Thomas Edison has reached the rare pinnacle of American sainthood, having been so translated by science and literary historians whose hagiographies of the great inventor focus on his genius, foresight, and skill. But the version of Thomas Edison’s life so promulgated is mostly based on a sanitized history of the man whose otherwise outlier beliefs are excised from the official story. His legacy is almost immeasurable because he literally created the communications-based society that we live in today. His inventions defined modern society, which, in turn, defines us. Therefore, his experimentation with a spirit phone, though it might seem enigmatic, was actually a logical extension of his attempt to push the envelope of reality to a new frontier.
Whether the spirit phone worked or not; whether the spirits of the departed are actually cohesive life units or not; whether, during that all-important first test at the beginning of the 1920s, spirits were actually summoned by mediums and clairvoyants and crossed the photon beam of Edison’s device or not, none of this detracts from the lasting effects Edison had not only upon American society, but upon the world. Just in terms of his two major entertainment industry inventions, the phonograph and the motion-picture camera and projector, Edison’s work turned America into a powerhouse of worldwide social culture. It still resonates today.
Legacy of Thomas Edison
Regardless of spirit phone proof of concept, the legacy of Thomas Edison has become an American legend, the story of our society as well as the personal triumph of Edison. For example, Edison’s family’s social ascendance was a quintessential American story about the rise of a family from the working class to industrial and governing elite. Sam Edison, a Canadian immigrant, was a hardscrabble shopkeeper and laborer. His son, Thomas, a scientist, invented the twentieth century, pointed America to the next century, and was one of his society’s greatest industrialists. Sam Edison’s grandson, Thomas’s son Charles, became the governor of New Jersey, the Edisons’ adopted state.
Thomas Edison’s legacy involves the three century-defining and social-defining industries that he created: recording, motion pictures, communications, and municipal electrical power grid.
And his merging of the recording and picture and communications industries, distributing content along an ancillary grid as part of a municipal power grid, laid out the basis for today’s Internet.
Scientia Vincit Omnia
One of the lasting social effects that Thomas Edison left us was his belief that science can solve problems, even problems of the spirit. This was the essence of his spirit phone, to use science to prove that there is a reality to the spirit that’s measurable and with which we can communicate. This was the holy grail of his, and Tesla’s, final years. The fact that we have no records of Edison’s device’s success doesn’t alter his belief that it was possible. At the least, Roger Penrose provides a quantum-based explanation of consciousness and the possibility that it lingers in an entangled quantum state after the body’s death. We know that Edison had a deep belief in the power of science to find the truth about life after death. We know that he reiterated to his followers and to audiences that the soul is immortal and we do not die. Though a materialist, he believed that using science to reveal the unseen in our reality was doable.
Edison was also one of the most important harbingers of the age of modern industrialism. Although Age of Science and Industrialism itself began in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century there was a new burst of industrialism that embraced the science of mass production and manufacturing as well as the sciences of theoretical physics and medicine and the science of mass communication. In this new age of industrial science, Edison, Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford, David Sarnoff, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, and Andrew Carnegie were all the industrial and financial barons who helped invent the century and create the environment that is still with us today. But it was Edison, only, who was the first to create an assembly line of science as opposed to an assembly line of product. Where Ford was able to marshal the skills of laborers to downstream the fabrication of automobiles, Edison took it one step further and worked from the stage of actual creation of the idea—the application of science to a market-fulfilling product—to the mechanism for mass producing the proof of concept. In this he was one of the most creative business personalities of his age.
In fact, even while he was alive, but certainly after he died, Thomas Edison was one of the few people who actually reached a form of American sainthood, if that is possible. He did this by surmounting his own humanity, his foibles and downright weaknesses, and through legend and lore was transmogrified.
