-Caveat Lector-
Howard R. Davis III wrote:
Life Magazine made a list of the individuals who had the
most effect upon our civilization during the last millenium.
At the top of the list was Thomas Alva Edison. When his
teacher told his mother that he would never amount to anything
because of his learning disability (of course, back then she
probably would have said he was retarded), his mother took
him out of school and he got the rest of his education from
his mother (and reading most of the books at the local library).
The Education of Thomas Edison
by Jim Powell
[Mr. Powell is editor of Laissez-Faire Books. He has written
for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's,
American Heritage, and more than three dozen other
publications.]
This article is from The Freeman, February, 1995.
Copyright (c) 1995 by Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
In 1854, Reverend G. B. Engle belittled one of his students,
seven-year-old Thomas Alva Edison, as "addled." This outraged
the youngster, and he stormed out of the Port Huron, Michigan
school, the first formal school he had ever attended. His
mother, Nancy Edison, brought him back the next day to
discuss the situation with Reverend Engle, but she became
angry at his rigid ways. Everything was forced on the kids.
She withdrew her son from the school where he had been for
only three months and resolved to educate him at home.
Although he seems to have briefly attended two more schools,
nearly all his childhood learning took place at home.
Thus arose the legend that Thomas Alva Edison (born February
11, 1847) became America's most prolific inventor -- 1,093
patents for such wonders as the microphone, telephone receiver,
stock ticker, phonograph, movies, office copiers, and
incandescent electric light -- despite his lack of schooling.
For years, he looked the part of the improbable, homespun
genius: five feet, 10 inches tall, gray eyes, long hair that
looked as if he cut it himself, baggy acid-stained pants,
scruffy shoes, and hands discolored by chemicals. Later he
took to wearing city clothes -- black. On more than one
occasion passersby mistook him for a priest and respectfully
tipped their hats.
Yet Edison probably gained a far better education than most
children of his time or ours. This wasn't because his mother
had official credentials. She had taught school, but only a
little. Nor was it because his parents had money. They were
poor and lived on the outskirts of a declining town. Nancy
Edison's secret: she was more dedicated than any teacher was
likely to be, and she had the flexibility to experiment with
various ways of nurturing her son's love for learning.
"She avoided forcing or prodding," wrote Edison biographer
Matthew Josephson, "and made an effort to engage his interest
by reading him works of good literature and history that she
had learned to love -- and she was said to have been a fine
reader."
Thomas Edison plunged into great books. Before he was 12, he
had read works by Shakespeare and Dickens, Edward Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, David Hume's History
of England, and more.
Because Nancy Edison was devoted and observant, she discovered
simple ways to nurture her son's enthusiasm. She brought him
a book on the physical sciences -- R. G. Parker's School of
Natural Philosophy, which explained how to perform chemistry
experiments at home. Edison recalled this was "the first book
in science I read when a boy." It made learning fun, and he
performed every experiment in the book. Then Nancy Edison
brought him The Dictionary of Science which further spurred
his interest. He became passionate about chemistry, spending
all his spare money buying chemicals from a local pharmacist,
collecting bottles, wires, and other items for experiments.
He built his first laboratory in the cellar of the family's
Port Huron house.
"Thus," Josephson noted, "his mother had accomplished that
which all truly great teachers do for their pupils, she
brought him to the stage of learning things for himself,
learning that which most amused and interested him, and she
encouraged him to go on in that path. It was the very best
thing she could have done for this singular boy." As Edison
himself put it: "My mother was the making of me. She
understood me; she let me follow my bent."
Sam Edison disapproved of all the time his son spent in
the cellar. Sometimes he offered the boy a penny to resume
reading literature. At 12, for example, Thomas read Thomas
Paine's Age of Reason. "I can still remember the flash of
enlightenment that shone from his pages," he recalled.
Typically, though, he used his pennies to buy more chemicals
for experiments in the cellar.
