5.15. Lesson 47: Get Between
On his visit to the Paris Exposition of 1889, Edison was enthusiastically greeted, feted, and generally hailed. Yet, amid the adulation, he also discovered that the scientists of Europe were always "surprised that I was not more of a scientist." Edison claimed that they "could not understand that I am between the scientific man and the public."
With this phrase—between the scientific man and the public—Edison offered a provocative definition of the inventor –innovator. As he conceived it, the inventor or the innovator operates as a kind of liaison between the world of pure theoretical science and that of the consuming public. As the Greek mythic hero Prometheus, bringer of fire, was a demigod, an intermediary between ...
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