In some ways, the figure of Thomas Alva Edison is mythological, and as the greatest hero of the mechanical age his story reveals a multifaceted figure. There is no single Edison, says historian of technology David E. Nye: “[E]dison long ago disappeared into the codes and texts that attempted to depict him realistically, to the point that no single Edison can be located in the documents” (Nye 1982). Dubbed by sensationalist media with nicknames such as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” and mythologized by historians since he first stepped into the national spotlight, Edison’s public persona is a narrative with fictionalized elements with meaning for the American experience. Yet, this myth was partly self-created; Edison manufactured aspects of his public image by advertising his inventions and selling the mystique of the lone genius—a self-made man from humble origins. As historians note, Edison would often feed rumors to newspapers, spreading news of imminent discoveries, unveiling his inventions as miracles of the modern age, even promising social mobility through the democratization of luxuries such as concert music, made publicly available through the power of the phonograph. Whether historical or mythological, Edison’s story is viewed as heroic to many Americans.
The Edison mythology developed in multiple incarnations, each speaking to a particular audience and advancing a specific agenda. These mythologies take the form of five central archetypes: the Edison as a “man of humble origins”; the Edison as “arch capitalist”; the Edison as “hero of the national narrative,” fabricating a kind of American authenticity; the Edison as “bulwark of the war effort”; and the Edison as “genius inventor.” From the beginnings of his career, until even today, the Edison mythologies inform the meaning of the American experience.
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) poses with his phonograph, ca. 1870–1880. The archetypal American inventor, an entire mythology developed around Edison during his own lifetime, often aided and abetted by the man himself. After his death Edison’s reputation became still more burnished, and aspiring start-ups today looking for inspiration might gain as much from studying Edison’s genius for self-promotion as they might from the technical prowess and intuitive leaps that produced his greatest inventions. (Library of Congress)
The Edison myths really begin with stories of his humble origins, a young man persevering through hardship to achieve greatness. Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in a lower-middle-class environment. His father, Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. (1804–1896), was a small businessman with local political connections; his mother, Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871), was a schoolteacher. Edison’s upbringing in the Midwest was not particularly destitute, yet histories written since his ascendance into popular consciousness often stress the difficulties Edison overcame as a child. According to the mythology, Edison lost his hearing at a young age, perhaps due to scarlet fever, or to wounds inflicted by a train conductor who struck young Edison as punishment for a chemical explosion he caused by accident on a train. The National Park Service’s timeline of “Edison and His Era” dates Edison’s loss of hearing between 1855 and 1859. Second, histories comment on young Edison’s lack of formal education; stories of his self-education, experimenting with chemicals and electricity in the basement of his childhood home, are common in the Edison mythology. Whether or how Edison lost his hearing, or if he was truly a self-educated man, or if his educated mother supported his intellectual development, is irrelevant. What is important is Edison’s perseverance in mythologized accounts of his growth and development.
The stories of Edison’s humble origins, which parallel those of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, define perseverance against odds as an American virtue. It is in the mold of the “boy who made good” that America most powerfully embraces Edison. Furthermore, as a common man laden with imperfection and adversity, Edison provided an example of someone who followed an inherently democratic and egalitarian path to scientific, technical, and economic success. In his mythology, Edison is the epitome of the can-do American who is clever, brave, and strong enough to overcome the challenges that stand in the way of his goals. What is more, the stories of Edison’s humble origins embody a trope that remains part of the cultural fabric of America.
The stories of Edison’s childhood perseverance go along with those of Edison’s financial success as a paramount capitalist. Born in the pre–Civil War era, Edison’s earliest memories were of wagon trains setting out for the California gold rush, the epitome of democratic capitalist speculation in nineteenth-century America. Then, as a youth, the Edison mythology dictates, he exercised his enterprising spirit as a newsboy, displaying the shrewd calculations of an aggressive businessman. As an inventor, Edison’s first achievement was an improvement on the stock ticker. Later in life, before the Motion Picture Patents Company notoriously merged with Eastman-Kodak to form the Edison Trust (1908–1918), Edison scrupulously managed his East Orange recording studio, firing artists and employees who didn’t perform to his standards. Despite his publicized love of art, Edison tenaciously displayed a hunger for capital, declaring, “It is money, and money alone that counts” (Stross 2007, 224).
Historian Daniel J. Boorstein argued that Edison represents the shining example of the “go-getter” attitude, a definitive American attribute; from its origins, the Edison mythology promoted the values of American capitalism. J. B. McClure’s Edison and his Inventions (1879), the first biography written about Edison, illustrates the “Edison as capitalist” archetype, setting the tone for histories to follow. As the story goes, Edison arrived in New York City, tattered and hopeless, which relates to the themes of his humble origins; but he soon found work as an engineer with a company owned by Jay Gould and “Jubilee Jim” Fisk. With his ingenuity and can-do spirit, Edison then fixed a measurement instrument, which enabled the robber barons to corner the gold market in 1869. In this first biography, Edison is a hero, trumpeting American capitalism. Throughout the course of the mythology, the capitalistic Edison archetype not only promoted liberal economic principles, such as free trade and an enterprising libertarian spirit, but furthermore embedded capitalism into the national narrative as something distinctly American.
In Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth, historian Wyn Wachhorst defined a cultural hero as one who resolves “mechanically contradictory values into a single paradoxical reality” (1983, 3). The Edison mythology not only welds together democracy and capitalism; it reconciles tensions between the organic, agricultural principles of American society and culture, and the inorganic, industrial ones. The “myth of the machine,” according to historian Leo Marx, showed how America could reach the “promised land” with the help of technology, whereas in preindustrial society, it stood in the way. Thomas Edison became the hero of this narrative, ushering in a new American mythology of machine as salvation. The Edison mythology represents the human triumph over nature, responding to the public needs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to come to terms with the increasing importance of machines in everyday life. “As Americans moved from the steam age to the electrical age,” according to Pat Brady, “the nation found in Edison a figure in which to mount its hopes and fears” (Brady 1998). As the Edison mythology came to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century, Edison followed in a long line of American heroes who collectively comprised a historical narrative of America, establishing a basis of authenticity for the country, then only a century old.
While the Edison mythology met American cultural needs at the turn of the twentieth century, solidifying the national identity as a machine-driven, modern, capitalistic society, it also served more tangible purposes. Stories of Edison’s life and inventions particularly supported American war efforts. During the Civil War, young Edison worked as a “tramp” telegraph operator on the Grand Trunk Railway between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan, relaying messages for the Union Army. Much later, during World War I, Edison made himself and his laboratories available to the government, founding the Naval Research Laboratories. Between 1917 and 1918, Edison developed defense technologies, such as improvements on searchlights, submarine sound detection, and naval camouflage. Furthermore, Edison’s symbolic support for the war effort kept America sure that science remained firmly behind the Allied cause.
The Genius Inventor
No one epitomizes the original American icon of the Genius Inventor as does Thomas Edison, who provides something like an industrial and entrepreneurial version of the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” myth. The Genius Inventor is a recurrent image in the American consciousness, appearing in both fiction and fact, although the former is often garbed in the latter, and indeed it can become difficult to parse out historical events from pervasive folkloric embroidering. A sort of more positive—and often more profitable—version of the “mad scientist” motif familiar from Frankenstein-like science fiction and horror narratives, the Genius Inventor appears in many, many well-known pop culture venues, from the Professor of Gilligan’s Island to the hapless father in Honey I Shrunk the Kids to Doc Brown in the Back to the Future franchise. Real-life versions are commonplace in the age of Silicon Valley startups, but perhaps the most iconic of our time are the original Silicon Valley Genius Inventor Wonder Twins, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who according to legend founded Apple Computers in a garage.
C. Fee
The last and perhaps most iconic archetype of the Edison mythology is the genius inventor. In 1879, the New York Daily Graphic coined the moniker “Wizard of Menlo Park” when Edison patented the incandescent light bulb—only two years after the phonograph. That year, the New York Herald depicted a Merlin-like Edison with long white hair, dwelling in a dark “cave” with “skulls and skeletons, and strange phials filled with mystic fluids.” Contemporary media romanticized Edison, constructing the alchemist of the mechanical age. As with other archetypes of the Edison mythology, Edison bolstered this public image, according to a former employee who recalled how the presence of a reporter changed Edison’s demeanor: “Old Man disguised himself to resemble the heroic image of ‘The Great Inventor, Thomas A. Edison’ graven in the imagination of those who have no imagination.” He remembered that Edison “froze into immobility” while the reporter approached, and “became statuesque in the armchair, and his unblinking eyes assumed a far away look like a circus lion thinking of the Nubian Desert” until his visitor finally reached him (Hughes 1989, 91).
A corollary to the genius inventor archetype is the myth of the “eureka moment,” in which a spontaneous flash of intuitive revelation produces invention. According to the Harvard Business Review, the “eureka moment” overshadows the far more practical matter of how the invention reaches the marketplace; yet it still looms large in the folklore of the modern business.
Overall, the Edison mythology, in all its incarnations, not only contributed to American society and culture—boosting the war effort, promoting American capitalism—but, moreover, it has built upon the national narrative of the quintessential American hero, embodying tropes such as “success from humble origins,” grounding the American experience in definitive attributes such as perseverance and hard work. The Edison mythology continues today through the stories of “genius inventors” like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, American heroes of a new era of technological innovation, who, like Edison, will be mythologized by media and history in years to come.
Ryan Donovan Purcell
See also Boone, Daniel; Crockett, Davy; Earhart, Amelia; Lincoln, Abraham, as Folk Hero
Further Reading
Brady, Pat. 1998. “The Inventor’s Finest Creation: Thomas Edison and the Making of a Myth.” University of Virginia Department of American Studies website. May 10. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG99/brady/edison.html. Accessed November 2, 2015.
Evan, Harold. 2005. “The Eureka Myth.” Harvard Business Review. June. http://hbr.org/2005/06/the-eureka-myth/ar/1. Accessed November 1, 2015.
Hughes, Thomas P. 1989. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1890. New York: Viking.
Nye, David E. 1982. “Biography’s Myth of Presence: Thomas Edison as Invention.” Prospects 7 (October): 177–186.
Stross, Randall. 2007. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown.
Wachhorst, Wyn. 1983. Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.