Word: edisonizing
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turned the facility over to Metropolitan Edison, but Met Ed, contends the commission, was ''lacking sufficient knowledge, expertise and personnel to operate the plant and maintain it properly...
...Edison had habits of mind that can still be useful to would-be inventors and their bosses. One was simple-but incredible-persistence. It was Edison who said that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." No matter that he hired assistants to do the sweating while he provided the spark; nearly all his inventions came after thousands of experiments that failed but taught him something. The only device that worked on the first try was the phonograph. It was a piece of serendipity; Edison had been trying to invent a device that would permit telephone messages to be sent...
...Edison also saw inventions in a social and commercial context. He drew up lists of inventions that the world needed, or at least would buy, and set out to produce them. In the case of electric light, gas was already lighting homes, and electric arc lights were illuminating streets and stores-though much too brilliantly, and expensively, for general use. The need, Edison saw, was for some other form of electric illumination that would provide a steadier and, above all, cheaper glow than...
There were technical differences between the bulbs that, Edison's partisans say, made his superior. For example, Swan's carbon rod was fairly thick, Edison's filament was thin. But a crucial difference was that Swan stopped with inventing the bulb, while Edison took what would now be called a "systems approach"; he saw that the bulb had to be only one of a whole series of inventions. To make it in the first place, he and his assistants had to produce a more complete vacuum than had ever been known before. Then they had to devise...
What drove him to invent? The desire to make money and win personal glory, of course. But even Edison saw that was not enough. One of his less noted sayings pointed the way not only for inventors but for all those who work with their brains. He plastered his labs with a quotation from Sir Joshua Reynolds: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking," to which Edison added one of his own: "The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses...