Seven Oaks Magazine.

The firm of John Wiley and Sons is known for two things. First, it is the last important mainstream US publishing house still owned by the family of its founder. The company that the first John Wiley began in 1807 may be publicly traded now, but it is still controlled by Wileys, one of whom is the chairman. I don’t believe any such houses exist even in Britain, not since 2002 when John Murray VII sold the imprint founded by the original John Murray in 1768 to Hodder Headline, a division of the booksellers W.H. Smith. (The founder’s son was Byron’s publisher and Jane Austen’s, and his son published Darwin’s Origin of Species.) The second thing is that John Wiley and Sons majors in business books. In fact, it is easily the most important producer of them. But it minors in popular history, and from time to time the two specialties go together. Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond by Alan Axelrod ($29.99) is a good example of this convergence without being a particularly fine result. Alexrod apparently has made a career of isolating the management secrets of historical figures, for his previous books include Eisenhower on Leadership (which could be useful, particularly if it discusses coming up with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan that he foisted on his successor) and Patton on Leadership. Yet another is Elizabeth I, CEO, a work whose title suggests to me that the work is rather less discerning and more down-market than, for example, the studies of Leonardo’s inventiveness that Martin Kemp and a number of other scholars have produced in recent years.

Alexrod points out that Thomas Edison (1847–1931: so much of greatness is longevity) “had more than a thousand patents to his name, including those for electric lighting, electric power generation, the phonograph, the basics of movie making, and even wax paper.” He then asks, “If Edison wasn’t a genius, who was, is, or could ever be?” His answer is Nobody, because Edison “was and remains the name-brand marquee inventive genius”. The message is that you can be too, in your way, by following the array of mantras and mottos that Alexrod has deduced from his Edison studies—for example, “Experiment with Everything”, “Make Defects Their Own Remedy”, “Inspire Confidence”, “Sell Innovation”, “Get the Big Picture”, “Exploit the Details”, “Never Neglect Logistics” and “Make the New Familiar”, and ninety-four others, each with a short inspirational text illustrated with quotations and scenes from Edison’s career. One wonders what Edison himself would have thought of these. Maybe he would have approved, as his method was to work away steadily and productively on specific problems, not always distinguishing between totally new ideas and missing links in what was known already. Perhaps he would also have felt comfortable with the folksiness and hokey-ness of such books, for he was no intellectual, though he was indeed a genius of the sort that Alexrod never gets round to defining or trying to explain.

In its present meaning, which supplanted “custom”, “virtue” and what could be called something like “the divine spirit of the human personality”, the word genius dates back only as far as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 1749, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The study of contemporary geniuses tends to show that they have something to do with mathematics, particularly the ability to see almost instantly the many possible combinations that lie beneath each equation. That so many musical geniuses have been extraordinary chess players is surely no coincidence. Alexrod avoids any serious attempt to consider the genius of the old analogue inventors such as Edison. This means that he also skips the role of national cultures, which is too bad, as the influence of one’s culture on inventing is something that Edison represents quite well and is certainly part of what makes him fascinating. His inventions include much of the machinery of contemporary living (and of dying too—as we’ll see in a moment). He was of course a modernist, not a post- anything. He wasn’t cut off from the traditional source of inspiration but worked at rechanneling the natural forces such as electricity, light and sound. While doing so much to invent not only the business of inventing but also America, he remained, in another sense, a semi-Canadian, with a highly Canadian view of what he undertook. Of course he is not often thought of in Canadian terms at all, though he missed being born here only because his parents, Upper Canada rebels of 1837, had to flee across Lake Erie to save themselves. So it was that Edison was born in Ohio. What’s more, he was born in the same decade as telegraphy, and grew up in a society that cherished Morse code: both creations of that better-rounded but far less pleasant figure Samuel F.B. Morse who moved Leonardo-like between painting and inventing but was a splenetic and bigoted fellow who sought public office on a platform of persecuting Catholics. Edison learned telegraphy as an adolescent, and came to Canada in 1863, briefly but not for the last time, and began his career as a telegrapher with the Grand Trunk Railway at Stratford Junction, Canada West. His first invention a few years later was a failure: a vote-tabulating machine that would speed up, and clean up, American elections, improvements that politicians and the whole legislative industry decided they could do without. Edison learned his lesson about the importance of market research, and shortly afterwards had his first big strike.

