Friday, July 8, 2011

Edison's failed "electric pen" finds a new life

This story is from Randall Stross' biography of Thomas Edison, "The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World":

Using his experience developing the machinery to perforate the paper tapes used for transmitting messages automatically, he came up with a handheld, battery-powered electric pen. This was Edison's first significant venture outside of the telegraphic field and would be the direct antecedent to the mimeograph machine: The pen had a sharp needle that moved up and down rapidly, creating a stencil master that could be used to run off hundreds of copies. Edison was sanguine about its commercial prospects. "There is more money in this than telegraphy," he wrote a colleague in September 1875....

The isolation of the [new] Menlo Park setting infused the laboratory with a feeling of unbounded creative freedom. It encouraged an outlook that saw far, which also meant that little interest could be mustered for fixing problems with older products like the electric pen. Royalty checks for the pen were not adding up as Edison had expected because it had been sent into the field without anyone at the laboratory noticing that it was rather difficult to hold and use. It was likened by one unhappy customer to holding "'the business end' of a wasp on a sheet of paper and letting the insect sting holes into the sheet while you move him back and forth." A sales manager reporting to Edison tried to strike an impossible balance of optimism and realism: "The thing is highly praised everywhere but it will be harder to sell than you anticipate." The fault, Edison was told by another manager, was with the customers' "prejudice and stupidity." (The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890's, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.) p20-22.

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