The Messy Reality Behind Thomas Edison’s ‘Genius’
It took a lot of people to create the light bulb. But a process of mythmaking has flattened one man and elevated him to legendary status.
The following is an excerpt from The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, by Helen Lewis.
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The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
It’s funny that we have come to use the phrase ‘lightbulb moment’ to describe a momentary flash of inspiration, because the birth of the lightbulb was slow, incremental, and highly contested. Although Edison holds U.S. Patent No. 223898 for the ‘electric lamp,’ it’s not really fair to call him its inventor. Between 1802 and 1809, Humphry Davy demonstrated the principle of incandescence through a series of experiments in London. In 1838, the Belgian Marcellin Jobard heated a carbon rod inside a vacuum, passed an electric current through it, and observed the glow it produced. By 1860, the Englishman Joseph Swan had created a working prototype of the lightbulb, using carbonised paper filaments, but it quickly burned out.
The problem that Edison and his Menlo Park team faced in the late 1870s was not conceptual. The basic elements of the incandescent bulb were already established. The challenge was to create a better vacuum, a longer-lasting filament, and a reliable supply of electricity. Only then could ‘glow bulbs’ replace the other available options: the gas lamps fitted in upper-class homes, and the giant, smelly carbon arc lamps used outdoors.
As usual, once Edison became interested in the subject of the lightbulb, he could not resist boasting to the press about how easy a solution would be; so simple that a bootblack might understand it. He skipped meetings with potential investors, telling them that he was working through the night because the solution was so tantalisingly close. He invited reporters to Menlo Park to witness his prototype. What he didn’t tell the journalists was that the platinum filament he was using, far from lasting ‘for ever,’ would burn out if the demonstration lasted more than a few minutes. His enthusiasm made him a dilettante. He set aside the work he had been doing on the phonograph; after its initial burst of popularity, the invention would languish for a decade while Edison was consumed by other projects. Like Elon Musk taking on the established car manufacturers, Edison and his lightbulbs presented a threat to an established industry. Gas lamps were smelly and dirty, and the suppliers were widely held to be charging too much. Edison’s electric lights were the future—cleaner, hopefully cheaper; a great American engineering triumph. If he could make them work.
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After several months, it became apparent that nothing of value was emerging from Menlo Park. A planned demonstration was cancelled. Visitors were barred from the laboratory. Journalists responded by laying on thick flattery to maintain their access to the great man; one writer called Edison ‘my esteemed manipulator of the fiery lightning,’ which even the most crawling modern tech writers would find a bit ripe. (In January 1879, that same writer, Edwin Fox of the New York Herald, received eight shares in the newly formed Edison Electric Light Company as a gift.) Doesn’t all this seem curiously modern? A genius was created by an admiring group who had a commercial (and personal) interest in his continued veneration. For as long as Edison’s legend sold newspapers, being the writer with the inside track on Edison was a prestigious position. And the man himself helped out: in a blaze of publicity, he sent explorers around the world to search for the perfect material for the filament. One of the explorers claimed not to have changed his clothes for ninety-eight days as he ‘penetrated the wilderness of the Amazon.’
Luckily for writers like Edwin Fox, their subject eventually realised that platinum filaments were unworkable. The lab began to try alternatives, and on 21 October 1879, Charles Batchelor created a bulb with a carbonised sewing thread, which glowed for more than forty hours before Edison ended the experiment by turning up the voltage until it burned out. Soon after, the lab discovered that carbonised paper was even better. A new Sprengel pump made the vacuum better. Edison devised a mains system, complete with meters to measure how much electricity each house consumed. All these improved elements combined to make a viable electric bulb. To my mind, the power grid was Edison’s most underrated innovation. By demonstrating, as he did in New York, that homes could be supplied with electricity through a meter system, he created the Electric Age.
That moment should have been Edison’s greatest triumph. But what came next was a soul-sapping gauntlet of lawsuits, patent battles, and mergers. If Edison was hungry to take the credit for inventing the lightbulb, it was partly because his investors demanded it. They wanted to protect their patents—and they knew how powerful Edison was as a brand name. We can see many of the faults of modern Silicon Valley in action during this period: the hype cycle, the lionisation of the founder or frontman, the attempt to create a monopoly by driving competitors out of business. Rinse and repeat.
The final insult was when Edison lost the ‘current war’ to fellow entrepreneur George Westinghouse, whose alternating current beat his direct version as the industry standard. Even Edison Electric eventually adopted alternating current, and Edison was pushed out. The company merged with another supplier and then became General Electric in 1892.
