[This coming
weekend will mark the 250th
birthday of Robert Fulton, about whose influential invention I’ll write in
Friday’s post. All week I’ll AmericanStudy some of our most complex and
significant inventors—and I’d love for you to share your thoughts on them and
other inventors (and inventions) for an innovative crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On heroes,
villains, and another way to see the historical picture.
It’s been a long
time since my elementary school days, but one of the lessons that still sticks
out from that era of my life—and one I’ve seen in my boys’ first few years of
school as well—is that inventors are consistently highlighted as some of the most
heroic individual figures from history, pioneering men and women who
personally and decisively changed the world. Even though the 21st
century world around us seems to offer numerous counter-examples to that idea—can
anyone name or identify the individual who invented the cell phone? The
personal computer? The
internet? Or do we all instead recognize these as the product of cumulative
work by many different people and institutions over many years—we still, I
would argue, cling to the heroic inventor narrative when it comes to figures
from our past. And no two figures better exemplify that narrative than Alexander
Graham Bell and Thomas Edison,
whose inventions of the telephone and the light bulb are almost always (rightly)
numbered among the most significant in our history.
I’m not here to
contest that sense of significance, not as I write by electric light after
talking to my boys on the telephone. But as historians have long known, and as
is perhaps starting to get into our textbooks and collective memories as well,
Bell and Edison not only did
not pioneer these inventions on their own, they might well have taken some of the credit due
to equally (if not more) pioneering colleagues. The articles at those prior two
hyperlinks tell the story: of Elisha
Gray’s groundbreaking work to develop the telephone, work at best copied
and perhaps (as that first article argues) stolen by Bell; and of Lewis
Latimer’s vital work in developing the light bulbs that became the
standard, work that was done as part of Edison’s laboratories but nonetheless
was almost entirely subsumed into a narrative focused on Edison as an
individual inventor. The fact that Latimer
was an African American only adds one more layer to the complexity of these
histories and how they have been remembered; but even if we leave aside that
piece of biographical information, there’s no doubt that our memories of these
inventions are drastically oversimplified if not downright inaccurate.
So were Bell and
Edison more historical villains than heroes? That’s what the first linked
article on Bell and Gray overtly argues, and what many
have argued in recent years about Edison as well (not only because of
Latimir but also, as that linked piece notes, because of the lack of credit
received by Edison’s
rival Nikola Tesla). Perhaps such a pendulum swing is inevitable, given our
past and to some degree still present embrace of the hero narrative for these
figures; and if it can help us better remember forgotten inventors like Gray
and Latimer, then it will at least be a productive swing. But it seems to me
that the historical truth is the same as the contemporary one—that pioneering
inventions are the products of multiple figures and efforts, across many
institutions and years. What would happen if our narratives of the telephone
and the light bulb didn’t fixate on Bell and Edison but didn’t seek to replace
them either, and instead became like the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, assembling
individual pictures and figures into a collage of how these wondrous
innovations came into the world? I’d say it’s worth trying and finding out!
Next inventive
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other inventors or inventions you’d highlight?
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