A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DThomas Alva Edison : 1847 - 1931
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847. In 1854 the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where seven-year-old Tom Edison set up his first chemical laboratory in the cellar of their large house. Edison's career as a telegraph operator began when he snatched a station agent's young son from the path of a moving freight car. Out of gratitude the father taught Edison the new science of telegraphy. By the time he was seventeen, Edison was "on the road" as a telegraph operator. He drifted from Stratford, Canada to Adrian, Michigan; Fort Wayne; Indianapolis; and Boston. When he was 21 years old Edison went to New York, almost penniless. By fixing a broken down machine in the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, he landed a $300-a-month job as superintendent of the company. At the same time, he was making many inventions, among them the "universal" stock ticker. For this and other inventions, he received $40,000, and with this money he opened a manufacturing shop in Newark, making stock tickers. At the age of 29, he went to Menlo Park to make perhaps the greatest invention of all, a successful incandescent electric lamp. Out of the Edison laboratory in the important years between 1876 and 1886 came the carbon telephone transmitter, the phonograph, the Edison dynamo, and the Edison incandescent lamp. When the electrical system with which he hoped to light whole cities required a new piece of machinery or a new device, Edison developed it. And if after developing it he could find no manufacturer, he would set up his own plants for manufacturing the equipment he had invented. By the very force of necessity, the Wizard of Menlo Park became a manufacturer of New York City. On September 4th, 1882, Edison started operating the Pearl Street Station, the first central generating station to light New York City. It began to be apparent early in the 1890's that electrical development was being helped up because no company controlled the patents on all necessary elements for installing an efficient and serviceable system. The conviction was taking shape that the incandescent lamp and the alternating-current transformer systems belonged together. The outcome in 1892 was the formation of the General Electric Company with the consolidation of the Thomson-Houston and Edison General Electric Companies. Edison's was one of the many distinguished names which appeared on the first Board of Directors of the new Company. At this period, however, he concerned himself less and less with manufacturing activities, and soon devoted his entire time to his laboratory in West Orange to perfect a modernized phonograph, a motion picture camera, and an electrical storage battery. Edison died October 18, 1931, in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, at the age of 84.
Dubbed the "Wizard of Menlo Park" during his own lifetime, and considered by some the "ancestral deity" of General Electric, Edison was a major contributor to the age of electronics. Renowned for his work on the incandescent light bulb and phonograph, his ingenuity also touched devices such as the stock ticker, mimeograph machine and telephone transmitter. Edison's New Jersey labs in Newark, Menlo Park and West Orange were think tanks extraordinaire, where creative minds worked together on key developments in early motion picture technology. Edison had already made a number of significant inventions, primarily in the field of telegraphic systems, and established himself in West Orange, the third and largest of his New Jersey laboratories, when he wrote on October 8, 1888, "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." This instrument was developed by Edison's assistant, amateur photographer W.K.L. Dickson. Dickson followed the experiments of European photographers Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who had been working with the notion of "persistence of vision" - whereby a quickly moving series of pictures gives the illusion of movement. Dickson improved on the Zoetrope or Magic Lantern*, which was constructed of separate glass plates mounted on a turning cylinder, by using strips of John Carbutt's (and later George Eastman's) newly invented flexible celluloid film. Rather than Etiene Marey's Photographic Rifle, or Muybridge's closely spaced cameras going off in rapid succession, Dickson devised an electrically controlled camera called the Kinetograph. - November 1890 saw the production of Dickson's debut film, Monkeyshines, featuring the antics of Fred Ott, another Edison assistant. At first, Edison rejected the notion of projected film. Instead, he had Dickson perfect the Kinetoscope, a small cabinet with a peephole, suitable for solitary viewing. The first nickelodeon "parlor", a storefront of ten Kinetoscopes with each viewing costing a nickel, opened April 14, 1894, at 1155 Broadway, in New York. It was soon followed by others in major cities in the US and Europe. Early movies were 60 to 90 second action shorts with titles such as Barber Shop , Barroom, Wrestling, Highland Dance, Trapeze and so on. These were produced in the West Orange Black Maria studio, a black tar-papered building on a pivot so that it could be turned to follow the path of the sun through its one skylight giving natural light. "Documentaries" of activities on Valley Road outside the lab were also filmed. Because he had failed to patent the Kinetoscope properly, however, Edison's developments were much copied. Although the 1894 prize fight between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing, fought in the Black Maria, proved a financial coup, he did not in general make much profit from his motion picture devices. This situation changed in 1895, when Edison joined forces with Thomas Armat, who was working on a Vitascope projector. Projected films, with the potential to reach large audiences, premiered on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, at 34th and Broadway, in New York, sharing the bill with vaudeville acts. Classics such as Edwin S. Porter's The Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903) were filmed at the "Black Maria" before the construction, in 1905, of a large glass studio in the Bronx, New York. In 1909 Edison, along with several other fledgling movie producers, formed the Motion Picture Patents Company to try to impede independent film production. In 1917, however, this monopoly was broken and Edison retired from the film business. MGM immortalized "the Wizard" in two 1940 movies, Young Tom Edison and Edison, The Man. * surely the Praxinoscope (Ed.) ?