Wall Street had urgent need of a device by which stock quotations sent from the exchange by telegraph could be translated into English for instantaneous consumption in brokers’ offices by speculators unable to sight-read Morse. Edison figured out how to decode the electrical impulses and use them to operate a perforator that would print the translation onto a paper tape (an instrument therefore that was also, in effect, the forerunner of the computer modem, though the connection is irrelevant). The rest of his long career was given over to applied experimentation, often tailored to the specific needs of business. It is a telling fact that Edison hated jazz. His young assistants were forced to record it surreptitiously on the phonograph their boss had given the world. For, strange to say, he was not foremost an innovator or a creator. He was actually wary of the creative imagination. Despite his so-called impracticality, such distrust, combined with his aim of serving industry, made him a success. But his vein of independence, so essential to his importance in his own time, would be an impediment now.

Edison’s practicality was his genius but also his limitation, and he said matter-of-factly that inventing should be taught in elementary schools. He was right, of course, but he made no suggestions regarding the obvious problem with all such sweeping schemes to improve public education: namely, how do you teach the teachers to teach it? The first step would have to be recognition that fashions in thinking come and go and that some must be extended, some resurrected and others cut short to encourage the interchangeability of talent from one field to the next. The notion is no longer a live one. No software has been written for it.

National pride will sometimes cause squabbling over the origin of a particularly seminal invention. The obvious example is the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was a Scot who spent long periods of his life in both Canada and the US. Ignoring Bell’s claim that he did all the important work in Ontario, Americans are taught that he was an American who invented the telephone in New England. The only dissenters are the regionalists who believe that a southerner named Amos Dolebar was the true discoverer (a dubious claim quite different from the Canadian assertion that R. A. Fessenden from Quebec, probably the foremost Canadian inventor of the day, had a workable radio before Marconi did). The debate ignores the more complicated relationship between nationality and invention, a connection difficult to pin down because it involves national essence, national personality and other concerns so amorphous and imprecise that they would have driven inventors like Edison crazy. It is, however, a simple enough matter to illustrate. For all Bell’s work in Canada, for example, he was always a much less intrinsically Canadian inventor than Edison. If Edison had got beyond dabbling in short films with which to feed the cinematograph he had invented and become a big-time professional filmmaker instead, he would have stayed with documentaries, not strayed into fictional features.

In recent years Edison scholars have been at some pains to correct the popular image of their man as a failure in business, but the truth still seems to be that he was not creatively successful as a financier. All the serious Edison biographers, starting with Matthew Josephson fifty years ago, author of perhaps the most highly entertaining if by no means the most fulsome work on the subject, have made this point, which movies and books for children have unmade by emphasizing his capitalist addictions. In the view of Josephson, who is best remembered for The Robber Barons rather than Edison, A Biography, Edison had “no disposition for money accumulation and could be gloriously ‘impractical’”. Rather, he was driven, in Josephson’s view, by “the passion for glory, rather than money, and the desire to gain pre-eminence through acts of skill [that] are usually the ruling motives for the inventor type”, which Edison personified and indeed might be said to have, well, invented. Despite his so-called impracticality, his distrust of creative showiness and his aim of serving industry might make him a success in today’s research-and-development labs, but his independence, so highly valued in his own time, would be an impediment now, preventing him doing much good—or bad, as with his involvement in the electric chair, the lethal punishment that let America discover itself further by breaking free of Europe’s hangings and firing squads. Edison and George Westinghouse (1846-1914) were arch-rivals, though essentially different. Edison was about eighty per cent inventor and twenty per cent manufacturer; in Westinghouse the proportions were reversed. In the 1880s, Edison was promoting direct current (DC) while Westinghouse was promoting alternating current (AC). Fortunes were at stake as each looked for opportunities to influence prospective clients. Judicial execution by electric chair was being put forward as more humane and efficient than the gallows, but the two inventors naturally were at loggerheads over which system should be used. The story becomes pretty macabre, especially in that Edison was actually opposed to the death penalty and the first-ever electric-chair execution was horribly botched.

