Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from In Search of America by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster (©2002 by The America Project, LLC).

Deep inside a five-thousand-square-foot concrete vault, buried below the streets of West Orange, New Jersey, lie the artifacts of one of history's greatest inventors: the notebooks, sketches, patents, contracts, correspondence, invoices, prototypes, and blueprints of Thomas Alva Edison and his legendary "invention factory." Bob Rosenberg, the director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, says he knew relatively little about Edison when he agreed to come here eighteen years ago. He knows more now. But both he and Paul Israel, his longtime colleague on this endeavor, say they have a long way to go to fully understand the subject that has become their life's work.

In Edison, the historians have chosen a subject whose image has been well kneaded by legend and worship. In the late nineteenth century, as his reputation as an inventor of genius began to take flight, Tom Edison had been seen as something of a mysterious figure, an alchemist scheming in a laboratory. But once the stream of machines began to pour forth from his first major laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey (the phonograph, electric light, and an improved telephone were all invented there), people discovered them to be the kinds of inventions that brought them exciting new conveniences.

Encouraged, in part, by Edison himself, who was a terrific self-promoter, the public that had once shied from him grew to see Edison as an American hero. Parents exhorted their children to follow his credo of hard work, perseverance, and exploration. By the 1920s, Edison had become an American senior statesman, the Midwestern country boy who, along with his friend Henry Ford, built the modern American city and its vibrant, new, electric culture. Indeed, by the twenties, Edison could witness the extraordinary impact of his labor: cities lit by his light, the sounds of a booming music industry created by his phonograph ,a whole new form of popular culture—movies—established by his motion picture camera. Death did not diminish his reputation; it enhanced it. By the mid 1930s, polls ranked Edison's popularity near that of Lincoln and Washington.

The best part of the Edison legend was its adventurous beginnings, with the young Edison leaving home to ride the rails, selling candy and newspapers while setting up a small lab for electrical experiments in the baggage car. But the essence of Edison's broader appeal was that he had not simply been a "scientist"; he was a peculiarly American scientist: because he was largely self-taught, he appealed to that innate American appreciation for the amateur; because he worked 112 hour weeks (and punched a clock just like the other workers), he confirmed the Yankee spirit for diligence and industry; because he focused his work on applied science—inventions which had a future in the marketplace—at the expense of the theoretical, he separated his discoveries from those that shattered popular values and beliefs. In fact, Edison derided scientists who spent their lives "studying the fuzz on a bee" as morally suspect and complained when one of his sons began to pursue theoretical physics.

By studying patents and drawings, ledger entries, and, especially, unbound scraps of paper upon which Edison and his associates recorded ideas in the midst of research, Rosenberg and Israel have exposed some of the innocent fictions that have developed around the Edison story and slowly given human form to a figure who had long been left to caricature. Yet, amazingly, the man they have discovered is no less impressive and perhaps even more representative of the national ethos.

While Europeans have always considered invention a refined occupation, in America it was a utilitarian activity, inspired by necessity and dedicated to results. The papers have revealed Edison to be perhaps the most representative figure of a technological style in the belief that if science is not serving humanity it is not worth pursuing.

By the 1970s, Edison's name had dropped down on the list of America’s most admired. But, perhaps because the waning days of the twentieth century and the first days of the twenty-first have defined a new “age of invention,” one as dynamic and transforming as the one that occurred over a hundred years ago, interest in Edison has recently skyrocketed. Before Edison, the image of the machine was as a behemoth, enslaver of humans; with Edison, the machine became a slave itself, to the human mind, an extension not of the muscles, but of the brain, from which naturally followed every major technological event, including the computer. "Edison," says Rosenberg, “was quite simply the best inventor who ever lived."