Edison Lab
Edison Lab
Edison LabWhile I was in Florida for the ACM Group conference, I visited Thomas Edison’s winter home and research laboratory in Fort Myers. Thomas Edison was good buddies with Henry Ford and the two of them, with their families, would spend their winters in Fort Myers, both enjoying the warm weather and working hard on their failed joint venture: cultivating a domestic source of rubber.

Edison was one dedicated inventor! Not only did he work every day of his long life, including while vacationing in Florida, but he also never slept more than two hours at a time, taking continuous cat naps throughout the day.

Edison’s career began with a number of great successes (e.g. the lighbulb :), which brought him fame and wealth, and this led to him forming a large R&D lab in Menlo Park, NJ. Later in his career, he had very few successes and a great number of expensive failures, such as trying to grow rubber domestically during WWII.

The tour I went on attributed some of his failures to his management style. When he began his career, he worked very closely with a small dedicated team, where each person was responsible for one part of the puzzle, but everyone knew what everyone else was doing at all times. When he built his lab at Menlo Park, the idea was that the lab would be 10 times as big as his prior lab, and would produce 10 times the number of inventions. No such luck. Because Edison insisted on being involved in all parts of the invention process, the work was no longer done in small, focused, close-knit teams, but was rather run from the top-down with him involved in every project. And innovation suffered. I thought it was really interesting to hear that one of America’s greatest inventors had difficulty letting innovation flourish in others. It may be that innovation only happens in small, independent teams. Can you think of some counter examples?

These are pictures I took of his lab in Florida, which kind of reminded me of my high school chemistry lab. (I did not go to high school in the 1940’s — my school was just that out-of-date! )