Then it was back to task, sometimes until dawn.īy connecting in this intimate setting, the team grew to deeply understand and trust each other. Edison ordered food from a tavern around 9:00 pm and the team would take what it dubbed “midnight lunch”––an hour to eat, tell stories, sing songs, and get to know one another. When they were working on something big, everyone stayed late. Though the team wasn’t static, by 1876 when Edison had settled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey lab, its members would remain pretty much the same for the rest of his life. “Edison is in reality a collective noun,” said Edison’s longtime assistant, Francis Jehl, “and means the work of many men.”Įdison called his team of scientists “muckers.” They’d come from all over to work with the famous inventor, and he came to rely on them to build and test his ideas. The true genius he possessed was seeing genius in others, creating conditions that sparked creativity and groups that could become greater than the sum of their parts. Over his long career, Edison generated 512 patents-as the leader of a 14-man team. “Here was a solitary genius revolutionizing the world.”īut Edison was actually not a “solitary” genius at all. “No figure so completely satisfied the popular conception of what an inventor should be,” The New York Times eulogized in 1931. Whatever the case, he’s probably by himself. Maybe he’s running through an open field in a thunderstorm, kite string in hand.

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