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Jonas Hughes      

   If one person can be said to have led the world into the age of technology it was Thomas Alva Edison. Not only did he invent and perfect many of the technologies vital to the modern world --- including the electric light, the motion picture camera and the first sound recordings --- he also set the standard for how research and development is done today.

   Edison's best-known saying is: "Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration." This belief was his religion: He worked day and night for much of his life. By the time he died in 1931, he had patented over 1,100 inventions. Some were entirely his own, but many were improvements he had made to the inventions of others.

   Edison's career began in New York, in 1869, when he was 22 years old. He arrived in the city with nothing but the shirt on his back. It turned out that the old family friends he had hoped would help him had moved on; consequently, Edison found himself out on the street. He ended up sleeping in the cellar of a company that operated an information service for stockbrokers. In those days, information was sent from place to place using tickertape, and one day the system collapsed. In the chaos that followed, Edison offered to fix the problem and within minutes had the equipment working again. He was immediately given a job.

   Within a year, Edison had saved enough money to open his own company manufacturing tickertape machines. The business did well, and Edison had plenty of time to concentrate on his experiments and inventions. In fact, he was so productive that within six years, he had patented over 120 inventions, in between  running a successful business, getting married and starting a family.

   Shortly after that, he moved his factory to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he established his first big laboratory. It was here that Edison was to do his best work and build his international reputation. The factory would also set the standard for how new technologies would be created and perfected in the future, according to patent consultant Ted Blake.

   "Edison was really the first man to run a research and development department like a modern technology concern. A lot of invention nowadays is modification of existing products and processes, to make them a little bit more commercial, a little bit more effective. And Edison started all that off."

   Few of Edison's most useful inventions were entirely original. Instead, he concentrated much of his time and effort on improving existing products. One was the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell invented it, but it was Edison who improved the range and clarity of the instrument  so that it could be put to practical use by ordinary people.

   Moreover, some of the inventions commonly attributed to Edison had already been invented. One example is the light bulb. This was first demonstrated in London in 1878 by its English inventor, Joseph Wilson Swan. However, when Edison demonstrated his light bulb in the US the following year, it was he who was given the credit for bringing electric light to the world.

   One reason was that Edison did more than just supply a light bulb, as Brian Bowers of London's Science Museum explains. "Edison believed that if you had electric light, then you should have an Edison electric light bulb in an Edison lamp, connected by a piece of Edison wire, all the way back to the Edison generator in the Edison power station. It was a different concept --- he was going for the whole system."

   In this, Edison was unlike most scientists and inventors, who tend to concentrate on one particular idea or field. Edison never restricted himself. The reason, says his biographer, Neil Baldwin, is that he was motivated by a desire to improve people's lives.

   "You can see this theme throughout his life --- to help the people of America to better their lives. He designed mass housing  for the working people; he tried to find a cheaper way to mine iron ore; he designed a battery for an automobile; and he tried to make an electric car, to cut down on environmental pollution."

   In fact, so great was Edison's desire to invent things that would make life easier and better that he neglected to exploit many of his inventions because he didn't believe they would be of use to people, or that people would want them.

   One of his biggest mistakes was to underestimate the attraction of cinema and radio. After inventing the motion picture camera, he abandoned filmmaking because he believed movies could only be of interest to specialists who would use them for education, not entertainment. And although he was the first person to record sound, he failed to develop that technology because he didn't think people would want radios. His reasoning was that the public would not allow into their homes a source of entertainment they couldn't control.

   Despite these occasional errors of judgment, Edison produced a steady supply of useful inventions throughout his life, many of which are still helping to shape our world.

未来的发明家