The Gilded Age’s Tom Edison: 11 Take-Aways

I’ve been reading for several years now that we have entered a second Gilded Age of wealth and excess. So, I thought, maybe it was time to bone-up on the first Gilded Age to see if the comparisons made any sense.

From the death of Lincoln to the rise of Teddy Roosevelt, the first Gilded Age spanned a period when the country first became "cemented," to the time it became a world power.

In a terrific study of the period by Sean Dennis Cashman called America in the Gilded Age, I came upon a section on Thomas Edison who, along with Alexander Graham Bell, “were, perhaps, the only authentic heroes of the age,” according to Cashman.

Holding over 1,000 patents and considered the greatest inventor in American history, Edison is most famous for inventing the light bulb. Here are 11 take-aways you probably didn’t know:

1. The American humor magazine Puck said: “Edison is the type of man common enough in this country—a smart, persevering, sanguine, ignorant show-off American. He can do a great deal and he thinks he can do everything.”

2. Most of Edison’s inventions were not the happy result of accident and intuition but of back-breaking trial and error in painstaking experiments. Edison was famous for saying, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

3. Edison’s career was governed by the priorities of business. His first notable invention was the Edison Universal Stock Printer--invented in 1871--an automatic machine capable of transmitting 200-300 words per minute and far superior to any in use.

4. With the backing of investors, the 24-year-old set himself up as an independent maker of stock tickers in Newark, New Jersey. But Edison knew what he didn’t know. He hired English immigrant Charles Batchelor and Swiss immigrant John Kruesi, both of whom had the scientific training Edison lacked. Edison would conceive, Batchelor would draw, and Kruesi would model.

5. In 1873 Edison devised the diplex and quadruplex, allowing two signals to be sent in each direction on the same telegraph line. The quadruplex was sold to entrepreneur Jay Gould, but the court battle over the invention, between Western Union and its rival, Atlantic and Pacific, made Edison famous.

6. In 1876 Edison established the world’s first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, a prototype of company labs in the future. That year he worked on the electromotograph, acoustic telegraph, autographic telegraph, speaking telegraph, electric pen, mimeograph, electrical dental drill and electric sewing machine. In 1887 he established a research facility ten-times bigger in West Orange, New Jersey, employing 120 research assistants and surrounded by 5,000 people making goods from his inventions.

7. Edison invented the photograph in 1877. He tested it with rhymes like:

Mary has a new sheath gown,
It is too tight by half.
Who cares a damn for Mary’s lamb,
When they can see her calf!

When the new invention was presented in Washington, President Rutherford B. Hayes woke his wife in the middle of the night so that she could hear it.

8. John Pierpont Morgan and other New York financiers subsidized Edison’s newly-formed Edison Electric Light Company, believing he could improve on the electric arc lamp, which used enormous amounts of power. Edison discovered that carbon remained stable in a vacuum; Charles Batchelor thought to shape the wire like a horseshoe, and the first viable incandescent lamp burned for sixteen hours on November 17, 1879. To gain support, Edison worked to get his light accepted in New York, Paris and London.

9. By 1883 Edison had 246 plants making electricity for 61,000 lamps.

10. Edison had few skills as a businessman, and made and lost several fortunes. His business dealings taught him to trust nobody, and his ruthlessness become so ill concealed that he was forced out of his own company. In 1892, when the General Edison Electric Company merged with its great rival, Thomas-Houston, it became General Electric. It took on a new president, Charles Coffin, and it excluded Edison’s name from the company’s title.

11. As a footnote, Edison went on to make a fortune from the phonograph and the kinetoscope, and eventually, moving, talking pictures.

And, as for whether the second Gilded Age really exists, or compares in any way with the first Gilded Age, I'll let you know in about 400 pages. . .

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

Tweet