"Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark while a large group of professionals built the Titanic" -- author unknown.
The founders of EPIC Merchant Energy take inspirations from many individuals in history. Of particular interest are stories of success in which individuals show what can be accomplished with perserverance and dedication by those willing to take risks, challenge the norms, and constantly work to improve upon old ideas. In the industry of electrons, protons, and neutrons, one particular individual stands out above all others just because of who he was and where he lived. That individual is Thomas Alva Edison, and here is a little bit of his inspiring story
Thomas Alva Edison
Born in 1847, Edison would see tremendous change take place in his lifetime.
He was also to be responsible for making many of those changes occur. When
Edison was born, society still thought of electricity as a novelty, a fad.
By the time he died in 1931, entire cities were lit by electricity. Much of
the credit for that progress goes to Edison. In his lifetime, Edison
patented 1,093 inventions, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo
Park." The most famous of his inventions was an improved incandescent light
bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the "kinetoscope," a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon
the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham
Bell's telephone. He believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a
day. Edison was quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99
percent perspiration."
Edison, Electricity, and the Lightbulb:
Thomas Alva Edison's greatest challenge was the development of a practical
incandescent, electric light. Contrary to popular belief, he didn't "invent" the lightbulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. In 1878
Joseph Swan, a British scientist, invented the incandescent filament lamp
and within twelve months Edison made a similar discovery in America. In
1879, using lower current electricity, a small carbonized filament, and an
improved vacuum inside the globe, Edison was able to produce a reliable,
long-lasting source of light. Swan and Edison later set up a joint company
to produce the first practical filament lamp. The idea of electric lighting
was not new, and a number of people had worked on, and even developed forms
of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been developed that
was remotely practical for home use. Edison's eventual achievement was
inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric
lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the
incandescent light practical, safe, and economical. After one and a half
years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent lamp with a
filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours.
There are a couple of other interesting things about the invention of the
light bulb: While most of the attention was on the discovery of the right
kind of filament that would work, Edison actually had to invent a total of
seven system elements that were critical to the practical application of
electric lights as an alternative to the gas lights that were prevalent in
that day.
These were the development of:
- the parallel circuit
- a durable light bulb
- an improved dynamo
- the underground conductor network
- the devices for maintaining constant voltage
- safety fuses and insulating materials
- light sockets with on-off switches
Before Thomas Edison could make his fortune, every one of these elements had
to be invented and then, through careful trial and error, developed into
practical, reproducible components. The first public demonstration of the
Thomas Edison's incandescent lighting system was in December 1879, when the
Menlo Park laboratory complex was electrically lighted. Edison spent the
next several years creating the electric industry.
The modern electric utility industry began in the 1880s. It evolved from gas
and electric carbon-arc commercial and street lighting systems. On September
4, 1882, the first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street in
lower Manhattan, went into operation providing light and electricity power
to customers in a one square mile area; the electric age had begun. Thomas
Edison's Pearl Street electricity generating station introduced four key
elements of a modern electric utility system. It featured reliable central
generation, efficient distribution, a successful end use (in 1882, the light
bulb), and a competitive price. A model of efficiency for its time, Pearl
Street used one-third the fuel of its predecessors, burning about 10 pounds
of coal per kilowatt-hour, a "heat rate" equivalent of about 138,000 Btu per
kilowatt-hour. Initially the Pearl Street utility served 59 customers for
about 24 cents per kilowatt-hour. In the late 1880s, power demand for
electric motors brought the industry from mainly nighttime lighting to
24-hour service and dramatically raised electricity demand for
transportation and industry needs. By the end of the 1880s, small central
stations dotted many U.S. cities; each was limited to a few blocks area
because of transmission inefficiencies of direct current (dc). Edison's
successes were not without controversy, however, as he was convinced of the
merits of DC for generating electricity, other scientists in Europe and
America recognized that DC brought major disadvantages.
The success of his electric light brought Thomas Edison to new heights of
fame and wealth, as electricity spread around the world. His various
electric companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought
together to form Edison General Electric. Despite the use of Edison in the
company title however, he never controlled this company. The tremendous
amount of capital needed to develop the incandescent lighting industry had
necessitated the involvement of investment bankers such as J.P. Morgan. When
Edison General Electric merged with its leading competitor Thompson-Houston
in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the company became simply
General Electric.
Directly from the Genius's own Thoughts:
Thomas Alva Edison expressed the following between 1914 and 1927. His
thoughts can be found printed in the book by Dagobert D. Runes (editor), The
Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, Philosophical Library,
New York, 1948.
