"We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide.
"... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
Thomas A. Edison
(1847-1931)
If you're going to contemplate a world in which there was never a man named Thomas Alva Edison, please do so somewhere that does not depend on electric light bulbs.
It should also be someplace that has no CDs or cassettes — the descendants of the records that were played on the phonograph that Edison invented. Clearly, such a place must be silent — with no recorded music playing if Edison wasn't there to discover the technology that made it possible.
I guess it would follow that DVD technology, which descended from video tapes, wouldn't exist in this alternate reality, either, considering Edison's work in visual communication — which included telegraphy and motion pictures.
Likewise, I suppose, computer technology — indeed, any technology involving electronics — wouldn't be possible without Edison's contributions.
It's almost impossible to find an aspect of modern life that wasn't influenced at some point by Edison's work. He was known as the "Wizard of Menlo Park" for the New Jersey city where he established the first industrial research lab, but his reputation was also built on the fact that he held more than 1,000 patents in the United States.
He even contributed technological ideas that helped in the development of the automobile — through his friend, Henry Ford.
Today is the anniversary of one of the things that built Edison's legacy. On this date in 1889, Edison showed his first motion picture. In nearly 120 years, that technology has evolved into so many things — an art form capable of both entertaining and educating as well as a form of communication, capable of bringing unfolding events into our living rooms with breathtaking immediacy.
Unfortunately, that technology has also been abused by some whose only motivation was to make a buck — and the source of such windfalls didn't seem to matter, even if they came at the expense of innocent bystanders (potentially depriving the perpetrators of any satisfaction they might gain from the knowledge that the victims' greed was in part responsible for their misfortune).
In a world that bears his mark in just about every conceivable way yet seems to have forgotten the significant roles that work ethic and integrity played in his life, Edison's modesty is refreshing. So is his can-do spirit.
"I have not failed," he said. "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Having identified the methods that were unsuccessful, he said, simply meant those methods "won't have to be tried again." And, through process of elimination, "[s]oon, we will find one that does."
We could use more of that in the modern world — a world that often seems intent on proving the adage that the definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
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