Beech Tree News Network

The following comes from CBS Sunday Morning from 10-12-25, David Pogue reporting.

If you plot the origins of the greatest inventions in history, you start to notice a pattern.  The lightbulb, the phonograph, the airplane, air conditioner, the zipper, microwave, lasers, transistors, personal computer, the internet, GPS and the smartphone, no country on earth has as rich a history of modern invention as the United States.  Why is that? The answer may start with a guy from Ohio.

We all know Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  Well, kind of.  Hal Wallace is a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American history.  “The lightbulb was just one component.  He invented new dynamos, cables, switches, sockets and meters.  Wallace says, "To get electricity, you need a meter."

On New Year’s Eve 1879, Edison gave an unforgettable demonstration in Menlo Park, New Jersey.  “He lit up the grounds, the laboratory, the office building with about 100 lightbulbs and invited the press to come out to Menlo Park and see what we’d done.  He especially invited his investors.  When the lights come on, it’s almost a mystical experience because these aren’t candles.

We know Edison for the phonograph and lightbulbs, but he had a lot in his portfolio: motion pictures, Portland Cement, occasionally we have on display one of his talking dolls-one of his famous flops.  

Steven Johnson has written 14 books about innovation.  He says “there are two archetypes that people use all the time that are almost always wrong: 1) the lone genius coming up with a brilliant idea and (having that idea in a moment of sudden inspiration.  That is almost never the case”.

Edison called Menlo Park the invention factory.  He employed engineers, chemists, glassblowers, and mathematicians.  “He came up with this idea that if you got these interesting people together and put them in the same room together, you could credit a factory for new ideas.  And that’s what Menlo Park became,” said Johnson.

According to Johnson, history is periodically upended by huge fundamental technological breakthroughs.  “Edison realized that, for the lightbulb to work, he had to build an electrical grid.  But it was the grid that really changed everything.  Once you had power to your homes, yeah you could turn on the light, but you could also fill the dishwasher.  

The personal computer launched another huge round of information, then the internet and now artificial intelligence.  All of it was invented in America.