1 / 8 Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is known as the world’s greatest inventor, the mind behind everything from the light bulb to the electric car. His record output – 1,093 patents – still amazes us, over a century later. How could one man invent so much? Short answer: he didn’t. Apart from his pet project, the phonograph, most Edison inventions were the work of unsung technicians, who toiled in the unsafe conditions of his laboratories and factories, so that Edison could take credit and get the patent. He was your classic Dickensian employer, paying as little as he could get away with paying. His move in 1876 to his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was partly prompted by a strike of his workers, which made him desperate to escape the trade unions of New York City. OK, Edison was a visionary -– like Leonardo Da Vinci, whose sketches of airplanes and armored tanks could not take form until the technology existed, centuries after his death. Of course, Leonardo didn’t have a team behind him. Without his engineers, Edison would have been no more an “inventor” than H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, or any other great visionary science-fiction writer. Still, Edison’s name is still synonymous with invention -– proof that, generally, his publicity worked. It wasn’t what he knew; it was whom he knew. As Jack Stanley, curator of the Thomas Edison Museum in Menlo Park, once told me: “He was brilliant enough to realize that he wasn’t brilliant.”

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