Alan Axelrod wanted to name his latest book Thomas Edison Was No Genius.
Publisher Jossey-Bass changed the title to Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity and Beyond.
Who is Axelrod to say that the nation’s most prolific inventor was intellectually mortal? The man secured a record 1,093 patents in his life – an average of 17 a year. Light bulbs. Record players. Portland cement. And much, much more.
Yet Axelrod stands by his assertion that Edison was merely “an ordinary man who was extraordinarily inventive.”
“Geniuses are interesting to read about, but you can’t learn anything from them,” Axelrod told Inventors Digest. “It’s like the lottery. You can win money from it, but you can’t learn from it.”
Axelrod is the co-author of The New York Times bestseller What Every American Should Know About American History, as well as the BusinessWeek bestsellers Patton on Leadership and Elizabeth I, CEO. Axelrod’s fascination with Edison came from his own anxiety as a serial author – what was he going to do for an encore?
Edison invented the modern discipline of industrial research and development, Axelrod writes.
Edison created “a means of making creativity, invention – genius itself – so predictable and reliable that it could be summoned on demand, with regularity, to conceive, develop, produce and market one technological breakthrough after another.”
Axelrod extracts business lessons from the life of Edison.
At the end of each of the 102 lessons is a modern takeaway message to help you act like a genius. Readers may find some of the lessons repetitive. Axelrod at times belabors that Edison believed no carefully conducted experiments were useless. There was no trial and error, but trial and learning.
Yet many of the lessons are worth taking to heart. Edison was a master at observation and an opportunist.
As a “news butcher,” he sold papers and snacks on the Grand Trunk Western Railway. He took his operation to the next level and printed and sold papers on the train – the first real-time news, sort of the CNN of his day.
Edison kept notes on anything and everything. He was willing to lose money. He wasn’t willing to lose an idea or observation.
And he imitated and improved on existing inventions – what we often refer to as innovation.
He constantly tweaked the telegraph system, for instance. His improvements on existing technology led to the phonograph or record player. Steve Jobs and the iPod come to mind. MP3 players existed long before the iPod, but none is quite as cool.
It’s tempting to speculate how Edison would fare today. Edison’s telegraph improvements that allowed multiple transmissions over a single line were sort of the broadband Internet of his era. Yet Axelrod thinks Edison may have struggled in our bytes and bits world.
Axelrod recalled a recent tour of the Henry Ford museum.
“Steam engines. Gears. All this stuff was based on energy,” Axelrod said. “But the form that energy takes is sensual and visible. Our whole technology has progressively gotten away from that.”
“One part of me says he would have naturally fallen in to becoming a computer programmer,” Axelrod added. But then again, Edison was at heart a gearhead.
