

Ing. Salih CAVKIC


Murray Hunter
University Malaysia Perlis

Perpetual Self conflict: Self
awareness as a key to our ethical drive, personal mastery, and perception of
entrepreneurial opportunities.
Murray Hunter

The Continuum of Psychotic Organisational Typologies
Murray Hunter

There is no such person as an entrepreneur, just a person who acts
entrepreneurially
Murray Hunter

Groupthink may still be a hazard to your organization - Murray Hunter

Generational Attitudes and Behaviour - Murray Hunter

The environment as a multi-dimensional system: Taking off your rose
coloured glasses
- Murray Hunter

Imagination may be more important than knowledge: The eight types of
imagination we use - Murray Hunter

Do we have a creative intelligence? - Murray Hunter

Not all opportunities are the same: A look at the four types of
entrepreneurial opportunity -
Murray Hunter

The
Evolution of Business Strategy
- Murray Hunter

How
motivation really works - Murray Hunter

Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities: What’s wrong with SWOT? - Murray
Hunter

The five types of thinking we use - Murray Hunter

Where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from? - Murray Hunter

How
we create new ideas - Murray Hunter

How emotions influence, how we see the world? - Murray Hunter

People tend to start businesses for the wrong reasons - Murray Hunter

One Man, Multiple Inventions: The lessons and legacies of Thomas Edison
- Murray Hunte

