10.11. Lesson 100: Prefer Evolution to Revolution
It is tempting to describe Thomas Edison's major inventions—the incandescent electric lamp, the phonograph, motion picture technology—as revolutionary, and if the term revolutionary is intended to describe the effect such inventions had on society and civilization, the description is appropriate enough. However, as an inventor and innovator, Edison tended to work along evolutionary rather than revolutionary lines.
His favorite invention, the phonograph, began with the notion of recording telephone messages. Why would it be important to record such messages? Edison, like other experimenters of the period, thought of the telephone as a species of telegraph—a "talking telegraph," as it was usually ...
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