Instrumentalizing Failure: Edison's Invention of the Carbon Microphone

Summary

For Thomas Edison, experiencing a failure did not mean that he had failed. Through an examination of the process that led to his invention of the carbon microphone, I argue that his positive approach to failure contributed both to his success as an inventor and to the functional success of his inventions. Edison's laboratory notebooks and legal testimony reveal that his seemingly erratic approach and reliance on trial and error methods in fact had a consistent direction and a rational basis, well suited to the under-determined problems he faced. The outcome of this process, the carbon microphone, contributed significantly to the commercial success of the telephone and remains in use today. Thomas Hughes has observed that nineteenth century inventors made use of the unexpected behaviour of their inventions as sources of novel phenomena to exploit in new inventions. This paper identifies other ways in which Edison made use of failure and proposes that, paradoxically, the success of technological artefacts can be determined by the thoroughness with which failure is pursued in their creation. It also notes a parallel between Edison's instrumentalizing of failure and the way in which recent philosophers of science have proposed that scientists should make use of error.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the stimulating academic community with the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where the draft was written. In particular, I would like to thank Ofer Gal and Rachel Ankeny for their many insightful comments on the draft, and Michael Selgelid Rachel Ankeny for their comments on my graduate diploma thesis which provided themes developed in this paper.94 I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Lastly, this research would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, without the work of the Thomas A Edison Papers project at Rutgers University who have produced the comprehensive and carefully researched Edison Papers Book Editions (TAEB), and made readily accessible 180,000 document images of primary source material in the Digital Edition (TAED).

Notes

¹Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison’, edited by Dagobert D Runes (New York, 1948), 43.

²Thomas A. Edison, Circuits for Acoustic or Telephonic Telegraphs, US Patent 203,019 filed 21 February 1878, and issued 30 April 1878.

³Douglas Allchin, ‘Error Types’, Perspectives on Science, 9 (2001), 38–59.

⁴Sungook Hong, ‘Marconi's Error: The First Transatlantic Wireless Telegraphy in 1901’, Social Research, 72, no. 1 (2005), 107–24. Marconi made use of tall radio masts, a concept for communication over water devised and patented (but not developed) by Edison in 1885. Thomas A. Edison, Means for Transmitting Signals Electrically, US Patent 465,971 filed 23 May 1885, and issued 29 December 1891.

⁵A reasonable assumption is that any telephone with a rotary dial will also use a carbon microphone. Millions remain in service today.

⁶In June 2002, the United States Congress resolved to recognize Italian born American, Antonio Meucci, as inventor of the telephone (US Congress, House of Representatives (2002) Resolution 269).

⁷Elisha Gray (1835–1901) was a prolific Chicago-based inventor of electrical devices and partner in the firm that was later to become Western Electric.

⁸Emile Berliner (1851–1929) emigrated to America from Germany and, like Edison and Gray, was a professional inventor. His best-known invention is the gramophone, a device similar to Edison's phonograph. The phonograph employed flat discs that eventually displaced Edison's cylinders. Thomas A. Edison, The Speaking Telephone Interferences, Evidence for Thomas A. Edison: Volume 1 (1880) http: //edison.rutgers.edu/singldoc.htm (TAED TI1: 2). (The Edison Papers Digital Edition is cited as TAED. The notation is explained in the Notes.)

⁹Thomas A. Edison, Speaking-Telegraph [1], US Patent 474,230 filed 27 April 1877, and issued 3 May 1892.Thomas A. Edison, Speaking-Telegraph [2], US Patent 474,231 filed 20 July 1877, and issued 3 May 1892.

¹⁰Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1).Thomas A. Edison, The Speaking Telephone Interferences, Evidence for Thomas A. Edison: Volume 2, Interfering Applications and Exhibits (1880) http: //edison.rutgers.edu/singldoc.htm (TAED TI2).

¹¹Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 490).

¹²Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 34).

