I’m not always sure what to think of Thomas Edison. Clearly the man was a creative genius who produced more than a few inventions entirely on his own and with his own self-education and intuition. He created the first true research and development system, designed to produce viable products for innumerable applications. Edison was endlessly curious and investigated nearly all aspects of science and technology, from electricity to chemistry. Edison considered himself a free thinker and contributed greatly to science, always meticulously documenting his activities and investigations.

But Edison was stubborn and went to great lengths to promote his DC current system over the superior AC system of Westinghouse and Tesla. Although Edison was a fixture in his laboratory and conducted much of the development first-hand, many of the inventions creditted to him were really developed by his technicians. Even the lightbulb was not really Edison’s idea. The incandescent light had been the subject of much research before Edison. Thomas Edison’s true contribution was simply to find a filament material which would produce ample light while having a reasonable lifetime.

In the end though, Edison deserves a lot of credit for the system he founded. That having been said, some excerpts from his “Edison, His life and Inventions” are provided here and show a rather disturbing side of Edison’s research and development years. It really shows how things have changed since Edison’s time. At a time when new scientific knowledge was arriving like never before safety was not taken as seriously as today. The liberties that Edison took and his caviler attitude would be considered shockingly reckless today. Things were obviously much different before one needed to worry about Osha, the EPA or other regulatory agencies. In one instance, an accident lead to a pipe shooting out several pounds of mercury metal… directly into the mouth of a laboratory worker. It doesn’t say what his fait was, but I presume he probably did not live very long thereafter. He also had a number of interesting chemicals in his laboratory, such as opium and heroin, which would also come into play.

It must have been a fun place though. Sounds like a combination of Mythbusters, my garage, a frat house and a terrible industrial accident.

Here are a few snippets:

“Some of my assistants in those days were very green in the business, as I did not care whether they had had any experience or not. I generally tried to turn them loose. One day I got a new man, and told him to conduct a certain experiment. He got a quart of ether and started to boil it over a naked flame. Of course it caught fire. The flame was about four feet in diameter and eleven feet high. We had to call out the fire department; and they came down and put a stream through the window. That let all the fumes and chemicals out and overcame the firemen; and there was the devil to pay.”

“I had read in a scientific paper the method of making nitroglycerine, and was so fired by the wonderful properties it was said to possess, that I determined to make some of the compound. We tested what we considered a very small quantity, but this produced such terrible and unexpected results that we became alarmed, the fact dawning upon us that we had a very large white elephant in our possession. At 6 A.M. I put the explosive into a sarsaparilla bottle, tied a string to it, wrapped it in a paper, and gently let it down into the sewer, corner of State and Washington Streets.”

“Another time we experimented with a tub full of soapy water, and put hydrogen into it to make large bubbles. One of the boys, who was washing bottles in the place, had read in some book that hydrogen was explosive, so he proceeded to blow the tub up. There was about four inches of soap in the bottom of the tub, fourteen inches high; and he filled it with soap bubbles up to the brim. Then he took a bamboo fish-pole, put a piece of paper at the end, and touched it off. It blew every window out of the place.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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