Considered by many as one of the greatest inventors in history, he was born in Milan, Ohio. He obtained patents in such fields as telegraphy, phonography, electric lighting and photography. In 1882, he designed the first hydroelectric plant in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1887, he and Sir Joseph Wilson Swan produced the Edison electric lamps. He changed the lives of millions of people with such inventions as the electric light and the phonograph. In his lifetime, he patented 1,093 inventions. He valued long, hard work. One of his famous sayings was "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
The story of Thomas Edison, inventor, is well told. At a young age, hearing problems motivated the brilliant tinkerer to develop the telephone transmitter, mimeograph machine, and the phonograph. His most lucrative invention, the stock ticker, provided the funding for Edison's New Jersey labs, where creative minds worked together in think tanks on key technologies. This is the Edison of legend, master of a collective brain trust, emissary of the modern world. Although the phonograph became the easy metaphor for experiments with recording moving pictures, the incandescent lamp was perhaps the more significant Edison contribution. Combined with low-voltage batteries, Edison's team, headed by the zealous Laurie Dickson, was able to illuminate photographs that flickered past an eye hole in the first Kinetoscope, introduced in 1894 in New York. Unlike Dickson, Edison regarded the Kinetoscope as a toy, suitable for the curious customer willing to stand at a storefront nickelodeon and pay five cents to watch a six second performance of a dancing woman or jumping dog. He was unprepared for its popularity. Although the Kinetoscope launched the motion-picture industry, the images were not projected, and Edison's short-sighted opinion was that public viewings would not be as profitable and popular as the experience of peering through an eyepiece. Occupied by other inventions, he failed to properly patent the Kinetoscope, and its dissemination across America and Europe sparked imitations. The profit was quickly all gone. Convinced by Dickson, Edison allowed for other inventor's ideas to be used in the creation of a new system. Dickson was able to convince scientists that Edison's stature was a better way to unveil their devices and put together the Vitascope camera and projector in 1889. Other inventors like the Lumière Bros and George Méliès attempted to duplicate its principle mechanics, often improving upon them. The Vitascope tipped the scales at nearly 2000 lbs. and had to be housed in the Black Maria, a tar-strip shack on the grounds of his Menlo Park facility. This time, Edison patented the intermittent movement of his projector, made possible by a synchronized shutter. However, a revolving Maltese cross ripped through the sprocket holes of the celluloid, when the reels pulled the film through the aperature. Edison brilliantly solved this problem by creating a simple loop in the feed, that allowed enough slack to prevent the ripping. These few innovations made the Edison equipment reliable enough to become the choice of theater owners by 1895. Despite the early guidance of the Wizard, the darkest years of the film industry also came at the hands of Edison. Inflamed over entrenchments on his patents, Edison went to court to prevent the use of all other film equipment. But a Supreme Court ruling of 1902 concluded that Edison's contributions did not constitute the actual invention of motion pictures. The combined discoveries of others were deemed critical. Furious, Edison vowed to win in the marketplace. Though he had a substantial share of commercial moviemaking devices, he wanted more control. In 1908, he solicted several companies representing all major producers and distributors in the industry; Vitagraph, Biograph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, Pathé, Méliès, and Gaumont. Together, these giants formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1909, commonly known as The Edison Trust, and forced independent filmmakers like to Adolph Zukor and Sam Goldwyn to sign restrictive contracts that guaranteed the use of camera and projection equipment, as well as other guidelines set by the Trust. Key to the power of the group was the inclusion of George Eastman, who refused film stock to uncooperative filmmakers. Edison's demands were tyrranical; he insisted films be limited to no more than two reels, believing movie audiences wouldn't sit for 20 minutes at a time. He also wanted there to be no screen credit for actors, fearing their popularity might equate to higher salaries. Producers like Thomas Ince and Jesse Lasky refused the Trust contracts and were physically threatened by Edison's hired henchmen. Running to safety rather than buckle, they saddled firearms and moved their operations to Texas and California to escape the Trust. Some independents stayed and fought, like William Fox, who led the charge against Edison and his cronies. In 1917, Fox broke Edison's monopolistic