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One Man, Multiple Inventions: The lessons and legacies of Thomas Edison
Murray Hunter
University Malaysia Perlis
Looking
at entrepreneurship & innovation through biographies
There are so many different interactive forces impacting upon both the
individual and the environment that influences entrepreneurship and innovation,
creating new opportunity configurations. Looking from the biographical context
allows us to examine the flow of events, the context in which they occurred and
the impacts upon society these actions and events had. Looking directly at the
biographies of historical figures can assist us in seeing the historical
contexts of their efforts, innovations, or inventions. This may help us to
understand how their insights occurred and opportunities were identified and
exploited, showing us the reasons behind the trajectories these historical
figures took with their inventions and innovations which impacted upon society’s
future development path[1].
Entrepreneurship and innovation is truly a human endeavor. Looking at
entrepreneurship and innovation from a biographical perspective tends to bring
in human perspectives that may not otherwise be seen. To understand the
importance of place, and time, one must look at the situations they faced
through their perspectives to appreciate the creativity of the individual
concerned at the time. Entrepreneurship is also a social phenomenon, linked to
our society and culture.
A synopsis of the life of Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1837, the Seventh child of Samuel Ogden
Edison and Nancy Matthews Elliot. His parents were actually Canadian but his
father had to flee Canada due to the role he played in the Mackenzie rebellion
of 1837[2].
Edison only spent a very short time in formal schooling and was taught at home
by his mother who was a school teacher, for the rest of his early years. There
are numerous stories about Edison’s youth which cannot be accurately verified[3].
However it can be verified from a number of sources are that Edison had the
tendency to daydream and one of his first entrepreneurial activities was to sell
newspapers and snacks on the train from Port Huron to Detroit[4].
It is also reported from Edison’s early years that he preferred reading
literature, which he did at the Detroit library while waiting for the return
train to Port Huron and had distaste for physics and mathematics[5].
Edison tended to be weak at mathematics and drafting, preferring to think up
things that needed to be invented and getting financiers to support while he
worked out how things could be done, most often hiring someone who would be most
likely to find the solution to the particular problem[6].
While on the Port Huron to Detroit run, Edison saved a station master’s three
year old son from falling in front of an oncoming train for which the father was
grateful and rewarded him with an intensive course of training as a Morse code
operator[7].
This was a great career opportunity at the time and after the course, Edison got
a job at Stratford Junction, Ontario. Shortly after Edison decided to return
home to Port Huron and found that the military had acquired the family home, his
father did not have a steady job and his mother was on the verge of a breakdown.
Around 1866 Edison took a job with Western Union where he worked on the
Associated Press news wire. He requested the night shift so he could read and do
his experiments. However this caused him dismissal when sulfuric acid from a
battery he was working on split onto the floor and dripped through to his boss’s
office below[8].
Edison moved to New Jersey where he stayed as a lodger with a friend Franklin
Leonard Pope who was also a telegrapher. During this time Edison experimented
with the telegraph and also invented a voting machine which failed to work when
he demonstrated it. Edison and Pope formed a partnership Pope, Edison & Company
Electrical Engineers in 1869 to undertake another venture. Pope had been working
on a stock ticker, which was accepted and employed in a number of stock
exchanges around the country. The company was bought out for the sum of USD
$15,000, a small fortune at the time, where Edison was now able to financially
assist his parents.
Edison had established a name for himself as an inventor and was commissioned by
Western Union to undertake some invention on their behalf. Edison solved
the problem of share-price printing machines going haywire and this impressed
many within the firm. Edison was made a payment of somewhere in between USD
$30-40,000, which was a staggering sum for the time[9].
Edison was then allowed to head his own division and hire his own staff to build
stock-price ticker machines. It was during this time that Edison recruited a
number of men that were to stay with him for a number of years. These included
Charles Batchelor an engineer and draughtsman, John Kruesi a Swiss clockmaker,
and Sigmund Bergmann a German mechanic. During this period Edison often worked
day and night, not worrying about his own personal appearance but produced a
number of inventions and improvements to inventions.
Edison made his first trip abroad to England in 1873 to see if the British Post
Office might be interested in buying some of his patents. He proved his
telegraph worked well between Liverpool and London, but upon being asked to
demonstrate how his telegraph would work over a 2,200 mile cable that was to be
laid between Britain and Brazil, his telegraph failed.
Edison returned from Britain empty handed. Back in the United States Edison
became involved in so many jobs for competing companies but was losing money. A
financier Jay Gould from Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph company appeared with a
check for USD $30,000 to buy out Edison and get him away from Western Union.
Even though Edison now had funding, he was very tired of the maneuverings
between Gould and his rival Vanderbilt at Western Union.
In 1876 Edison left what he was doing and with the money he received from Jay
Gould set up what could be called the first industrial research laboratories at
Menlo Park, New Jersey. Now Edison was free to take work from anybody he wanted
and brought over many of his colleagues in to carry out the development work
under his direction. Again Edison showed his determination by working day and
night, motivated by the possibility of fame and fortune from his inventions.
Edison was the first inventor to see that the business aspects were more
important than the invention itself[10].
