Where Do New Ideas Come From?
In 1887, after achieving great fame and money for his invention of the phonograph, a machine that recorded sound, the acoustic telegraph, which transmitted more than one message at a time, and commercially viable light bulbs, Thomas Edison built a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. He recruited a team of talented scientists and engineers to help him further develop his famous inventions and, of course, to come up with new ones.
Edison’s team there invented a cotton picker, a snow compactor, and a way of using magnetized iron to generate electricity. But probably the most famous device to emerge from that lab was the kinetoscope, a machine for viewing motion pictures. How, exactly, the engineers designed this machine, and how much of the credit should be given to one of Edison’s assistants, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, are fascinating stories. But as a writer who constantly struggles to come up with something new, I’m more interested in the machine’s origin story. How did Edison generate the idea in the first place?
We tend to think of inventors as another species—geniuses—who have sudden flashes of insight. I can’t think of a single instance when a light bulb went off in my head, leading to some killer new idea. Is that because I’m an uncreative dud? Perhaps. Alternatively, it might be because Eureka moments are the stuff of legend. According to historians who specialize in the development of inventions and the thought processes of inventors, innovation is often a slow and iterative process.
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