Page 176 - DNBI_A01.QXD

1534 : STEP TWO – GENERATING NEW IDEAS

politicians so often enviously cite Edison when they bemoan the British
inability to capitalise on ground-breaking invention.

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847. His start in life was not
auspicious. Born into a family of seven children, of whom only four
survived, he received just three months of formal schooling. However, in
addition to being taught at home by his ex-schoolteacher mother, he fed
his inquisitive mind by reading voraciously and experimenting
continually.

His innate and irrepressible commercial streak first manifested itself
when at the age of 12 he started selling newspapers and journals from
the Grand Trunk Railway. By the age of 15, he was publishing his own
weekly, the Grand Trunk Herald, focused on local issues and railroad
matters, which he printed in the baggage coach in which he had also
established a chemical laboratory.

A fire which broke out in his travelling chemical laboratory led to
Edison’s permanent expulsion from the train. Matters took a turn for the
better when Edison saved the child of a local station-master from
walking in front of a slow-moving train. Edison’s reward was to be taught
all the intricacies of telegraphy: the Morse-code based communication
method patented in 1840 which represented the ‘information
superhighway’ of the day.

In pursuit of knowledge and experience, Edison used this new-found
expertise in telegraphy to go ‘on the tramp’, working as an itinerant
telegraph operator across the South and Midwest of the United States.
Since telegraphers not only sent and received messages but also had to
keep the equipment running, Edison learned a lot about practical energy
– how batteries work, how to wire circuits and so on.

In 1868, at the age of 21, Edison secured his first patent, for an
electrical vote recorder designed for the Massachusetts State
Legislature. The politicians’ failure to adopt the system meant that his
first invention was not a commercial success. The experience led to two
key realisations, however: firstly, never invent something which people
don’t want, and secondly, regard every wrong attempt discarded as a way
forward.

Edison’s in-depth knowledge of telegraphy led to his first successes.
His ‘Universal Stock Printer’ for printing stock prices from the
M