Edison Short Quotes

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His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.
Nikola Tesla
Edison was good at making things the world didn’t yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn’t scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.” But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings—bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano—to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter. A
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Edison’s famous “invention” of the incandescent light bulb on the night of October 21, 1879, improved on many other incandescent light bulbs patented by other inventors between 1841 and 1878. Similarly, the Wright brothers’ manned powered airplane was preceded by the manned unpowered gliders of Otto Lilienthal and the unmanned powered airplane of Samuel Langley; Samuel Morse’s telegraph was preceded by those of Joseph Henry, William Cooke, and Charles Wheatstone; and Eli Whitney’s gin for cleaning short-staple (inland) cotton extended gins that had been cleaning long-staple (Sea Island) cotton for thousands of years.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
I remember on one of my many visits with Thomas A. Edison, I brought up the question of Ingersoll. I asked this great genius what he thought of him, and he replied, 'He was grand.' I told Mr. Edison that I had been invited to deliver a radio address on Ingersoll, and would he be kind enough to write me a short appreciation of him. This he did, and a photostat of that letter is now a part of this house. In it you will read what Mr. Edison wrote. He said: 'I think that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed....' I mention this as an indication of the tremendous influence Ingersoll had upon the intellectual life of his time. To what extent did Ingersoll influence Edison? It was Thomas A. Edison's freedom from the narrow boundaries of theological dogma, and his thorough emancipation from the degrading and stultifying creed of Christianity, that made it possible for him to wrest from nature her most cherished secrets, and bequeath to the human race the richest of legacies. Mr. Edison told me that when Ingersoll visited his laboratories, he made a record of his voice, but stated that the reproductive devices of that time were not as good as those later developed, and, therefore, his magnificent voice was lost to posterity.
Joseph Lewis (Ingersoll the Magnificent)
For nine months, the engineers had been testing and calibrating and retesting all aspects of the system, especially the behemoth Westinghouse dynamos. Lead engineer B. J. Lamme described what happened during one early test in Pittsburgh of a giant dynamo when numerous little temporary steel bolts had “loosened up under vibration, and finally shook into contact with each other, thus forming a short circuit…. In a moment there was one tremendous [electric] arc around the end of the windings of the entire machine…. It looked, at first glance, as though the whole infernal regions had broken loose. Everybody jumped for cover.” One man managed to shut down the machine, and gradually the huge flaming electrical arc that had engulfed the dynamo subsided. Peering forth from their shelters, the engineers then rushed back and “someone climbed underneath to see what had become of our man inside … expecting him to be badly scorched…. He said the fire came in all around him but did not touch him.”30 No one present had ever seen such a sight.
Jill Jonnes (Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World)
Those who do not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them, will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it & reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion, & faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that which it recognizes much better in itself. Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as Berkley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life, on the same plan, the Interior & the Exterior, Spirit & Matter, with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over the second. For him the idea of progress was never anything but a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope if we place it in the future. On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment of an old manuscript of l'Eve future: "We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all! Soon will come the senility & decrepitude of this strange polyp, & the evolution accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace of some unquestionable necessity.
Remy de Gourmont (The Book of Masks)
Florencio also knows how dangerous it is to wander around a mine alone, and concludes that Edison, as a Chilean expression puts it, “is one plank short of a bridge” (le falta un palo para el puente). For Edison, running through those corridors where a falling slab might kill you is his way of saying he’s going to stand up in the face of adversity.
Héctor Tobar (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free)
At age twelve, his first job was as a railway newspaper boy, hawking wares to passengers on a Midwest rail line. But Edison soon realized he could make more money selling his own newspaper. The preteen began reporting and publishing the Grand Trunk Herald, a gossipy conglomeration of short articles about railroad employees, regular passengers, and bits of news about popular stops and amenities to be found there.
Jeff Guinn (The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip)
Edison’s words of encouragement: “Young man, that’s the thing. You have it. Keep at it.” Sometimes Ford described even more than that—he’d spent a long time at the banquet, talking with Edison; the two of them sketched things on napkins and shared a short train ride afterward. Ford was almost certainly exaggerating. But no matter how brief or extended this initial contact, his admiration for Edison blossomed into virtual worship as a result. Throughout his own business successes, as his hard work and belief in himself culminated with the Model T and subsequent automobile industry dominance, Ford warmed himself with memories of that encounter with his hero.
Jeff Guinn (The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip)
After all, without the benefit of budgets, bureaucrats, and MBA supervisors worried about short-term profitability, Thomas Edison had single-handedly electrified the world and along the way fathered the recording and motion-picture industry.
Stephen Coonts (The Minotaur (Jake Grafton, #3))
At age sixty-seven, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building. Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees, looking for his son. “Go get your mother and all her friends,” he told his son with childlike excitement. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.” What?! Don’t worry, Edison calmed him. “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.” That’s a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about it, there really was no other response. What should Edison have done? Wept? Gotten angry? Quit and gone home?
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)