Late Great Engineers: Thomas Alva Edison - Bright ideas from Menlo Park

What Albert Einstein was to theoretical physics, Thomas Alva Edison was to invention, innovation and technology discovery. That’s according to armchair technologists who have accorded both men the dubious honour of household name status. Even heads of state have got in on the act. On 18 October 1931 – the day Edison died – US President Herbert Hoover, eulogised him as the nation’s ‘greatest inventor’ and ‘a rare genius’.

While Hoover remembered his friend as doing “more than any other American to place invention on an organised basis”, other analyses of Edison’s legacy are more guarded. In 1947 (16 years after his death), the journal Nature published Edison’s obituary, closing its first paragraph in cautionary, coded and euphemistic language: “all that he did has to be studied with a knowledge of what had been and was done by others, for he always made fullest use of contemporary discoveries.”

As with Einstein, when it comes to Edison there exists a tangled web of publicly-owned myth that has little to do with the facts. Which means it’s hardly surprising that almost a century after his death Edison still divides opinion. To some, he was the greatest engineer ever to have walked the earth: a modern Leonardo da Vinci, who invented the lightbulb, electrical power generation, audio recording, moving pictures, the telegraph. To others he was an opportunistic charlatan who “lied, cheated and scammed his way to the top”, tortured animals, stole ideas, bullied competitors and destroyed their legacies.