Edison Lightbulb Quotes

Fuck Edison and his goddamned lightbulb.

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

Edison? Like Thomas?” “Who’s Edison Thomas?” “I mean Thomas Edison. The inventor?” Peabody explained. “The lightbulb?” “No, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t about lightbulbs. Like the sicko guy who married his own mother, then whined about it.” After a moment’s confusion, Peabody’s own lightbulb went off. “That’s Oedipus. I’m pretty sure that’s Oedipus.” “Edison, Oedipus, platypus. Whatever.

Edison was not a loner. For the invention of the lightbulb, he had thirty assistants, including well-trained scientists, often working around the clock in a corporate-funded state-of-the-art laboratory!

There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So

The invention of the light bulb has greatly reduced the number of times we look at, and therefore the number of times we think about, the moon and the stars.

When something is chance based, be stubbornly persistent. There’s no reason to quit a (free) chance-based venture. Ever. It’s irrational to quit unless it costs you something. It’s free to submit guest post articles, ask women to go to dinner with you, apply for dream jobs, or ask your boss for a raise. There can be many upsides if you get positive results, so take action without apologizing. Be the most aggressive person you know! When something fails, try a different approach. Concrete failure, as opposed to chance failure, gives you an opportunity to eliminate that way of doing things (Edison’s failed lightbulb prototypes are a popular example of this). When you suspect a negative result comes from a combination of chance and failure, be persistent, but try varying strategies to the degree that you think it’s failure.

Thomas Edison was a graduate of Cooper Union. Like Otis, he is principally famous for things he didn’t do. He didn’t invent electricity, or the lightbulb, the phonograph or the movies. These misappropriations didn’t bother him much: he didn’t correct folk. What he was good at, what he really knew, was patents.

Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method.

By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.

I think Edison’s large-scale success was built on a foundation of tending to small details. I would like to turn the discussion back to how Edison himself described his approach for constructing the foundations for his innovative work, specifically, how he solved problems like finding the best filament material for his lightbulb: “None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”6

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Principle #7: Embrace Adversity and Struggle: Strengthen Your Achievement Muscles Who ever came up with the expression, “Get it right the first time?” Who ever gets it right the first time? In fact, we’re not supposed to get it right the first time. Thomas Edison failed nearly 10,000 times trying to invent the lightbulb. Walt Disney was turned down hundreds of times in his attempts to finance Disneyland. Babe Ruth struck out twice as many times as he hit home runs. Babies don’t walk the first time they try.

Find Soul Mates The next step is to find some soul mates to go on your adventure—think Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring. However, people love the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (lightbulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), and Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). It’s wrong.

The well-known author Napoleon Hill described this principle as ‘The Mastermind’ in his work Think and Grow Rich, which was published in 1937. With this expression he wanted to shed light on the fact that several brains pondering about the same problem are more effective than one single brain. Napoleon Hill interviewed successful entrepreneurs like the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Ford Motor Company Henry Ford, and the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas A. Edison. They all surrounded themselves with a small group of trusted advisers. Even though they always made the final decisions themselves, they had at their disposal a range of intelligent opinions that could be utilised in reaching the final conclusion. Instead of only their own mind, they had a ‘Mastermind’ at their disposal.

That’s when I began dividing my work day into three sections: the Finder, the Keeper, and the Doer. This was a watershed moment for me as a businessperson. Was this what Thomas Edison felt like when he finally got his fucking lightbulb to work? Probably.

he wanted to shed light on the fact that several brains pondering about the same problem are more effective than one single brain. Napoleon Hill interviewed successful entrepreneurs like the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Ford Motor Company Henry Ford, and the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas A. Edison. They all surrounded themselves with a small group of trusted advisers. Even though they always made the final decisions themselves, they had at their disposal a range of intelligent opinions that could be utilised in reaching the final conclusion. Instead of only their own mind, they had a ‘Mastermind’ at their disposal. But it is not only other people’s knowledge

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.

Historians estimate that the average annual income in Italy around the year 1300 was roughly $1,600. Some 600 years later – after Columbus, Galileo, Newton, the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the invention of gunpowder, printing, and the steam engine – it was … still $1,600.3 Six hundred years of civilization, and the average Italian was pretty much where he’d always been. It was not until about 1880, right around the time Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison patented his lightbulb, Carl Benz was tinkering with his first car, and Josephine Cochrane was ruminating on what may just be the most brilliant idea ever – the dishwasher – that our Italian peasant got swept up in the march of progress. And what a wild ride it has been. The past two centuries have seen explosive growth in both population and prosperity worldwide. Per capita income is now ten times what it was in 1850. The average Italian is fifteen times as wealthy as in 1880. And the global economy? It is now 250 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution – when nearly everyone, everywhere was still poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly.

Luckily for Rockefeller, the lightbulb didn’t instantly drive out kerosene: It took time for Edison to cover the country with power stations, and by 1885 only 250,000 lightbulbs shone across America.

Same with Edison and the lightbulb. A Russian scientist named Alexander Lodygin actually invented it, and Edison made it commercially viable.

Even before the modern era, the best ideas seldom sprang whole from a single mind; rather, they were the fruit of cross-fertilization among various minds. Who invented the lightbulb? Thomas Edison. Wrong. Edison was merely the savviest member of a cluster of rival inventors who learned and borrowed from each other. Convinced that small teams with a range of expertise were the most inventive, he presided over a staff of more than twenty.