business in a highly-charged court case. Shattered and embarassed, Edison retired to his laboratory and dropped his interest in film entirely. Thomas Edison's profound effect on the film industry goes well beyond any of the world-record 1,093 patents he held for gadgetry. His leadership and household name were instrumental. He became the ambassador, however reluctant, of a new art form that he himself hardly could appreciate. Eventually, the international fascination with movies became greater than he could wrangle. His life was honored in film stories by some of the same studios he once attempted to stifle. The flattering screen biographies Young Tom Edison and Edison, The Man were both made by MGM in 1940, to little box office success. Today, action stars have all but replaced inventors as the heroes of young people.
When he was 21 years old, Thomas Edison took out his first patent. It was for an electric vote counter to be used in the United States House of Representatives. The machine worked perfectly, but the congressmen would not buy it. They did not want vote counting to be done quickly. Often the roll call was used for purposes of delay (filibustering).This experience taught the young inventor a lesson. He decided to follow a simple rule: "First, be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead." When he died at 84, Edison had patented 1,093 inventions. They included the motion-picture projector, phonograph, electric-light bulb, and hundreds of others. Many were among the most useful and helpful inventions ever developed. The man who was often to be called the greatest inventor who ever lived was born in Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847. His father, Samuel Edison, was a shingle maker. His mother, Nancy Elliott Edison, was a schoolteacher. When young Edison was 7, the family moved to Port Huron, Mich. There he went to school for three months, the only formal schooling he ever had. Because of his very large but well-shaped head, the doctors thought young Edison might have brain trouble. His teachers thought him stupid because he questioned every answer given him. His mother, however, understood that her son asked so many questions because he wanted to know exactly how things worked. She encouraged him in his eagerness to learn. By the time he was 12, with his mother's help, he had read Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', Hume's 'History of England', Sears's 'History of the World', Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy', and the 'Dictionary of Sciences'. He had also begun to do chemistry experiments and had his own laboratory in his father's basement. By this time Edison's father was a successful grain and feed dealer in Port Huron. The young inventor did not really have to go to work, but he wanted his own money. He wanted to buy chemicals and equipment for his experiments. When he was 13, Edison became a newsboy on the Grand Trunk railroad between Port Huron and Detroit. Between trips he spent his free time reading science and reference books in the library. In order to continue his chemistry experiments Edison set up a laboratory in a baggage car on the train. He also began publishing his own newspaper there on a press that had been used for printing handbills. He was typesetter, press operator, editor, publisher, and newsboy for this paper, which he called The Herald. He published not only local news but also national and international events. He got this news from telegraphers at stations along the way. He printed many reports of the Civil War battles, and these helped to make his newspaper a success. The London Times carried a story about Edison' s paper, pointing out that it was the first newspaper in the world to be printed on a moving train. An accident at about this time started the deafness which Edison had for the rest of his life. One day he was trying to climb into a freight car with both arms full of newspapers. The conductor took him by both ears to lift him into the car. Edison felt something snap in his head, and his deafness began then. He always said he did not mind being deaf. It kept him from being bothered by outside noises and he could give full thought to the work at hand. One day Edison was making an experiment in his baggage-car laboratory when a stick of phosphorus accidentally set the car on fire. The conductor threw out the boy and his equipment. Edison's railroading days came to an end. When Edison was 15, he saved the life of the baby son of a station agent at Mount Clemens, Mich. Edison was standing on the station platform when he saw that a freight car was about to run over a child who was playing on the tracks. He dashed to the rescue. The child's grateful father, John Mackenzie, offered to teach young Edison how to be a telegraph operator. He soon learned the Morse code and became skilled in sending and taking messages. At 16 he became a telegrapher at Stratford Junction, Canada. In his spare time Edison experimented with an old telegraph set, taking it apart and putting it together again. Finally he