Edison’s greatest invention was a way of thinking about technology
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
To my mind, Edison picked many low hanging, simple fruits, and the inventions that remain to us in the 21st century are simply far too complicated to churn out by the 1000 patents. Could anyone today have 1000 patents to their name, nevermind a dozen legitimately world changing ones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_inventors
Alas no metric to measure the quality of these patents. Though I'd say that how much a patent made would be probably the best metric upon that. Though a list of patents and profitability of said patents by inventor is going to be much digging and research to collect all that data.
I would say though that some of the most profitable patents have been for drugs and would not be supprised that the top 5 drug patents would of made more money than all of Edison's patents, but that's just a gut feeling and may be wrong.
Covered devices, total licensing revenue, enabled market sector, energy throughput (after Leslie White's societal metric), would be possibilities. Assessing those could still pose challenges.
Though the attempt might reveal that patents aren't actually all that useful.
But things are never just about money as a comparison metric, just that when you can reduce things to that metric, hard not to compare.
Figuring out how to allocate that amongst contributing inventions is ... an "interesting" problem.
As examples, take what Vaclav Smil notes as the inventions powering the world: Otto cycle, Diesel, and Turbine engines. Of the three inventors, Diesel died a suicide and near if not bankrupt (or at least insolvent), Parsons (turbine) did well, Otto AFAIU made workman's or salaryman's wages, but nothing terribly impressive.
The typewriter (you're likely using something inspired at least in part by it), Turing machine, Unix, and synthetic insulin are all inventions which have returned vastly more in net social benefit than their inventors ever saw, for various reasons.
The elevator made possible an entire class of structures. Safety brakes on railroad carriages likewise, as did Bessemer and subsequent steel (wrought-iron rail was used previously, but would split easily).
The net social return of modern medicine is, by many accounts, singularly unimpressive. Pharmceuticals in particular may return large revenues and profits, but deliver little by way of additional lifespan, reduced mortality, or more complex measures such as QALYs (quality-adjusted life-years). See Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which discusses this at length, or the work of Victor Fuchs, health economist.
Some devices (or substances, availed via processes) are absolutely essential to various modern activities. Others could be fairly readily substituted at relatively low additional cost. The models for accounting for this appear ... poor at best.
May well find that some of the best inventions are the ones we take for granted and in their time - made nothing. Tinned food, being one of the greatest ever as a way to preserve food (Nicolas Appert). Then their is the tin opener.
I suppose one way to quantify it would be sit down to work out what inventions you used in a week and with that, not all inventions are used by everybody, but some common ones we take for granted are, and in a way that we glibly just dismiss or overlook them.
The case of inventions long going unsung is a whole 'nother aspect. Or of inventions that came around at one point in time but really didn't hit their prime until far later.
Example: The drilling rigs which were used during the early part of the petroleum era -- 1859 - 1900 or so, were based on a 1,300 year old Chinese method for salt brine drilling. The main change since has been the introduction of rotary cutter heads (in the early 20th century, possibly late 19th), rather than a fixed bit at the drillhead itself. And yes, there've been incidental improvements in metalurgy, diamond-coated cutters, carbide steel, drilling muds, and more recently, hydrofracking (itself dating to the 1950s).
For measures of impact, I'd look to the work, again, of Vaclav Smil, who's quantified a bunch of this stuff and has some good thoughts on how to go about that.
Funny Edison’s rivals last name was Tesla ;-)
Also amusing that he had a lab in Menlo Park, but the New Jersey one ;-) It became Bell Labs, which paved the way of research labs as an idea, leading to Xerox Parc, then the PC and Arpanet. Wow!
Thought experiment, what would a modern, open source “cross-disciplinary invention factory” look like? Is this what GitHub is perhaps?
I think so, after watching a recent GitHub Satellite talk that had some of the scientists who developed the first picture of a black hole present. They said their team was ~200 people, but the contributor count of all the open source project transitive dependencies they used was on the order of 20,000+ people[1].
How will that idea evolve and how can we all participate in that evolution?
But if you're looking at something close to inventions(and not "just" useful product features) from open source, I would look for open-source projects that are publically funded , maybe with some criteria to filter important projects from the noise.
Do you have any ideas on what a modern “cross-disciplinary invention factory” would look like?
And since we live in a very competitive society, that's a big problem. Not just for academia, btw.
As for ideas: I think AI and code offer us new ways of capturing expertise(search engines already do so to some extent) - and that may mean everybody could build a cross-disciplinary team "on the cheap".
But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business.
Interesting. As a taxpayer, I’d like to see legislation passed to mandate open sourcing code I’ve paid for. I have compassion for researchers careers though, but am not well versed anywhere near enough in the machinations of that to suggest a solution.
> But even with that, inventing important things still feels like it would require a lot of work and experimentation and tools - so it would be an expensive business.
This feels a bit like capitalism as practiced today. Not judging it. Just curious if there are new approaches to be discovered and applied here.
Most of the innovation I find really inspiring and valuable is more of the “lone genius” kind. I also really like the “give credit where credit is due” creed of open source and scientific research, and to me that sort of requires that you can trace innovation back to individuals.
If they're smart and they also come with good ideas ? that's even better. You saved yourself some work.
Isn’t this basically the definition of American corporate entrepreneurship?