illuminating innovation
Beyond the light-bulb moment - ten innovation lessons from Thomas Edison
My dad spent his life in lights. His name wasn’t in them, but he spent his career working with them. A lighting engineer, he knew all about illumination – and he was pretty good at using light to do more than just show you the way around a dark room. He was one of the early pioneers of son et lumière, using sound and light to retell stories, and he worked across theatre lighting’s great transition, from an analogue tradition with its roots in the old limelight to the digital technology behind today’s programmable extravaganzas.
But my brother and I share a simpler memory – him telling us, as wide-eyed kids, about his exploits on Lowestoft pier and sea front, setting up the summertime illuminations. Warning: don’t try this at home! His job, as a 14-year-old apprentice, was to test whether the light sockets were live. By licking his fingers – and sticking them in!
Obviously a formative experience, since I’ve also spent my life in illumination – only my interest is in the ideas which light up the world. Innovation. And you don’t have to look far to see its symbol. It’s everywhere, still, in our language – the lightbulb moment, the flash of inspiration. The bulb has become the universal shorthand for a bright idea, one which persists even though the incandescent bulb itself has been consigned to history, replaced by the ubiquitous LED.
And who gave us that lightbulb, as a practical device as well as a wonderful metaphor? His god-fatherly face beams out at us from thousands of photos. If we want to get really authentic we can watch him in early film clips or hear him in scratchy early recordings – all made possible by his seemingly unending stream of inventive ideas.
Thomas Alva Edison. ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’, holder of 1,093 US patents, whose electric companies were the foundation for General Electric, and midwife to so much of the technology of power, sound and light which we take for granted today.
Comments