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Edison's Laboratory
by Paul Israel
Director and General Editor of Thomas
A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University
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| Thomas Edison to
"Friend Griffin," June 6, 1893. GLC
02480.03. |
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Thomas Edison's death in October 1931 seemed to mark the
passing of an era. Writing in the New York Times Magazine,
Waldemar Kaempffert, the editor of a two-volume Popular
History of Invention, expressed the common view that
Edison was the last of the great heroic inventors and
that the "future belongs to the organized, highly
trained physicists and chemists of the corporation research
laboratory." The seminal inventions of the nineteenth
century, including Edison's electric light, were seen
as the work of lone geniuses drawing on innate Yankee
ingenuity.
In fact, rather than being an enterprise of lone individuals,
nineteenth-century invention involved communities of skilled
operatives, machinists, superintendents, and manufacturers
who drew on practical experience to design, build, and
refine new technology. They worked in manufacturing and
experimental machine shops that served as their research
laboratories. This kind of shop invention went well beyond
the simple method of “cut-and-try” experimentation
that is often attributed to nineteenth-century inventors.
Inventors not only kept abreast of scientific and technical
research that might contribute to their work, but frequently
undertook experiments designed to give them more general
knowledge that might prove crucial to their success.
When Edison created the first industrial research laboratory
in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, he was seeking to
extend, not replace, this shop tradition. Nonetheless,
the Menlo Park laboratory prefigured a new model of research,
as Edison merged the shop tradition with laboratory research.
In addition, Edison turned increasingly to teams of researchers
in order to develop all aspects of his inventions and
move them rapidly into commercialization. By the early
1880s, Edison had transformed his "invention factory"
into a true research and development laboratory, and,
by doing so, he laid the cornerstone of modern industrial
research.
Edison began his career as an inventor in the late 1860s
while working as a telegraph operator, and by the early
1870s he had achieved a reputation as one of the industry's
leading "electromechanicians." This term captured
both the mechanical character of nineteenth-century electrical
technology -- like stock tickers -- and the role that
machine shops and skilled machinists played in the inventive
process. Early in his career Edison took advantage of
his success as an inventor to open a telegraph manufacturing
shop in Newark, New Jersey, which provided not only another
source of income for himself but also steady work for
the skilled machinists who assisted him with his inventions.
Edison's work as a contract inventor for the leading telegraph
companies, including Western Union, provided income from
patent royalties as well as research and development money.
Edison also enjoyed income from manufacturing many of
the instruments he invented for these companies at his
Newark shop. By the spring of 1875, he was able to make
his expanding laboratory entirely independent of the manufacturing
shop and turned to invention full-time. With the skilled
workmen and tools from his Newark telegraph shops adapted
solely to inventive work, Edison could rapidly construct,
test, and alter experimental devices. At the end of 1875,
Edison built his now famous laboratory in Menlo Park,
New Jersey, which was designed to be an "invention
factory" where he planned to produce "a minor
invention every ten days and a big thing every six months
or so."
Edison was not alone in his efforts to develop more sophisticated
laboratories for invention. Electrical and chemical laboratories
could be found in a number of American telegraph shops.
Edison had seen inventor Moses Farmer's small laboratory
above Charles Williams's shop in Boston with its "immense
quantity of valuable electrical and experimental apparatus,"
and he conducted some of his own experiments in the shop.
A few years later, Alexander Graham Bell met Thomas Watson,
the young machinist who became his chief experimental
assistant, when he brought his instruments to Williams's
shop. After arriving in New Jersey, Edison experimented
in Dr. Leverett Bradley's telegraph shop in Jersey City,
where he found a fine electrical laboratory used by Bradley
in designing and manufacturing the first American-made
galvanometer. Western Electric Manufacturing Company,
where rival inventor Elisha Gray conducted his experiments,
had a laboratory with "ample accommodations for electrical,
chemical, and other scientific investigations." What
set Edison's effort apart from those of his contemporaries
was its scale and scope. The laboratory he built in Menlo
Park was probably the best equipped private laboratory
in the United States and certainly the largest devoted
to invention. Over the course of the next five years,
Edison would turn his invention factory into a true research
and development laboratory and produce some of the most
important new technologies of his time.
In order to support his expanding laboratory, Edison needed
to find additional financing. Writing to Western Union
President William Orton, he described the advantages of
his new laboratory which "with machinery & apparatus
cost about $40,000." Noting that this provided him
with "unusual facilities" for "perfecting
any kind of Telegraphic invention," Edison proposed
that Western Union pay the "running expenses of my
[machine] shop," which "including coal kerosene
& labor is about 15 per day or 100 per week."
Orton agreed to Edison's proposal, and on March 22, 1877,
they signed a new agreement that included much of Edison's
language justifying the company's support for his laboratory.
In exchange Western Union would acquire all of Edison's
inventions, including any that resulted from his work
to improve upon Bell's new telephone.
Edison soon made a signal contribution to telephone technology
when he developed the carbon-button transmitter in 1877–78.