Glorified by the Motion-Picture Industry
The very industry that Edison created, motion pictures, bestowed upon him its own version of sainthood with two biographical films. In 1940, nine years after Edison’s death, Louis Mayer’s MGM made two motion pictures about the great inventor, films that were headed up by the most valuable talent the studio had under contract at the time—Mickey Rooney in Young Tom Edison and Spencer Tracy in Edison the Man. These two films were hagiographic pieces, the first with Mickey Rooney playing the inquisitive youth always getting into trouble but ultimately always doing the right thing. The second looked at Edison in 1929, just two years away from his death, standing at a testimonial awards dinner in which he looks back on his life.
For the making of Young Tom Edison, it was necessary that the Edison home and laboratory in Port Huron, Michigan, be recreated from whatever could be relocated from Menlo Park and Fort Myers, where Edison had lived next to Henry Ford. Ford took the motion picture so seriously that he actually wanted the film to be shot in Edison’s home of Port Huron and, to facilitate that, he arranged on his own dime to have the entire Edison laboratory relocated and restaged at Port Huron.81 Afterwards, Ford was so impressed with Mickey Rooney’s performance in the film that he arranged for Rooney to meet with Edison’s widow. Ford’s friendship with Rooney continued well into the next decade, as did Edsel Ford’s friendship with Mickey Rooney. In fact, Ford made sure that the very first Edsel that rolled out off the assembly line was delivered to Mickey Rooney, who bragged about it well into his eighties.
It took just two generations for the Edisons to become one of the most powerful families in America. And it took three generations for an Edison to rise to political power. This is how America works. But besides the financial story of the Edisons and their rise to prominence, it is the intellectual story of Thomas Edison that is so intriguing. He was more than just the right person at the right time. He actually invented the future.
How the Evolution of Edison’s Inventions Worked: The Electric Pencil
It is fascinating to track the evolution of Edison’s ideas into products because it demonstrates his abilities to see beyond the immediate invention to industry that would result. One of the best examples of this is Edison’s invention of the electric pencil, which led to the invention of the mimeograph machine, a device with which an operator would mark a letter or image on a stencil, which would then imprint on a piece of paper. This created the duplicating industry and brought the power of print, which in the 1870s was only a power available to industry because of the expense of heavy printing presses, to smaller businesses and schools. In this, Edison was like the inventor of moveable type, a nineteenth-century Gutenberg, who brought graphic duplication to the world. And how ironic it was that Edison’s first business was based upon his acquisition of used moveable lead type for his Grand Trunk Railroad newspaper when he was still a boy. The modern mimeograph machine, popular as recently as the 1970s and then superseded by the photocopier, revolutionized the dissemination of information. Imagine a simple device for reproducing designs and text, improved over the decades, which lasted over one hundred years. This was Edison’s vision.
The R&D Factory
His other vitally important vision was the idea that inventions could be imagined and brought to fruition within a laboratory setting, corralling the talents of many different individuals with different skills. In this way, it wasn’t just the invention itself that came out of Edison’s Menlo Park factory, it was the creation of what today we call the research and development shop, a function so critical to industry that R&D is a line item on corporate budgets. Research and development is the heart and soul of industries that need to stay ahead of their competitors, that need to foresee the need for new products to provide solutions for things consumer and business markets might not even know exist, and that need to create value out of intellectual product.
The Quest for Fire
One of the seminal moments in the development of human civilization was the utilization of fire. It brought light to the night, brought humans together to share the food they cooked, and provided warmth. Fire also brought about the rapid development of structured vocal human language, and from structured language to concepts, ideation, and literacy. Though this may seem like a stretch at first, the electric light and municipal power grid also extended the reach and growth of civilization. This wasn’t just the creation of a new industry, public electric utilities; it enabled cities to grow, to electrify themselves to bring more light than natural gas provided, and to electrify mass transportation. Thus, the advancement of human civilization in the twentieth century can be attributed to Edison’s experiments with electricity in the late nineteenth century. The invention of the light bulb, and thence the Edison tube, became the basis for communication via electrical circuitry, particularly television. There is also the socioeconomic legacy of Thomas Edison. Perhaps his biggest legacy was the consumerization of a market previously only open to the rich, appliances and convenience appliances could be produced for the masses instead of only for the upper classes. He brought about a greater egalitarian distribution of goods, which, in turn, brought about a greater spread of opportunities for advancement and growth for the working classes. In so doing, he transformed America in the twentieth century.
