Questions to ask Thomas Edison

Edison's life in a few dates

How to make an Edison interview good

The weak Edison interview asks “How did you invent the light bulb?” and gets a myth. The strong one asks how a team, a laboratory and a lot of money produced a system. Edison employed machinists, chemists and a mathematician, and he patented their work in his name, which was normal at the time. Ask about the people around him as well as the man. Then ask the hard questions about the current war and his business tactics; his sensitivity on those is part of the story.

Questions about growing up

• 1. You spent only a few months in school. What did your mother teach you at home?
• 2. You printed a newspaper on a moving train at fifteen. How?
• 3. How did you lose most of your hearing, and did it help or hurt your work?
• 4. You saved a station agent's small son from a train, and he taught you telegraphy in return. What did telegraph work teach you?

What the record says: his mother, Nancy Elliott Edison, a former teacher, schooled him at home after a short and unhappy time in a Port Huron school. He sold papers on the Grand Trunk line between Port Huron and Detroit and printed the Grand Trunk Herald in a baggage car in 1862. The cause of his deafness is uncertain; he told different stories, and illness in childhood is a likely factor. He worked as a travelling telegraph operator from about 1863 to 1868.

Questions about Menlo Park and the phonograph

• 5. Why did you build an invention laboratory instead of working alone?
• 6. You promised a minor invention every ten days and a big one every six months. Did you keep that promise?
• 7. What did you say into the first phonograph, and how did your team react?
• 8. In 1878 you listed ten uses for the phonograph. Which came true, and which did not?
• 9. Who were Charles Batchelor, John Kruesi and Francis Upton, and what did they do?

What the record says: the phonograph used a needle to cut sound into tinfoil on a turning cylinder; Kruesi built it from Edison's sketch in late 1877, and Edison recited “Mary had a little lamb”. His article “The Phonograph and Its Future” in the North American Review (June 1878) predicted letter writing and dictation, books for the blind, music, family records and talking clocks. Batchelor was his chief experimenter, Kruesi his machinist and Upton the mathematician who calculated the lighting system.

Questions about light and power

• 10. Electric lamps already existed. What was wrong with them, and what did you fix?
• 11. How many materials did you test for the filament, and why did bamboo win for a time?
• 12. What happened at the Menlo Park demonstration on New Year's Eve 1879?
• 13. Why was the Pearl Street Station as important as the lamp?
• 14. Joseph Swan in England made a carbon lamp at the same time. Who invented it?
• 15. Lewis Latimer, a Black draftsman and inventor, worked on lighting for your company. What was his part?

What the record says: arc lamps were too bright for homes, and earlier incandescent lamps burned out fast. Edison's team made a high-resistance carbon filament in a strong vacuum, first from carbonised cotton thread in October 1879, then from bamboo. They tested thousands of materials. The real achievement was the whole system: dynamos, wiring, meters, fuses and the central power station. Swan demonstrated a carbon lamp in Britain in 1879, and the two men combined their British companies in 1883. Our myth check, did Edison invent the light bulb, weighs the evidence.

Questions about the current war and his tactics

• 16. Why were you so against alternating current?
• 17. You supported public demonstrations in which animals were killed with alternating current. How do you defend that?
• 18. What part did your side play in the first electric chair, used in 1890?
• 19. A young engineer worked for you in 1884 and left within a year, saying you had not paid him a promised bonus. What happened?
• 20. In 1908 you led a group of film companies that tried to control the whole movie business. Was that fair competition?

What the record says: Edison's direct current worked only within about a mile of a power station; alternating current, backed by George Westinghouse and using Nikola Tesla's motor patents, could be sent much further. Edison argued in “The Dangers of Electric Lighting” (North American Review, November 1889) that high-voltage AC was deadly. Harold P. Brown, with help from Edison's laboratory, staged animal killings in 1888, and New York first used the electric chair, powered by AC, in August 1890. Tesla's claim about a 50,000 dollar bonus comes from Tesla's own later accounts and cannot be checked. You can hear the two men argue in the War of the Currents debate and compare Edison with another inventor in Edison vs Bell.

Questions about later life

• 21. Your assistant Clarence Dally died after X-ray experiments. What did you do afterwards?
• 22. In December 1914 fire destroyed much of your West Orange plant. How did you react?
• 23. Why did you, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone go camping together?
• 24. Why did you spend your last years searching for a plant that could produce rubber in America?
• 25. You said you hoped to build a machine sensitive enough to hear from the dead. Were you serious?

What the record says: Dally died in 1904 of cancers caused by radiation exposure; Edison stopped working with X-rays. After the 1914 fire he rebuilt quickly and the plant was producing again within weeks. The camping trips of 1915 to 1924 were widely photographed. The Edison Botanic Research Corporation (1927) tested thousands of plants and settled on goldenrod. The talk about contacting the dead comes from interviews of October 1920; no such machine has been found in his papers.

Sample answers in his own words

For question 7 or 8:

For question 21:

For a question about the future of energy:

For a playful closing question about radio, from 1926: “I quite approve of radios but they should not be used for musical purposes.” (Associated Press report, 23 September 1926). He owned a record company, which may explain the view.

Lines to check, and questions he could not answer

• “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration” is credited to him from about 1903 in different wordings. It sounds like him, but the original is uncertain. Say “attributed”.
• “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work” has no reliable source from his lifetime.
• He did not personally order the killing of Topsy the elephant in 1903, though his film company filmed it.
• Speaking from 1879, he cannot know about the current war, films or the 1914 fire.
• He died in 1931, so nothing about LED lamps, the internet or music streaming. Ask instead what he hoped recorded sound would do.

See how to check if a quote is real for the method.

Rehearse your interview

Edison was quick, blunt and fond of a joke, and he was hard of hearing, so his interviewers had to speak up and stay on point. You can practise yours with an AI recreation of Thomas Edison on Yuga, by voice or text. It is built from his papers and the historical record, but it is a recreation and can be wrong. Cite the Edison Papers, not the app.

Where to read Edison's papers

• The Thomas A. Edison Papers project at Rutgers University: notebooks, letters and patents, many digitised and free.
• His patents, including 200,521 (phonograph) and 223,898 (electric lamp), on Google Patents and at the National Archives.
• Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey, run by the National Park Service, which preserves the laboratory.
• Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (1998), by the director of the Edison Papers.

For more inventors to compare, see famous inventors and inventions.