Thomas Edison Slams Religion 1 另 1910年他接受紐約時代雜誌的採訪說 In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison also stated: 自 然界是我們所了解的，但宗教的所有的神，我們並不知道，自然界並不仁慈(按有如老子講的~天地不仁以萬物為芻狗) 有同情心或有愛心，如果這種我所說的有仁慈、具同情心、有愛心的神造我，那他也造魚被我抓來吃，試問他造魚時的仁慈、同情、與愛心在那裏?大自然造就我 們~自然形成所有的事物~我們並不是宗教的神祉造的。 "Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions." =============== June 30, 2012 by Edwin Hensley
Thomas Edison interview in the New York Times, Oct 2, 1910.
Most historians consider Thomas Edison to be the greatest inventor of all time. He invented the light bulb, the movie projector, the phonograph or record player, mimeograph machine, storage battery, electric Christmas tree lights, the electric chair and much more, patenting over 1,000 products and ideas. Edison is always included in lists of the most influential people of history, often at the very top.
Churches, temples, mosques and other religious buildings throughout the world use Edison’s light bulbs and other inventions every day. However, these religious institutions do not openly publicize Edison’s views on religion.
Readers of the New York Times were shocked by the Sunday Magazine cover story of October 2, 1910, entitled “No Immortality of the Soul” Says Thomas A. Edison. You can read this document at http://www.sundaymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/19101002-5-no.pdf. Outraged citizens attacked Edison for his atheism, and he responded with an interview in The Columbian Magazine in 1911. This magazine went out of publication later that year, but the text of that article may be found at http://atheists.org/content/thomas-alva-edison-1911-columbian-interview.
Please feel free to read these articles in detail. I will include selected quotes from each of these articles, starting with the New York Times in the next paragraph.
“No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life — our desire to go on living — our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it, though. Personally I cannot see any use of a future life.”
“But the soul!” I protested. “The soul–”
“Soul? Soul? What do you mean by soul? The brain?”
“Well, for the sake of argument, call it the brain, or what is in the brain. Is there not something immortal of or in the human brain — the human mind?”
“Absolutely no,” he said with emphasis. “There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal than there is to think that one of my phonographic cylinders will be immortal. My photographic cylinders are mere records of sounds which have been impressed upon them…
“Yet no one thinks of claiming immortality for the cylinders or the phonograph. Then why claim it for the brain mechanism or the power that drives it? Because we don’t know what this power is, shall we call it immortal?”
Many readers wrote letters of outrage to the New York Times. Dr. W. H. Thomson, a highly regarded scientist and author, criticized Edison, claiming that his denial of the soul’s personality was proof that Edison was “pathological,” or diseased. Edison replied to the readers in general and Thomson specifically in The Columbian Magazine interview, with selected quotes shown below. I added the bold emphasis.
“Dr. Thomson’s inference was wrong,” Mr. Edison has since told me, “I never have denied Supreme Intelligence. What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.
“When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day. Now they are hampered by innumerable isms and formalities – a multitude of side-issues which keep them from the proper emphasis of that one great Truth, the Golden Rule. There are men of vast ability connected with the churches. If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology.
It may be that, in the past, the fables, mis-conceptions and mis-statements which have from the beginning, infiltrated the creeds, have made it easier for folks to conform to the mighty moral laws which tend toward rightful life, and, therefore, toward true happiness, but if that ever was the case I think it now has ceased to be.
“The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased. I greatly admire Thomson. What he said about my mind did not disturb me. I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim.
“I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do. But that does not imply that I am surely right. I work on certain lines – what might be called, perhaps, mechanical lines. A man who worked along another line might disagree with me with perfect honesty, and might be right. But I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study.
“It is a pity, too. There are great minds in the pulpits. If they would stop declaring the unprovable, and give their time to finding what is really Truth, the world would move more rapidly. Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.