understood exactly how it worked. One of Edison's first inventions was a telegraph repeater which automatically relayed a message to a second line. The second instrument was made to work at a slower rate of speed than the first. When a message came in too fast over the first receiver for Edison to copy easily, he could slow down the message by relaying it over the second machine. This device was the germ from which some of his later important inventions were developed. However, all it earned for him at the time was a reprimand from the manager of the telegraph office. The manager thought young Edison was wasting the telegraph company's time using such "toys." As a young telegraph operator Edison dressed poorly. He spent all he earned on books and equipment. His employers were impatient with his habit of forgetting about his work as a telegrapher while he worked on his own experiments. Even so, he became a skilled operator. Soon he began to wander about the country, getting jobs as a "tramp telegrapher" whenever he had to have money. He continued to work hard on his ideas for inventions. After five years of this wandering life Edison went to Boston and then to New York City. In Boston in 1869 at the age of 21 Edison patented his commercially unsuccessful vote counter. He brought with him to New York an idea for a stock quotation printing device. In New York he met a Dr. Samuel Laws, who already had a "stock ticker" in operation. When this primitive machine broke down, Edison repaired it. He was then hired by Laws and out of this association grew the development of a stock ticker that worked perfectly. For this and other inventions useful in stockbrokers' offices Edison expected to be paid only a few hundred dollars. He was sure he was being made the victim of a practical joke when Laws handed him a check for $40,000. The only interest Edison ever had in money was to use it to buy more scientific equipment to work on new inventions. He used this $40,000 to start a laboratory and factory at Newark, N. J. He soon had 300 employees and began turning out a number of moneymaking inventions. He had as many as 50 inventions at various stages of development and manufacture at one time. Most of these had to do with various kinds of multiplex systems of telegraphy. But before he was 30 Edison' s health failed, and he gave up his Newark factory. When he regained his health, Edison opened a laboratory at Menlo Park, N.J. There, from 1876 to 1886, he devoted his time entirely to invention. He soon became world-famous as "the wizard of Menlo Park." In one year alone (1882) Edison applied for 141 patents, 75 of which were granted. His major inventions were the incandescent electric light bulb, the phonograph, the motion-picture projector, automatic and multiplex telegraph, the carbon telephone transmitter, a stock ticker, and the alkaline storage battery. Not all his inventions were made easily. He worked on some for years and spent thousands of dollars in perfecting them. The first Bell telephone was both a transmitter and a receiver. One spoke through it and then put it to one's ear to hear the reply. The instrument was also weak in reproducing the voice and picked up much static. Edison invented a carbon transmitter that gave the voice unlimited power. He also invented a receiver that contained a button-sized chalk diaphragm. This chalk receiver was widely used for many years, particularly in England. In using the early telephones people rang a bell by hand and then said into the instrument, "Are you ready to talk?" or asked some similar question. One day Edison was working in his laboratory to perfect the telephone. According to one story, he picked up the instrument during a test and said into the transmitter, "Hello!" This greeting soon became a standard way to start a telephone conversation. Edison married his first wife, Mary G. Stillwell, in 1871. She had worked in his laboratory. They had three children--Marion, Thomas, and William. Edison nicknamed his first two children "Dot" and "Dash." Mrs. Edison died in 1884, and the inventor married Mina Miller in 1886. They also had three children--Madeline, Charles, and Theodore. Charles later became governor of New Jersey. A big workshop and a small house suited Edison. He went about in shabby work clothes and with acid-stained hands. Most of the time his wife and children dined alone, for Edison ate when he was hungry and rested when he was tired. He worked 18 and 19 hours a day as a rule and was so absorbed in his work that he seldom knew if it was night or day. "I owe my success," he often said, "to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom." Another secret of Edison's success was his unlimited patience. "Genius," he said, "is two per cent inspiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration." His powerful imagination, his firm optimism, and his complete self-confidence were other traits that helped to distinguish him from ordinary men. When he was about 30, Edison invented the phonograph. He called it a "talking machine." It worked much like the