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The Edisonian approach to innovation is characterized by trial and error discovery rather than a bottom-up theoretical approach. This may be a convenient term but it is an inaccurate and misleading description of the method of invention used by Thomas Edison. An often quoted example of the Edisonian approach is the successful but protracted process it is claimed that Thomas Edison used to invent a practical incandescent light bulb. Trail and error alone cannot account for Edison's success with electric lighting when so many others failed (Friedel and Israel (1987) list 23 others) or his remarkable record of almost 1100 patents (See List of Edison patents). The historical record indicates that Edison's approach was much more complex, that he made use of available theories and resorted to trial and error only when no adequate theory existed.
Trial and error (hunt and try) Based on detailed study of his notebooks a number of scholars have pointed out that Edison generally resorted trial an error in the absence of adequate theories. For example in developing the carbon microphone (or carbon grain transmitter) that became the basis of telephones of the next hundred years, Edison and his co-workers tried hundreds of substances, finally settling on lamp black as the variable resistance medium. Edison could not use theory to solve this problem because, as Gorman and Carlson note, at the time "no one had yet developed a chemical theory that Edison could have used to identify a form of carbon with the electrical properties he wanted" (Gorman and Carlson, 1990). Edison was not alone in using trial and error (more accurately termed by Hughes as "hunt and try") because he, like others, was working at the edges then current knowledge. Thomas Midgley who held a PhD and was the inventor of tetraethyl lead and halogenated hydrocarbon refrigerants said of trial and error, "the trick is to turn a wild goose chase into a fox hunt" (quoted in Hughes 2004). Such leading edge work requires a combination of theory and empirical approaches. Edison used a "bottom up theoretical approach" when developing electric lighting, undertaking detailed analysis of the whole electric lighting system based on Joule's and Ohm's laws. This lead him to conclude that to be economically successful he had to produce a high resistance lamp (around 100 ohms). (Friedel and Israel 1987) Once he had established the need for a high resistance lamp he was faced with a lack of electro-chemical theories to describe the behaviour of materials when heated to incandescence. It was then that he embarked on a systematic search for a suitable material and for the techniques to manufacture it in economic volumes. Edisons method Historian Thomas Hughes (1977) describes the features of Edison's method. In summary, they are: Edison on literature reviews Edison is quoted as saying, "When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past - that's what all these books in the library are for. I see what has been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I gather data of many thousands of experiments as a starting point, and then I make thousands more." | ||||||||
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