by Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight? ~Al Boliska
Hundreds of years ago, the world was shaped by an artistic revolution. That period birthed painters, musicians, scientists, and sculptors, their minds and talents supported by the world around them to produce masterpieces held in high regard well past their own death. Hundreds of people had their legacy immortalized in museums and collections, taught in classes, and performed live for millions more than they could ever reach in their own lifetimes. Their work was truly their own, and they became deified for it. Their names became entrenched in the arts they dedicated their lives to as symbols of perfection and success.
The advent of modern technology has driven our world into another renaissance – an age of design and attention, where every success story masks thousands of failures. If you need an example, take a look in your pocket at your phone, which is most likely an Apple or Samsung product. Of the 100+ listed cell phone brands in the world, we are only aware of those that have dominated the top of the market, many of which have built their success upon preexisting fortunes rivaling that of large countries. No inventor sees their name in the paper, and no one truly knows who designed the award-winning interface, or whoever pioneered the multi-thousand dollar chunk of metal.
Of course, designers are not individuals – enterprises hire scores upon scores of people to develop every aspect of their product, stripping it of any one person’s claim to the work. In this sense, it is the company that created the app. It is the company that birthed it. It is the company that owns it. While the practice itself isn’t quite reprehensible, there are those who twist it further for their own fame and gain. If one were to look for a well-known example of this, we wouldn’t need to look any further than Thomas Edison.
The man garnered titles and awards for his work, patenting many inventions that carried the world into a new age well lit by electricity. He was renowned as an inventor and businessman, though this portrayal of him is only partially correct. While he was a businessman, and a ruthless one at that, he was no inventor. The work he passed as his own was that of the many inventors he had hired to work under him. His only real invention of his own was his “invention factory”, which served as a large-scale think tank where he funded the work of many scientists and purchased patents for the fruits of their labor. This practice saw a significant amount of criticism, anointing Edison with the title of thief, though it wasn’t necessarily all that bad. Inventors were given the requisite funds and resources to better the world in ways that they might have never had the opportunity to otherwise.
Historically speaking, the quote from the beginning of the entry might not be entirely correct, as Edison was not only not the inventor of the light bulb (that honour goes to Joseph Swan), but it is also entirely possible that someone else could have created that invention had he never supported Swan through his work. If we look to calculus, which was invented by two mathematicians independently of one another at nearly the same time, we could say that inventors are simply realizing inventions that someone will make, regardless of who it might be that eventually does the deed.