February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
Over every principal room of his West Orange laboratory–workshop, Edison hung a quotation from the British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." Edison complained, late in life, that hardly a day went by when he did not discover the painful truth of Reynolds's maxim.
Edison was a great believer in automation. Machines should and one day would do all the "mechanical" things, he believed, thereby freeing people for creative thought. The trouble was that most people found it more comfortable to behave like machines themselves, spending their time and energy doing mechanical things—going through the usual routines, ...