“They were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether or not those things would be of any use. The absolute quintessence of the phenomenon was Thomas Edison. Nobody was better (or worse, depending on how you choose to view it) at inventing things that had no obvious need or purpose. Overall, Edison was of course immensely successful and a huge generator of wealth. By 1920, it has been estimated, the industries his inventions and refinements spawned were worth, in aggregate, $21.6 billion. But he was terrible at working out which of his interests had the best commercial prospects. He simply persuaded himself, as no human being ever had before, that whatever he invented would make money. In fact, more often than not it didn’t, and nowhere was that more true than with his long and costly dream to fill the world with concrete homes. By 1907, Edison was the fifth-biggest cement producer in the world. His researchers patented more than four dozen improved ways of making quality cement in bulk. Edison cement built Yankee Stadium and the world’s first stretch of concrete highway, but his abiding dream was to fill the world with concrete houses. It was a wild and ultimately unrealizable dream. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter. for Edison was good at making things the world didn’t yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them. He completely failed, for instance, to see the potential of the phonograph as a medium for entertainment, but thought of it only as a device for taking dictation and archiving voices—he actually called it “the speaking machine.†For years he refused to accept that the future of motion pictures lay in projecting images on screens because he hated the thought that they could become visible to someone who had slipped into the viewing chamber without buying a ticket. For a long time he held out for the idea of keeping moving images securely inside hand-cranked peepshow boxes. In 1908 he confidently declared that airplanes had no future. After his costly failures with cement, Edison moved on to other ideas that mostly proved to be impractical or demonstrably harebrained. He developed an interest in warfare and predicted that soon he would be able to induce mass comas in enemy troops through “electrically charged atomizers.†He also concocted a plan to build giant electromagnets that would catch enemy bullets in flight and send them back the way they had come. He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working. It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one. Thanks to Thomas Edison, electric lighting became the wonder of the age. Interestingly, as we shall see a little further on, electric lighting turned out to be one of the remarkably few Edison inventions that actually did what he hoped it would do. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 200). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 200). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 325-326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 325). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 325). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 324). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 323). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 322). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 322). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
