"Interpreting Edison" commemorates Edison Sesquicentennial
Two hundred people, ranging from record collectors to historians of science and technology came together in the city of Newark, NJ, on three of the hottest days of June. The reason: "Interpreting Edison" in what would have been the year of his hundred and fiftieth birthday.
Seth Shulman's article, "Unlocking the Legacies of the Edison Archives," in February/March 1997 Technology Review, noted that Leonard DeGraaf of the National Park Service was "organizing a symposium that will be the first to draw a group of scholars from around the world to consider Edison from every angle: as scientist, entrepreneur, and cultural icon." "Interpreting Edison," held at the Rutgers University Newark campus on 25-27 June 1997, was that symposium.
It was held at Rutgers/Newark because of its partnership with the Edison National Historic Site, the Edison home and laboratory in nearby West Orange, which the Park Service administers. People came for any number of reasons to be interested in Thomas Alva Edison: collectors of old records (both cylinders and discs), affiliates with museums associated with various aspects of Edison's life, film aficionados, and historians of science and technology, many of whom had worked on the Edison papers, a fledgling enterprise which has seen the publication of only three of what may be 20 volumes.
Their work had led many of them to their Ph.D. theses -- e.g., Jill Cooper, who was investigating Edison's development of the electric pen, and DeGraaf, who was doing the same for Edison's development of the phonograph. Mary Ann Hellrigel had done the same for the marketing of electrification to replace gas as a source of lighting in American homes. Others spoke of their research on other aspects of Edison's work: George Tselos (also of the Park Service) on Edison's development of the fluoroscope, Gilbert Mom (from the Netherlands) on the alkaline storage battery which Edison envisioned to power automobiles, and Andrea Dragon (from College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station, NJ) on Edison's attempt to develop a domestic rubber industry (on behalf of his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone).
As Ed Pershey (of Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland) observed in his closing keynote, there was greater emphasis on the twentieth century part of Edison's work at the symposium, perhaps a reflection of the progress of microfilming the Edison papers into that time frame, and less about invention than the business and social aspects of Edison's life. It was generally recognized that Edison would not have accomplished what he did without the assistance of his technical staff -- in fact, his "invention factory" is looked upon as a precursor of modern-day research and development laboratories, and his West Orange laboratory was viewed as the finest in the world when it was constructed in 1887. But while Edison was generally credited with commanding the loyalty of and according recognition to those who worked closely with him, the same could not be said about his relationships with his factory workers. (For example, when workers in New York City went on strike, his response was to move the plant to Schenectady.)
Edison was likewise faulted as a businessman. David Sicilia suggested that Edison did not match his manufacturing capability at West Orange with a marketing system. One suggestion was that Edison wanted to depend too much on free publicity, resulting from his cultivation of the press. Another, advanced by DeGraaf, was that he expected the quality of his consumer goods to sell themselves to the public, as had been the case for devices he had produced for Western Union. Though the superior quality of Edison's sound was acknowledged several times during the conference, DeGraaf added that Edison didn't understand how the mass market worked, unlike Eldridge Johnson of Victor, who marketed celebrity artists like Enrico Caruso. Joseph Sullivan similarly criticized Edison for being a nineteenth century businessman who believed in the owner-manager style of management.
As George Wise (of the Hall of History in Schenectady) put it, Michael Jordan sometimes misses what would be the game-winning shot. Likewise, Thomas Edison sometimes missed winning ideas, one of them being AC over DC, but not because he had not considered it. Although thicker wires were required to carry the larger currents required of DC at the time, DC was still at a cost advantage over AC because there was no need for transformers. Indeed, added Wise, the "attacking technology" doesn't always win (see box).
Another winning idea which passed Edison by, according to Jane Mork Gibson, was the effect which bears Edison's name, the thermionic emission of electrodes from a heated filament in the presence of an external electric field. Only later, after the electron was identified in 1897 by J. J. Thomson, was this effect understood as the basis of vacuum tubes.
Unlike many other inventors, Edison developed a system to produce and market things developed in his laboratories, and he seemed to delight in outpacing his competitors, typically by claiming the technical superiority of his products. He also seemed to delight in the attention he received from the public, particularly in the annual interviews he gave the press on his birthday, in which he foresaw such inventions as an automatic clothes folder as well as a washer and dryer. On the other hand, he sought no profit whatsoever from his development of the fluoroscope, which enabled people to see X-ray pictures instantaneously through fluorescence.
There was an educational component to the conference as well as a historical one. In addition to concurrent sessions designed especially for teachers, the second day of the conference was turned over to presentations from the five museums dedicated specifically to various stages in Edison's life: the Edison Birthplace Museum in Milan, OH; the Port Huron Museum in Port Huron, MI; the Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, FL; Edison's Reconstructed Menlo Park Laboratory at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI; and the National Historic Site.
As Michele Albion of the Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers said, "As students study less about Edison in schools, museums will have to do more." What they should do was a question raised more than once at the conference, first by Andre Millard of the University of Alabama in addressing changes at the National Historic Site. The West Orange site became a shrine to Edison after he died, Millard observed, left much as it was at the time, although by then the focus of Edison's work has shifted to Fort Myers and his quest for a domestic rubber industry there. Millard commended the Park Service for attempting to restore the West Orange lab to a more active time period of 1914. (Because of new windows installed in that year, it would be difficult to target an earlier year, a Park Service spokesperson said when we toured there.) We don't need a shrine fostering the cult of personality (which Edison himself fostered) to inspire our youth, Millard added.
In his closing remarks Pershey likewise applauded the Port Huron Museum for providing children opportunities to replicate Edison's experiments. What is needed is ways to experience Edison, he suggested -- by hearing impersonators (three of whom performed at the conference) or visiting a recreated kinetoscope parlor. In fact, the last afternoon of the conference offered the audio equivalent of the latter -- a live wax cylinder phonograph sound recording demonstration.
Transmitting information about Edison was also demonstrated in two ways he might never have dreamed of: a distance learning hookup from Greenfield Village and a tour of what has been put onto the World Wide Web from the Edison Papers at edison.rutgers.edu and the Library of Congress lcweb.loc.gov.
"Attacking Technologies" that failed to displace the status quo
- Gas vs. electric refrigerators
- Nuclear vs. fossil fuel electricity
- Electric vs. internal combustion auto
- 3-D vs. 2-D movies
- Picturephone vs. telephone
- Videodisc vs. VCR
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