{"id":9809,"date":"2006-09-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-20T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-last-breath-of-thomas-edison"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:08:06","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:08:06","slug":"the-last-breath-of-thomas-edison","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-last-breath-of-thomas-edison","title":{"rendered":"The Last Breath of Thomas Edison"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Edison died seventy-five years ago this fall, with \u201ca rack of eight empty test tubes close to his bedside.\u201d For a man whose \u201creal love was chemistry,\u201d recounted his son Charles, it was \u201cnot strange, but symbolic, that those test tubes were close to him at the end.\u201d Just after Edison died, Charles asked the attending physician to seal the glass tubes with paraffin. Charles later gave one of the test tubes to Edison\u2019s friend and admirer Henry Ford. For many years, it was on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan under the label \u201cEdison\u2019s Last Breath?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Ford, who had been inspired early on by a meeting with Edison (\u201cNo man up to then had given me any encouragement … but here, all at once and out of a clear sky, the greatest inventive genius in the world had given me complete approval\u201d), also paid to have Edison\u2019s famous Menlo Park laboratory moved to Michigan. This was a fitting tribute, since Edison\u2019s lab was itself among the inventor\u2019s greatest innovations: the style of research and development he pioneered there, bringing together the best technical minds, soon became a mainstay of modern industry.<\/p>\n

Schoolchildren are still taught of Edison\u2019s breathtakingly broad creativity: his thousand patents; his invention of the phonograph and the first practical incandescent light bulb; his improvements to the telephone, telegraph, and typewriter. Lesser innovations that would, on their own, make another man memorable, are drowned in the wide sea of Edison\u2019s career \u2014 like his pioneering work on motion pictures, or his coining of the word hello<\/em> as the standard telephone greeting.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Edison\u2019s most important achievement was the one most invisible to us today, the one we most take for granted: electrification. Edison\u2019s famous search for the right filament for his light bulb would have been for naught without an electrical industry to power the bulbs. Edison and his team, as Tom McNichol puts it in his new book AC\/DC<\/em><\/a>, had to \u201cinvent a complex system of interlocking technologies to complement the incandescent lamp: switches, meters, sockets, fixtures, regulators, underground conductors, junction boxes, and, most important, a central station\u201d to generate the power and \u201ca distribution network to deliver it.\u201d So accustomed have we become to our machines obeying the merest flicks of our fingers that we are apt to forget the genius and the hard work \u2014 the inspiration and perspiration, to use Edison\u2019s formulation \u2014 that made this new world possible.<\/p>\n

After Edison breathed his last on October 18, 1931, some of his admirers called for all electrical current in the country to be shut off for two minutes as a tribute on the day of his funeral. \u201cBut the proposal drew immediate criticism from businesses and factory owners who argued that cutting the power would cost tens of millions of dollars in lost production,\u201d McNichol reports. How few people leave behind a world so thoroughly dependent on their genius, a world of flickering candles and gas lamps remade into one aglow with electricity. Edison, undeniably, was one of the greats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Edison died seventy-five years ago this fall, with \u201ca rack of eight empty test tubes close to his bedside.\u201d For a man whose \u201creal love was chemistry,\u201d recounted his son Charles, it was \u201cnot strange, but symbolic, that those test tubes were close to him at the end.\u201d Just after Edison died, Charles asked the attending physician to seal the glass tubes with paraffin. Charles later gave one of the test tubes to Edison\u2019s friend and admirer Henry Ford. For many years, it was on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan under the label \u201cEdison\u2019s Last Breath?\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[4646],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5047,5046],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=9809"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=9809"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=9809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}