What Silicon Valley Won’t Admit About Technology and Progress

All the great inventions took painstaking, risky, indirect routes to fruition. Has Silicon Valley really escaped history?

circa 1871: Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) American scientist, inventor and industrialist, after spending 5 continuous days and nights perfecting the phonograph, listening through a primitive headphone — Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By Edward Tenner

Last spring, I finally visited one of the United States’ industrial shrines: the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. Before the rise of Silicon Valley, Thomas Edison was the country’s greatest technological celebrity and, even now, no Silicon Valley billionaire approaches Edison’s portfolio of 1,093 US patents. (For example, Amazon’s founder Jeffrey Bezos is on just 81, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is on 31, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin is on 20.)

After touring Edison’s laboratory, shops and a replica of his original Black Maria film studio, I reflected on what Edison might have thought of the iPhone SE and Waze software that had conquered my aversion to the chronic congestion and confused highway grid of northern New Jersey, testaments to the success of Edison’s friend Henry Ford. He would have admired the miniaturisation of today’s smartphones and the software that can give turn-by-turn instructions with no additional charge to the user. Waze is far from perfect; on my return trip, it originally pointed me in the wrong direction at the…