THE INVENTOR'S LOT
dated 1914
THE INVENTOR tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization. Society is
never prepared to receive any invention. Every new thing is resisted, and it
takes years for the inventor to get people to listen to him and years more
before it can be introduced, and when it is introduced our beautiful laws
and court procedure are used by predatory commercialism to ruin the
inventor. They don't leave him even enough to start a new invention.
THEY WON'T THINK
dated 1921
EVERY MAN has some forte, something he can do better than he can do anything
else. Many men, however, never find the job they are best suited for. And
often this is because they do not think enough. Too many men drift lazily
into any job, suited or unsuited for them; and when they don't get along
well they blame everybody and everything but themselves.
Grouches are nearly always pinheads, small men who have never made any
effort to improve their mental capacity.
The brain can be developed just the same as the muscles can be developed, if
one will only take the pains to train the mind to think.
Why do so many men never amount to anything? Because they don't think.
I am going to have a sign put up all over my plant, reading "There is no
expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of
thinking."
That is true. There is hardly a day that I do not discover how painfully
true it is.
What progress individuals could make, and what progress the world would
make, if thinking were given proper consideration! It seems to me that not
one man in a thousand appreciates what can be accomplished by training the
mind to think.
It is because they do not use their thinking powers that so many people have
never developed a creditable mentality. The brain that isn't used rusts. The
brain that is used responds. The brain is exactly like any other part of the
body: it can be strengthened by proper exercise, by proper use. Put your arm
in a sling and keep it there for a considerable length of time, and, when
you take it out, you find that you can't use it. In the same way, the brain
that isn't used suffers atrophy.
By developing your thinking powers you expand the capacity of your brain and
attain new abilities. For example, the average person's brain does not
observe a thousandth part of what the eye observes. The average brain simply
fails to register the things which come before the eye. It is almost
incredible how poor our powers of observation--genuine observation--are.
Let me give an illustration: When we first started the incandescent lighting
system we had a lamp factory at the bottom of a hill, at Menlo Park. It was
a very busy time for us all. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every
day and slept only four hours--and thrived on it.
I fed them all, and I had a man play an organ all the time we were at work.
One midnight, while at lunch, a matter came up which caused me to refer to a
cherry tree beside the hill leading from the main works to the lamp factory.
Nobody seemed to know anything about the location of the cherry tree. This
made me conduct a little investigation, and I found that although
twenty-seven of these men had used this path every day for six months not
one of them had ever noticed the tree.
The eye sees a great many things, but the average brain records very few of
them. Indeed, nobody has the slightest conception of how little the brain
'sees' unless it has been highly trained. I remember dropping in to see a
man whose duty was to watch the working of a hundred machines on a table. I
asked him if everything was all right.
Yes, everything is all right, he said.
But, I had already noticed that two of the machines had stopped. I drew his
attention to them, and he was mortified. He confessed that, although his
sole duty was to watch and see that every machine was working, he had not
noticed that these two had stopped. I could hide myself off and keep busy at
thinking forever. I don't need anybody to amuse me. It is the same way with
my friends John Burroughs, the naturalist, and Henry Ford, who is a
natural-born mechanic. We can derive the most satisfying kind of joy from
thinking and thinking and thinking.
The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking
misses the greatest pleasure in life. He not only misses the greatest
pleasure, but he cannot make the most of himself. All progress, all success,
springs from thinking.
Of course, even the most concentrated thinking cannot solve every new
problem that the brain can conceive. It usually takes me from five to seven
years to perfect a thing. Some things I have been working on for twenty-five
years--and some of them are still unsolved. My average would be about seven
years. The incandescent light was the hardest one of all; it took many years
not only of concentrated thought but also of world-wide research. The
storage battery took eight years. It took even longer to perfect the
phonograph.
Which do I consider my greatest invention? Well, my reply to that would be
that I like the phonograph best. Doubtless this is because I love music. And
then it has brought so much joy into millions of homes all over the country,
and, indeed, all over the world. Music is so helpful to the human mind that
it is naturally a source of satisfaction to me that I have helped in some
way to make the very finest music available to millions who could not afford
to pay the price and time necessary to hear the greatest artists sing and
play.
Many inventions are not suitable for the people at large because of their
carelessness. Before a thing can be marketed to the masses, it must be made
practically fool-proof. Its operation must be made extremely simple. That is
one reason, I think, why the phonograph has been so universally adopted.