¹³Orton's patent strategy is discussed later in more detail. Another factor in Orton's decision that Western Union should develop its own telephone was that Gardiner Hubbard, Bell's future father-in-law and promoter of his invention, was a vocal critic of Western Union's telegraph monopoly. Apart from the cost of Bell's patent, Orton did not reward an outspoken critic. Orton's decision was vindicated when Western Union sold the patent rights to Edison's carbon microphone to Bell telephone. Notwithstanding Hubbard's objection to Western Union's monopoly, possession of this key patent helped Hubbard and Bell to establish an even greater monopoly (Bell Telephone) than Western Union.

¹⁴V. Legat, Reproducing Sounds on Extra Galvanic Way (1862) http: //edison.rutgers.edu/singldoc.htm (TAED TI2: 456–58). Legat, as inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph, prepared this report on demonstrations conducted by Philip Reis. It was Reis who coined the term ‘telephone’. Reis's apparatus had also been demonstrated in New York in 1872 and described in J. Baile, Wonders of Electricity, trans. by John W Armstrong (New York, 1872).

¹⁵Legat, Reproducing Sounds on Extra Galvanic Way (TAED TI2: 458).

¹⁶Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 23). Edison had been deaf since childhood. He frequently referred to loudness rather than fidelity of sound in relation to the telephone, perhaps reflecting his disability. Throughout the development of the telephone, his deafness led Edison to rely on others to act as his ‘ears’. When he listened himself he often used a modified telephone relay held between his teeth to hear quiet sounds.

¹⁷Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 455).

¹⁸Thomas A. Edison, Relay Magnets, US Patent 141,777 filed 13 March 1873, and issued 12 August 1873.

¹⁹Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 22).

²⁰Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 22).

²¹Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 36). Charles Adams (?–1879) was a British seaman who joined Edison in Newark, first as night watchman, then as Edison's assistant in invention. Adams travelled to Europe to work on telephone installations and died in Paris. Soon after Adams was followed by Edison's nineteen-year-old nephew and promising inventor, Charles Edison, who also died in Paris.

²²Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1. (TAED TI1: 28).

²³Francis Jehl (1860–1941), joined Edison in November 1878 aged 19. Jehl had studied at Cooper Union, been a law clerk, and worked in the machine shops of Western Union. He was to play a prominent role in the development of electric lighting and, despite writing scathingly of Edison in 1913, became first custodian of Henry Ford's reconstruction of Edison's Menlo Park complex at Dearborn in the 1930s.

²⁴Francis Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences: Written in Edison's Restored Menlo Park Laboratory, vol. 1 (Dearborn, MI: Edison Institute, 1937), 109.

²⁵Reese Jenkins and others, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, Book Edition, vol. 1 to 5 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989–), Doc. 759. (Hereafter cited as TAEB. For an explanation of the notation, see Notes.)

²⁶Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 463).

²⁷Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 765.

²⁸Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences: Written in Edison's Restored Menlo Park Laboratory, 143–54.

²⁹The capacitance (or condenser) microphone varied the voltage in the circuit by varying the electrical charge between insulated plates. Edison did not patent it, but the principle is now one of the most commonly used microphone designs. The voltaic pile design varied the current by varying the number of current producing cells (batteries) in the circuit. Edison, US Patent 203,019. Thomas A. Edison, Speaking-Telegraphs [1], US Patent 203,013 filed 13 December 1877, and issued 30 April 1878. Thomas A. Edison, Speaking-Telephones, US Patent 208,299 filed 20 July 1877, and issued 24 September 1878. Edison, US Patent 474,230. Edison, US Patent 474,231.

³⁰Quoted in George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, 1988), 69.

³¹Thomas Hughes notes that for the independent inventor-entrepreneurs like Edison, more patents not only led to greater financial rewards but also increased their public reputation and self esteem, since the independents ‘tended to count patents as well as—perhaps more than—money as symbols of success’ Thomas P Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970, 2nd edition (Chicago, 2004), 24.

³²Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 799.