“Study, along the lines which the theologies have mapped, will never lead us to discovery of the fundamental facts of our existence. That goal must be attained by means of exact science and can only be achieved by such means. The fact that man, for ages, has superstitiously believed in what he calls a God does not prove at all that his theory has been right. There have been many gods – all makeshifts, born of inability to fathom the deep fundamental truth. There must be something at the bottom of existence, and man, in ignorance, being unable to discover what it is through reason, because his reason has been so imperfect, undeveloped, has used, instead, imagination, and created figments, of one kind or another, which, according to the country he was born in, the suggestions of his environment, satisfied him for the time being. Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved. We accept no ordinary scientific fact without the final proof; why should we, then, be satisfied in this most mighty of all matters, with a mere theory?
“Destruction of false theories will not decrease the sum of human happiness in future, any more than it has in the past. I think modern man demands things more substantial than in mere theories. The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power. He was too wise a man to credit miracles, too good a man to claim things which were not precisely true.”
Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. It is fallacious to declare that we have souls apart from animal intelligence, apart from brains. It is the brain that keeps us going. There is nothing beyond that.”
Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals – they are mere aggregates of cells.
There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural.
I did not include quotes from him regarding Bert Reese, a psychic medium who fooled Edison into thinking he had the ability to see through solids. Reese would later be shown to be a fraud. Edison felt that Reese had unusual abilities, but Edison believed these abilities were due to something natural, as opposed to supernatural.
Edison made other comments against theism, such as “All bibles are man made” in the October 1921 Atlantic Monthly Journal. However, these two articles show the most in depth revelations into how the greatest inventor of all time felt about religion.
里程臭名昭著的《遊子吟》中提到米勒評論愛迪生：「如果沒有神的啟示，沒有一個『舵手』，沒有一個引導的力量，愛迪生決不會有一個科學的和數學的精密頭腦來領悟宇宙的奧秘。」我翻了好幾遍原作，也沒找著。這「神的啟示」，是里程自己無恥地加進去的！當然了，他把愛迪生所有的「超級智慧」全寫成「上帝」，結合這本爛書的主體，把讀者引向了「愛迪生信耶神」的混淆概念。而米勒傳記裡提到愛迪生實驗室裡一篇銘文中的一句話：「I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the universe」，竟被譯成「我深信有一位全智全能的、充滿萬有的、至高至尊的上帝的存在。」加了這麼多料，里程，你是讓非基們懷疑你的英文水平，還是驚訝你的造謠水平？
Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker".[72] Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paines The Age of Reason.[72] Edison defended Paines "scientific deism", saying, "He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity."[72] In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison stated:
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.[87]
Edison was called an atheist for those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter:
You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made.[72]
He also stated, "I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt."[88]
Nonviolence was key to Edisons moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." Edisons philosophy of nonviolence extended to animals as well, about which he stated: "Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."[89] However, he is also notorious for having electrocuted a number of dogs in 1888, both by direct and alternating current, in an attempt to argue that the former (which he had a vested business interest in promoting) was safer than the latter (favored by his rival George Westinghouse).[90]
Edisons success in promoting direct current as less lethal also led to alternating current being used in the electric chair adopted by New York in 1889 as a supposedly humane execution method. Because Westinghouse was angered by the decision, he funded Eighth Amendment-based appeals for inmates set to die in the electric chair, ultimately resulting in Edison providing the generators which powered early electrocutions and testifying successfully on behalf of the state that electrocution was a painless method of execution.[91]
In 1920, Edison set off a media sensation when he told B. C. Forbes of American Magazine that he was working on a "spirit phone" to allow communication with the dead, a story which other newspapers and magazines repeated.[92] Edison later disclaimed the idea, telling the New York Times in 1926 that "I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke."[93] Views on money
"My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it." [Thomas Edison, Do We Live Again?]
