Some of the most powerful inventions are those that allow other inventions to flourish. The bar code, the cold chain, and the shipping container combined to unleash the forces of globalization. The elevator was vastly more useful when deployed alongside steel and concrete, the subway, and the air conditioner.
But nowhere is this more true than when someone develops an idea that allows other ideas to emerge. Thomas Edison arguably did just that, inventing a process for inventing things, bringing together in Menlo Park, New Jersey, the resources needed to tinker and experiment on an industrial scale. Here’s a description from 1876:
On the ground-floor, as you enter, is a little front-office, from which a small library is partitioned off. Next is a large square room with glass cases filled with models of his inventions. In the rear of this is the machine-shop, completely equipped, and run with a ten-horse-power engine. The upper story occupies the length and breadth of the building, 100 × 25 feet, is lighted by windows on every side, and is occupied as a laboratory. The walls are covered with shelves full of bottles containing all sorts of chemicals. Scattered through the room are tables covered with electrical instruments, telephones, phonographs, microscopes, spectroscopes, etc. In the center of the room is a rack full of galvanic batteries.1
Equipped with his “invention factory,” Edison reckoned that he would develop “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”2 It’s hard to quibble with the results: Edison’s name appears repeatedly in these pages.
But even Edison’s invention of the invention factory itself arguably pales beside some of the other “meta-ideas” that have been developed—ideas about how ideas should be protected, how ideas should be commercialized, and how ideas should be kept secret. And the oldest idea about ideas is almost as old as the plow itself.