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As a boy in Ohio Edison gained a reputation

for being odd, asking so many questions

which infuriated his teachers that his mother,

a teacher herself, decided to educate him at

home. He read quickly and memorized

easily; at twelve, only Newton’s Principia

seems to have floored him. To afford chemi-

cals for his home laboratory he worked as a

newsboy on the railroad between Port Huron

and Detroit, and then, graduating to a print-

ing press, issued his own newspaper, the first

to be printed and published on a train. After

his baggage coach laboratory caught fire, he

and his gear were thrown off. In 1862, a sta-

tion agent, father of a boy he had rescued

from train rails, offered to teach Edison to be

a telegrapher. He became the fastest in

America; with the earnings he reinforced his

technological knowledge, buying (amongst

others) Faraday’s writings. During the Civil

War years he wandered the central states, one

of those tramp operators – skilled, in demand

and intellectually alert – who were trans-

forming American communications and

thereby the structure of society. He liked

Othello and copied plays for a Cincinnati

theatre. In 1868 in Boston he patented his

first invention – a mechanical vote-recorder,

which failed because Congress did not particu-

larly want voting procedures speeded up –

lesson number one for the young inventor:

only invent what is needed. Waiting to be

interviewed in New York City in 1869, he

repaired a telegraph machine (basic for specu-

lation) and immediately got a job. During the

speculation burst that year, the president of a

Wall Street firm paid him $40,000 for a stock

ticker. So, at the age of twenty-three, he

could found the first firm of consulting tech-

nologists, and for six years in Newark, New

Jersey, invented continuously – practical

quadruplex telegraphy in 1874, the mimeo-

graph, telegraphic improvements, waxed

paper, etc., always basing invention on social

justification and commerciality. In 1876 he

founded Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first

industrial research factory – to produce, he

planned, an invention every ten days, from a

technological and scientific team. This

method was a major advance on the tradition

of chance individual cleverness. Before his

death ‘the wizard of Menlo Park’ had issued

nearly 1,300 inventions including radio aer-

ials (purchased by Marconi), the dictaphone

and gummed paper. In one four-year period

the rate became one invention every five

days. He had converted the lonely study,

partly resulting from his deafness, into a

group industry.