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

5.14. Lesson 46: Imagine the Future

In 1891, the journalist George Parsons Lathrop proposed to Edison that they collaborate on a science fiction novel about the future. Accepting the proposition on the basis that the business of invention is in large part the disciplined art of imagining the future, Edison drew up some hundred pages of notes (though only about a third of these survive) that incorporated many themes from his existing inventions and from ongoing projects. In some of his notes, Edison combined inventions and ideas, imagining, for example, a bare-wire trans-Atlantic cable that used the "etheric force" (a form of electrical energy Edison believed he had discovered) to transmit photographic images from one continent to another. Edison ...