Thomas Edison on Resilience
In the early evening of 7 December 1914, an explosion rocked Thomas Edison’s film-finishing building, part of he complex of buildings surrounding his laboratory. The building was swiftly evacuated, just ahead of the fire that swept the two story structure. As the film stock fed the flames, the fire jumped to the surrounding buildings, where it was fed by the rubber and chemicals used to record manufacturing. These buildings were made of reinforced concrete, the material that Edison had boasted was completely fireproof. Their combustible contents, however, fed conflagrations whose temperatures melted the floors, and soon walls collapsed. Even the newest building, less than two years old, and said to be state of the art in fireproof construction, succumbed when its contents — phonograph records — caught fire. Liquid chemicals poured down the sides of the building as streams of flame. The high temperatures rendered the efforts of the firefighters, who had been summoned from six neighboring communities, largely ineffectual. Ten to fifteen thousand people gathered to watch.
…The fire had broken out at dinner hour when Edison happened to be home. He was one of the first to the scene. The facilities for phonograph and record manufacturing were lost…. The estimated damage was $3-$5 million. On that night as the fire burned from one building and spread to the next, Edison’s equanimity was put to the test. His immediate reaction? He cracked jokes, laughed, and declared, “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” Nothing could rattle him.
This story is narrated in Randall Stross’s biography on Thomas Edison, called the Wizard of Menlo Park.
Reading this passage reminded me how in my own family, my grandfather had a similar experience. He was an editor for the Morning Star, a newspaper published from Dhaka, East Pakistan. One day he got a call asking him to come to his printing press. When he got there he saw that it had been burned to the ground. It was 1971. A mob had burnt it down. And a civil war had erupted in the country. My grandfather took one of the last planes out of the country into Karachi, West Pakistan. East Pakistan seceded to become present day Bangladesh. West Pakistan became Pakistan. Everything him and his team had worked for had been destroyed. In Karachi my grandfather restarted his journalism career.
My grandfather didn’t talk about this experience directly. He never expressed resentment about it. He displayed quiet dignity. When I first read about it in his autobiography, I was surprised and awed. I couldn’t imagine how he summoned the resources within to move forward after losing it all.
When I was 20 a friend of mine recommended reading Victor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning. It is a story of a psychiatrist, Victor Frankl who gets apprehended by Nazi’s during World War II. After surviving his detention at Auschwitz, he looked back for patterns of people who managed to survive the holocaust. He noted:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Life is not linear. It is unpredictable. Still, it invites us to play.
