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Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond
book

Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

by Alan Axelrod
February 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
Jossey-Bass
Content preview from Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

10.11. Lesson 100: Prefer Evolution to Revolution

It is tempting to describe Thomas Edison's major inventions—the incandescent electric lamp, the phonograph, motion picture technology—as revolutionary, and if the term revolutionary is intended to describe the effect such inventions had on society and civilization, the description is appropriate enough. However, as an inventor and innovator, Edison tended to work along evolutionary rather than revolutionary lines.

His favorite invention, the phonograph, began with the notion of recording telephone messages. Why would it be important to record such messages? Edison, like other experimenters of the period, thought of the telephone as a species of telegraph—a "talking telegraph," as it was usually ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780787994594Purchase book