Edison's Electric Light: The Art of Invention

The Menlo Park Mystique

118 edison’s electric light The Menlo Park Mystique Although Menlo Park has, with considerable justification, been called the world’s first industrial research laboratory, it was not, in its essential organization, a prototype for those that followed. Later laboratories would provide an environment within which separate creative minds could work, stimulating each other and making common use of the facilities. For Edison, the laboratory was structured to serve only one creative mind, his own. As he said, “I am not in the habit of asking my assistants for ideas. I generally have all the ideas I want.The difficulty lies in judging which is the best idea to carry out.”This is not to say that others were completely stifled, but the rule in the lab was to carry out Edison’s specific instructions first, pursuing other work if there was time.And if the master was not present to provide direction, as happened from time to time, the pace of action dropped precipitously.Thus, Upton reported in a letter home:“One thing is quite noticeable here . . . the work is only a few days behind Mr. Edison, for when he is sick the shop was shut evenings as the work was wanting to keep the men busy.” To keep an enterprise going under such circumstances was no mean feat. The small, intimate laboratory of phonograph days expanded substantially in late 1878 and again in 1879 for the electric lamp enterprise.Three new buildings were constructed (the office-library, the engine house, and the photographic studio , which soon became a glassblower’s shed), and more people were hired. In 1883 Edison recalled that “the place was crowded with people; I had thirty or forty assistants, and sadly neglected my usual care in dating exhibits and recording all experiments . . . I really had not the time.” He went on to compare the activity with an only slightly earlier time when he was working on the telephone:“I only had two or three assistants. We had more time, and I did a great portion of the work myself , whereas with the electric light I had 20 or 30 assistants and things were going on with a great rush, and I could not make the records myself.” The actual size of the work force at Menlo Park can now be estimated with some accuracy.Time sheets are available for the last five months of 1878, for three scattered dates in 1879, and for all of 1880.Additional information can be gleaned from various accounts and court records, and from the files of the Edison Pioneers.The data speak graphically of the level of activity in the laboratory. The number of employees, fifteen at the beginning of August 1878, began to increase in October, reaching about two dozen at the end of the year.This number held fairly constant through much of 1879 until the late summer or fall, when new hires raised it to about thirty-five. The successful demonstration of the light at the year’s end, and the new activities that followed, produced a rapid increase at the beginning of the new year. In February 1880, sixty-four people were working with Edison at Menlo Park, a number that held remarkably constant for the rest of the year.There was, of course, a lot of turnover. By the end of 1880 some 220 persons could claim to have worked with the Wizard on his electric lamp. Edison, as is well known, worked long hours, preferring those after dark, Business and Science 119 and expected his men to stay with him. Stay they did, late into the night and frequently until daybreak.As John Ott put it, “My children grew up without knowing their father. When I did get home at night, which was seldom, they were in bed.” Charles Flammer had a room in the laboratory where he worked putting carbons in lamps. He noted that he “slept there nights, or whenever [he] got a chance” but concluded, “It was very seldom I slept at night.”There was compensation, in the form of overtime pay (at the regular rate), but there was evidently a higher degree of motivation at work, creating an enthusiasm that George Bernard Shaw— briefly employed to promote Edison’s London telephone operation—noted in his preface to The Irrational Knot. The American technicians who had come to London, wrote Shaw, “adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art and...