There was no point inventing something that nobody wanted.
One of Edison’s first jobs was for Western Union to improve the telephone
devised by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. While working on improvement
of the telephone Edison and his team found that they could record and play back
the spoken word. Edison originally conceived of a device that would be like an
answering machine. Although his phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a ground
cylinder, it had poor quality, and could only be used a few times. However this
invention seemed so amazing to the public that Edison himself became dubbed the
‘wizard of Menlo Park’. Such a device had numerous potential applications
and a company was set up to commercialize it, but the technology was too crude
for commercial use.
During 1878, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania George Barker invited
Edison to accompany a group to observe the total eclipse of the sun in the
Rockies. Edison went along and both of them discussed the potential operations
of electricity, including its use for lighting. Barker upon their return
arranged for Edison to visit a company called Wallace and Sons in Connecticut
that operated a brass and copper foundry and had developed a powerful electrical
generator or telemachon[11].
They were experimenting with carbon arc lighting systems and trying to send
electrical currents over long distances.
According to a report, Edison was totally enraptured by the concept and gloated
over the demonstration, immediately sitting down trying to calculate the power
of the instrument, the lights and the probable loss of power during the
transmission. Edison saw the technology in terms of how much coal it could save
over a week, a month, and a year, and the effect it would have on manufacturing[12].
Edison immediately ordered one of Wallace’s telemachons and envisaged a world
lit by an electrical lighting system modeled on the existing gas supply system
which was fed through the streets and into individual homes. Carbon arc lights
were too bright and uneconomical for home use, so Edison had to devise a new
version of the incandescent light bulb which had been the subject of
experimentation by other inventors for many years. Edison also considered the
numerous other requirements that an electrical distribution system would require
including generators, sockets, switches, meters, etc., to produce the equivalent
to a gas network.
Electric light was not a new idea, especially in Europe. There had been a number
of attempts by people including Humphry Davy, James Bowman Lindsay, Moses G.
Farmer, William E. Savage, and Heinrich Göbel to perfect the concept. Most of
the electric lights produced had a very short lifespan, used a lot of
electricity and were expensive to make. Paul Jablochkoff developed arc lamps
which were very successful for street and lighthouse lighting. By 1877
Jablochkoff’s were used all over Paris streets. A year later electric street
lights were tested along the Thames Embankment. However they didn’t last long
because they were more expensive to run than gas.
Joseph Swan in the United Kingdom had been developing the light independently of
Edison. By the 1860s Swan had a working model and obtained a British patent for
a carbon filament incandescent lamp in partial vacuum. However due to the poor
vacuum, the light was inefficient and had only a very short life span. By 1875
Swan was able to improve the light bulb with a better vacuum. Swan obtained
another patent for the lamp in 1878 about a year before Edison and then obtained
another patent in 1880, where he started into commercial production.
Meanwhile Edison at Menlo Park was frantically undertaking experiments on the
light globe and other devices required to build an electrical distribution
system. William J. Hammer was assisting Edison on perfecting the incandescent
lamp, testing each version as it was developed. By 1879 Edison had been able to
produce a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum that would burn hundreds of
hours. Edison was ready to show his inventions to the public.
The Paris exhibition was chosen by Edison as the stage to show off his invention
and outshine his rivals. The judges were asked to compare four different
incandescent light bulbs from Swan, Edison, a British inventor St George Lane
Fox-Pitt, and an American Hiram Maxim[13].
The four light globes appeared much the same but it was the good public
relations of Edison and alleged bribing of some influential journalists to give
Edison a favorable write up that won the day for him[14].
Edison continued to improve upon the light globe and had a number of disputes
over intellectual property that took a number of years to sort out. Some of
Edison’s financiers managed to sort out a dispute with Swan’s patent claims by
forming a joint venture company which became known as Ediswan in 1883, where
Swan also agreed to Edison having the American rights to the light bulb.
In the United States Edison had filed a patent for an electricity distribution
system in 1880 and formed the Edison illuminating Company in New York City. The
system went live soon after with a generating plant in Lower Manhattan producing
a 110 volt DC current supplying 59 homes in the area.
There were a lot of obstacles to electricity being accepted universally. Gas in
Europe was much cheaper and the price of kerosene made lighting by lamps much
cheaper than electricity. Edison and George Westinghouse were locked in a battle
over using direct verses alternating current (AC) which led to many theatrics
such as the public execution of animals by Edison’s people to show that AC was
more dangerous than DC.
The lessons and legacy of Thomas Edison
Although Edison didn’t invent the first electric light bulb, it can be argued he
developed the first commercially practical light bulb. However through his good
public relations he convinced most that he was the actual inventor. Edison’s
Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy almost two city blocks, showcasing
the first commercially orientated new product development laboratory in modern
industrial history, with an objective of systematic invention and development.
Edison’s laboratories went on to invent and develop carbon microphones, the
fluoroscope, the kinescope, and the development of electric trains. General
Electric was formed in 1890 to bring together all of Edison’s interests and
stands as a legacy to his work. Edison had more than 1,000 patents to his name