dictating machines that were later adapted from it. Edison's phonograph consisted of a revolving cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. A sharp point was pressed against the foil-wrapped cylinder. Attached to the point were a diaphragm and a large mouthpiece. The cylinder was rotated by hand. When Edison spoke into the mouthpiece, his voice made the diaphragm vibrate. This caused the sharp point to cut a trace in the tinfoil. When a needle replaced the cutting point, the talking machine reproduced Edison's original words. When Edison first demonstrated the machine to his laboratory assistants, they were startled to hear coming from it the words, "Mary had a little lamb." For a time they would not believe that the device actually worked as Edision said it did. They thought he was playing some kind of trick on them. Later, when everyone had become convinced of the reality of Edison's latest invention, he continued to work on improvements for it. He spent more than 3 million dollars perfecting the phonograph. While perfecting the phonograph, Edison was also developing a motion- picture camera and projector. The camera, called a kinetograph, and the projector, called a kinetoscope, used roll film developed by George Eastman. Previously single-plate film had been used in an effort to produce motion pictures. Edison's kinetograph was the first practical motion-picture camera; the kinetoscope was the first workable projector. The kinetoscope was a small "peep-show" type of box inside which the motion picture was projected. The picture was viewed through an eyehole in the top of the box. A disadvantage was that only one person at a time could view the show. It was Thomas Armat who invented a projector that would show pictures on a screen in a room where many people could watch them. Edison later marketed this forerunner of the modern motion-picture projector under the name Vitascope. Among his many other "firsts," Edison developed the first motion- picture studio. This was a tar-paper shack at West Orange, N.J. It was called "the black Maria" and was built on rails so that it could be moved about to take advantage of the sun as a scene was being filmed. In an effort to produce electric light, Edison studied the entire history of lighting. He filled 200 notebooks containing more than 40,000 pages with his notes on gas illumination alone. His aim was to invent a lamp that would become incandescent, or luminous, as a result of heat passing through it. He made threads of many heat-resistant materials. He put these filaments into glass globes. The heat crumbled the filaments into ashes. Later he pumped air out of the bulbs. Using platinum filaments in these vacuum bulbs, he had some success. But he needed an inexpensive substance to use for filaments. He continued his research for many months, spending thousands of dollars. On Oct. 21, 1879, Edison introduced the modern age of light. In his laboratory at Menlo Park, the young man tensely watched a charred cotton thread glow for 40 hours in a glass vacuum bulb. He knew then that he had invented the first commercially practical incandescent electric light. In his continuing search for a filament that would work better than the cotton thread, carbonized bamboo seemed most successful. He sent men into tropical jungles for samples of bamboo, and for nine years millions of Edison lamp bulbs were made with bamboo filaments. In time, however, the modern filament of drawn tungsten wire was developed. Edison also devoted his energies to improving the dynamo to furnish the necessary power for electric lighting systems. In addition, he developed a complete system of distributing the current and built a central power station. In 1887 Edison opened a new laboratory at West Orange, N.J. He called it his "invention factory." In 1914 the plant burned to the ground. Edison took the loss calmly. "All of our mistakes have been destroyed," he said. "In a new factory we can start our experiments with a clean slate." During World War I Edison headed the Naval Consulting Board for the government and directed research into torpedo mechanisms and antisubmarine devices. In 1920, largely at his instigation, Congress established the Naval Research Laboratory, the first institution for military research. In October 1929, 50 years after Edison had invented the electric-light bulb, America paid tribute to him on Light's Golden Jubilee. The setting for the event was the "permanent birthplace of light," created by Henry Ford at Dearborn, Mich., in the Edison Institute. Here Ford moved the Menlo Park laboratory and the railroad station where the newsboy Edison was "dumped" after he set fire to a car with his chemicals. Honors came to Edison until he could "count his medals by the quart," as he often jokingly said. Edison died on Oct. 18, 1931, and was buried in Orange, N.J. His West Orange laboratory and his 23-room home, Glenmont, were designated a national historic site in 1955. The laboratory is exactly as he left it. It includes his library, papers, and early models of many of his inventions.
