February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
Edison relished informality and cultivated the individual initiative engendered by a craft shop culture. He knew, however, that his enterprise ultimately had to exist within the greater culture of an industrial society, a marketplace that had come to expect and demand the reliability, uniformity, and availability of technology created by mass production. Thus Edison divided the innovative research efforts of his company into invention on one hand and manufacturing on the other. For example, he created an internal "Standardizing Bureau" to create standards for all equipment used in the Edison electric lighting system. The bureau did not simply impose its standards, it took into consideration the input of "the ...