"All Bibles are man-made." [Thomas Edison]
"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk." [Thomas Edison]
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." [Thomas Alva Edison, Columbian Magazine]
"I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States." [Thomas Edison]
"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." [Thomas Edison]
"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul... No, all this talk of an existence beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life - our desire to go on living - our dread of coming to an end." [Thomas Edison, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]
"The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them." [Thomas Edison, quoted by Joseph Lewis from a personal conversation; source: Cliff Walkers Positive Atheisms Big List of Quotations]
"What fools." [Thomas Edison, commenting on he spectacle of hundreds of thousands making a pilgrimage to the grave of an obscure priest in Massachusetts, in the hope of effecting miraculous cures, quoted by Joseph Lewis from a personal conversation; source: Cliff Walkers Positive Atheisms Big List of Quotations]
"Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people." [Thomas Edison, quoted by Joseph Lewis from a personal conversation; source: Cliff Walkers Positive Atheisms Big List of Quotations]
2 Comment ============ [1847-1931] American inventor
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
"I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States."
"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk."
?I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. . . . I am an aggregate of cells, as, for instance, New York City is an aggregate of individuals. Will New York City go to heaven? . . . . No; nature made us--nature did it all--not the gods of the religions.? The New York Times, Oct. 2, 1910 ("No Immortality of the Soul" Says Thomas A. Edison, ========== The Religious Affiliation of Inventor Thomas Edison
Edison attended a Congregational church in Ft. Myers, Florida, where he had a winter home. The church was renamed for him and is now the Thomas Edison Congregational Church. This church was one of those which did not join in the merger whch formed the United Church of Christ. The Second Congregational Church of Greenwich in Connecticut has in its archives a letter from Edison containing suggestions for for protecting their 212-foot steeple from lightning strikes.
Edisons wife was a devout Methodist and, early in their marriage, tried to convert him to her religious views, but failed. As for his personal beliefs, Edison made many statements which indicated disbelief on key topics. John P. M. Murphy described Edisons position as "truculent agnosticism." [Source: John Patrick Michael Murphy, "Murphys Law: Thomas Alva Edison", article on "The Secular Web" (agnostic, atheist website), 1999; URL: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/john_murphy/edison.html] ======================
Thomas Alva Edison by Thomas S. Vernon
Index: Historical Writings (Biographies) Home to Positive Atheism
"I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill."
THERE IS AN interesting disparity between people who have achieved greatness in science and technology and those who have achieved greatness in art and literature. In both cases one can see a fortuitous matching of talent and historical setting which in retrospect makes their careers seem inevitable. There is a difference, however. It seems likely that the scientific insight of an Einstein and the technological inventions of an Edison would have come about in time even if these persons had not arrived on the scene; someone would have hit upon the theory of relativity, and someone would have invented the electric light bulb and phonograph. It does not seem likely, however, that the Seventh Symphony would have been composed or The Merchant of Venice written if Beethoven and Shakespeare had not lived. Works of art and literature have a uniqueness and individuality that the results of scientific investigation and technological creativity do not have. This by no means diminishes the stature of the giants in the fields of science and technology; their genius is no less remarkable. It is just that uniqueness resides more in their persons than in their works.
Few men or women have come as close to actualizing the American Horatio Alger myth as Thomas Alva Edison. His father, Samuel Edison, Jr., was involved in the abortive Mackenzie revolt in Canada and fled to this country. He settled in Milan, Ohio, where Thomas Alva was born on February 11, 1847. He grew up in a family where parental discipline was practiced with what we today would regard as a shocking degree of severity. At the age of six he started a fire which destroyed the family barn. For this he was whipped publicly by his father after advance notice to the community. Although the incident left an indelible impression, it seems not to have diminished either his mischievousness or his lively curiosity. A year later the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Due to illness, Al (as his family called him) was unable to attend school until he was eight years old. The schoolmaster thought Al a stupid and intractable boy, but his mother, who thought otherwise, took him out of the school and undertook to teach him the "three Rs" at home.
