The labor of the productive genius — VOICES for REASON

It has been many years since I’ve visited the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey—but I recall it as a fascinating place to learn about, and pay homage to, an inventive genius. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you might want to take advantage of a fee-free “Edison Day” on Sept. 25 or Nov. 11. This informative article from The Wall Street Journal gives some of the reasons why:

In this era of cyberspace and fiber-optics, our image of an inventor tends to revolve around intangible diagrams manipulated on a computer screen by technogeeks working behind sliding glass doors. But back when Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was opening up the new age of electricity, the act of inventing usually involved prototypes made of very tangible materials—spring steel, cast iron, polished brass, beveled glass and varnished oak. Edison’s world ran on tooled gears, tanned leather, rubber, tar-paper and shelves of chemicals in hand-labeled bottles with ground glass stoppers. Machinery in motion really moved—flywheels spinning, pistons snorting, belts running from driveshafts—while smoke, tallow and machine oil lent their pungent smells to the air. . . .

In the West Orange lab, Edison and his staff invented, among other things, a successful alkaline storage battery, a fluoroscope for viewing X-ray images, and a method of erecting poured-concrete buildings. Here they also developed motion pictures and conducted experiments toward adding sound to the silent movies. In the surrounding factory buildings, with their own large work forces, Edison ran the various businesses born of his inventions, including the manufacture of movie cameras, film and projectors, and his favorite enterprise, the Edison Phonograph Co., with its vast catalog of phonographs and recordings released under the Edison label. Indeed, Edison effectively invented the modern entertainment industry.

Edison’s career stands as an eloquent symbol of the productive human mind. As we close the door on another Labor Day holiday, it’s worth thinking about how much we owe to those men and women whose mental labor makes the creation of industrial wealth possible. Here’s a short passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on that theme:

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

Are you curious about that last comment, concerning the “work of the philosopher”? You really have to read the book!

Image: WikiMedia Commons