated with the technology he continued to make improvements to insure its reputation as well as his own. This kept him in the public eye as reporters wrote stories about his latest improvements.

Edison's public image was also a result of his skill at public relations. He had developed an understanding of the newspaper business while working as a press-wire telegraph operator and, after becoming famous for inventing the phonograph, he had established close relationships with several reporters in New York City who found Edison a ready source of news, opinion, and human interest. Thus even when other inventors made important technical contributions, the public credited Edison first.

While Edison's willingness to make announcements through the press aided his marketing efforts, it created problems for his scientific reputation. When Edison claimed that he had observed a new natural phenomenon and termed it etheric force in 1875, he made his first announcements through the newspapers and continued to press his claims through press interviews rather than through the scientific journals as did his opponents. Similarly after British inventor David Hughes's claim to the invention of the microphone appeared in the scientific journal Nature, Edison launched a public attack through the New York City newspapers rather than responding in the scientific press. In both cases, Edison's claims in the scientific community were weakened by his failure to adhere to the norms of scientific publication and debate.

While Edison saw himself as a member of the larger scientific community and presented papers before the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the 1870s and 1880s, he was foremost an inventor and more interested in attracting public interest in his work than advancing scientific knowledge. Nonetheless when his inventive work produced devices that were primarily useful for scientific research he was willing to forego royalties in their manufacture and make them available to the scientific community. This occurred with a heat measurer he called the tasimeter in 1878, when he gave some early light bulbs to scientific researchers in 1880, and with his work on X-ray technology in 1886.

Public Policy Issues

Because the public saw Edison as a leading figure of science and technology, his comments on important public issues could carry significant weight. In two instances his reputation proved crucial to the enactment of public policy.

In the first and more controversial instance, Edison was asked in 1888 for his expert opinion on the establishment of electrocution as a more humane form of execution than hanging. Although opposed to the death penalty, Edison agreed to support this position and also allowed Harold P. Brown, a self-taught electrician, to conduct experiments on animal electrocutions at his laboratory. These experiments in support of electrocution were undertaken in part due to Edison's firm belief in the dangers of high-voltage electricity, and thus his ethical opposition to its public use.

But it also stemmed from the increasing competition his low-voltage direct-current (DC) electrical system was receiving from the high-voltage alternating current (AC) system being marketed by George Westinghouse. The debate on electrocution thus became wrapped up in this commercial struggle. Edison's strong opposition to high-voltage and the demonstrations at his laboratory that showed high-voltage AC to be more dangerous than high-voltage DC led him to champion the electric chair and testify on behalf of the state in the appeals of the first death penalty case involving electrocution. Edison would later regret his role in the development of the electric chair but never gave up his opposition to high-voltage electricity.

Edison's other significant involvement in public policy came as the result of a 1915 New York Times interview in which he urged greater military preparedness and the need for a national research laboratory to develop new military technologies for defense. This led Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to ask Edison to establish and head a new Naval Consulting Board. The Board was made up of leading inventors, engineers, and industrial research scientists. Edison would eventually lose the larger debate within the Board over the nature of the research laboratory. Based on the newer style of industrial research laboratories, the new Naval Laboratory, which was not established until after World War I and was headed by naval officers rather than civilians, focused on science-based research leading to the development of small-scale prototypes. It was not a works laboratory like Edison's, equipped with extensive machine shop facilities for turning prototypes into commercial technology.

The differences over the Naval Laboratory were also reflected in Edison's own contribution to research during World War I. Although Edison developed forty-two inventions that he believed could contribute to the war effort, the Navy adopted none. Instead the Navy officers responsible for introducing new technology turned to the efforts of those researchers whose approach included the mathematical rigor and theoretical basis that their university educations had taught them were the foundations of modern research.

The growing differences between Edison and more youthful researchers marked a shift in the nature of scientific and technical training. This shift became more evident by the end of Edison's life, when news accounts treated him as the last of the lone cut-and-try inventors rather than the creator of the first industrial research laboratory. A closer study of his life, however, reveals that in the course of reshaping the ways in which invention took place, including at his laboratories, Edison was faced with many of the same ethical issues encountered by twenty-first-century inventors and industrial researchers.

PAUL ISRAEL

SEE ALSO Entrepreneurism;Invention;Technological Innovation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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