This was as close as Edison ever got to formal schooling, but his mother introduced him to such books as Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Humes History of England, as well as to works of Shakespeare and Dickens. He became captivated by R.G. Parkers School of Natural Philosophy, a sort of science primer that described experiments, many of which the nine-year old Edison was able to perform at home. At the age of eleven, he established a laboratory in the corner of the basement. Here he would immerse himself for long hours, when other children were playing. His interests were not entirely confined to science. He read Paines Age of Reason when he was twelve. In later years he remarked, "I can still remember the flash of enlightenment that shone from his pages."
He was fascinated by the recently-invented telegraph in particular and by the mysteries of electricity in general. At the age of twelve, however, his familys fortunes were at such a low ebb that Al was obliged to go to work. He secured a job as "candy butcher" on the newly-established Grand Trunk Railway that made daily runs between Port Huron and Detroit. As "candy butcher," he was an entrepreneur who sold food, sweets, and newspapers to passengers. The train would leave Port Huron at 7:00 in the morning and took a little over three hours, at the speed of 30 mph, to reach Detroit. It would make the return trip in the evening, arriving back in Port Huron around 9:30. During the long lay-over in Detroit, he was able to further his education, becoming one of the first patrons (for a fee of $2.00) of the Detroit Free Library. He later claimed to have gone systematically through their entire stock of books. He also persuaded the train officials to let him set up a laboratory in a corner of the baggage car. He was careful, however, to see that his mother got a dollar a day out of his earnings.
One morning he was delayed in getting aboard and as the train started to pull away he struggled to clamber aboard the freight car with both arms full of newspapers. He started to climb the first step but could not keep his balance. A trainman grabbed him by the ears and hauled him up. Edison felt something snap inside his head, and this marked the beginning of a deafness which grew progressively worse throughout his life. He later remarked, "I havent heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old." In an autobiographical account, however, Edison catalogues numerous advantages that he claimed accrued to him as a result of this handicap. It forced him to do more reading; not being able to hear the "small talk" at social gatherings, his mind was free to occupy itself with thought; he was less distracted by the cacophony of urban life. He wrote: "Most nerve strain of our modern life, I fancy, comes to us through our ears." Edison never indulged in self-pity and maintained a detached sense of humor throughout his many ups and downs.
At the age of fifteen he struggled unsuccessfully with Newtons Principia. One result of this was to give him a permanent dislike of mathematics. Throughout his life he professed a disdain for theoretical science, though this was probably a defensive pose. Some of his closest friends and co-workers were theoretical scientists. He pursued a vigorous course of self-cultivation and by no means scorned intellectual labor. Joshua Reynolds once wrote: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." Edison made a framed copy of this quotation to hang in his laboratory for all to see.
During his years as a train boy, major events were occurring -- the hanging of John Brown, the election of Lincoln, the beginning of the Civil War. Edison observed that his newspapers sold faster on days when big news was breaking. When an account of the Battle of Shiloh reached Detroit by telegraph, it occurred to Edison that he could sell more of his papers on the return trip to Port Huron if the people along the line had advance notice of this big news. He arranged for a short dispatch to be sent by wire to stations along the way and persuaded the editor of the Detroit Free Press to provide him with a very large consignment of papers. This issue contained details not yet known to the towns along the return route. At each stop he found crowds of people eager to buy his papers, and he raised the price from one stop to the next. The result was an unprecedented bonanza. It was his first display of the business acumen which characterized his later years.
The Mount Clemens station master taught him the art of sending and receiving by telegraph. He became adept at the Morse code and was soon an expert telegrapher. At the age of sixteen, he left his home and his work as a train boy to take up the itinerant life of a telegraph operator. In 1868 he settled briefly in Boston before deciding to try his luck in New York City. The twenty-one year old Edison arrived in the metropolis flat broke. He knew only one person, and from this friend he was able to borrow an initial capital of one dollar. He had no place to sleep and spent the first night walking the streets. The Gold Indicator Company on Broad Street was a firm that, by means of a primitive telegraph system, kept the New York financial world informed of fluctuations in the price of gold. He was offered employment here, and a place to sleep in a corner of the basement. During the first few days he lived on that one-dollar loan, eating five-cent meals of apple dumpling and coffee.