But Thomas Edison had discovered intellectual play. He
wanted to learn everything he could about steam engines,
electricity, battery power, electromagnetism, and
especially the telegraph. Samuel F. B. Morse had attracted
tremendous crowds when he demonstrated the telegraph back
in 1838, and telegraph lines were extended across the country
by the time Thomas Edison was conducting his experiments. The
idea of transmitting information over a wire utterly
fascinated him. He used scrap metal to build a telegraph
set and practiced the Morse code. Through his experiments,
he learned more and more about electricity which was to
revolutionize the world.
When the Grand Trunk Railroad was extended to Port Huron
in 1859, he got a job as newsboy for the day-long run to
Detroit and back. After about a year, he looked for ways
to make better use of the five-hour layover in Detroit
before the train made its return trip. He got permission
to move his cellar laboratory equipment aboard the baggage
car, so he could continue his experiments. This worked
well for a while until the train lurched, spilled some
chemicals, and the laboratory caught on fire.
In 1862, a train accident injured his ears, and the
15-year-old began to lose much of his hearing. Apparently,
he realized that as a handicapped boy without any
credentials, he must learn everything he needed to know
on his own. He dramatically intensified his self-education.
"Deafness probably drove me to reading," he reflected
later. He was among the first people to use the Detroit
Free Library -- with card number 33 -- and he
systematically read through it shelf by shelf. He
read literature. He was thrilled by Victor Hugo's new
romantic epic, Les Miserables, especially the stories
of lost children. He talked so much about the book that
his friends called him "Victor Hugo" Edison.
Of course, what fascinated Edison most was science. He
devoured books on electricity, mechanics, chemical
analysis, manufacturing technology and more. He struggled
with Isaac Newton's Principles, which made him realize
his future would be with practical matters, not theorizing.
The Joy of Learning
As a home-schooled, self-educated youth, Edison learned
lessons that were to serve him all his life. He learned
education was his own responsibility. He learned to take
initiative. He learned to be persistent. He learned he
could gain practical knowledge, inspiration and wisdom
by reading books. He learned to discover all kinds of
things from methodical observation. He learned
education is a continuing, joyful process.
At 2O, Edison got a job as itinerant Western Union
telegraph operator and became remarkably proficient.
He worked in Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis,
Memphis, Boston, and New York. The more he learned
about telegraphy, the more he wanted to learn. He
took apart equipment and reassembled it until he
understood how it worked. He experimented with ways
to make it better. He decided that greater knowledge
of chemistry would help him, so he haunted used
bookstores and ordered chemistry books from London
and Paris. He filled his rented rooms with chemicals
and junk metal for his experiments. One associate
observed: "He spent his money buying apparatus and
books, and wouldn't buy clothing. That winter he went
without an overcoat and nearly froze."
Edison's knowledge and enterprise led to a dramatic
series of inventions. On January 25, 1869, he applied
for a patent on a telegraphic stock ticker which, after
he filed patents for dozens of successive improvements,
became standard office equipment in America and Europe.
Edison invented a printing telegraph for gold bullion
and foreign exchange dealers. Western Union and its
rivals battled to gain control of Edison's patents
which revolutionized the telegraph business. For example,
he figured out how a central telegraph office could
control the performance of telegraph equipment at
remote locations. He developed a method for transmitting
four messages simultaneously over the same wire. Intense
curiosity, nourished by his home education, drove him to
become perhaps America's best technician on telegraphy.
>From his practical experience, Edison learned to make the
most of unexpected opportunities. For example, on July 18,
1877, he was testing an automatic telegraph which had a
stylus to read coded indentations on strips of paper. For
some reason, perhaps excessive voltage, the stylus suddenly
began moving so fast through the indentations that the
friction resulted in a sound. It might have been only a
hum, but it got Edison's attention. His imagination made
a wild leap. Explains archivist Douglas Tarr at the Edison
National Historical Site, West Orange, New Jersey: "Edison
seemed to reason that if a stylus going through indentations
could produce a sound unintentionally, then it could produce
a sound intentionally, in which case he should be able to
reproduce the human voice." A talking machine!
