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

10.13. Lesson 102: Work Beyond the Cutting Edge

Thomas Edison is rarely described as a scientist. He was an inventor, most comfortable and most productive working within the margins—albeit the outer margins—of what was well known and well established. Yet his long involvement in the technology of transforming one form of energy into another—electricity into light and sound, heat into steam and steam into electric current—drove him beyond the cutting edge on at least one occasion.

During the 1880s, Edison proposed to produce electricity directly from coal using what he called a pyromagnetic generator. As an inventor of devices to convert energy, Edison was eager to find the most direct means of producing the form of energy he most often exploited: ...