The Education of Thomas Edison; J. Powell

Thus arose the legend that Thomas Alva Edison (born February 11, 1847) became America's most prolific inventor-l,093 patents for such wonders as the micro phone, telephone receiver, stock ticker, phonograph, movies, office copiers, and incandescent electric light-despite his lack of schooling. For years, he looked the part of the im probable, homespun genius: five feet, 10 inches tall, gray eyes, long hair that looked as if he cut it himself, baggy acid-stained pants, scruffy shoes, and hands discolored by chemicals. Later he took to wearing city Mr. Powell is editor ofLaissez-Faire Books. He has written/or The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, American Heritage, and more than three dozen other publications. clothes-black. On more than one occasion passers-by mistook him for a priest and respectfully tipped their hats. Yet Edison probably gained a far better education than most children of his time or ours. This wasn't because his mother had official credentials. She had taught school, but only a little. Nor was it because his parents had money. They were poor and lived on the outskirts of a declining town.

Nancy Edison's secret: she was more ded icated than any teacher was likely to be, and she had the flexibility to experiment with various ways of nurturing her son's love for learning. "She avoided forcing or prodding," wrote Edison biographer Matthew Joseph son, "and made an effort to engage his interest by reading him works of good liter ature and history that she had learned to love-and she was said to have been a fine reader." Thomas Edison plunged into great books. Before he was 12, he had read works by Shakespeare and Dickens, Edward Gib bon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Em pire, David Hume's History ofEngland, and more. Because Nancy Edison was devoted and observant, she discovered simple ways to nurture her son's enthusiasm. She brought him a book on the physical sciences-R. G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy, which explained how to perform chemistry 73 74 THE FREEMAN • FEBRUARY 1995 experiments at home. Edison recalled this was "the first book in science I read when a boy." It made learning fun, and he per formed every experiment in the book. Then Nancy Edison brought him The Dictionary of Science which further spurred his inter est. He became passionate about chemistry, spending all his spare money buying chem icals from a local pharmacist, collecting bottles, wires, and other items for experi ments. He built his first laboratory in the cellar of the family's Port Huron house.

"Thus," Josephson noted, "his mother had accomplished that which all truly great teachers do for their pupils, she brought him to the stage of learning things for himself, learning that which most amused and inter ested him, and she encouraged him to go on in that path. It was the very best thing she could have done for this singular boy." As Edison himself put it: "My mother was the making of me. She understood me; she let me follow my bent." Sam Edison disapproved of all the time his son spent in the cellar. Sometimes he offered the boy a penny to·resume reading literature. At 12, for example, Thomas read Thomas Paine's Age ofReason. "I can still remember the flash of enlightenment that shone from. his pages," he recalled. Typi cally, though, he used his pennies to buy more chemicals for experiments in the cel lar. But Thomas Edison had discovered intel lectual play. He wanted to learn everything he could about steam engines, electricity, battery power, electromagnetism, and es pecially the telegraph. Samuel F. B. Morse had attracted tremendous crowds when he demonstrated the telegraph back in 1838, and telegraph lines were extended across the country by the time Thomas Edison was conducting his experiments. The idea of transmitting information over a wire utterly fascinated him. He used scrap metal to build a telegraph set and practiced the Morse code. Through his experiments, he learned more and more about electricity which was to revolutionize the world.

When the Grand Trunk Railroad was extended to Port Huron in 1859,he got ajob as newsboy for the day-long run to Detroit and back. After about a year, he looked for ways to make better use of the five-hour layover in Detroit before the train made its return trip. He got permission to move his cellar laboratory equipment aboard the bag gage car, so he could continue his experi ments. This worked wellfor a while until the train lurched, spilled some chemicals, and the laboratory caught on fire. In 1862, a train accident injured his ears, and the 15-year-old began to lose much of his hearing. Apparently, he realized that as a handicapped boy without any credentials, he must learn everything he needed to know on his own. He dramatically intensified his self-education. "Deafness probably drove me to read ing," he reflected later. He was among the first people to use the Detroit Free Library-with card number 33----andhe sys tematically read through it shelf by shelf.

He read literature. He was thrilled by Victor Hugo's new romantic epic, Les Miserables, especially the stories of lost children. He talked so much about the book that his friends called him "Victor Hugo" Edison. Of course, what fascinated Edison most was science. He devoured books on elec tricity, mechanics, chemical analysis, man ufacturing technology and more. He strug gled with Isaac Newton's Principles, which made him realize his future would be with practical matters, not theorizing. The Joy of Learning As a homeschooled, self-educated youth, Edison learned lessons that were to serve him all his life. He learned education was his own responsibility. He learned to take initiative. He learned to be persistent. He learned he could gain practical knowl edge, inspiration and wisdom by reading books. He learned to discover all kinds of things from methodical observation. He learned education is a continuing, joyful process.

At 20, Edison got ajob as itinerant West ern Union telegraph operator and became remarkably proficient. He worked in CinTHE EDUCATION OF THOMAS EDISON 75 TholtUlSAlva Edison cinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Memphis, Boston, and New York. The more he learned about telegraphy, the more he wanted to learn. He took apart equipment and reassembled it until he understood how it worked. He experimented with ways to make it better. He decided that greater knowledge of chemistry would help him, so he haunted used bookstores and ordered chemistry books from London and Paris. He filled his rented rooms with chemicals and junk metal for his experiments. One asso ciate observed: "He spent his money buy ing apparatus and books, and wouldn't buy clothing. That winter he went without an overcoat and nearly froze. " Edison's knowledge and enterprise led to a dramatic series of inventions. On Janu ary 25, 1869, he applied for a patent on a telegraphic stock ticker which, after he filed patents for dozens of successive improve ments, became standard officeequipment in America and Europe. Edison invented a printing telegraph for gold bullion and for eign exchange dealers. Western Union and ~ its rivals battled to gain control of Edison's patents which revolutionized the telegraph business. For example, he figured out how a central telegraph office could control the performance of telegraph equipment at re mote locations. He developed a method for transmitting four messages simultaneously over the same wire. Intense curiosity, nour ished by his home education, drove him to become perhaps America's best technician on telegraphy.

