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Thomas Edison: Success and Innovation through Failure

Part of the Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Book Series (volume 52)

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-29940-8

ISBN: 978-3-030-29939-2

Publisher: Springer International Publishing - Springer Journals

Jan 2, 2020

1 - 10 of 12 Chapters

LitStream

Chapter 1Introduction

Wills, Ian

Pages: 1 –8

[Thomas Edison wrote this in a letter to an acquaintance in 1878, soon after starting work on his electric lighting system. It is a telling description of his way of inventing because his laboratory notebooks are filled with descriptions of bugs – things that “gave out” – and the ways in which he...
LitStream

Success, Failure and Innovation: The Carbon Microphone

Wills, Ian

Pages: 11 –47

[Thomas Edison was remarkably positive in the face of failure. Towards the end of his life, he related the following incident:Edison seems to have been fond of thinking of failure in this way because it appears in a number of other anecdotes. After the failure of many experiments on electrical...
LitStream

Failure and Success

Wills, Ian

Pages: 49 –59

[December 1877 to May 1878 was a hectic period for Edison, culminating in the sale of his carbon microphone patent rights to Western Union. The period began spectacularly in December 1877, with Edison’s demonstration of a revolutionary invention, the phonograph. The Phonograph made Edison a...
LitStream

Innovation and Systems

Wills, Ian

Pages: 61 –79

[Historian of technology Thomas Hughes argues that global electric power networks are systems in which technological, social, political and economic aspects are all components. Hughes describes a system as follows:The key features of Hughes’s concept of a system are:]
LitStream

Innovation Must Fail

Wills, Ian

Pages: 81 –96

[I didn’t have much faith that [my first tinfoil Phonograph] would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the...
LitStream

Catastrophic Failure

Wills, Ian

Pages: 97 –102

[Previous chapters have dealt with failure using examples drawn mainly from Edison’s laboratory notebooks. Even when these failures significant effect on the inventions he was developing, none could be described as a catastrophic failure. In contrast, catastrophic failures are easily recognised...
LitStream

Inventive Success: The Phonograph

Wills, Ian

Pages: 105 –140

[On 7 December 1877, Thomas Edison and his associate, Charles Batchelor, visited the editor of Scientific American bringing with them “a little affair of a few pieces of metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square”. To the editor’s astonishment, the “little affair”, Edison’s first...
LitStream

Scientific Failure: Etheric Force

Wills, Ian

Pages: 141 –168

[In 1885, Thomas Edison added to his already substantial tally of 141 patents in telegraphy, a patent for sending telegraph messages without wires. This invention, he claimed, would enable communication “between distant points … by induction without the use of wires connecting such distant...
LitStream

Thomas Edison and Patents

Wills, Ian

Pages: 171 –201

[Without patents and the patent system, Thomas Edison could not have become a professional inventor, nor without patents, could he have become an inventor-entrepreneur. Understanding Edison as inventor and entrepreneur requires understanding patents and the patent system.]
LitStream

The Edisonian Method: Trial and Error

Wills, Ian

Pages: 203 –222

[The day after Thomas Edison died, Nicola Tesla, who worked for Edison in 1882–83, was reported as saying, “His 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...

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