From Edison’s diary

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest inventors we know about. Sometime ago, I stumbled upon a book titled THE DIARY AND OBSERVATIONS OF THOMAS ALVA EDISON, and was an interesting read. In there we obtain an insight to Edison’s view on many different subjects including education, work, religion etc. Edison was a person with strong views. His working methods were unconventional. Here are a few interesting facts I learnt from this book:

1) Edison had to recruit many executives to his labs; he always emphasized on a memory test and gave them a questionnaire to answer. He insisted that memory is very important for decision making, and he usually employed those people who had very good memory. Edison wrote “…Certainly the brain should have the facts. If a brain possesses an enormous number of facts, those facts, through action of the subconscious mind, will automatically keep themselves available when needed and will automatically keep themselves out of the way, not interfering when not required.”

2) Edison’s view on education was interesting and bold for his times, and he believed that learning through movies would be vital for future education. As early as 1890s, he said that best way to teach geography is either by taking the student on a tour or to show them a movie. Edison wrote “…motion pictures can be applied to a scientific, systematic course of memory training in the schools, taking the children at an early age when the mind is plastic enough to adapt itself most readily to new habit of thought.

Most of our text books fail on two big counts. They are not sufficiently human, and their application is not sufficiently practical”

3) In the following lines Edison gives an insight to how he worked: “When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past-that’s what all these books in the library are for. I see what has been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I gather the data of many thousads of experiments as a starting point, and then I make thousads more.”

“ …..The motive that I have for inventing is, I guess, like the motive of the billiard player, who always wants to do a little better-to add to his record. Under present conditions I use the reasonable profit which I derive from one invention to make experiments looking towards another invention…..”

4) Edison rates phonograph as his greatest discovery. He writes “Which do I consider my greatest invention ? Well, my reply to that would be that I like the phonograph best. Doubtless this is because I love music. And then it has brought so much joy into millions of homes all over this country, and , indeed, all over the world.”

5) The following quotation by Joshua Reynolds was hung in every room of Edison’s laboratory “ There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking”

There are many more fascinating thoughts of Edison, many agreeable and a few disagreeable ones, in the above mentioned book, and if you happen to find it, read it through…it’s a classic autobiography.

Sailing against the wind

John Petit-Senn told “True courage is like a kite, a contrary wind raises it higher”. To have a firm belief in something and to pursue it courageously till the end is one of the finest human qualities. This quality was exemplified by Daniel Shechtman, who recently won the Nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals. According to conventional knowledge of crystallography, crystals can exist with certain symmetries only. So the convention was that crystals in nature can have only 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- or 6-fold rotational symmetry, with everything else not allowed. Contrary to this, Daniel discovered that there exist crystals whose rotational symmetry is 10 fold. When he announced this discovery, he was mocked and humiliated, and was asked to leave his sabbatical research group. Great scientists including Linus Pauling made fun of the discovery on quasicrystals saying “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientist”. However, Daniel pursued his research and submitted it to Journal of Applied Physics, but was rejected. Yet he persuaded his colleagues in different countries to verify his discovery and finally his paper was published in Physical Review letters. This speaks of Daniel’s character of persistence and how he believed in his observations and finally triumphed. Nowadays everybody approves of quasicrystal’s existence, and Nobel prize is a fair indicator.

[A word of caution: all great research will not fetch the Nobel prize, and some of the deserving scientist may have been omitted in the past for various reasons. Who gets this prize, they usually deserves it, but the one who misses it should not be forgotten.]

What is related to this matter of persistence is that there have been plenty of scientific discoveries in the past that was initially rejected by the scientific community, but later went on to win the Nobel prize. A search on internet resulted in an interesting paper by a Spanish researcher named JUAN MIGUEL CAMPANARIO who wrote on Rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries: accounts by Nobel Laureates, in Scientometrics, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2009) 549–565. There he notes how more than 20 discoveries which were rejected ina journal were later accepted either in a different journal or in the same journal, and further went on to win the Nobel prize.

So the next time when you make a discovery and if somebody rejects it, you know what to do !