[00:00.00]Lesson Fifteen Text
[00:05.30]Edison: Inventor of Invention Walter Lippmann
[00:12.56]It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison
[00:17.92]by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated.
[00:23.67]Far-reaching as many of them have been in their effect upon modern civilization,
[00:30.62]the total effect of Edison's career surpasses the sum of all of them.
[00:37.38]He did not merely make the incandescent lamp
[00:42.34]and the phonograph and innumerable other devices practicable for general use;
[00:50.99]it was given to him to demonstrate the power of applied science so concretely,
[00:57.65]so understandably, so convincingly that he altered the mentality of mankind.
[01:06.12]In his lifetime,largely because of his successes,
[01:11.47]there came into widest acceptance the revolutionary conception
[01:18.03]that man could by the use of his intelligence
[01:24.19]invent a new mode of living on this planet;
[01:29.34]the human spirit,
[01:32.60]which in all previous ages had regarded the conditions of lifeas
[01:38.77]essentially unchanging and beyond man's control, confidently,
[01:46.63]and perhaps somewhat naively,
[01:51.31]adopted the conviction that anything
[01:55.96]could be changed and everything could be controlled.
[02:01.31]This idea of progress is in the scale of history a very new idea.
[02:07.87]It seems first to have taken possession
[02:12.31]of a few minds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
[02:18.16]as an accompaniment of the great advances in pure science.
[02:24.82]It gained greater currency in the first half of the nineteenth century
[02:31.20]when industrial civilization
[02:35.14]began to be transformed by the application of steam power.
[02:41.10]Edison supplied the homely demonstrations which insured
[02:47.16]the popular acceptance of science,
[02:52.02]and clinched the popular argument,which had begun with Darwin,
[02:58.26]about the place of science in man's outlook upon life.
[03:04.50]Thus he became the supreme propagandist of science
[03:11.06]and his name the great symbol of an almost blind faith in its possibilities.
[03:18.92]Thirty years ago, when I was a schoolboy,
[03:23.57]the ancient conservatism of manwas still the normal inheritance of every child.
[03:31.62]Perhaps these things would work. Perhaps they would not explode.
[03:38.98]Perhaps it would be amusing to play with them.
[03:44.44]Today every schoolboy not only takes all the existing inventions
[03:51.81]as much for granted as we took horses and dogs for granted,
[03:57.69]but also he is entirely convinced that all other desirable things
[04:05.45]can and will be invented.
[04:09.10]In my youth the lonely inventor
[04:13.54]who could not obtain a hearing was still the stock figure of the imagination.
[04:20.41]Today the only people who are not absolutely sure
[04:25.87]that television is perfected are the inventors themselves.
[04:32.22]No other person played so great a part as Edison
[04:37.50]in this change in human expectation,and finally,
[04:43.45]by the cumulative effect of his widely distributed inventions
[04:50.51]plus a combination of the modern publicity technique
[04:57.04]and the ancient myth-making faculty of men,
[05:02.11]he was lifted in the popular imagination to a place
[05:08.04]where he was looked upon not only as the symbol but as the creator of a new age.
[05:16.08]In strict truth an invention is almost never the sole product of any one mind.
[05:23.74]The actual inventor is almost invariably
[05:29.20]the man who succeeds in combining and perfecting previous discoveries
[05:36.46]insuch a way as to make them convenient
[05:43.01]Edison had a peculiar genius for carrying existing discoveries
[05:49.68]to the point where they could be converted into practicable devices,
[05:56.52]and it would be no service to his memory,
[06:01.06]or to the cause of sciencewhich he serves so splendidly,
[06:06.92]to pretend that he invented by performing solitary miracles.
[06:12.87]The light which was bom in his Laboratory at Menlo Park fifty-two years ago
[06:20.03]was conceived in the antecedent experiments of many men in many countries
[06:27.58]over a period of nearly forty years,
[06:32.02]and these experiments in their turn were conceivable
[06:36.98]only because of the progress of the mathematical
[06:43.96]and physical sciencesin the preceding two centuries.
[06:48.22]Because of Edison,more than of any other man,
[06:53.68]scientific research has an established place in our society;
[07:00.44]because of the demonstrations he made,
[07:04.70]the money of taxpayers and stockholders has become available for studies
[07:12.07]the nature of which they do not often understand,
[07:17.24]though they appreciate their value
[07:21.08]and anticipate their ultimate pecuniary benefits.
[07:26.64]It would be a shallow kind of optimism
[07:31.00]to assume that the introduction of the art of inventing
[07:36.78]has been an immediateand unmixed blessing to mankind.
[07:42.84]It is rather the most disturbing element in civilization,
[07:48.30]the most profoundly revolutionary thing which has evei let loose in the world.
[07:55.85]For the whole ancient wisdom of man is founded upon the conception of a life
[08:03.29]which in its fundamentals chi imperceptibly if at all.
[08:10.34]The effect of organized,subsidized inven
[08:15.91]stimulated by tremendous incentives of profit,
[08:21.55]and encouraged by an insatiable popular appetite for change,
[08:27.92]is to set all the relation men in violent motion,
[08:33.78]and to create overpowering problems faster than human wisdom
[08:39.84]has as yet been able to assimilate them.
[08:44.51]Thus the age we live in offers little prospect of outward stability,
[08:51.07]and only those who by an inner serenity
[08:56.42]and disentanglement
[09:00.19]have learned how to deal with the continually unexpected can be at home in it.
[09:07.55]It maybe rhat in time we shall become used to change
[09:13.61]as in our older wisd we had become used to the unchanging. |