9.11. Lesson 89: Keep Score
There can be no doubt that Thomas Edison took great joy in the creative processes of invention, yet he was always determined to make invention a business, and he knew that the language of any business is spoken in time and in money. Creativity is a force he was loath to fetter, but, as a businessman, he was committed to keeping score.
Edison called for "a better time sheet ... for the Experimenters. Something which describes [the] nature [of the] experiment, time consumed & Roughness of amount of material used ... . Also we must apportion the rent of different parts of Laboratory." Edison assigned every project a number so that the project's costs and revenues could be readily tracked.
Among the coterie of his closest ...
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