“What we refer to as a great and special talent usually implies superiority that is expeditious rather than qualitative. In other words, it simply means doing quickly and with brilliant success what ordinary intellects carry out slowly but well. Instead of distinguishing between mediocre and great minds, it would be preferable and more correct in [...]
“Some time after his visit to the General Electric Laboratory, Edison, old free lance that he was, shook his head and declared that the ‘corporation laboratory’ would not do. The inventor was now a ‘hired person’ for the corporation, assigning to it all his patents; such men now worked in large groups and held many [...]
Edison “brought out a pear-shaped glass bulb intended for lamp experiment…and gave it to Upton [a highly trained mathematician], asking him to calculate its cubic contents in centimeters. Upton drew the shape of the bulb exactly on paper, and got the equation of its lines, with which he was going to calculate its contents, when [...]