Most people believe Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. But there is a legend in Mexico that "Tõmas" Alva was born in Lagos de Moreno, then taken to the U.S. as a toddler and adopted into the Edison family. The legend, true or not, testifies, at least, to the international veneration that this most prolific inventor enjoys, even today. Who wouldn't want to claim Edison as a native son? Edison was born in 1847, a year when Michael Faraday practically invented alternating current (passing a magnet through a coil of wire, he found, generated electricity). When Edison died in 1931 (at the age of 84), the whole world was running its industry on power plants fashioned after Edison's own design, and reading its books and magazines and newspapers under light bulbs of Edison's invention. The man held 1093 patents, including several for the first motion picture camera (called the kinetescope), and the phonograph, the invention he was most proud of, made of tinfoil and wax cylinders. He invented the carbon button transmitter, which is still being used in most of our microphones and telephones, the first alkaline storage battery, the mimeograph machine, flexible celluloid film and the first movie projector. Later, he would make the movies talk. Young Tom Edison grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, after his father (or, perhaps, if you prefer to go along with Mexican legend, foster-father) was hired on as a carpenter at the Fort Gratiot military post. But, because of hearing problems that made it difficult for him to follow the class lessons, his teachers considered him to be a dull student and his school attendance became sporadic. Nevertheless, Edison became a voracious reader and at age 10, he set up a laboratory in his basement. When his mother could no longer stand the smell of his chemistry lab, Edison took a job as a train boy on the Grand Trunk Railway, selling magazines and candy. He spent all he earned on books and apparatus for the chemical laboratory he set up in an empty freight car. He was twelve at the time. (Go to your local video store and rent a copy of the MGM movie, "Young Tom Edison," starring an Oscar-winning Mickey Rooney. Some of that movie is myth, but it is myth that captures the spirit of this budding genius, who, at age 13, was printing his own weekly newspaper for the train's passengers, which he called the Grand Trunk Herald.) While Edison was working for the railroad, something happened that changed the course of his career. Edison saved the life of a station official's child, who had fallen onto the tracks of an oncoming train. For his bravery, the boy's father taught Edison how to use the telegraph. From 1862 to 1868, Edison worked as a roving telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada, and New England. During this time, he began developing a telegraphic repeating instrument that made it possible to transmit messages automatically. By 1869, Edison's inventions, including the duplex telegraph (which sent messages in opposite directions at the same time on the same wire) and the message printer, were progressing so well, he left telegraphy and began a career of full-time inventing and entrepreneurship. At age 22, Edison moved to New York City, and there he perfected a telegraph printer used by the New York financial community now known generically as a "stock ticker." That ticker made the financial world go round. Brokers decided to buy Edison's patents on it. How much did he want? He stammered, thought he'd ask for $3,000, then said, "Suppose you make me an offer." They gave him a check for $40,000. It was equivalent to several million in today's dollars. Stunned, he staggered to a bank with the check, and, after some misunderstandings, finally got the $40,000, in ten and twenty dollar bills, stuffed them in his overcoat pockets and repaired to the room at his boarding house, where he spent a sleepless night thinking that someone would surely murder him for his hoard. He was so naive he didn't know he could deposit the money in that same bank, and draw on it at will. Which he shortly did. With this windfall, Edison was able to establish a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and later in West Orange, where he continued to turn out a prodigious amount of work for the rest of his life in what would become a model of the modern industrial research laboratory. Soon, he would marry Mary Stillwell, who bore him three children. Edison made fortunes for himself and others, but he was