Light And How Thomas Edison Did Not “Invent” The Light Bulb

Just about a century ago, this image from space would show complete darkness. Artificial light has been one of those innovations that drastically altered human behavior. We can now work when darkness sets because of artificial light. Even our own sleep cycles have changed — we used to sleep for four hours right when darkness hit, wake up for a couple hours to work under a candle light, and then sleep for another few hours (people with insomnia still have remnants of this).

Steven Johnson, in his insightful book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, writes

Artificial light has transformed the way we work and sleep, helped create global networks of communication, and may soon enable radical breakthroughs in energy production. The lightbulb is so bound up in the popular sense of innovation that it has become a metaphor for new ideas themselves: the “lightbulb” moment has replaced Archimedes’s eureka as the expression most likely to be invoked to celebrate a sudden conceptual leap.

Light at night for the past two thousand years has been a result of candles. Beeswax was highly prized and expensive for anyone but the clergy or the aristocracy. It brought along with it a foul odor and thick smoke. In 1743, the president of Harvard wrote in his diary how he produced seventy-eight pounds of candles wax in two days of work made from a different type of animal fat that would burn for two months — a breakthrough at the time.

Later New Englanders found that the use of an oily substance in the skull of a whale that washed up on the beach could be used to produce stronger candles that lasted longer and did not produce offensive smoke. The substance, called spermaceti, was highly valued and almost led to the extension of whales — many whales were hunted and killed during this period. The thousands of killed creatures is what inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. If it had not been for oil — the new source of artificial light — the entire whale population might have been killed off.

Enter the electric lightbulb.

The strange thing about the electric lightbulb is that it has come to be synonymous with the “genius” theory of innovation — the single inventor inventing a single thing, in a moment of sudden inspiration — while the true story behind its creation actually makes the case for a completely different explanatory framework: the network/systems model of innovation.

To claim that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb is the same as claiming Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player.

The canonical story is that Edison, after a great start to his career inventing the phonograph and stock ticket, went out west for a few months and landed in a place that was significantly darker than the gaslit streets of New York city. Days after returning to his lab, he begins drawing diagrams in his notebook and titles them “Electric Light.” By the end of 1879, he files for a patent, and by the end of 1882, Edison’s company is powering Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan with electric light.

Edison had a flash of inspiration and within a few years, his idea was lighting up the world.

The issue with this tale is that first, its hand wavy, and second, is that people have been inventing incandescent light — light as a result of heating — for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it.

There are three fundamental elements to a lightbulb: a filament that glows when an electric current runs through it, a supply of electric power, and a mechanism for keeping the filament from burning out too quickly.

Steven Johnson writes on the men before Edison who worked on this basic formula for a lightbulb:

In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy had attached a platinum filament to an early electric battery, causing it to burn brightly for a few minutes. By the 1840s, dozens of separate inventors were working on variations of the lightbulb. The first patent was issued in 1841 to an Englishman named Frederick de Moleyns. The historian Arthur A. Bright compiled a list of the lightbulb’s partial inventors, leading up to Edison’s ultimate triumph in the late 1870s.

At least half of the men had hit upon the basic formula that Edison ultimately arrived at: a carbon filament, suspended in a vacuum to prevent oxidation, thus keeping the filament from burning up too quickly.

When Edison began lighting up Pearl Street in Manhattan, other firms were also selling their own versions of electric lamps. “Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.”

So how come Edison gets all the credit? Many people say of Steve Jobs when discussing his fame and work is that he was a master of marketing and PR. The same could be said for Edison. He would make an announcement of a product that never existed, and scare off competitors by telling reporters of how efficient his product was even though they had never seen it in action. Publicity however only takes you so far.

In 1882, Edison did in fact, similar to the MP3-player, produce a lightbulb that had significantly out preformed its competitors.

Steven Johnson writes,

Edison’s “invention” of the lightbulb was less about a single big idea and more about sweating the details. (His famous quip about invention being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration certainly holds true for his adventures in artificial light.) Edison’s single most significant contribution to the electric lightbulb itself was arguably the carbonized bamboo filament he eventually settled on. Edison wasted at least a year trying to make platinum work as a filament, but it was too expensive and prone to melting.

Edison was also a deal-maker. He orchestrated deals with China and Japan to buy the strongest bamboo that Edison’s team had ever encountered, which was used for the filaments in the bulb to prevent it from burning out too quickly. He started the tradition in America of importing components from Asia.