Shortly after his arrival there was a break-down in Gold Indicator Companys cumbersome equipment. In the midst of the ensuing panic, the young Edison was able to locate the source of the trouble and make the necessary repairs. His fortunes then took a turn for the better. Western Union hired him as an inventor; here he designed and built what became known as the "stock ticker." Within two years after his arrival in New York, he was a man of considerable substance, engaged in manufacturing as well as inventing, and able to send substantial sums of money to his family in Port Huron. His enterprises kept him too busy to visit them and, in 1871, his mother, after a long illness, died before he could reach her bedside.
He became owner and manager of two manufacturing shops, one in Newark and one in Jersey City. He was attracted to the sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell, a worker in one of his shops. He reported later that his deafness was an asset in courtship because he had to get quite close to the young woman in order to hear her, a tactic which his shyness would not otherwise have allowed. They were married on Christmas Day, 1871. His non-stop work schedule, however, left him with little time for family life. His mental ability and power of concentration were extraordinary. Matthew Josephson, a biographer, writes:
Like one possessed, he would carry in his head the entire plan of some new and elaborate invention, in all its complex details, for days on end. He had the gift of total recall. His memory was so extensive that he would work out many aspects of a difficult problem in his mind, oblivious to his surroundings, forgetting the time, the place, and even his own identity.
Edisons career was by no means one of uninterrupted success. Though he was highly competent in business affairs as well as in the area of technology, he was frequently baffled by the world of high finance as it operated in the early days of Americas industrial revolution. Josephson states:
What Edison did not then [the early 1870s] realize, except dimly, was that the decision as to the commercial acceptance or refusal of inventions, and much of the control of industrial technology, turned not upon the question of merit or usefulness, but upon the outcome of intermittent wars or peace negotiations between the rival "barons" in the railroad and telegraph fields, such as the Goulds and Vanderbilts.
The next major stage of Edisons career began in 1876 when Edison established what was probably the worlds first "invention factory" in the little hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey, about 25 miles from New York City. A large barn-like structure was built into which $40,000 worth of equipment was installed during the first two years. Here Edison was able to concentrate on what he most wanted to do, the making of inventions. The industrial research laboratory Edison created here is now itself regarded as being one of his most remarkable inventions. It was here that Edison developed the phonograph and the first commercially practicable electric light bulb.
Before he started to work in earnest on the bulb, Edison worked out in his mind the entire plans for strategically located power plants and commercially feasible methods for delivering the necessary electric power to individual businesses and homes. The actual creation of the bulb was only the last step in the process. It was, however, the longest and most difficult step. The problem was to find a filament that would burn with sufficient light without being destroyed in the process. He had to devise a method for creating a bulb with near-perfect vacuum, a major feat in itself. More elusive was the problem of the right material for the filament. It was Edison who coined the description of genius as being "99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration."
A similar prolonged and intensive effort resulted in the phonograph, a device which Edison thought useful mainly in business for taking dictation and keeping records. He was slow to realize its enormous potential in the field of home entertainment. This was partly because his enjoyment of music was severely limited by his deafness. He was obliged to test his machines by picking up the sound through his teeth! It was the phonograph that first brought him national and even world-wide fame; he was becoming known as "the Wizard of Menlo Park," and Menlo Park was becoming a tourist attraction.