Edison is a figure whose broad streak of frontier practicality masked a good deal of ambivalence. He and so many of the other old-fashioned makers-of-the-new were by their nature generalists as well as independents. They lived in a time before commercial art was renamed design, and it was almost a form of commercial art they were practising (in that they may have been close to what’s now called R&D but never to technology transfer as an economic policy). The inventing process itself, a sort of applied tinkering, certainly presumed a gift for engineering in the normal course of events, but it might also demand a little bit of physics, a dash of chemistry here, a knack for steam-fitting there: an agglomeration of miscellaneous talents. Such cumulative skill, picked up through a knockabout life, is quite different from a matched set of specialties such as the corporate world demands now.

We’re sometimes given to understand that the blurring of disciplines is a distinguishing characteristic of science today (and given to understand exactly the opposite as well). What merging does in fact take place is easy to exaggerate. In any event, it works against and not for the notion of general science, as it used to be called in school curricula. It often appears rooted in the application of a particular narrow mode of investigation to more than one branch of science. That kind of transferability is most likely to produce lateral innovation because that’s what it’s designed to do. What inventors of the mechanical age excelled at was a different kind of thinking altogether, the sort inherited from settlers who had to cross a swift unfordable river and so became instant bridge-builders. Their “genius” didn’t reside in technological specialisation; it rested instead in the humanist tradition with its quest for knowledge about how things fit together. In our own time, whatever part of Edison’s approach still exists is no longer called inventing but more closely resembles philosophy, in that philosophy too has become more specialised, more technical, with greater stress on linguistics and the philosophy of science rather than on the search for how to live a good life. Just as there is no longer much place in philosophy for archaic knowledge and mystical revelations, so there is no room in technology for people like Edison.

Edison and Westinghouse were linked by more than the AC-DC question, which the story of the electric chair only symbolises. They were also linked by the quite different figure of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the original mad inventor of fiction come to life. He has long appealed to people with a mystical streak (no surprise then that Gwendolyn MacEwen wrote a book of poems about him). He trained in Edison’s invention-factory in New Jersey but couldn’t get along with Edison himself nor, later, with Marconi, whose claim to the invention of radio he later challenged in court, with some posthumous success. In his middle years, he set up his own corporate structure, much as Edison had done, and was hired by Westinghouse to find a way of harnessing AC for general use, which he did. He also seems to have invented fluorescent lighting, for which our own generation is unlikely to forgive him. There is no question but that the bladeless turbine was his. The accomplishments of Tesla’s that cannot be proved, however, have always been more intriguing than any of his concrete claims to renown. For example, he seems to have foreseen a sort of primitive version of the Star Wars defence initiative. He held a patent on a transformer for sending electrical energy through ionised space without the use of solid conductors, an idea whose ultimate conclusion is the laser death-ray for which the American military has so long searched with the dedication of those who once sought a piece of stemware from the Last Supper. His papers are scoured for certain clues to computer science and robotics as well. He was quite Edisonian in that people such as Westinghouse approached him with their inventing needs, and he satisfied them, and then proceeded to work away merrily in areas he had carved out for himself.

Sometimes a country’s inventions say a great deal about its culture as a whole. The fact that, at their most representative, Americans have tended to invent weapons and Canadians have tended to come up with everyday down-to-earth consumer items such as bubble wrap and the green plastic garbage bag is a perfectly useful generalisation but only as far as it goes, which isn’t far. There is obvious truth, however, in the common conclusion that Canadians have accounted for many advances in land, sea and air transportation and also in the transmission of information mechanically and digitally. A map tells you why.

George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books). His “Books This Week” column appears on Wednesdays.