Edison worked out its fundamental principles in his
notebooks, and on December 17, 1877, he filed a patent
application for the phonograph ("sound writing"). This
was no improvement of existing technology. It was something
brand new, Edison's most original invention. It was also
one thing he didn't seek to invent, unlike the light bulb,
power generation systems, and other famous inventions
which he deliberately pursued. Having developed the idea,
Edison followed up, working on and off for more than two
decades to produce recorded sound quality which would
thrill millions.
With a flexible and open mind, Edison enjoyed an important
advantage in the race for electric light. Other inventors
were committed to refining low-resistance arc lights (then
used in light houses) which required large amounts of
electrical power and copper wire-the most costly part of
their lighting systems. In September 1878, Edison
cheerfully began considering the opposite: a high
resistance system which would require far less electrical
power and copper wire. This could mean small electric
lights suitable for home use. By January 1879, at the
laboratory he established in Menlo Park, New Jersey,
Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent
electric light. It worked by passing electricity through
a thin platinum filament in a glass vacuum bulb to delay
the filament from melting.
But the lamp worked for only an hour or two. Improving
performance required all the persistence Edison had
learned as a child. He tested many other metals. He
thought about tungsten, the metal in light bulb filaments
now, but he couldn't work with it using tools available in
his day. He tried carbon. He tested carbonized filaments
of every imaginable plant material, including baywood,
boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He contacted
biologists who could send him plant fibers from the tropics.
"Before I got through," he recalled, "I tested no fewer
than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world
for the most suitable filament material." Best performer
for many years: carbonized filaments from cotton thread.
This proved to be one of Edison's most perplexing
inventions. "The electric light has caused me the
greatest amount of study and has required the most
elaborate experiments," he wrote. "I was never myself
discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I
cannot say the same for all my associates." Edison at
the peak of his inventive powers drew inspiration, as
he did in his youth, from Victor Hugo's novel Toilers
of the Sea. The hero, Gilliatt, struggled against the
waves, the tides and a storm to save a steamship from
destruction on a reef.
Hailed as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," Edison was often
able to see possibilities others missed because he
continuously educated himself about different technologies.
For example, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, he
read widely about the latest developments in photographic
optics. He investigated the potential of tough, flexible
celluloid as motion picture film and had George Eastman
make 50-foot-long, 35mm wide test strips. Edison worked
out the mechanical problems of advancing film steadily
across a photographic lens without tearing. He linked his
new motion picture camera to an improved phonograph,
capturing sound synchronized with motion pictures. Then
Edison developed what he called the Kinetoscope to project
these "talking" images on a screen.
In 1887, Edison built a magnificent laboratory in West
Orange, New Jersey. It was 10 times larger than his
first, fabled facility in Menlo Park. The main building
alone contained some 60,000 square feet of floor space
for machine shops, glass-blowing operations, electrical
testing rooms, chemical stockrooms, electrical power
generation, and other functions.
Once a day, Edison toured this vast facility to see what
was going on, but he did most work in the library. It had
a great hall, a 30-foot-high ceiling and two galleries.
Right in the center, Edison sat at a desk with three
dozen pigeonholes, surrounded by some 10,000 books. Here
he would ponder new ideas and hear his associates report
on their progress.
As Edison grew older, he became stouter and harder of
hearing, but he remained as enthusiastic as ever about
the free-wheeling pursuit of practical knowledge. In
1903, he hired Martin Andre Rosanoff, a Russian born,
Paris-trained chemist who asked about laboratory rules.
"Hell," Edison snorted, "there ain't no rules around
here! We're tryin' to accomplish somep'n."
After Edison died on Sunday, October 18, 1931, his
coffin was placed in his beloved West Orange library
for mourners to pay their respects. Rosanoff identified
a key to the Old Man's enduring fame: "Had Edison been
formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity
to create such impossible things."
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