Thomas Edison’s Greatest Invention
I believe Edison’s greatest invention was his public image. He was no doubt a great inventor of technological products. But he failed to commercialize most of his inventions. What allowed him to raise money to continue inventing was a persona he crafted that the public and his investors adored.
Throughout his career his brand helped him gain leverage to raise more money and work on more inventions. His lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey gave him access to journalists from the major newspapers in New York. Journalists would visit his lab to check out his inventions. They left impressed with Edison’s ability to speak plainly about complex topics.
Edison learned to be a master brander and guerilla marketer. Before YCombinator popularized the idea of a “demo day,” Edison might have been the first tech entrepreneur to carry one out. In 1875 Alexandar Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson were experimenting with Acoustic telegraphy when they discovered that these instruments could convey any kinds of sound. In June of that year, Bell, with an ear pressed against a vibrating reed, could hear the faint blurry sound of Watson’s voice. This was sufficient to provide Bell with the insight that led to the telephone. Edison who had been close to inventing the device himself followed with an improvement on Bell’s model. Bell and Edison became direct competitors in the brand-new telephone business. To promote their new invention they played upon the public’s interest in musical performance by holding telephone “concerts” in exhibition halls to demo their product.
The competition was as keenly followed as a sports rivalry by local newspapers including the NYT. In fact, it was similar to the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rivalry of the 1980s. Bell and Edison were the same age, each improving upon the major invention that the other had come up with first. Edison following Bell then Bell following Edison. The telephone’s commercialization set the two inventors up for a showdown. The big city debut of Edison’s musical telephone was arranged in Philadelphia in mid-July 1877. The demo was to transmit music from a concert five miles away using the telephone’s technology. 3,500 people showed up to the demo day. The performance went so well that they asked for an encore. The New York Times gave it a glowing review in the papers the next day.
After Edison invented the light bulb he faced several challenges. The first was creating a distribution strategy to connect electricity to the homes that would be using electrical appliances like the bulb. At the time there was a huge demand for on-site plants to power electric appliances. Edison Electric received four thousand orders for on-site plants. With a few exceptions, Edison ignored these short term opportunities to commercialize the electric light and instead focused on the more difficult and more profitable task of launching a central power system. This was a risky move because he was competing with Bush Electric which went decided to manufacture on-site plants. In the end Edison’s strategy was successful. This was surprising because Edison’s decision “was not the result of formal study, or broad consultation with his lieutenants. Instead it was an intuitive hunch that ..a centralized system would be strategically more important to the business than accepting orders from individual customers.”
He also had to prove that direct current (DC ) was better than the alternating current (AC). AC current was cheaper, and Westinghouse, another Edison competitor had five times the number of customers that Edison had in three years of operations. He tried getting high profile customers on board by providing mini-plants to high profile businessmen. Thus Americans like William Vanderbilt and JP Morgan were the first to have electric lighting installed in their houses. Much like Elon Musk would cater the first model of the Tesla to celebrities who cared about the environment, Edison’s strategy gave electric lighting the stature of being a status symbol that others aspired to.
Edison also tried to discredit the AC current. One way was by associating DC currents with human deaths. Edison advocated that electrocution be used for the death penalty: so that “the lethal nature of the alternating current could be demonstrated in dramatic fashion.” The state agreed and nominated a convicted murderer William Kemmler. He had exhausted his appeals and was to be the first person electrocuted. An AC current was to be used. The date for his execution was set to 6th August 1890. Even though executions were private, this one drew crowds, who gathered on prison walls, atop trees and rooftops to watch the spectacle. The execution was a grotesque sight. The first shock did not take the convict’s life. A second shock had to be delivered. The onlookers saw Kemmler’s chest go up and down and blood drop from his forehead and they could smell the stench of his burnt hair. “Far Worse than a Hanging” was the headline on the NYT the next day which called this AC electrocution “a disgrace to civilization”.
Seeing his brand rise nationally, others asked for his association in their campaigns. Henry Ford enlisted Edison’s help in an anti-smoking marketing campaign that he would promote among his workers. “In asking Edison to serve as a quotable authority on the subject, Ford reveals his understanding of how celebrity, his, Edison’s anybody’s — confers, in the eyes of the not-famous, expertise in all manners of subjects. Edison could speak about the deleterious affects of smoking not because of background in respiratory disease…but because he was Edison. If Ford’s fame alone could not persuade his employees to quit smoking, perhaps the combination with Edison’s would be persuasive.”
Before the Kardashians and Trump, Edison filmed and featured in one of the first reality shows. He used his invention of the vitascope, an early film recording and motion picture technology to create a short film. Called Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory, he cast himself. The backdrop is a room which had shelves filled with glassware and a work bench with retorts and burners. These props made the room look like a Laboratory. Edison wore a white lab coat and would dash from one end of the room to another, pretending to be engaged in an experiment.
So effective were Edison’s efforts that towards the end of Thomas Edison’s life he was voted “The greatest man in history” in 1922 by the 750,000 youth group members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, beating Roosevelt, Shakespeare and Ford. And when he died, President Hoover asked the country to turn off their lights simultaneously across of the country at 10 pm EST to honor his contributions.
[1] Quotes taken from The Wizard of Menlo Park