Edison was a cigar smoker, and one of his minor annoyances was that reporters helped themselves from the box in his office and kept depleting his supply. He tried keeping the box in his safe, but fellow workers would get it out. As a measure of desperation, he conspired with his cigar-maker to prepare a box of "cigars" whose filler consisted of old paper and hair. One day, he noticed that these were all gone. Upon investigation he discovered that he had smoked them all himself" This story gives one some idea of the degree to which Edisons mind was absorbed in his work. Needless to say, his eventual triumph with incandescent electric lighting increased even more his stature as a popular American hero.
His wife Mary was stricken with typhoid and died in 1884. Edison was thirty-eight. A few years later he found himself attracted to Mina Miller, whose father was a co-founder of Chautauqua, a devout Methodist, and quite different in his religious views from Edison, who never attended church -- his deafness providing a plausible excuse. In a diary which Edison kept during these days, he wrote: "My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sundays. It must be encrusted with a sort of irreligious tartar." Edison taught Mina the Morse code, and they enjoyed communicating secretly by tapping out messages on each others hands. Edison claims that he proposed and was accepted in this manner.
His prolonged search for a vegetable fiber suitable for use as a filament took him to Florida; he liked Florida so well that he built a winter home at Fort Myers. Shortly after, he purchased the Glenmount mansion in West Orange, New Jersey, and took up residence there after his marriage to Mina in 1886. Half a mile from this residence he created a new industrial research laboratory much larger than the one at Menlo Park. He was now engaged, not only in inventing, but also in the management of several manufacturing enterprises, as well as the promotion of his inventions abroad. Among the celebrities of England who recorded their voices on the Edison phonograph was Arthur Sullivan, who engraved the message:
I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evenings experiments -- astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever!
Josephson writes that "by 1888 [Edison] was actually one of Americas ranking industrialists, employing between 2000 and 3000 workers." Not all of his enterprises were successful. He spent five years devising machinery for mining iron ore in the wilds of Ogdensburg, New Jersey, machinery which could grind chunks of rock the size of a piano down through various stages to a fine powder. The discovery of a much richer source of iron ore in the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota put an end to the Ogdensburg project. Although he lost money in such ventures, he never lost enthusiasm, and would plunge immediately into some new endeavor. His pioneer work in cinematography was more successful, but his efforts to construct an improved storage battery and to discover an economical native source of rubber brought only limited success. None of these ventures were complete failures, for useful lessons were always learned, and new insights often came about by serendipity. When a fellow worker expressed discouragement over the lack of progress on the storage battery, Edison exclaimed: Why, man, Ive got a lot of results. I know several thousand things that wont work!" When his West Orange laboratory complex was destroyed by fire in December, 1914, Edison remarked: "I am 67; but Im not too old to make a fresh start. Ive been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui."
Henry Ford helped to finance the rebuilding of the plant. By then, these two had become good friends. It was Ford who spurred Edison in his search for a native vegetable source of rubber (goldenrod turned out to be the best candidate) -- until the development of synthetic rubber turned out to be a better approach. Economically and politically, Edison was conservative; he and Ford agreed on most matters, though Edison shied away from some of Fords more irrational binges, such as the latters rabid anti-Semitism, which Ford himself later repudiated. Josephson remarks that Ford was "dangerously ignorant." While Edison had little sympathy with labor unions, he believed his efforts were leading to the emancipation of humankind from the slavery of drudge labor. "Human slavery will not be abolished," he wrote, "until every task now accomplished by human hands is turned out by some machine. He was strongly imbued with the "Protestant work ethic," but he believed that labor should be a meaningful discipline, not a deadening monotony.
One area in which Edison was decidedly not a conservative was that of religion. He was a freethinker from the time he first read Paines Age of Reason as a boy. Josephson makes the interesting observation that "nonconformity was more widely respected in America, and religious freedom more honored, fifty years ago than now." Josephsons biography was published in 1959. His observation, sadly, is as true thirty years later.
