Edison's Speculations on the Future

Read Edison's Speculations About the Phonograph

Alternative Energy

In the mid-1890s, Edison began speculating about the future of alternative energy sources. These speculations were spurred by growing concern over the long-term supply of coal. In a November 1896 interview Edison speculated on alternative energy sources, promoting the development of solar power technology such as John Ericsson’s sun engine. And in an with the New York correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph on the future of electric automobiles and storage batteries.

Interview with Thomas Edison

Elbert Hubbard

He further elaborated his views of future alternative energy sources in an interview with Elbert Hubbard, author of the Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Men. Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Men “When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and tides are manifestations of energy.”

Medicine

One of Edison’s most oft-quote speculations appeared in an interview with a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published on January 1, 1903: “The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and cause and prevention of diseases.” In this interview Edison expressed his expectation of “great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease.” And in an era when patent medicines were still common, he noted, “Every new discovery in bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.”

Machines and Labor

One of the great topics of Edison’s era, which remains a source of controversy today, is the role of machines in replacing labor. His most detailed discussion of this subject appeared in one of several interviews conducted by journalist Edward Marshall. In 1926, Marshall published two interviews with Edison in The Forum. The first of these bore the title “Machine-Made Freedom.” Edison believed that “Man will progress in intellectual things according to his release from the mere motor-tasks.” The value of replacing human with machine power, he argued, was illustrated by the history of slavery:

While slave labor was available, the brains of men in general were not stimulated to the creation of machinery. This was more disastrous in its general effects than was realized by the majority, even of those opposed to slavery. It meant that human beings all along the line, not only the enslaved but the enslavers, could not be released by machinery for efforts better and more elevating than those to which they had been habituated in the past. Progress of mind became impossible.

That is the reason why I call machinery the greatest of emancipators. I will go farther and say that human slavery will not have been fully abolished until every task now accomplished by human hands is turned out by some machine, if it can be done as well or better by a machine.

Woman of the Future

Edison thought that electrical appliances would also liberate women from housework, a subject he had addressed in a 1912 interview with Marshall that appeared in Good Housekeeping under the title “The Woman of the Future.“

“The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman’s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman’s energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields.”

Edison's Prediction

Edison believed that electricity would fundamentally change the way we lived. His prediction, reported in the November 14, 1914 issue of the Literary Journal in an article titled “Edison’s Prophecy: A Duplex, Sleepless, Dinnerless World,” sounds eerily prophetic: “In the old days man went up and down with the sun. A million years from now we won’t go to bed at all. Really, sleep is an absurdity, a bad habit. We can’t suddenly throw off the thraldom of the habit, but we shall throw it off.”

Cities

Edison’s faith in science and technology to improve the human condition is apparent in another 1926 interview with Edward Marshall titled “The Scientific City of the Future.” In this interview Edison focuses on the same problem that would be the subject of General Motors Futurama exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 New York World’s Fair—automobile congestion. Edison thought that this problem could be solved by mathematicians and traffic engineering combined with the use of buses on streets and helicopters flying between skyscrapers. The city would be run by scientifically trained managers instead of politicians who would also ensure that the police were scientifically trained and managed. However, because Edison thought that his own deafness was an advantage. he dismissed concerns about noise pollution and suggested that “city dweller of the future… will be sufficiently deafened by Nature so that the noisest places will not be disagreeable to him.”

Communicating with the Dead

Among Edison’s most controversial interviews were those related to his belief that that consciousness existed in fundamental units that combined to make up each human being and that these existed prior to and after death. He first discussed this idea in his interviews with Lathrop and was doubtless among the imaginative ideas that led Lathrop to collaborate with Edison on their novel of the future.

Edison elaborated on this idea in a 1910 New York Times interview with Edward Marshall. This interview and its headline with headline “’No Immortality of the Soul’ Says Thomas A. Edison” stirred up an enormous controversy. This is also the first time Edison proposed that it might be possible to scientifically prove (or disprove) spiritualist beliefs in the existence of consciousness beyond death.

A Machine to Communicate with the Dead

A decade later, in interviews that appeared in Scientific American and The American Magazine, he claimed to be working on an apparatus that could be used by psychic investigators to try to communicate with the dead.

“I am not promising communication with those who have passed out of this life. I merely state that I am giving the psychic investigators an apparatus which may help them ln their work, just as optical experts have given the microscope to the medical world. And if this apparatus falls to reveal anything of exceptional interest, I am afraid that I shall have lost all faith in the survival of personality as we know it in this existence.”

Dubious Claims for the Machine

No verifiable evidence has ever been found regarding Edison’s work on a device to communicate with the dead. Nonetheless, the belief has persisted that Edison built such a device and some have even claimed to have knowledge of what the device looked like. The first description of such a device appeared in the October 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix:

In a darkened room in his great laboratory, surrounded with beakers, generators, and other experimental equipment, Edison set up a photo-electric cell. A tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface of this cell, where it was transformed instantly into a feeble electric current. Any object, no matter how thin, transparent or small, would cause a registration on the cell if it cut through the beam. This experiment, which the article describes as a failure, is likely related to Edison's experiments to find an unknown force he called "XYX." These experiments began in December 1885 and continued periodically into the 1920s.

An even more dubious device was described in the April 1963 issue of Fate. The author claimed that with the help of a medium tracings of the lost blueprints of Edison’s device had been found. Although a machine was made based on these tracings it did not work.

A third device known as the psychophone was also attributed to Edison. However, this was debunked on an episode of the PBS show History Detectives, which drew on research by the staff of the Edison Papers.

Has Man an Immortal Soul

If Edison did attempt to make such a device, it is clear that by time Marshall again interviewed him on the topic he thought the difficulties of such an investigation would be too difficult to overcome. This interview appeared under the headline “Has Man an Immortal Soul” in the November 1926 issue of The Forum. It included the following discussion by Edison of the difficulties that confronted scientific research on the subject.

“There are two reasons why we do not possess positive knowledge on the difficult subject of the soul and immortality. Principal of these is the fact that we do not at present know how even to begin investigation of them. Thought in this line has been nebulous and loose. Mathematics, which is the only exact science we possess, cannot be applied to it in any way as yet discovered. The Soul apparently is not something to be analyzed by chemists or weighed in scales, or photographed, or recorded by any instruments whatever.”

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