4.5. Lesson 29: Build an Invention Factory
When Edison established his laboratory–workshop complex at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in the 1870s, his objective was to rationalize and regularize the process of invention, to take it out of the realm of hit-or-miss inspiration and luck, and to create what he called an "invention factory." The industrial revolution had already passed into its first great maturity. Mass production of all sorts of goods was a well-established fact. What Edison now perceived was that invention itself—hitherto regarded as the product of more or less whimsical inventive "genius"—could be incorporated into the industrial mass-production process.
Menlo Park, the invention factory, was itself a great invention, but, like most ...
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