Like all inventions, Edison’s lightbulb was a mix of many small improvements and a diverse team of brilliant engineers. His team at Menlo Park marked the beginning of organizations with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and engineers working on a common problem. Edison invented this way of development that remains present to this day.

Steven Johnson writes,

By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere. “I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It’s their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me,” Edison famously said. “I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor.’”

The central theme in Steven Johnson’s How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World and Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is the long genius theory of innovation is in fact a myth. The idea of someone sitting in a garage, has a breakthrough, and goes out to build a world changing product all by herself is simply a lie. The innovations over the past few centuries, like the lightbulb, have been a product of what is called networked innovations. Ideas and incremental inventions built over the course of decades and a group of people coming together to create a breakthrough technology.

Steven Johnson writes,

Why should we care whether Edison invented the lightbulb as a lone genius or as part of a wider network? We know that one key driver of progress and standards of living is technological innovation.

If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.

Big ideas coalesce out of smaller, incremental breakthroughs.

As we dig deeper into the stories of “lone genius inventors”, we often find that the most important innovations arrive in clusters of simultaneous discoveries. Galileo heard of the telescope 2 years before he set out to build his own, taking ideas, concepts, and implementations already previously built. And Galileo’s genius isn’t about the telescope itself, but rather his mathematical mind and what he did with the telescope.

This is a frequent pattern in various innovations. An individual or group of people begin to notice new breakthroughs created by others and latch on to their ideas and work to build their own versions, and that building process involves the work and efforts of many people, both directly and indirectly.

Steven Johnson writes,

Most innovation happens in the present tense of the adjacent possible, working with the tools and concepts that are available in that time. But every now and then, some individual or group makes a leap that seems almost like time traveling. How do they do it? What allows them to see past the boundaries of the adjacent possible when their contemporaries fail to do so? That may be the greatest mystery of all.

The conventional explanation is the all-purpose but somewhat circular category of “genius.” Da Vinci could imagine (and draw) helicopters in the fifteenth century because he was a genius; Babbage and Lovelace could imagine programmable computers in the nineteenth century because they were geniuses. No doubt all three were blessed with great intellectual gifts, but history is replete with high-IQ individuals who don’t manage to come up with inventions that are decades or centuries ahead of their time. Some of that time-traveling genius no doubt came from their raw intellectual skills, but I suspect just as much came out of the environment their ideas evolved in, the network of interests and influence that shaped their thinking.

If there is a common thread to the time travelers, beyond the non-explanation of genius, it is this: they worked at the margins of their official fields, or at the intersection point between very different disciplines.

Steve Jobs had written that innovation lies at the intersection between science and the humanities. Isaac Asimov, in his brilliant essay “How Do People Get New Ideas”, says that new ideas are formed when the person makes a connection between multiple previous ideas — a network.

Stay within the boundaries of your discipline, and you will have an easier time making incremental improvements, opening the doors of the adjacent possible that are directly available to you given the specifics of the historical moment. (There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Progress depends on incremental improvements.) But those disciplinary boundaries can also serve as blinders, keeping you from the bigger idea that becomes visible only when you cross those borders.

Innovators are usually adept at intercrossing many different disciplines. Hobbyist and artists working from their garages and studios are able to take in this mix of ideas generated by others and creatively find a way to form them together. Inventors are only able to invent by standing on the shoulders of giants. The lone genius theory of invention implies isolation. The reality is, the inventors collect and mix ideas of their current time to build something new.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

If there’s anything we know from the history of innovation — and particularly from the history of the time travelers — it is that being true to yourself is not enough. Certainly, you don’t want to be trapped by orthodoxy and conventional wisdom. Certainly, the innovators profiled in this book had the tenacity to stick with their hunches for long periods of time. But there is comparable risk in being true to your own sense of identity, your own roots. Better to challenge those intuitions, explore uncharted terrain, both literal and figurative. Better to make new connections than remain comfortably situated in the same routine. If you want to improve the world slightly, you need focus and determination; you need to stay within the confines of a field and open the new doors in the adjacent possible one at a time. But if you want to be like Ada, if you want to have an “intuitive perception of hidden things” — well, in that case, you need to get a little lost.

Originally published at omarismail.io on March 8, 2015.