Edison and the Business of Innovation
by André Millard, Published by The John Hopkins University Press
ISBN 0-8018-4730-3, paperback, 408 pp, $29.95
EN-Genius Reviewer: Dennis L. Feucht

This book is about an important aspect of Thomas A. Edison to engineers: how his business and inventive efforts related. As America's foremost inventor, Edison still holds the record number of patents, somewhat over a thousand. The author is a history professor with an interest in early electricity in the US and Britain. The primary value of this book, to me, was that it put into a more realistic historical perspective the work of Edison as both an inventor and entrepreneur. When you consider that names like Westinghouse and Ford -- contemporaries of Edison -- survived to our time as large companies, while the name of Edison is found only in the names of regional electric utilities, this sets the tone for what Millard unfolds in his book. Besides Edison's well-known invention of the electric light, dc electric generation and distribution, motion pictures, and development of the acoustic phonograph, Edison pioneered industrial research, the organization of product engineering within his company, and departmentalization of the business enterprise according to major areas of invention. The laboratory inventions drove the businesses. Edison's enterprise also, ironically, put in place what now is called industrial engineering: improvement of the efficiency of manufacturing processes and employees, and the beginnings of rigorous accounting of resources, so that profit and loss could be accurately determined.

Despite these organizational improvements, Edison never could delegate authority, and remained the dependent center of his businesses. In time this contributed to their deterioration, as Edison's habitual hiring and firing binges left even good managers and engineers at risk of their jobs, and many left. His short attention span, driven by an overabundance of good ideas to work on, caused R&D to be rather undisciplined and resulted in a trail of abandoned projects. But it also led to company diversification, which saved it in its later years. Others who worked with Edison and had better business sense brought about the needed organizational reforms, just as many of his inventions were improvements upon the pioneering work of others. Yet Edison got the credit. His mythical status among the American public allowed the Edison name to substitute for the advertising for which competitors, such as Victor (of Victrola phonograph renown), were spending greater sums of money. The picture that emerges of Edison was that he hired some good people who themselves contributed to both business and technical innovation. The Edison laboratory was the leading concentration of creative American technical activity from the 1870s until World War I.

After the War, GE, Victor, AT&T and other companies were surpassing TAE, Inc in most areas, as Edison had grown too fond of his pioneering work. (The older Edison is a prime example of what is described in my upcoming TechNote, The Hindrance of Breakthroughs.) He continued, for instance, with cylindrical phonograph records for too long instead of going to disks. Why? Edison was a perfectionist, and in his mind the technical advantages of cylinders for greater sound fidelity outweighed the market features customers wanted, such as longer playing time. He also stuck with hill-and-dale (as the author calls it) recording for the same reason rather than the familiar lateral recording found on disks. Edison also maintained decision-making authority for the selection of music (and movies) that his company produced, overriding marketing department managers. Edison's idiosyncrasies kept his music selection limited mainly to classical and operatic music, while the competitors were recording jazz, a genre Edison disliked.

Edison's real love in life was to invent in his own laboratory. His businesses existed to serve this end. Edison's time bridged the change from the old machine-shop culture of the late 1800s, to the modern company of the 1900s. It was in the late 1800s that Edison became popularly known as the "Wizard of Menlo Park," though the laboratory with which we now associate him was the bigger, better one at West Orange, NJ, not far from New York city. By the 1920s, Victor, RCA, and AT&T followed in Edison's lead in establishing industrial research activities, but managed the directions that the researchers took. In contrast, the machinists were the inventors of the 19th century, and tended to work freely on whatever new ideas caught their fancy, as Edison allowed of his laboratory inventors.

Edison's sons Charles and Theodore, both MIT graduates, were also involved in TAE, Inc. The fall of the house of Edison was in large part brought on by the Old Man's (as he was called in the lab) inability in his later career to do what he thrived on earlier: effect technological change. While the audion (early vacuum tube triode) was applied to recordings to increase their volume, Edison, the perfectionist, found fault with the sound quality of these early electronic-based products of competitors. However, by 1920, Victor and others who had applied electronics wrote the epitaph for acoustic recording. Buyers were willing to sacrifice some sound quality for greater volume. Edison's lab often in the past had found themselves having to catch up with improvements of their own technology elsewhere. They sometimes were capable of leapfrogging the competition, and used the sales line that Edison did not want to release his innovative technology to the public until it was perfected -- a ruse about Edison quality to deflect the fact that Edison's company was catching up. The phonograph was no different. The effort proved too little, too late, and the commercialization of the invention for which Edison was credited passed on to others.

The story of Edison, as told by Millard, is useful today in gaining perspective on technology-driven enterprise, for it highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the relationship between inventing and entrepreneuring when both were in their early American formative stages. In Edison, many of the struggles between marketing and engineering found in tech-oriented companies of today are manifested in their infancy, and this provides some insight into today's relationships between engineers and sales people. Millard is a historian, not a technologist, and this is evident in some of his language describing Edison's technology. Yet the point of the book is the business of innovation, which I think can be useful to any electronics engineer with entrepreneurial aspirations. One has not fully come to understand something until one understands its origins and early development.

This book is one of a history-of-technology series of books published by Johns Hopkins University Press, covering mostly Gilded Age (1875 - 1925) technological progress. One other book in the series, in particular, is recommended: What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter G Vincenti. It is based on aeronautical, not electrical, engineering, but I have a copy and find it also well worth having in my library.

One final note about Edison: he had a broad working knowledge of mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering rarely found in engineers today. This allowed him to invent over a wide range of technologies, a trait that almost all engineers in our time can only admire.