Like the Beatles, then, Edison had it—that indefinable quality—and then he didn’t. You could say the same about Einstein, who died a global celebrity but out of fashion with his fellow physicists. Or Picasso, who grew more famous and less respected as he approached old age. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, writes Wyn Wachhorst, ‘growing ever older, less energetic and more disillusioned, Edison increasingly talked more and invented less.’ His collaborators moved on, drifted away, or died. An ore-milling project took years and produced nothing of worth. He was tied up in litigation over his inventions. He claimed to have invented the movie camera but one of his employees was revealed as the true brain behind it. His grand new laboratory in West Orange burned down in 1914. He spent years convinced that a sufficiently powerful battery would make an electric car possible—and then Ford produced the Model N and Model T, which ran perfectly well on gas, killing off the idea for nearly a century. Edison’s interviews became less about his inventions and more about his pronouncements on the state of the nation. (He did not go full Shockley, but certainly demonstrated the same willingness to air his thoughts on subjects outside his expertise.) By the 1900s, he had been swallowed by his public image: ‘Edison seemed more willing to rest on his laurels, pretending always to be maintaining the old pace.’
Why did Edison’s great gift ebb away? There are many potential answers. One is that there was a change in the scenius: he was the last dabbler who could compete with the new industrial scale of chemistry and engineering. In the 1870s, a small lab like the one at Menlo Park could find conceptual innovations and knock-up prototypes to explore them. By the end of the century, that had become almost impossible. Another possibility is that Edison was a conceptual innovator and he peaked early. As he became older, he calcified into the assumptions of the field—assumptions that he had helped to create. Just like Einstein lived long enough to be puzzled by quantum mechanics, Edison survived to see the radio boom, but could never grasp its commercial potential.
As his ability to generate breakthroughs diminished, his mythology only grew. In old age, Edison became the great sage, full of homespun wisdom and supernatural insights into the cosmos. His interviews were a reliable source of headlines, as he offered his opinion on women (obstinate), Turks (smelly), and the soul (non-existent). The recruitment questionnaire he used for his companies—the ‘Edison Test’—leaked in 1921. Questions included ‘Who was Paul Revere?’ ‘How is sulphuric acid made?’ and, somewhat bleakly, ‘What was the approximate population of England, France, Germany and Russia before the war?’ Einstein reportedly took this test and flunked it—something that was presented as a triumph for the self-taught tinkerer over the ivory-tower academic.
That archetype became the most popular form of the Edison mythology. In 1932, the year after Edison died at the age of eighty-four, Harper’s Monthly ran an article by a former assistant. This depicted the inventor spitting on the floor and declaring, in Midwestern dialect: ‘Hell! There ain’t no rules around here! We are trying to accomplish somep’n.’ (A preview of Silicon Valley’s taste for ‘disruption’ and creative destruction.) Seven years after his death, his name was invoked to oppose the New Deal, a massive public works programme and expansion of the welfare state, by his former secretary A. O. Tate, who called the deal a threat to ‘individual initiative.’
Those close to him—the ones who weren’t cashing in themselves, at least—noticed that the myth was replacing the man. His employee Mary Nerney criticised the authorised biographies for making him ‘a conventional figure . . . a great name, a bust in time for the Hall of Fame, but not Edison.’ There was no longer any need to debunk him or question whether his inventions would actually arrive: in death, he passed into a new role as a national symbol.
There is no doubt that he was a selfish genius. The ferociously talented Nikola Tesla lasted only a year at Edison’s laboratory and left after winning a bet with Edison (which the latter then claimed was a joke). Tesla later refused the Nobel when it was offered to him jointly with Edison. True, the American inventor pushed his lab workers forward by the strength of his enthusiasms, but he held them back when he lost interest or careered off down another rabbit hole.* More recent biographies ‘have brought to light an introverted, antisocial egomaniac to whom close personal relationships meant almost nothing, including those within his own family.’ He neglected his first wife almost completely, leaving her at home alone while he had all those midnight dinners at the laboratory. His eldest son Thomas Jr was a classic failson—unable to live up to his father’s stature, he became a wastrel. He was eventually convinced to put his famous last name to a piece of quack machinery called the ‘Magno-Electric Vitalizer.’
The myth-making blotted out Edison the manager, celebrated for his mastery of complex systems and his ability to run a laboratory, and boiled him down to the sole inventor of the phonograph and the lightbulb. He became a parable for children. Since the Second World War, Wachhorst notes, ‘the ratio of juvenile to adult Edison literature has steadily increased, and the average age level of readers has dropped.’ Today, he is a morality tale for children: work hard, and you can achieve anything. Interest in Edison as a man has fallen away, and what remains is the American Adam, the Prometheus, the Wizard of Menlo Park.
Excerpted from THE GENIUS MYTH: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea by Helen Lewis, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Helen Lewis.
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About Helen Lewis
Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, based in London, who writes about politics and culture.