³³Edison included a drawing of a rheostat in Telephone Interferences testimony (Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 466), but the drawing does not include means for varying the pressure on the carbon. In his testimony, Charles Batchelor said of the device only that ‘the resistance was greater or less according to the compactness of the carbon’ but not explain how this was achieved, Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 91). Jehl describes a rheostat that seems to better fit Edison's description, consisting of ‘fifty or more silken discs filled with fine particles of graphite’ and a micrometer screw to vary the pressure on the discs producing resistances of from 400 to 6 000 ω. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences: Written in Edison's Restored Menlo Park Laboratory, 113.

³⁴Charles Batchelor (1845–1910). Batchelor was an English-born textile mechanic who joined Edison in Newark in 1873 and was Edison's primary associate in invention for 20 years. Batchelor's careful and meticulous approach to inventing complimented Edison's’ fountain of ideas. Together, they made an effective combination which Edison recognised by allocating Batchelor a significant proportion of the royalties from his patents.

³⁵Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 83).

³⁶Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 874 note 1.

³⁷Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 2 (TAED TI2: 73).

³⁸Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 882.

³⁹Edison, US Patent 203,013.

⁴⁰Edison, US Patent 474,231.

⁴¹Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 885. Thomas A. Edison, Telegraph Relay, US Patent 434,585 filed 8 September 1880, and issued 19 August 1890.

⁴²Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 921.

⁴³Thomas A. Edison, Unbound Notebooks: Volume 11 (1877) http: //edison.rutgers.edu/singldoc.htm (TAED NV11: 61).

⁴⁴It is this arrangement, rather than that in figure 6, that is illustrated in the patent that Edison eventually received. Edison, US Patent 474,231.

⁴⁵Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 941.

⁴⁶Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 968.

⁴⁷Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1016 note 1.

⁴⁸Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1005.

⁴⁹Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1067.

⁵⁰Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1068.

⁵¹Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1289 note 2. Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1316. In July 1878, Edison accompanied a scientific expedition to Wyoming at the request of physicist George Barker and astronomer Samuel Langley. The expedition was to observe a solar eclipse, and Edison brought with him the tasimeter, which he attempted to use to measure the temperature of the solar corona. It is likely that discussions during this trip on the possibility of electric lighting aroused his interest in the subject because he commenced research on it the day after his return to Menlo Park.

⁵²Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1095.

⁵³Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1107.

⁵⁴Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1154.

⁵⁵Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1194.

⁵⁶Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1251.

⁵⁷Edison, US Patent 203,013.

⁵⁸Edison was not strictly correct in this. The diaphragm did vibrate, but in the frequency range he was working with, the amount of vibration would have been imperceptible, unlike that in the head of a tympany, a mental model he referred to periodically.

⁵⁹Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1251 note 3.

⁶⁰Basalla, The Evolution of Technology. John Ziman editor, Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process (Cambridge, 2000).

⁶¹Janet L. Kolodner, Case-Based Reasoning (San Mateo, CA, 1993), 7.

⁶²Thomas P. Hughes, ‘Edison's Method’, in Technology at the Turning Point, edited by William B Pickett (San Francisco, 1977), 5–22 (9).

⁶³Lindley Darden, Theory Change in Science: Strategies from Mendelian Genetics, Monographs on the History and Philosophy of Biology (New York, 1991). See also Deborah G Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations (Chicago, 1996). Gerd Gigerenzer, ‘I Think, Therefore I Err’, Social Research, 72, no. 1 (2005), 195–218. This issue of Social Research is devoted to the role of error in science and includes a number of case studies illustrating the positive contribution error can make.

⁶⁵Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1570. Edison may be the original source of this meaning of ‘bug’. This quotation, which is dated 13 November 1878 pre-dates the earliest citation (1889 and also from Edison) in the Oxford English Dictionary.

⁶⁴Ian Hacking, ‘Experimentation and Scientific Realism’, in The Philosophy of Science, edited by J.D. Trout and others (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 247–59 (254).

