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Analysis

During the early 1870s, Edison came into himself as an inventor and a businessman. Unfortunately, this process did not happen smoothly. He made great mistakes during this period, both in choosing partners and in conducting business transactions. At first, he tended to pick business partners from his associates in the telegraph business, only to become angry when they used their superior business acumen to earn a greater share of the business revenue. And his fiasco with the quadruplex cast a shadow over his reputation. One biographer says, "While his reputation as a maverick grew, so did his status as a talented inventor."

Despite these mistakes, Edison learned valuable lessons about the relationship of business to invention. He began to correct some of his monetary mistakes and educate himself on the business world. His experience with the vote recorder, for example, taught him that inventions needed a market in order to be successful. After his humiliating experience in Washington, Edison learned to do thorough market research and to give careful consideration to the economic potential of his inventions. Edison was not the free-spirited inventor that some historians have made him out to be. He was a businessman, and he did not bother with inventions unless he believed they would make money someday.

His manufacturing shops in Newark were a predecessor for his Menlo Park laboratory. At the Newark shops, Edison created the job environment he would have liked for himself: a loose structure, with an emphasis on innovation and hard work. He rewarded workers who were loyal and creative, but he made great demands of all of his employees. Only twenty-four years old, Edison could stay up until all hours of the night and put great energy into products being manufactured at the shops. He expected his workers to do the same. Later on, Edison brought this same employer persona to his laboratories in Menlo Park and West Orange.

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