Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 February 1947
Edison is a name of yesterday, and barely that. One does not readily picture the man who bore it as already the subject today of a centenary. He died only sixteen years ago and, even when past the seventies, Thomas Alva Edison was not a man who could be thought of as a spent force. Two world wars have quickened the tempo of invention since the days of his prime and the technical wonders which attract most attention today are the work of his successors.
Flight, wireless and television, radar and the varied fields of the application of sub-atomic forces sometimes seem to have carried us a long way from the primitive simplicities of telegraph or telephone or the dimly remembered phonograph that first set a microphone singing. They are linked up, for all that, with Edison's world and with the man himself; "pure" science and its technological application have been linked since his time, and largely by the force of his example, in a way which owes more than is generally realised to Edison's ideas and Edison's practice. This is the sense in which he was the first of the moderns. His appreciation of his own personal gifts for making scientific ideas work and an acute analysis of the methods by which they could best be employed led him inevitably to the large-scale organisation of applied research.
It would be a mistake to measure Edison's influence on the development of modern industrial practice by the number of his patents still in use. The challenge of a rival invention would always spur him to the improvement or the scrapping of his own earlier designs, and that there should have been any great degree of permanency about his mere technical devices would probably have seemed stranger to Edison than to most men. His work on dynamos and the incandescent lamp, which gave him his first world reputation, was only a part of his intense application to the practical problems of the utilisation of electricity. By the time he was thirty-five he had an invention to fill almost every gap between theory and the working plant, whether in the generation of power or its distribution. New York owed him its first power station, which was followed in the same year, 1882, by the station on Holborn Viaduct.
Edison has now so many heirs that the products of his own time and hand fall rapidly into obsolescence; but that is one of the fruits of the inheritance. The realisation of the importance of research which is growing in all branches of industry may usefully take us back to the life story of this American pioneer who first really tackled the job of linking laboratory theory with the practice of the workshop.