Thomas Alva Edison
From Philosopedia
Edison, Thomas Alva (11 February 1847 - 18 October 1931)
Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, the youngest of seven. While still in his teens, he said he “ate his way” steadily through fifteen feet of books on the shelves of the Detroit Public Library, this after having read - when ten years of age - Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Hume’s History of England. However, his teacher Reverend Engle thought the boy's mind wandered too much and was overheard calling him "addled." This ended Edison's three months of formal schooling. His mother had been a school teacher in Canada and happily took over the job of schooling her son. She encouraged and taught him to read and experiment. He recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." Supporting himself at a very early age, Edison sold newspapers, worked for railroad companies and became a telegraph operator.
Despite deafness from the age of twelve and only three months of formal schooling, Edison was one of the most productive inventors of all time. “Genius,” he held, “is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”
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Inventions
Edison invented the carbon microphone (1877), the record player (1878), the incandescent lamp (1879), and the kinetoscope (1889). In 1996, however, the French proposed commemorating the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema by Auguste and Louis Lumière, by which they hoped to dramatize that they, not Edison with George Eastman, invented the cinema. Edison’s kinetoscopic camera, they held, was no more than the precursor of television; to view it, one had to peep into a box.
Views on Religion
“What does God mean to me?” Edison once wrote. “Not a damned thing! Religion is all bunk.”
He also wrote, “All Bibles are man-made” and “When a man is dead, he is dead,” and “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of Heaven and Hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”
In 1910, he told The New York Times in an interview,
- I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. I am an aggregate of cells, as, for instance, New York City is an aggregate of individuals. Will New York City go to heaven? . . . . No; nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions. . . . No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life - our desire to go on living - our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it, though. Personally, I cannot see any use of a future life.
In an 8 June 1915 interview in The New York Times, he said,
- I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
Martin Gardner is negative in some of his criticism about Edison. He writes of Edison’s changing religious opinions, his lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, and his gullibility. As a youth he admired Thomas Paine but, Gardner notes, unlike the deist Paine, Edison did not believe in God, the soul, or an afterlife. At the time a pantheist, Edison liked to call nature the “Supreme Intelligence,” indifferent and merciless toward humanity. But in 1920, Gardner avers, Edison came to believe in an afterlife and actually worked on an electrical device for communicating with the dead, a change which befriended him to Christian leaders.
Edison’s second wife, eighteen years his junior, was a devout Methodist who thought evolution a plot of Satan. In 1926 Edison was quoted as referring to God as both a “Great Power” and a “Creator.” And he praised Christianity as the wisest and most beautiful of world religions. Matthew Josephson in his biography, however, said that when Edison’s wife entertained six Methodist bishops and a theological debate ensued, Edison said, “I’m not going to listen to any more of this nonsense!” and stormed out. Allegedly, the Edisons agreed from that point on not to discuss religion and lived happily until his death at age eighty-four.
Two years before he died, Edison had a conversation with the well-known atheist, Joseph Lewis, saying,
- The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age, and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them. Incurably religious - that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people. Incurably religious.
Similarly, biographers Matthew Josephson and Wyn Wachhorst pointed out that Edison was incurably irreligious, that he rejected three fundamental tenets of Christianity: Christ’s divinity, a personal God, and immortality. In 1948, D. D. Runes edited Edison’s Diary and Sundry Observations, which included his negative views of organized religion.
His Critics
As to whether “his 1,093 patents are all to be credited to his undisputed genius or to the work of many assistants,” Martin Gardner also has had doubts. In “Thomas Edison, Paranormalist” (Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1996), Gardner chooses not to discuss the world’s most famous, most prolific inventor’s foibles:
- his temper tantrums, his lust for money, his efforts to purloin ideas, his boasts about war weapons that never existed, or his disastrous relations with his two wives and his children.
Also according to Gardner, Edison in his old age was bamboozled by a magician, Berthold Reese (1841—1926). Houdini the magician had been impressed by Reese’s skill but had, during a séance with him, “caught him cold-blooded. He was startled when it was over, as he knew that I had bowled him over. So much so that he claimed I was the only one that had ever detected him.” Of Edison’s faith in Reese, Houdini wrote Conan Doyle,
- That he fooled Edison does not surprise me. He would have surprised me if he did not fool Edison. Edison is certainly not a criterion, when it comes to judging a shrewd adept in the art of pellet-reading [a pellet being a billet rolled into a ball].
When an article in the New York Graphic unveiled some of Reese’s techniques, Edison was so furious he wrote the editor that he had watched Reese several times, that on each occasion he had written something on a piece of paper when Reese was not near or when he was in another room, and that in no case was one of the papers handled by Reese. “Yet he recited correctly the contents of each paper.” An account of Reese’s methods by Ted Annemann in The Jinx (1936, Summer Issue) included a photograph of Reese, his hand holding a cigar that he habitually smoked during his performances because it made it easier to palm a folded billet.
Gardner reports a number of Edison’s failed predictions, that the talking motion picture would not supplant the regular silent motion picture; that the possibilities of the aeroplane in 1895 had been exhausted “and we must turn elsewhere”; that the radio craze would die out; that more electricity would be sold for electric vehicles; that only direct current should be used; etc. Gardner, however, is one of the few to have viewed Edison in such a light. As for that device to communicate with departed souls, Haught among others holds that Edison “played games with his detractors,” citing Edison’s statement, “It will give them a better opportunity to express themselves than Ouija boards or tilting tables.” As for the minister’s inquiry about the need for installing lightning rods on the church spire, Edison had replied, “By all means, as Providence is apt to be absent-minded.”
Edison's Final Years
According to his biographer, Ronald W. Clark, Edison had been working right up until the end of his life, one project being that of developing a substitute for rubber. He died in Glenmont at 03:21 on 18 October 1931, at the age of eighty-four. He had been in a coma for five days. Mrs. Mina Miller Edison, his wife; his six children; his personal physician Dr. Hubert S. Howe; and two nurses were at his side. The end had come after a day and night during which Edison had sung keeper and deeper into a state of coma while his heart began to falter. Just before he had lapsed into the coma, he was said to have looked out the bedroom window and across the valley by his home. “It is very beautiful over there” were his last words.
The American public was asked to dim lights at 22:00 on the day of Edison's funeral, 21 October 1931, exactly 52 years after his invention of the first practical light bulb.
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