That Light Bulb Moment

Elementary school students love field trips. Trips beat parsing sentences and doing long division any day. In 1963 (I think), one of the trips taken by my class was to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in nearby West Orange, NJ. This was where Edison opened his research laboratory in 1887. It dwarfed his previous facility in Menlo Park. Nothing like it on this scale had existed before anywhere. Edison’s movie studio was built on the same grounds in 1893. The lab was in operation until the 1930s and hasn’t changed much since then. Thomas’ son Charles Edison (governor of NJ in the 1940s) saw to that; he donated the site to the federal government in 1956.

For no good reason, I hadn’t been back inside the place since 1963 – until, that is, a week ago when friends from CA (see http://innermammalinstitute.org/), in the area for some business at the Bronx Zoo, suggested I meet them in West Orange. There was no need to ask twice. Revisiting the site was fun. I appreciated all of it on a different level than in 1963, of course.

I’ve been mulling a question that arose during the tour. The question was whether Edison, for all his 1,093 patents, was as important as all that. Could it be that the time was just ripe for his inventions? Wouldn’t someone else have invented them had he not existed? I didn’t respond to this particularly well at the time, but I’ll do it now. The answer is yes, but… emphasis on the “but.”

The “times” don’t create anything. People do, individually or in teams. The surprising thing is not how often several inventors are working on a similar idea at the same time, but how few those inventors always are. To be sure, the times do matter. For example, the ancient world cared little for Heron’s steam engine or (except for slinging bolts and rocks) Archimedes’ levers. The ruling classes were perfectly happy with slave labor and saw no need to exploit mechanical power in its place. By 1800 circumstances were very different in parts of Europe and North America. Yet, the social conditions which made the 19^th century ripe for the industrial application of science were created, once again, by people – people with names, even if we no longer know most of them. The “times” did not simply emerge out of the ether. Nothing “just happens.” Somebody makes it happen.

I remember growling something similar to myself while slogging through War and Peace years ago. About 1,000 pages into the book Tolstoy seems to lose interest in his characters and instead treats us to more and more of his theory of history. He tells us how the times were responsible for creating Napoleon and how his defeat was inescapable. Um, no. The times (created by specific people, many of them Revolutionaries) did make Napoleon possible, but not necessary. Had he died in Italy there is no reason to believe anyone else would have or could have duplicated his career. Nor was his defeat in Russia woven into the fabric of time. Alexander had something to do with that. It all could have turned out quite differently with different actors in place. I'm not sure why this is even a matter for dispute, but apparently it is.

In short, I don’t think we make a mistake by admiring people who revolutionize our lives, whether in business, science, politics, or culture. Without them, might others come along sooner or later with comparable contributions? Yes. In that case we wouldn’t be making a mistake by admiring them instead. One way or another, it always takes a real live human being, not some nebulous chronology. 

Thomas Edison deserves a park with his name on it.