The Thomas Edison Myth
Our myths come in a wide range, including the relatively harmless propaganda of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree to the slightly more sinister myth that Americans cannot be forced to incriminate themselves in a court of a law. (Just try pleading the Fifth during questioning in front of a grand jury).
One of the greatest American Myths is the legend of Thomas Edison. You know old Tom, don’t you? Inventor of the light bulb, the phonograph and the movies. Considered by most to be the single greatest inventor of modern times and in competition only with Leonardo DaVinci for the title of Greatest Inventor Ever. Every time you flip on a switch, you should be paying a royalty to Edison, right?
Well, maybe not so much. Thomas Edison still holds the record for the most patents in the United States, well over 1,000. Movies have been made about him, books have been written, reality shows inspired by his lessons. But just as there’s very little actual reality to be found in reality shows, so too is there very little reality to be found in the commonly accepted biography of Edison.
To begin with, the overwhelming majority of those patents were not actually for anything that Edison himself invented. Most, in fact, were simply improvements made on an original idea thought up and created by others. And as far as those original ideas to come out of Edison’s office, most of them were actually created and designed by his employees.
Let’s start with the most famous: the light bulb. Every third grader can tell you that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Well, that’s what you get for listening to third graders. Inventors in grand old Britain had been tinkering around with electric lights for half a century before Edison even got into the game. In fact, light bulbs had been used inside labs as far back as 1823. Edison wasn’t even the first to patent an incandescent bulb; that honor goes to Joseph Swan in 1845, over thirty years before Edison even began work on his bulb.
The reality of the history is that Edison wasn’t attempting to invent the light bulb. He was attempting to create a filament that would last long enough to make an electric light bulb practical for commercial use. So, then we can thank Thomas Edison for coming up with the invention that made it possible for a light bulb to last longer than a few hours, right?
Not so fast. Edison failed on several occasions to come up with an alternative filament. Edison’s famous saying that genius is 99 percent sweat can be traced back to his primary means of invention: trial and error, error, error. In fact, Edison’s method was to go at invention without a care in the world about failure; he simply built another prototype whenever one failed. This process might have been significantly shortened if he had ever bothered to take a look at the work others had done. Edison typically ignored all other research and as a result he often wasted months making the same mistakes others had already made before him. Of course, this failure wasn’t really all that taxing on him since he was hiring other people for both labor and ideas.
Thomas Edison failed to perfect a long lasting filament and so brought in other experts, notably Francis Upton from Princeton. Upton immediately set to work doing something that Edison hadn’t. He and his assistants studied every piece of available evidence dealing with the concept of electrical lighting until they discovered the primary obstacle to success. If it hadn’t been for Upton’s arrival and his insistence on testing materials to discover which contained properties best suited for a filament, Edison’s name might never have even been attached to the notion electric light.
About that patentâÂ?¦well, Edison registered his patent for the light bulb in 1879. In 1883, it was declared invalid by the US Patent Office on the grounds that it was based a little too much on the work of another man, William Sawyer. The Thomas Edison myth isn’t based on the fact that he was one of the most litigious Americans of all time. The Thomas Edison reality should be based on that. Edison, as usual when he was faced with opposition, immediately took things to court. In 1889 the patent was again ruled valid, but he still wasn’t completely out of the courtroom on this issue. This time he lost to Joseph Swan, but eventually they teamed up to create a company to market their invention.
Though it is arguable just who deserves the credit for inventing the light bulb, there is far less ambiguity as to who invented the movie camera. And, well, it ain’t Edison. One of Edison’s employees, William Dickson, is well known to have been the actual inventor of the forerunner of today’s movie cameras. In fact, the Thomas Edison myth is so complete that Edison gets credit for inventing something that he not only had nothing to do with, but wasn’t even interested in pursuing after seeing it work.
Edison had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the prototype envisioned and created by Dickson. And as the movie business began to take off, Edison remained so shortsighted that he never envisioned the possibility that a large group of people would want to watch a movie at the same time without standing in line to look through a little peephole. If Edison had been in charge of the movie business, not only would there not be any multiplexes, there would never even have been such a thing as a movie theater with one screen.
Of course, all myth is built on some tiny kernel of truth and the Thomas Edison myth is no different. As of yet there is no indisputable evidence to suggest that Edison did not invent the phonograph all by himself. And his oft-repeated statement that the phonograph was his personal favorite of all the inventions attributed to him certainly lends credence to the idea that he actually did invent it.
