Is Edison Still Relevant?

It is August in Paris, and for anyone who has spent any time in France knows, there is little chance of finding many laboratories open, as the country has gone south for the month. So my search for labs is on hold until September. Since I have the time I have been reading a lot of blogs, discovering new gardens with my daughter, and having fun using our amateur microscope together. I did find some of my old online photo albums last night, and many photos of a film which I was producing, called “The Edison Project”, which never got completed. The idea of the film was something I had wanted to explore for a long time, which was how a research lab, Thomas Edison’s in New Jersey, could make the first films. That is, how such diversity of innovation came from one small lab, which led not only to the light bulb, but also the moving image, which would become a new way to understand humanity and nature. Of course the movie business is a large industry, which requires a great deal of expense and is ultimately why the film was never completed. The director, Martin Cespedes, and myself, spent several years on this journey though (starting in 2000), and like so much unfinished business in life, it did inform and inspire so much of what I was doing simultaneously with my family business, and would do later when setting up labs.
My family business was a small company in Ohio that my parents had started 20 years before called Tech Pro. The company was an enterprise started in our family’s garage, with a small guest bedroom in the house doubling as an office. Though this story doesn’t end with us becoming a Dell or Hewlett Packard, my parents did manage to create a successful company (moving out of the garage) that did some truly innovative work in laboratory instrumentation and software. I have always considered my Dad to be an Edison type, minus the anti-Semitism and egomania. He is Edisonian in that while educated in mathematics, he always learned most through experiment and reading. He also has a general optimism that allows him to create things that others say is not possible. I hope I have inherited some of this, though I am afraid I don’t live in places where having a garage to work in is economically possible. What I did have 9 years ago when we started the Edison Project was my first fulltime position at Tech Pro. I was “Director of Development”. There was not a strict job description for this position, as it was a title Dad and I created ourselves, and had not existed at Tech Pro before. What I knew was that it was up to me to figure out what to do with it, while at the same time learning about everything from accounting, to shipping, to sales, and even some limited technical service. So, I was doing two things, producing a feature film and trying to run development for a technology company, which were both overly ambitious as I had no experience or education in either at the time. Still, when Martin and I first visited the Edison labs in Orange New Jersey, I was so excited that I would never stop day dreaming about doing what Edison did.
The Orange facilities are rather large, as they were the head quarters for his businesses, the research center, and manufacturing base. The main area though was several modest sized rooms which were an invention factory. The first was a very well stocked library. Even 9 years ago I realized how lucky I was to be trying to create technology in the 21rst century, where a physical library of books would not be necessary anymore. Edison and his team must have spent days looking up articles, ordering new books, waiting for new journals to arrive. All of this was becoming available to us on the internet. Edison had nearly 2000 patents; it is hard to imagine how many he would have had if he had the extra time the internet would have allowed him. Another room, which was an inventory room of sorts, was perhaps the most fascinating to me. In this room were samples of nearly everything from animal tusks and bones (which could be used for comparing physical properties), chemicals, anchors, seeds and just about anything else completely unrelated to each other that you could imagine. All of the Edison team could use these items whenever they wanted in order to help them with a new invention. This leads me to the basic premise of the Edison labs. That is, everyone working there was expected to file a new patent, that is invent something original, every week. It didn’t matter what field it was in. They just needed to be fulltime inventors. They could use the two rooms I just described, or any of the others, which were chemistry and material science labs, and a machine shop. They had to document everything they were doing with great detail. They also had to work next to and with all of the other inventors, even though they were working on completely different projects. This was a simple and effective way of sharing information, which could serve multiple purposes. This is something that modern companies still struggle with. Many pharmaceutical giants for instance, have so many products in process, and teams working on them at such distances that complicated software are needed to share data, so that no one is redoing work that has already been done. Even with this, most researchers will admit to wasted effort.
The Edison labs had ideas about research which I wanted to explore 9 years ago to create a movie and set-up systems at Tech Pro. I was inspired, and did some of what I had learned, but of course left so much undone, including the movie itself. Part of the exploration of labs that I will be undertaking is to see if this type of development is being done, or is even possible today. It starts with two basic assumptions. The first idea is that you can be small enough to be in close contact with others (or at least well connected enough though the internet) so that ideas become contagious. The other is whether invention can be structured like other jobs, such as painting a house. Edison’s requirements for patent applications assumed, like a house painter, that with effort, and a certain amount of time, a job could be finished. Painting a house may take a week, so does inventing the phonograph! Was this possible because of the times, where the industrial revolution had made the ability to actually make things that others had only theorized about before possible? Perhaps we are in another one of these times, where computation, connectivity, nanoscience and genomics make it possible to realize ideas that humanity has had for ages. This will be interesting to see, and who knows? Maybe a movie can be made about it.