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

7.2. Lesson 60: Get the Biggest Picture

Throughout his creative life, Thomas Edison invented and innovated a dazzling array of devices for converting energy into useful work. Toward the end of his life, he became increasingly interested in energy itself. By the early 1920s, atomic energy intrigued him because he understood its potential as a force "gigantic and illimitable," capable of producing electricity, he believed, that could be "projected across" not only "the Atlantic, but flung from any part of the world to any other part." Yet he could not visualize this newly discovered force, and he therefore found that he had "nothing to hang the imagination on." In 1922, he reported—vaguely—that he was "experimenting along the lines of gathering ...