Electric Innovation : Thomas Edison and the Hackers

These few have enjoyed a unique culture. The astounding technological breakthroughs whose consequences we live in today are the product of a mixture of corporate, industrial, and scientific interests, with a good deal of innovation for innovation's sake. This culture's origin is often dated to the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I will show that the way of managing and directing the intellectual and, more prominently, technological curiosty that characterizes the intensely bright individuals found in labs the world over can be traced, not to the academic computer labs of the 1960s, but rather to the industrial research and development facilities popularized by Thomas Edison with his Menlo Park Invention Factory in the 1870s and 80s. He took the raw talent of his staff at Menlo Park and gave it the organization and direction it needed to produce great things.

It appears that the main ingredient, or at least common denominator, for innovation in the wide field of electrics and electronics, is the ``hands-on imperative'', a desire to understand and change the machinery. Edison was self-taught (this sort of self-motivation is still a highly prized attribute in the computer community) and perhaps as a result of his informal (but rigorous) technical education, he was a true pragmatist, and wanted to make things work, rather than simply discuss abstract theories. This attitude no doubt figured heavily in the style of research conducted at Menlo Park.

There appears to be a certain amount of disagreement, or at least confusion, over whether Edison was primarily a researcher or a ``tinkerer''. One wonders whether it even makes sense to attempt to characterize the Menlo Park research facility in terms of Edison alone---although he did establish it and outfit it with the best available chemical, electrical, and mechanical equipment available at the time, he had to hire mechanics and engineers to use and modify that equipment, and researchers to explore the limits of technology. Those people, too, must have contributed to the culture of Edison's laboratory. While the term ``tinkerer'' trivializes the atmosphere at the Invention Factory, Edison was an entrepreneur, and so valued research, but only because it yielded marketable inventions and ultimately, profit. So the good people at Menlo Park were likely only tinkerers in the sense that they were experimenting with the technology, improving it incrementally until it could be sold.

The invention factory was, for our purposes, significant for two reasons: The first was Edison's group-oriented approach to innovation. He organized and directed the intellectual efforts of the entire facility, allowing for testing and evaluation of mechanisms and materials to happen much faster. Secondly, his eye was always on the bottom line; if research wasn't going to turn a profit, the Menlo Park people weren't going to be wasting their time on it. Edison had a reputation for disdain of pure research, an impression he actually cultivated himself. It's unlikely the Edison actually looked down upon pure scientific research---his entire livelihood was built on the pure research of earlier men who did not share his apparent distaste for inapplicable principles---rather, he didn't want to waste time with such research at his lab. His staff was to stay firmly based in the current state-of-the-art, to make sure that every invention they produced was instantly feasible to bring to market. This is not to say that they did nothing new. Rather, Edison was mindful of how the human resources of his lab were being spent, and making sure their efforts would come quickly to fiscal fruition.

This has been an important, though hard-learned, lesson for subsequant corporate R & D efforts. When working to bring truly revolutionary products to market, researchers and engineers often lose sight of what will sell in the real world, and for what price. Even managers can fall into this trap, failing in their job as the mediator between the lab and the real world. Edison was such a pragmatist, it is doubtful that he would have had any patience for (for example) the self-styled "artists" at Apple Computer. One of the afflictions that has plagued that company almost since its inception is an excess of hubris; no doubt they would've done well with a dose of Edisonian practicality. When Apple began a research project called "Macintosh", Jef Raskin, the intial project leader, was continuously cognizant of the need to keep price low and goals reachable, something his sucessor, Steve Jobs, had more trouble with. In a memo Raskin wrote to Jobs, he said: ``We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today's and the immediate future's technology. These factors must all be juggled simultaneously.'' This sense of the current state of technology has proved very important. A product that is ahead of its time actually stands a good chance of failing. Whether Edison was aware of this or not, his endeavors were exactly state-of-the-art. He showed that timeliness was important for financial success.

It's important to point out that while Edison stayed within the current state of technology, he didn't limit its application. He hired the best people, and to make sure their talents didn't go to waste, set up the best possible facilities. It's doubtful that the electric light and the infrastructure to support its use could've been brought to fruition as quickly as it was otherwise. The Menlo Park facility, because it was equipped with living quarters, made a kind of intense persistence possible. This persistence, this willingness to work tirelessly toward a just-possible goal, certainly characterizes both the Menlo Park staff and the researchers of today. A good programmer, for example, is known for the ability to enter hack mode, a state of intense concentration in which large amounts of complex code can be written. It is incongruous to say that hack mode is a trait only associated with programmers, though; no doubt the Menlo Park researchers were capable of something akin to hack mode as well. Edison knew how to foster this kind of focused intellectual effort, and how to make it deliver the goods.

