I recently read (and took notes and reread numerous passages from) Edmund Morris’s biography of Edison, so you will be hearing quite a lot about it here on the blog over the next few weeks.
Though it got very good reviews, one aspect of the book that threw a number of critics was the reverse chronology. The prologue to the book was a short chapter on the death of Edison. The next chapter discussed the final decade of his life, with the title Botany (every chapter was titled after the field of science that Edison was focused on at the time).
One of the things I liked about this backwards telling of Edison's story is that we are introduced to the man not through his early and spectacular successes, but through arguably the greatest failures of his career: the disastrous mining operation that cost him his fortune, the attempt to be the first to create a viable system of talking pictures, his plan to bring military research into the 20th century, and his search for a viable native alternative for rubber production.
What's notable is that, though deeply flawed, all of these ideas were good—even great—and often remarkably prescient.
His innovations in automating mining did have an effect on the industry, and the advances he made in the production of cement had a huge impact on the construction industry, including providing much of the raw materials for Yankee Stadium. The only problem was that no level of innovation could overcome the cheap and superior ore recently discovered in the West.
When it worked, his talking picture system was, if anything, superior in sound quality to what came a decade later. Unfortunately, it didn't work that often. As with Langley's steam-powered planes, the work was impressive, but it was simply the wrong approach.
While the specific technology (all defensive—that was his one rule) that he and his team came up with during World War I was clever and often anticipated major advances of the next two or three decades, it was his plans for a massive, civilian-controlled research and development lab—in many ways DARPA decades before DARPA—that are truly remarkable and represent an incredible missed opportunity. It turned out the navy wasn't all that eager to be reformed.
Edison's last great project had him move into the entirely new field of botany, throwing himself in with characteristic energy and focus despite advanced age and failing health. His research was top-notch, showing that even in an area as far removed as could be imagined from electrical or mechanical engineering, he could set up top tier R&D teams. As with mining, however, Edison ran into the hard truth that no amount of innovation can overcome competitors with a better supply of a cheaper product. In this case, it was the one-two punch of the rubber cartels never making their anticipated production cuts, followed a few years after Edison’s death by the development of synthetic rubber, that doomed the idea of American-based production. Somewhat ironically, Edison himself was on record for decades having predicted that synthetic materials and fibers would soon replace most natural materials.
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