For millions of rural Americans, the battery-powered radio was often the first electric device in the household. Even at the end of the war in 1918, strikingly, only half of American homes had been wired for electricity, with rural households largely left out. Before the pleasures of Edison’s lightbulb and the alternating-current standard propagated by Westinghouse became ubiquitous, the next generation of their respective corporations brought pop culture to the nation’s living rooms, where Americans in the city and out in the country huddled to spend their evenings—often in a collective trance, listening to the same thing at the same time for the first time in history.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - said the genius who was 1% showman and 99% fraud.

And Thomas Edison after having tried and failed thousands of times over to invent the lightbulb: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” — Thomas Edison

iteration frees people to experiment, as Edison did with such success. “I need the freedom to just try a bunch of crap out. And a lot of times it doesn’t work,” Docter told me. With this process, that’s fine. He can try again. And again. Until he gets something that burns bright and clear, like Edison’s lightbulb. “If I knew I have to do this only once and get it right, I’d probably hew to the things that I know work.” And for a studio built on creativity, that would be a slow death.

The patent system, which protects property rights in ideas, was systematized in the Statute of Monopolies legislated by the English Parliament in 1623, partially as an attempt to stop the king from arbitrarily granting “letters patent” to whomever he wanted—effectively granting exclusive rights to undertake certain activities or businesses. The striking thing about the evidence on patenting in the United States is that people who were granted patents came from all sorts of backgrounds and all walks of life, not just the rich and the elite. Many made fortunes based on their patents. Take Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonogram and the lightbulb and the founder of General Electric, still one of the world’s largest companies.

Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb either.

Edison didn’t dream up the idea of electric lighting on his own, and carbon had been used in lightbulb filament investigations long before Edison started looking into its suitability—Joseph Swan experimented with carbon extensively. Yet such predecessors failed to create a practical lightbulb. Edison succeeded. Why? An adequate explanation must include Edison’s conception of electric lighting as a complex electric generation and distribution system, his already-established track record as an inventor, his ability to parlay his reputation into the necessary corporate funding for his investigations, and his vision to establish and lead one of the first product-oriented research and development labs, an organization that efficiently coordinated the efforts of many.5

Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch.

First, iteration frees people to experiment, as Edison did with such success. “I need the freedom to just try a bunch of crap out. And a lot of times it doesn’t work,” Docter told me. With this process, that’s fine. He can try again. And again. Until he gets something that burns bright and clear, like Edison’s lightbulb. “If I knew I have to do this only once and get it right, I’d probably hew to the things that I know work.” And for a studio built on creativity, that would be a slow death. Second, the process ensures that literally every part of the plan, from the broad strokes to the fine details, is scrutinized and tested. Nothing is left to be figured out when the project goes into delivery. This is a basic difference between good and bad planning. In bad planning, it is routine to leave problems, challenges, and unknowns to be figured out later. That’s how the Sydney Opera House got into trouble. In that case, Jørn Utzon did eventually solve the problem, but it was too late. The budget had exploded, construction was years behind schedule, and Utzon was ousted with his reputation in tatters. In many projects, the problem is never solved.

Thomas Edison is legendary for learning from his failures. So much so that he refused to even call them failures. In the 1890s, for example, Edison and his team were trying to develop a nickel-iron battery. Over the course of about six months, they created more than nine thousand prototypes that all failed. When one of his assistants commented that it was a shame they hadn’t produced any promising results, Edison said, “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” This was how Edison looked at the world—as a scientist, an inventor, and a businessman. It was this kind of positive mindset, this sort of brilliant reframing of failure, that led Edison to the invention of the lightbulb barely a decade earlier and to the thousand other patents issued to him by the time he died.

In deceptively brief terms, Edison tells us: “I make trial after trial until it comes.” He and his team were willing to perspire, but he also knew what he would be doing with all those hours: trial and error. For the lightbulb, filaments were the key, and bamboo was the most promising material, so Edison tested every kind of bamboo to find the best. If Burns is to be believed, there were twelve hundred varieties of bamboo, and Edison tried each one. It sounds simple, and it was, but the way Edison defined the project also gave it a shape. He crossed off items from a to-do list. When we made our porting strategy for the web browser, we turned to something like Edison’s model. We knew the compiler would tell us about broken cross-references, and we examined all of them one at a time. We knew our FIXMEs would tell us where our code was weakest, and we studied the reports closely. Moving toward the Black Slab Encounter was a stepwise process, much like Edison’s search for the best bamboo. Edison did trial after trial with filaments; we went file after file in our build process and FIXME after FIXME trying to load a web page. Both projects were built on unglamorous grunt work, but the specifics matter. Edison wasn’t just trudging toward the horizon in a desert, hoping that the crest of the next sand dune would reveal an oasis—that sounds more like the way that Don and I wandered through our browser investigations in the weeks before Richard joined us. Instead, Edison searched specifically for the best kind of bamboo, and he was undaunted by the need to check a vast number of varieties. Each one he tested was an item crossed off and brought him closer to finding which one was the best. In the lead up to the Black Slab Encounter, we did the same. Even though Don, Richard, and I struggled with the tedium, we kept plowing through each file and FIXME.