and became an industrial leader based on invention, innovation, ability to
attract financiers and scientists, and public relations.
The biography of Thomas Edison helps us see the importance of systematic
development work, self promotion, and having a workable and viable business
model in mind to exploit any subsequent invention. These were paramount elements
of his success. Many of the failing entrepreneurs of the dot.com bust of
2000 failed to see the necessity of having a workable and viable business model
to exploit their ideas and could have well learnt from the lessons Edison gave
us. Any invention must have direct benefits to users that they can easily
recognize. It is not the invention itself or the technology, but what it can do
for the consumer. Application is probably the most important aspect of
invention, which is often forgotten. Success comes to those who are able to
bring new concepts to the marketplace. Thus invention is not the key, but
modification and improvement is what creates marketability.
Edison’s life also shows the importance of fate, where through certain life
events like saving the station master’s son and chance meetings with people, new
life paths opened up. Edison’s biography also shows that success is not
something that one can expect without serious efforts that may not necessarily
be rewarding until many years afterwards. This is the meaning to the words “…I
have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways how not
to make a light bulb” attributed to Edison.
Success has never been about intelligence but the ability to generate new
approached through creativity and work hard on them. We also see that within the
process of creativity, there are no leaps or illuminations that come from
nowhere. The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane, Thomas Edison’s
development of the light globe and Picasso’s development of a new style of
painting were all the result of incremental advances built upon previous work.
Probably one of the greatest tools these people had available was the ability to
imagine new ideas working in the world.
The transmission of electricity to homes allowed a host of other electrical
devices to be invented. Many inventions, subsequent commercialization and
acceptance by society have dramatically changed our way of life over the
centuries. Electricity and the electric light, the aircraft and jet engine, the
automobile and combustion engine, and microchips, computers and mobile phones
have all in different ways drastically changed society. These changes have led
to further opportunities where entrepreneurs have been able to exploit.
We see that Edison is one of some of the most famous entrepreneurs of our time
did not complete college. Thomas Edison finished school at 12, Steve Woznick and
Steve Jobs did not graduate, and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start
Microsoft, while Michael Dell quit the University of Texas to start Dell
Computers. Probably common was the dedication to keep working on their ideas,
and at some junctures the occasional ruthless act.
What we certainly don’t know is where a new Thomas Edison, Oprah, Bill Gates,
John D. Rockefeller, Sam Walton, or Steve Jobs will appear and what they will
do. This is the most unpredictable element of the future but also the most
important driver of the future.
Notes and References
[1]
Chandler, A. D. (1962). Strategy and Structure:
Chapters in the History of American Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge, MA,
MIT Press.
[2]
A series of uprisings in Canada in the name of
seeking political reform.
[3]
There are many versions of Edison’s early life
with different dates related to events.
[4]
Weightman, G. (2007). The Industrial
Revolutionaries: The making of the modern world, 1776-1914, New York, Grove
Press, P. 328.
[5]
Israel, P. (1998). Edison: A life of Invention,
New York, John Wiley.
[6]
Weightman, G. (2007). “The Industrial
Revolutionaries”, P. 328.
[7]
Baldwin, N. (1995). Edison: Inventing the
Century, New York, Hyperion.
[8]
Baldwin, N. (1995). Edison: Inventing the
Century,
pp. 40-41.
[9]
Weightman, G. (2007). “The Industrial
Revolutionaries”, P. 330.
[10]
Weightman, G. (2007). “The Industrial
Revolutionaries”, P. 333.
[11]
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NOT18781225.2.14&e=-------10--1----2--
(Accessed 27th
January
2011)
[12]
Friedel, R., Israel, P., & Finn, B. S. (1988).
Edison’s Electric Light, Camden, NJ., Rutgers University Press.
[13]
Hiram Maxim was ahead of Edison in the United
States. He started his career as a carriage maker at the age of fourteen on to
engineering works, gas lighting, and then to pioneer the electric light. He sold
out to Edison in 1881 and moved to London where he invented the Maxim
machine-gun.
[14]
Weightman, G. (2007). “The Industrial
Revolutionaries”, P. 339.
July, 2012
PUBLICATIONS:
One Man, Multiple Inventions: The lessons and legacies of Thomas Edison -
Murray Hunter
People tend to start businesses for the wrong reasons - Murray Hunter
How
emotions influence, how we see the world? - Murray Hunter
How we create new ideas - Murray Hunter
Where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from? - Murray Hunter
The
five types of thinking we use - Murray Hunter
Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities: What’s wrong with SWOT? - Murray
Hunter
How
motivation really works - Murray Hunter
The
Evolution of Business Strategy - Murray Hunter
Not all opportunities are the same: A look at the four types of
entrepreneurial opportunity -
Murray Hunter
Do we have a creative intelligence? - Murray Hunter
Imagination may be more important than knowledge: The eight types of imagination
we use - Murray Hunter
The environment as a multi-dimensional system: Taking off your rose coloured
glasses
- Murray Hunter
Generational Attitudes and Behaviour -
Murray Hunter
Groupthink may still be a hazard to your organization - Murray Hunter
Perpetual Self conflict: Self awareness as a key to our ethical drive, personal mastery, and perception of
entrepreneurial opportunities - Murray Hunter
The Continuum of Psychotic Organisational Typologies - Murray Hunter
There is no such person as an entrepreneur, just a person who acts
entrepreneurially - Murray Hunter
Go Home, Occupy Movement!!-(The McFB– Was Ist Das?) - prof. dr. Anis Bajrektarevic
Diplomatie préventive - Aucun siècle Asiatique sans l’institution pan-Asiatique - prof. dr. Anis Bajrektarevic
Democide Mass-Murder
and the New World Order - Paul Adams
Posted: July, 2012













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