Even a child can operate it.
Another reason, is that people are far more willing to pay for being amused
than for anything else.
One great trouble with the world to-day is that people wander from place to
place, and are never satisfied with anything. They are shiftless and
thoughtless. They revolt at buckling down and doing hard work and hard
thinking. They refuse to take the time and the trouble to lay solid
foundations. They are too superficial, too flighty, too easily bored. They
fail to adopt the right spirit toward their life work, and consequently fail
to enjoy the satisfaction and the happiness which comes from doing a job, no
matter what it is, absolutely in the best way within their power. Failing to
find the joy which they should find in accomplishing something, they turn to
every imaginable variety of amusement. Instead of learning to drink in joy
through their minds, they try to find it, without effort, through their eyes
and their ears--and sometimes their stomachs.
It is all because they won't think, won't think!
THEY DO WHAT THEY LIKE TO DO
dated 1921
PEOPLE WILL NOT only do what they like to do--they overdo it 100 per cent.
Most people overeat 100 per cent, and oversleep 100 per cent, because they
like it. That extra 100 per cent makes them unhealthy and inefficient. The
person who sleeps eight or ten hours a night is never fully asleep and never
fully awake--they have only different degrees of doze through the
twenty-four hours. Most people seem to think they must eat until they are no
longer hungry. Most of their energies are taken up in digesting what they
eat. I see what people eat and for myself half as much is enough.
For myself I never found need of more than four or five hours' sleep in the
twenty-four. I never dream. It's real sleep. When by chance I have taken
more I wake dull and indolent. We are always hearing people talk about "loss
of sleep" as a calamity. They better call it loss of time, vitality and
opportunities. Just to satisfy my curiosity I have gone through files of the
British Medical Journal and could not find a single case reported of anybody
being hurt by loss of sleep. Insomnia is different entirely--but some people
think they have insomnia if they can sleep only ten hours every night.
Now, I'm not offering advice. That's no use. Nobody takes advice. As I say,
people do what they like to do and overdo it 100 per cent, and the same rule
applies to the giving of advice that nobody pays any attention to. The world
is badly overstocked with unused advice.
THE DESIRE FOR CHANGE
dated 1927
PERPETUAL YOUTH and virtual immortality on this earth would seem to me to be
most undesirable. When the time comes, normal human beings do not desire
abnormal extension of the earthly life-period. No dreamer about immortality
has crystallized his dreams into a desire for a perpetual extension of such
lives as we live here. Enough's enough of any human life as human lives are
now. Those normal men who have reached the extreme limit of the human life
cycle invariably are indifferent to death. They do not desire extension of
the present existence. The group of entities which make up such a normal
man's intelligence seek release from, rather than prolongation of, existence
in the conditions and environments of this cycle so that they may enter
another, whatever it may be. All through life humanity yearns for change,
for without change progress is impossible and I am convinced that at the end
of that which we call life this subconscious desire for something new is
very great, and in many instances influential, no matter how the conscious
mind, trained by instinct and long habit to cling to this existence, may
struggle to combat it. New scenes, new occupations, new emotions, new
successes,--these all normal human beings strive for during this life. When
they have had all of these that they can get out of it they must turn for
change to whatever may come beyond.
AGE AND ACHIEVEMENT
dated 1927
THE MAN who has reached the age of thirty-six has just about achieved
readiness to discard the illusions built on the false theories for which
wrong instruction and youthful ignorance previously have made him an easy
mark. He is just beginning to get down to business. If he is really worth
while he has passed through a series of hard knocks by that time. The useful
man never leads the easy, sheltered, knockless, unshocked life. At
thirty-six he ought to be prepared to deal with realities and after about
that period in his life, until he is sixty, he should be able to handle them
with a steadily increasing efficiency. Subsequently, if he has not injured
his body by excess indulgence in any of the narcotics (and by this term I
mean, here, liquor, tobacco, tea, and coffee), and if he has not eaten to
excess, he very likely may continue to be achievingly efficient up to his
eightieth birthday and in exceptional cases until ninety.
Then the curve turns sharply down. The cycle is approaching the end. At
about that age the entities which form that man will be preparing to discard
their abode, which is that man, and enter upon a new cycle. Then and not
till then men should, must and do begin to step aside. If all men did so at
the age of thirty-five the world of times to come would be virtually without
achievement and leadership.
In tribute to this important American, electric lights in the United States
were dimmed for one minute on October 21, 1931, a few days after his death.