Even so, Edison stirred up a storm when, in a 1910 interview with journalist Edward Marshall, Edison rejected the idea of the supernatural, along with such ideas as the soul, immortality, and a personal God. "Nature," he said, "is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent." Edison was denounced by many. A prominent psychologist exploded that "people who do not believe in immortality are abnormal, if not pathological." There were, of course, religious liberals who did not feel threatened by Edisons bluntness, but their opinions did not make good press copy. Edison believed that religion should place emphasis on morals rather than theology, that churches should "become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables ... which keep them from the proper emphasis on that one great Truth, the Golden Rule." Wyn Wachhorst, a biographer, points out, "Edison rejected three fundamental tenets of Christianity: the divinity of Christ, a personal God, and immortality;" and Josephson remarks:
For a while the controversy threatened to be as heated as those provoked during the Victorian era in England by the skeptical writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, which were the favorite reading of Edisons youth.
Edison was a great admirer of Robert Green Ingersoll and offered the extravagant tribute of suggesting that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man. He also admired other contemporary freethinkers, such as Luther Burbank, and his good friend John Burroughs, the naturalist.
Edison did apparently believe in a "Supreme Intelligence," in which respect he was a typical 19th century deist. "I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt." Toward the end of his life, Edison toyed with a sort of quasi-Leibnizian conception of microscopic "life entities" (which Ford referred to as "enities"); this line of thought led nowhere, though it encouraged Ford and others to hope that the great inventor would discover scientific evidence for a belief in immortality.
During his courtship of Mina Miller there was a brief period when Edison kept a diary. In this one finds many interesting and novel turns of phrase. Edison could write! He bought some peaches in Boston from a vendor who assured him that they had been grown in California. Edison wrote: "Think of a lie three thousand miles long." In the entry for July 17, 1885, he wrote: "Hottest day of the season. Hell must have sprung a leak." On the 29th of that month he reported that he had "slept as sound as a bug in a barrel of morphine." When urged to follow a fitness regime of exercise and calisthenics, he declined, saying, "I use my body just to carry my brain around."
Wachhorst notes that Edison, in the course of his life, took out 1093 patents, "the most ever granted to any one person." During the elaborate pageantry that Ford arranged for celebrating the 50th anniversary of the light bulb, a radio announcer solemnly intoned, "And Edison said: Let there be light!" At the evening banquet at Dearborn in his honor, the aging Edison collapsed, and it was feared that he was dying. This was in October, 1929, and Edison was 82. He rallied, however, and lived for two more years, but his stints in his beloved laboratory became briefer and less frequent. He still set problems for himself, such as a fog-penetrating light for aviators (after Lindbergs flight), and he speculated about the awesome possibilities of atomic energy:
There will one day spring from the brain of Science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so will abandon war for ever.
In August of 1931, he took a turn for the worse, and it was clear to everyone that he was slipping away. Someone asked him if he had thought about a life hereafter, and he replied, "It does not matter. No one knows." He passed away early Sunday morning, October 18, 1931. Josephson comments: "The electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, the radio, with all of which his life had been bound up, flashed the news to all corners of the world."
Index: Historical Writings (Biographies) Home to Positive Atheism
Graphic Rule
============== This actually caused a bit of an uproar, with public accusations of Edison being an atheist. He never allowed himself to get wrapped up in the public drama, but he wrote the following privately in a letter:
"You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made."
Edison specifically states that he believes in a Supreme Intelligence, but not the god of modern religions. Nature was Edisons god, and he considered it a sentient force. An Intelligence. He was a pantheist, believing that everything is part of an all-encompassing immanent God, or that the Universe (or Nature) and God (or divinity) are identical.
Edison put it even more simply when he wrote on a piece of stationary from his office,
"I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe."
In addition, his family also testified regarding his belief in a Supreme Being:
"He never was an atheist. Although he subscribed to no orthodox creed, no one who knew him could have doubted his belief in and reverence for a Supreme Intelligence, and his whole life, in which the ideal of honest, loving service to his fellowman was predominant, indicated faithfully those two commandments wherein lies `all the law and all the prophets."
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