The Creation of the Science of Invention
It can be said that the science of invention, if not the practice of science itself, is a form of intellectual reverse engineering. Scientists begin with a theory of something—say the theory that the lightning we see striking the earth is a form of electricity. Then, scientists, like Benjamin Franklin, use experimentation—say a lightning rod attached to a high-flying kite—and the design of what constitutes proof to certify that theory is either correct or incorrect. But in either instance, it starts with a theory, sometimes only based upon a hunch.
This reverse engineering of thought to practice to proof also best describes how Edison worked and why his work was so consumer oriented. It also explains the process by which he formulated his ideas for the spirit phone. Because he lived and worked in the age of Einstein and Planck and was a consumer of intellectual thought during the age of Freud and Jung, he was able to develop his theory of life units. But, he advanced the thought by supposing that if electronic particles had qualities that allowed for attraction, perhaps these life units also possessed the physical attribute of attraction. And, even half predicting the theory of quantum entanglement and spooky attraction, Edison theorized that these life units were able to corral themselves into specific cohesive masses.
Then, inasmuch as life units formed the basis for how human bodies navigated and rejuvenated themselves, he supposed, they not only pre-existed the body, but were the building blocks of life. And here he was advancing his own concepts that would become the theory of the genome and the work of DNA and RNA. But where he took it, no one had gone before. His thought process ultimately merged spiritualism and religion. Edison believed that we don’t really die, and that this could be assayed scientifically. And that, as stressed throughout this book, was why the spirit phone would work.
We may take Edison’s life and work for granted today, now that we’re in the digital age in which human beings and machines are actually merging to evolve into a new lifeform, the cybernetic organism with paralyzed limbs directed by computer and brain implants to merge thought, volition, and machine, but it was the process of Edison’s thought that brought us to this point. It’s not just the inventions, but the intellectual process itself behind the inventions that brought them into existence. That is Edison’s greatest legacy.
The mere possibility that science could prove that the unseen could be perceived as the driving force behind Edison’s vision of the importance of electricity and the measurement thereof. It is, therefore, a more than fitting tribute that over sixty years after the death of Albert Einstein, the scientist who probably influenced Edison the most, one of the major aspects of his theory of General Relativity was borne out. This occurred in 2016, when a gravitational wave ever so slightly altering the space/time of planet Earth reached the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, our intergalactic version of a nineteenth-century tromometer, after its 1.3-billion-mile journey across creation, where it was duly registered. Of course, this gravitational wave did not prove that Edison, or Tesla for that matter, could talk to the dead. But it did show that both Edison and Tesla were correct in their respective theoretical pursuits of a device that could measure what had only been dreamed of for scores of thousands of years: a device to ping the unknown.
Edison was devoted to the process of taking research into theory, then developing inventions based on the proof of that theory and tailoring them to a consumer market that could exist. In the final decade of his life, there was an insight into a market that not only existed at the time, but had existed since the beginning of civilization. This was a market that asked, and sought explanations for, the basic questions concerning what is life and what happens when life is over. Imagine a person who had invented the very things that electrified and mechanized an entire civilization, now in the final decade of his life, going back to the beginning of human existence at the mouths of caves to answer the primal questions that remained for the hundred millennia of human development. Was that because Edison knew that he would be staring into the face of death and believed that the only way to understand it was through science? Or maybe it was because the person who lit up the darkness of the urban night now wanted to light up the last realm of darkness that existed: the darkness of death. If science could create cities of light, why couldn’t science light up death itself?
This was how the process of Edison’s thought led him to the creation of the spirit phone. At the very last, when he awoke from his coma in 1931, he was finally able to answer the question that he had been working for ten years: the spirit lives on and we don’t die.