From his practical experience, Edison learned to make the most of unexpected opportunities. For example, on July 18, 1877, he was testing an automatic telegraph which had a stylus to read coded indenta tions on strips of paper. For some reason, perhaps excessive voltage, the stylus sud denly began moving so fast through the indentations that the friction resulted in a sound. It might have been only a hum, but it got Edison's attention. His imagination made a wild leap. Explains archivist Doug las Tarr at the Edison National Historical Site, West Orange, New Jersey: "Edison seemed to reason that if a stylus going through indentations could produce a sound unintentionally, then it could produce a sound intentionally, in which case he should be able to reproduce the human voice." A talking machine! Edison worked out its fundamental prin ciples in his notebooks, and on December 17, 1877,he fileda patent application for the phonograph ("sound writing"). This was no improvement of existing technology. It was something brand new, Edison's most origi nal invention. It was also one thing he didn't seek to invent, unlike the light bulb, power generation systems, and other famous in ventions which he deliberately pursued.

Having developed the idea, Edison followed up, working on and off for more than two decades to produce recorded sound quality which would thrill millions. With a flexible and open mind, Edison enjoyed an important advantage in the race for electric light. Other inventors were com mitted to refining low-resistance arc lights 76 THE FREEMAN • FEBRUARY 1995 (then used in light houses) which required large amounts of electrical power and cop per wire-the most costly part of their lightingsystems. In September 1878,Edison cheerfully began considering the opposite: a high resistance system which would require far less electrical power and copper wire. This could mean small electric lights suit able for home use. By January 1879, at the laboratory he established in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in a glass vacuum bulb to delay the filament from melting.

But the lamp worked for only an hour or two. Improving performance required all the persistence Edison had learned as a child. He tested many other metals. He thought about tungsten, the metal in light bulb filaments now, but he couldn't work with it using tools available in his day. He tried carbon. He tested carbonized filaments of every imaginable plant material, includ ing baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He contacted biologists who could send him plant fibers from the tropics. "Before I got through," he recalled, "I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament materiaL" Best per former for many years: carbonized filaments from cotton thread. This proved to be one of Edison's most perplexing inventions. "The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate exper iments," he wrote. "I was never myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I cannot say the same for all my associates. " Edison at the peak of his in ventive powers drew inspiration, as he did in his youth, from Victor Hugo's novel Toilers of the Sea. The hero, Gilliatt, struggled against the waves, the tides and a storm to save a steamship from destruction on a reef.

Hailed as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," Edison was often able to see possibilities others missed because he continuously ed ucated himself about different technologies. For example, during the late 1880sand early 1890s, he read widely about the latest de velopments in photographic optics. He in vestigated the potential of tough, flexible celluloid as motion picture film and had George Eastman make 50-foot-Iong, 35mm wide test strips. Edison worked out the mechanical problems of advancing film steadily across a photographic lens without tearing. He linked his new motion picture camera to an improved phonograph, cap turing sound synchronized with motion pic tures. Then Edison developed what he called the Kinetoscope to project these "talking" images on a screen. In 1887, Edison built a magnificent labo ratory in West Orange, New Jersey. It was 10 times larger than his first, fabled facility in Menlo Park. The main building alone contained some 60,000 square feet of floor space for machine shops, glass-blowing op erations, electrical testing rooms, chemical stockrooms, electrical power generation, and other functions.

Once a day, Edison toured this vast fa cility to see what was going on, but he did most work in the library. It had a great hall, a 30-foot-high ceiling and two galleries. Rightin the center, Edison sat at a desk with three dozen pigeonholes, surrounded by some 10,000books. Here he would ponder new ideas and hear his associates report on their progress. As Edison grew older, he became stouter and harder of hearing, but he remained as enthusiastic as ever about the free-wheeling pursuit of practical knowledge. In 1903, he hired Martin Andre Rosanoff, a Russian born, Paris-trained chemist who asked about laboratory rules. "Hell," Edison snorted, "there ain't no rules around here! We're tryin' to accomplish somep'n." After Edison died on Sunday, October 18, 1931, his coffin was placed in his beloved West Orange library for mourners to pay their respects. Rosanoff identified a key to the Old Man's enduring fame: "Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things." D THEFREEMAN IDEASON UBERTY E PluribusUnum by Ralph A. Raimi I t is futile to argue about the proper translation of the motto EPluribus Unum; the Latin used there is ambiguous, as befits a motto, and it is in the nature of the Latin language to be a bit cryptic in its preposi tions and verbs. I myself have no doubt that the motto refers to the States, which is to say that where there had been a certain 13 colonies (in America) they were now be come a single nation. To some degree though I doubt this-the motto might have meant also that various ethnicities were combined, as that Pennsylvania had a large German component and New York Dutch, and that Calvinists were to live peaceably with Wesleyans. Possibly, but all this was minor compared to the real problem of 1789, which was to combine 13 quarreling inde pendent States into one nation, with a com mon policy in foreign and interstate trade, a common defense, a guaranteed respect for one another's laws, and so on.