SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA 



some new order of procedure in technical education, some revolutionary 

 innovation, if need be, will not put the coming race of engineers on a 

 plane which is lifted above the embarrassments from which we are 

 slowly emerging. 



B. 

 EDISON, THE PROFESSIONAL INVENTOR- 

 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP 



CAlthough Thomas A. Edison is easily the most famous technolog- 

 ical innovator in American history, placing him in the proper perspective 

 in the application of science to technology is not easy. He differed in 

 important ways both from the old-style inventor and the new-style sci- 

 entist in industry. In this passage he uses the words "discovery" and "in- 

 vention" in a very special way which probably do not fit with the other 

 definitions which you may be able to formulate. You should even enter- 

 tain the possibility that Edison has interchanged the usual definitions of 

 these words. (George Parsons Lathrop, "Talks with Edison," Harper's 

 New Monthly Magazine, LXXX [1890], 432-34.) 



How do Edison's ideas about discovery and invention fit into the 

 definitions of science and technology as indicated in the Bessemer story 

 where the innovation was done, not by specialists in innovating, but by 

 practical men on the job?] 



Edison has often been spoken of as a discoverer; and in one sense 

 he may appear to have discovered things by reaching out into the realm 

 of what to other persons was the unknown. But he himself dislikes the 

 term as applied to himself. "Discovery is not invention," he once said to 

 me, "and I dislike to see the two words confounded. A discovery is 

 more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road, 

 say from the laboratory here to Orange station, intending to catch the 

 train. On the way his foot kicks against something, and looking down to 

 see what he has hit, he sees a gold bracelet imbedded in the dust. He 

 has discovered that, certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find 

 a bracelet, yet the value of it is just as great to him at the moment as if, 

 after long years of study, he had invented a machine for making gold 

 bracelets out of common road-metal. 



"Goodyear discovered the way to make hard rubber. He was at 

 work experimenting with India-rubber, and quite by chance he hit upon 

 a process which hardened it — the last result in the world that he wished 

 or expected to attain. Bell's telephone was a discovery too, not an inven- 

 tion. He was engaged with the possibilities of sending sound waves over 

 a telegraph wire, and filed an invention by which this could be done. 

 Then, by accident, it was discovered that articulate speech could be sent 

 over the wire — and there was the telephone. But Bell did not set out to 

 make an instrument by which talk could be transmitted, and therefore I 

 say he discovered instead of inventing the telephone. In a discovery there 

 must be an element of the accidental, and an important one too; while 

 an invention is purely deductive. An abstract idea or a natural law, I 

 maintain, may be invented; for, in my opinion, Newton invented but did 



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