⁶⁶Gal has argued that Hacking fails to realize the full potential of his own position when dealing with science, tools, and, in effect, technology. That is, Edison is far closer to Hacking's experimental scientists than Hacking himself acknowledges, and the science–technology distinction is much less distinct than supposed. Gal is primarily concerned with Robert Hooke, but Hooke was as much an inventor as the scientist he is remembered as. Ofer Gal, Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the ‘Compounding of the Celestiall Motions of the Planetts’, vol. 299, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, 2002).

⁶⁷Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 1315.

⁶⁸This was far from their only objection. See David A Hounshell, ‘Edison and the Pure Science Ideal in 19th-Century America’, Science, 207, no. 4431 (1980), 612–17.

⁶⁹Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences: Written in Edison's Restored Menlo Park Laboratory, 141.

⁷¹Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 34–35.

⁷⁰John Kruesi (1843–1899) A Swiss-born clock- and instrument-maker, Kruesi joined Edison in Newark in 1872, moving with him to Menlo Park, where he headed the machine shop that occupied much of the ground floor of the laboratory. Kruesi oversaw the installation of Edison's first electric lighting station in New York and later became general manager of the Edison Machine Works.

⁷²New York Times, ‘Tesla Says Edison Was an Empiricist’, New York Times, 19 October 1931, 25.

⁷⁴Quoted in Ronald R Kline, ‘Tesla and the Induction Motor’, Technology and Culture, 30, no. 4 (1989), 1018–23 (1022).

⁷³Ronald R Kline, ‘Science and Engineering Theory in the Invention and Development of the Induction Motor, 1880–1900’, Technology and Culture, 28, no. 2 (1987), 283–313.

⁷⁵Hughes, American Genesis, 91.

⁷⁶For example, in Thomas P Hughes, ‘The Electrification of America: The System Builders’, Technology and Culture, 20 (1979), 124–61.

⁷⁷Michael E. Gorman and W Bernard Carlson, ‘Interpreting Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Telephone’. Science, Technology and Human Values, 15, no. 2 (1990), 131–64 (152).

⁷⁸Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences: Written in Edison's Restored Menlo Park Laboratory, 117.

⁷⁹Quoted in W Bernard Carlson and Michael E Gorman, ‘A Cognitive Framework to Understanding Technological Creativity: Bell, Edison and the Telephone’, in Inventive Minds: Creativity in Technology, edited by Robert J. Weber and David N. Perkins (New York, 1992), 48–79 (69).

⁸⁰Edison, Telephone Interferences Vol. 1 (TAED TI1: 38).

⁸¹Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer's Approach to Problem Solving (New York, 2003), 89.

⁸²Jenkins and others, TAEB, Doc. 767 note 1.

⁸³Tesla said of Menlo Park and Edison:We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sort or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene’. New York Times, ‘Tesla says Edison was an Empiricist’

⁸⁴Bernard S. Finn, ‘Working at Menlo Park’, in Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience, edited by William S. Pretzer (Dearborn, MI, 1989) (44).

⁸⁵Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 102.

⁸⁶Friedel and Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention.

⁸⁷Francis William Rolt-Wheeler, Thomas Alva Edison (New York, 1925), 92.

⁸⁸Reese V. Jenkins, The Making of an Inventor, February 1847–June 1873, vol. 1, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Baltimore, MD, 1989).

⁸⁹Robert A. Rosenberg editor, From Workshop to Laboratory, June 1873–March 1876, vol. 2, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Baltimore, MD, 1989).

⁹⁰Robert A. Rosenberg editor, Menlo Park: The Early Years, April 1876–December 1877, vol. 3, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Baltimore, MD, 1989).

⁹¹Paul B. Israel and others editors, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878, vol. 4, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Baltimore, MD, 1989).

⁹²Paul B. Israel editor, Research to Development at Menlo Park, January 1879–March 1881, vol. 5, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Baltimore, MD, 2004).

⁹³Edison Papers, ‘Citing Edison Papers Documents’, Rutgers University (2006) </http://edison.rutgers.edu/citationinst.htm> [Accessed 7 December 2006].

⁹⁴Ian Wills, ‘Instrumentalising Failure: Edison's Carbon Microphone’ (unpublished thesis, The University of Sydney, 2005).