a poor financial manager. He seemed indifferent to wealth, except as a means of further invention, further knowledge, and further triumph. Once, when a new employee checked in at Menlo Park, he asked Edison for a copy of the lab rules. "There ain't no rules around here," said Edison. "We're trying to accomplish something." Accomplish he did. He worked 24 hours a day, taking fifteen-minute cat naps when he was tired, and eating on the run, when he was hungry. In 1878, Edison began work on an electric lamp and sought a material that could be electrically heated to incandescence in a vacuum. During these experiments on the incandescent bulb, Edison noted a flow of electricity from a hot filament across a vacuum to a metal wire. This phenomenon was known as thermionic emission, or the Edison effect, and it led one of Edison's engineers, William J. Hammer, into the discovery five years later of the vacuum tube, later adapted by Lee de Forest and called "the audion tube", a key component of something Marconi ended up calling "radio." Edison, therefore, was one of the godfathers of radio, and of television. In the late 1870s, backed (at first haltingly) by leading financiers including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, Edison established the Edison Electric Light Company. In 1879, he publicly demonstrated his incandescent electric light bulb. In 1882, he supervised the installation of the first commercial, central power system in lower Manhattan. In 1915, though he had been determinedly against all war, he agreed to help Pres. Woodrow Wilson bring the combined efforts of the nation's scientists to bear on the U.S. effort in World War I, to the vast disappointment of his friend, car maker Henry Ford, who had begged Edison to join him on his quixotic efforts to take a ship to Stockholm in December 1915, in order to end the war. Ford planned to bring leaders of the world's most powerful nations, in the full course of battle, to lay down their arms. When Edison saw Ford off at the dock in New York, the story goes, Ford shouted an offer to Edison: a million dollars if he would get on board. Edison didn't hear him. Ford returned from his well-intentioned cruise, embittered at Europe's leaders, who never came to Ford's meeting in Stockholm. But Edison's refusal to join the "Peace Ship" never sullied Ford's affection for Edison. Ford had become a staunch believer in the after-life. And so he was delighted when he heard of Edison's metaphysical speculations about life after death. "The greatest thing that has occurred in the last fifty years," said Ford, "is Mr. Edison's conclusion that there is a future life for all of us." What led to this encomium from Ford? This. In 1920, Edison said that he had long believed that the cells of the human body possessed "intelligence," and, taken together, constituted "a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants." A man, he concluded, was not merely an individual, but also "a vast collection of myriads of individuals." The intelligence of a man, then, consisted of the combined intelligence of all the cells, or "entities" within him, "as a city is made up of the combined intelligence of its inhabitants." After death, those cells were separated and diffused, yet persisted in some new form, served over and over again, lived forever, and could no more be destroyed than matter. Thus, he demonstrated, he had burned his thumb. But the skin was perfectly formed and replaced. "The life entities," he said, "rebuilt that thumb with consummate care." Edison told a writer for American Magazine, that he was "at work on the most sensitive apparatus I have undertaken to build, and await the results with the keenest interest." Such an apparatus, he said, "might be operated by personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us; it will give them a better opportunity to express themselves than ouija boards or tilting tables." We cite these speculations of Thomas Alva Edison not because we believe he was propounding a thesis that had any scientific, or even theological, certitude, but because Edison was a great man with great intuitive powers. In positing "the intelligence of cells," we believe Edison was on to something, something that would be elaborated at much higher and more serious speculative levels decades later by Jean-Emile Charon, a French atomic scientist and, in his later years, a philosopher who explored the frontiers between physics and metaphysics.
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