On the occasion of his birthday, we celebrate “the Wizard of Menlo Park”. Thomas Alva Edison, who placed first in a list of the 100 most important people in the last 1000 years, that was published in a special 1997 issue of Life Magazine. In that issue, the consummate inventor outranked Albert Einstein whom Time Magazine would select 3 years later as the most important person of the past century. How can we reconcile the fact that one 20th-century icon is declared the most important person in the last 1000 years and a different icon from the same century declared the most important person in the last 100 years? A way out of this conundrum will be presented after we review their respective contributions.
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan Ohio on February 11, 1847, the seventh and last child of Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliot. When Thomas was 7 years old, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. By this time he had been in and out of several different schools in Ohio and Michigan on account of a reading disability that we know today as dyslexia. A few months into his first-grade school year, his teacher Reverend G. B. Engle, became frustrated by Edison’s learning difficulties and called him “addled.” The scorned youngster stormed out of school ending his formal education. Fortunately his mother was a teacher, so Thomas was home-schooled thereafter.
Under his mother’s tutelage, Edison became an avid reader, pursuing his natural curiosity through books and chemical experiments. By age 13, he was earning $50 per week selling candy, fruit, and newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad run from Port Huron to Detroit. His flair for entrepreneurial enterprise was further evident at age 15 when he wrote and printed, on a small printing press located in a baggage car, The Grand Trunk Herald–a newspaper that he sold to the 400 railroad employees. Using money earned from his enterprise, he purchased books on chemistry along with chemicals for experiments that he conducted in his own makeshift baggage car “lab.” Years later Edison said that both he and his laboratory were tossed off the train at Smiths Creek, Michigan by an angry train conductor when a chemical experiment went horribly wrong and burst into flame.
In the years that followed, the dyslexic youngster evolved into the consummate inventor. Deafness in one ear, resulting from scarlet fever in his early youth, led to his creation of the phonograph. News of his invention spread rapidly throughout the world, bringing him international fame and flocks of visitors, who traveled from afar, to witness a burgeoning new era in electronic devices. Less than two years later, Edison discovered the invention for which he is most remembered–the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb. The first air conditioning system, the motion picture camera, and a host of other life-enhancing innovations followed soon after and Thomas Edison, as the personification of inventive genius, became immortalized as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
Enamoured with his prolific inventiveness, the industrial world showered him with a wide variety of honors and awards, including his receipt of the American Congressional Gold Medal in 1928. On February 11, 1947 the US Post Office issued a commemorative stamp to celebrate the centenary of Edison’s birth, and in 1983, the United States Congress designated Edison’s birthday, February 11, as National Inventor’s Day.
Albert Einstein
In August 1900, a 21-year-old student named Albert Einstein graduated in physics from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich with a commendable mark of 4.91 out of 6. Since it was customary for students to be offered junior academic appointments upon graduation, Einstein was bitterly disappointed when he was the only one of his graduating friends who was passed over. His independence of thought and his unwillingness to submit to intellectual authority had been perceived as arrogance by his elders, preventing him from winning an academic post.With no means of supporting himself, he desperately sought employment.
On June 16, 1902, after two years of temporary tutoring and teaching jobs, Einstein finally landed a job as an engineer Class III in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. Three years later, while still toiling as a clerk in the Patent Office, Einstein was awarded a doctorate by the Zurich Physics Institute for his 21-page dissertation, A New Definition of Molecular Dimensions. Though the examining committee had been divided on whether it was “physics” or “mathematics”, a final judgment asserted, “[despite] crudeness in style and slips of the pen in the formulas which can and must be overlooked, …, [the paper displays a] thorough mastery of mathematical methods.”
Achieving a Ph.D. in physics was a relatively minor accomplishment for Einstein in a year that has become known as his annus mirabilis (miracle year). On March 17, 1905, just three days after he turned 26, Einstein submitted to the physics journal Annalen der Physik a paper explaining the photoelectric effect–a paper for which he would eventually receive a Nobel Prize.
Then, on May 11, just two months later, he submitted to that same journal another opus magnum, this time on Brownian motion, explaining how colliding molecules produce the random motion observed when microscopic particles like pollen grains oscillate in water.
Despite the significance of these two papers, they would eventually be eclipsed in importance by a third containing a revolutionary insight captured in his Special Theory of Relativity–an insight that would revolutionize physics irrevocably by challenging Newton’s assumption that space and time are absolute. These three papers, any one of which would have earned Einstein a place among the greatest physicists of all time, appeared in the celebrated Volume 17 of Annalen der Physik in July 1905.
As if this flurry of papers were not enough, on September 27 of the same year, he submitted yet a fourth paper, an “addendum” to his Special Theory of Relativity which was subsequently published in Volume 18. In it, he derived his famous equation E = mc2 that defines his mass-energy equivalence principle and often serves as an icon for the discoverer himself. It took a couple of decades for the scientific community to accept Special Relativity, and incorporate it into the mainstream of accepted scientific fact. During this period of gradual acceptance, Einstein had been preoccupied with his search for a theory that would unify gravitational and electromagnetic forces. This eventually led to his General Theory of Relativity, proposing that in the presence of large masses, the geometry of space is non-Euclidean i.e., curved. Therefore, objects fall to earth, not drawn by an invisible force called “gravity”, but because they are merely following the curvature of space around the earth’s mass.
It wasn’t until November 6, 1919 after months of scrutiny, that the results of Sir Arthur Eddington’s expedition to photograph stars during an eclipse were presented at a joint meeting of members of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. With all the pomp and circumstance of formal British society, Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson announced, “After a careful study of the plates, I am prepared to say that there can be no doubt that they confirm Einstein’s prediction.” J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, asserted, “The result is one of the greatest achievements of human thought.”22
The day following Dyson’s announcement, The Times of London front-page headline blazoned:
News of Eddington’s verification of Einstein’s Theory spread like a tsunami from Europe across the Atlantic, reaching the front page of The New York Times on November 10, 1919. The media elevated Einstein to demigod status, emphasizing the abstruse equations and asserting that only a dozen scientists could comprehend the complicated theory. Einstein himself, with his disheveled appearance, his contemplative pipe, and his unworldly ways became the caricature of genius.
Who was More Intelligent?
The question, “Who was smarter, Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison?” would require that we agree on a basis for comparison. Though Edison was highly intelligent and a genius at invention, he had minimal training in formal mathematics and therefore, little hope of fully understanding the Theory of Relativity. Conversely, Einstein, as theoretician, had little interest, or perhaps practical facility in performing experiments or embarking upon entrepreneurial ventures. Therefore, while both men were very intelligent, comparing their intelligence requires an examination of their individual thought processes, actions, and accomplishments. Edison was the preeminent inventive genius, while Einstein was superbly gifted in abstract conceptualization. Each was superior in his own domain. Questions that compare intelligences of geniuses, reveal the underlying widely-held misconception that intelligence, like height, can rank any group of people from first to last. While height is uni-dimensional, intelligence has many dimensions including fluid intelligence (measured as a component of IQ), inventiveness, creativity, and intensity of focus, a variety of other factors. A more detailed discussion of the many dimensions of intelligence is available at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/chapter-1-the-many-faces-of-intelligence/
