Lesson Fifteen   Text
　　Edison: Inventor of Invention Walter Lippmann
　　It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison
　　by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated.
　　Far-reaching as many of them have been in their effect upon modern civilization,
　　the total effect of Edison's career surpasses the sum of all of them.
　　He did not merely make the incandescent lamp
　　and the phonograph and innumerable other devices practicable for general use;
　　it was given to him to demonstrate the power of applied science so concretely,
　　so understandably, so convincingly that he altered the mentality of mankind.
　　In his lifetime,largely because of his successes,
　　there came into widest acceptance the revolutionary conception
　　that man could by the use of his intelligence
　　invent a new mode of living on this planet;
　　the human spirit,
　　which in all previous ages had regarded the conditions of lifeas
　　essentially unchanging and beyond man's control, confidently,
　　and perhaps somewhat naively,
　　adopted the conviction that anything
　　could be changed and everything could be controlled.
　　This idea of progress is in the scale of history a very new idea.
　　It seems first to have taken possession
　　of a few minds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
　　as an accompaniment of the great advances in pure science.
　　It gained greater currency in the first half of the nineteenth century
　　when industrial civilization
　　began to be transformed by the application of steam power.
　　Edison supplied the homely demonstrations which insured
　　the popular acceptance of science,
　　and clinched the popular argument,which had begun with Darwin,
　　about the place of science in man's outlook upon life.
　　Thus he became the supreme propagandist of science
　　and his name the great symbol of an almost blind faith in its possibilities.
　　Thirty years ago, when I was a schoolboy,
　　the ancient conservatism of manwas still the normal inheritance of every child.
　　Perhaps these things would work. Perhaps they would not explode.
　　Perhaps it would be amusing to play with them.
　　Today every schoolboy not only takes all the existing inventions
　　as much for granted as we took horses and dogs for granted,
　　but also he is entirely convinced that all other desirable things
　　can and will be invented.
　　In my youth the lonely inventor
　　who could not obtain a hearing was still the stock figure of the imagination.
　　Today the only people who are not absolutely sure
　　that television is perfected are the inventors themselves.
　　No other person played so great a part as Edison
　　in this change in human expectation,and finally,
　　by the cumulative effect of his widely distributed inventions
　　plus a combination of the modern publicity technique
　　and the ancient myth-making faculty of men,
　　he was lifted in the popular imagination to a place
　　where he was looked upon not only as the symbol but as the creator of a new age.
　　In strict truth an invention is almost never the sole product of any one mind.
　　The actual inventor is almost invariably
　　the man who succeeds in combining and perfecting previous discoveries
　　insuch a way as to make them convenient
　　Edison had a peculiar genius for carrying existing discoveries
　　to the point where they could be converted into practicable devices,
　　and it would be no service to his memory,
　　or to the cause of sciencewhich he serves so splendidly,
　　to pretend that he invented by performing solitary miracles.
　　The light which was bom in his Laboratory at Menlo Park fifty-two years ago
　　was conceived in the antecedent experiments of many men in many countries
　　over a period of nearly forty years,
　　and these experiments in their turn were conceivable
　　only because of the progress of the mathematical
　　and physical sciencesin the preceding two centuries.
　　Because of Edison,more than of any other man,
　　scientific research has an established place in our society;
　　because of the demonstrations he made,
　　the money of taxpayers and stockholders has become available for studies
　　the nature of which they do not often understand,
　　though they appreciate their value
　　and anticipate their ultimate pecuniary benefits.
　　It would be a shallow kind of optimism
　　to assume that the introduction of the art of inventing
　　has been an immediateand unmixed blessing to mankind.
　　It is rather the most disturbing element in civilization,
　　the most profoundly revolutionary thing which has evei let loose in the world.
　　For the whole ancient wisdom of man is founded upon the conception of a life
　　which in its fundamentals chi imperceptibly if at all.
　　The effect of organized,subsidized inven
　　stimulated by tremendous incentives of profit,
　　and encouraged by an insatiable popular appetite for change,
　　is to set all the relation men in violent motion,
　　and to create overpowering problems faster than human wisdom
　　has as yet been able to assimilate them.
　　Thus the age we live in offers little prospect of outward stability,
　　and only those who by an inner serenity
　　and disentanglement
　　have learned how to deal with the continually unexpected can be at home in it.
　　It maybe rhat in time we shall become used to change
　　as in our older wisd we had become used to the unchanging.