Book Blurbs

“The traditional view of invention assumed that it was something like an act of God, a ‘divine accident’; like ‘the poet in a fine frenzy rolling,’ the inventor and the scientist were supposed to discover things by a stroke of genius…Edison was a genius who held that there was no such thing as genius. With his bustling organization at Menlo Park he worked to dispel all the old myths about the accomplishments of inventors. Like a good Darwinian, he believed that inventions arose out of man’s developing culture, his environment, his social and industrial relations. His busy workshop was turned by him into something far removed from those elegant laboratories of the earlier epoch, often placed in a pavilion in some formal French garden, where aristocratic amateurs of science demonstrated their superior intellectual capacities or their ’superhuman cleverness,’ without regard to the needs of industry or human welfare.

“Edison’s decision not to undertake inventions unless there was a definite market demand for them was of great historical importance, as a modern commantator, James G. Crowther, has written in a very discerning paper: ‘He was the first great scientific inventor who clearly conceived of invention as subordinate to commerce.’” (pp. 137-138)