It is true, at least in modern intensive R & D efforts, that this kind of effort takes its toll on some people. Particularly when a student is recruited fresh out of school, the expectation is for them to devote themselves completely to the singular effort of their work. This expectation can and does produce amazing results, but there is often a high price. Even the most talented engineer will burn out eventually, given a heavy enough workload. A promising microprocessor designer assigned to the Data General Eclipse project had this to say about the environment: "There was no question of deadlines. You'd already missed it, whatever it was . . . if I spent only a sixty-hour week, I felt intensely guilty." He left the company, eventually, after burning out on nanosecond-level errors in the arithmetic operations unit he was designing. The following note was found on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." The pressure problem can be more serious still. Returning to the example of Apple Computer, one of the members of the Newton design team (notorious even within Apple for its high-pressure environment), Ko Isono, commited suicide, unable to handle the personal and professional stress that has become the norm for commercial technology development. Presumably the stress levels were similar at the invention factory, given the impressive pace that facility was able to maintain.

The nature of commercial research has changed somewhat since Edison's time, but in many ways its character has remained the same. Loath though many engineers would be to admit it, administration and management are essential to this process of innovation, particulary when commercial interests are involved. It's not clear exactly how much of the technology that came out of the invention factory was actually created by Edison. His own technical prowess is not in question, but it seems doubtful that he created each breakthrough that led to his one thousand-plus patents, even though his name is on all of them. This is one thing that has changed over time. The engineers of sucessful products now become celebrities within their own companies. The company usually still owns the patent or copyright, but the employee (or team of employees) is credited with the breakthrough, and rightly so. From a certain perspective it's not important whether Edison was personally involved in every phase of development, because it was his management and motivation that drove innovation at Menlo Park.

Of course, Edison's material contribution to human technology is hard to overestimate, but what is more important still is his contribution to the methodology of innovation. This is not to say that the invention factory way of doing things was the only way, but the path technology took through the twentieth century supports the idea that the sort of focused, group effort that Edison pioneered was an excellent way to create the kind of innovation that would be profitable.

However, the Edison way of doing things was not the only way. Nikola Tesla, for example, took out well over 500 patents in his lifetime, and worked largely alone. But even today, much of Tesla's work remains uncredited and poorly understood. Although he was legendary for his flamboyant demonstrations and press releases, Tesla worked alone, and generally in secret. Much of his work was not patented, and many of his notes and papers were lost, or at least misplaced, because he left no will. He was posthumously recognized, for example, as the inventor of radio transmission, and also notable is the fact that it was Tesla's work with alternating current power transmission that drives our modern electrical infrastructure, rather than Edison's direct current method. Still, Telsa remains largely a background figure because of his solitary nature. Both men contributed immensely to the body of technology as a whole, but Edison gave us the tools to continue adding to that body, while Tesla's methodology (or lack thereof) died with him.

Edison also set an example by the kind of people he hired. He liked working with young people, perhaps because he knew that a younger person, in some sense, didn't know what couldn't be done. Perhaps he knew he could push kids harder and get the kind of results he wanted: a minor breakthrough every 10 days, and something major every six months. The team at the invention factory in this way uncannily resembles the teams who today design the unthinkably complex computers we use every day. Fresh out of graduate school, they're hired fully expecting to work 80 hours a week or more. The invention factory had living quarters; modern software companies have couches and Dr Pepper, but the idea is much the same: Work technological miracles, and work them quickly.

So it's clear that while the world is always better for the work of lone geniuses like Tesla, a still greater calling is to "make tools to make tools," to advance the state of technology while at the same time providing ways for others to advance it still further. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is an ideal among modern programmers, the idea being that anyone can create a new application, but it is the sign of a truly great programmer when he can invent a new way to be still more creative. Edison showed how to harness the once-disparate disciplines of scientific research and engineering so effectively that it has become almost meaningless, in some modern endeavors, to make a distinction between the two. This lesson, this invention of thought, well-learned by subsequent generations of entrepreneurs, is more important than any one piece of technology.

I have references, but I don't think anybody cares