Edison's decision to use carbon drew on his efforts to
understand the subtleties of the cable telegraph system
he had seen while visiting England in 1873. His automatic
telegraph system was designed to transmit messages at
high speed and record them automatically on chemically
treated paper. However, while testing it on a submarine
cable, he was astonished to discover that a simple dot
was recorded as a twenty-seven foot mark. Soon after his
return Edison began equipping a new laboratory at his
Newark shop with electrical and chemical equipment. He
also devised and built a high-resistance rheostat made
of carbon-filled glass tubes so that he could conduct
bench-top experiments on cable telegraphy. Although he
found this artificial cable to be unstable because the
motion and noise of the machinery caused the resistance
of the carbon to change erratically, it was just this
kind of sensitive variable resistance that he later required
for transmitting the varying sound waves of the human
voice over a telephone circuit.
While working on the telephone, Edison thought about the
need to record messages in order to automatically repeat
them over long distances and also to provide a permanent
record. Thus, in July 1877, he conducted his first experiment
recording sound by putting a needle on a telephone diaphragm
and using it to emboss waxed paper. Finding that the sound
"vibrations are indented nicely," he concluded,
"there’s no doubt that I shall be able to store
up & reproduce automatically at any future time the
human voice perfectly." Never lacking for confidence,
six months later he successfully recorded "Mary had
a Little Lamb" on his new cylinder phonograph. In
January 1878, Edison was able to convince investors connected
with the Bell Telephone Company to form the Edison Speaking
Phonograph Company and invest $10,000 in research and
development of the phonograph. Although he spent the first
half of 1878 working to improve the tinfoil phonograph,
it remained a novelty. Not until Alexander Graham Bell
and Charles Sumner Tainter developed wax recording at
Bell's Volta laboratory in the 1880s did Edison again
take up sound recording. By the end of the century, using
the resources of his research laboratory, he successfully
improved the technology of sound recording and turned
it into a commercially viable industry.
By the spring of 1878, funding from Western Union and
from Edison Speaking Phonograph enabled Edison to increase
his staff from the original small group who accompanied
him from Newark to around twenty-five men. This included
four experimenters, a couple of general laboratory assistants,
six machinists, a patternmaker, a general handyman, a
watchman, a bookkeeper, and a private secretary.
Over the next two years, Edison turned to research on
electric lighting, funded primarily from Western Union
investors. Their support enabled Edison not only to increase
his staff but to greatly expand his laboratory. He built
a separate and larger brick machine shop, which enabled
him to expand his electrical laboratory on the ground
floor as well as add a photometric laboratory. In addition,
he built a two-story brick office and library building
and stocked it with an impressive collection of technical
and scientific books and journals. These new laboratory
resources, combined with his greatly augmented staff,
enabled Edison to turn Menlo Park into a true research
and development laboratory.
Between the fall of 1878 and the fall of 1879, Edison
added additional staff, including several experimenters.
Most notable was Francis Upton, who had received the first
Master of Science degree from Princeton and then did post-graduate
work with Herman von Helmholtz. He also hired several
chemists, including two with German Ph.D.s, and a German
lamp-blower who had worked for a scientific instrument
maker. Although a few experimenters, like Charles Clarke
and Julius Hornig, were hired because of their formal
training as engineers, most were ambitious young men attracted
by the aura surrounding Edison and his laboratory and
who learned on the job. Edison now had teams of researchers
who could work simultaneously on all elements of the electric
lighting system. This enabled him to rapidly leapfrog
past his competitors and to develop not just a laboratory
prototype of a lamp or generator but a complete commercial
system of electric lighting.
Edison's great success at the Menlo Park laboratory made
it a model for others. Alexander Graham Bell was influenced
by what he called Edison's "celebrated laboratory
at Menlo Park" when he set up his own Volta Laboratory
in Washington, D.C., in 1881. Other electrical inventors,
such as Edward Weston, were also inspired by Edison's
example as they set up laboratories of their own. The
Bell Telephone Company likewise drew on the example of
Edison's laboratory when it established an experimental
shop in 1883. The influence of the laboratory even extended
to the scientific community as American and European scientists
visited and found it better equipped than their own laboratories.
Menlo Park also provided the model for the even larger
laboratory Edison built in West Orange, New Jersey, in
1887, which he planned to be "best equipped &
largest Laboratory extant, and the facilities incomparably
superior to any other for rapid & cheap development
of an invention, & working it up into commercial shape
with models patterns special machinery." Having developed
a process of research and development at Menlo Park, Edison
applied it at West Orange to a wide variety of technologies.
Thomas Edison made fundamental contributions to many of
the technologies we associate with our modern, technological
society. He founded three key industries: electric light
and power, sound recording, and motion pictures. He also
made important contributions to many other industries,
including telecommunications, mining technology, cement
manufacture, and storage batteries. But his most important
contribution was a new method of invention that was part
of a larger system of innovation. Edison created the first
industrial research laboratory devoted to developing new
technologies by taking traditional shop invention and
grafting onto it modern chemical and electrical laboratories.
In the process he devised a method of team research that
made invention more regular and predictable and demonstrated
to corporate leaders that support for research could be
of long-term benefit to their companies. While often thought
of as the leading symbol of a mythic American past in
which an unschooled empirical genius could astound the
world through hard work and persistence, Edison should
instead be remembered as the founder of modern industrial
research and as an innovator of new industries and new
technologies.
| For a list
of books and websites about Edison's life
and his contributions to science and technology,
visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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