Successes and Failures of a Great Inventor
by Thomas Edison was almost certainly the most prolific inventor of all time. He is best remembered for three inventions:
Patent Genius
Thomas Edison was almost certainly the most prolific inventor of all time. He is best remembered for three inventions: the incandescent lamp, the kinetoscope (peep-show ancestor of the cinema) and the phonograph. But in a long life, lasting from 1847 to 1931, he patented more than 1300 and inventions in the United States and abroad. At the height of his powers, in the 1880s, he was filing a patent every five days on average.
Needless to say, not all his ideas were successful. His first patented invention, devised in 1868, was an electric system to speed up the cumbersome process of recording of votes in the United States Congress. Each congressman was to be provided with “yes” and “no” buttons linked to an automatic central display. This eminently sensible system worked-but Congress was hostile to the invention and declined to buy it.
Word of power
One of Edison’s most bizarre ideas was the phonomotor, a spinoff from his the famous phonograph. This vocal engine attempted to harness the energy of sound vibrations from the human voice to drive machinery. Thus a sewing machine would be powered, not by a pedal or electricity, but by the seamstress talking in a loud voice. However, the device proved impractical.
Also related to the phonograph were the talking dolls many in the 1880s. Each tin doll contain a small phonograph cylinder with a recording of a nursery rhyme or other text, operated by turning a key.
When Edison focused his attention on the building industry in 1908, he was, startlingly innovative. He proposed replacing slum tenements with cheap new housing using concrete. Each house would be many in one piece, by simply pouring concrete into an iron form. The whole process would take only three hours. Edison’s proposal was much ridiculed, but he proved it actually could be done by creating a concrete house himself. While the use of concrete and buildings continued to increase throughout the early 20th century, Edison’s single mould houses did not catch on.
His curiosity stretched beyond the bounds of the material world. In his later years, spurred on by the millions who have lost relations in the First World War, he applied his skills to attempting to contact the dead. Skeptical of Ouija boards and other standard spiritualist equipment, he sought to invent a machine to amplify whatever weak vibrations might emanate from beyond the grave. Unfortunately this last quest of the great inventor’s lifetime proved a failure.
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