There's no question that Thomas Alva Edison was a towering figure in his time. He lived from 1847 to 1931. When he was born, this country was lit by gas and whale oil. In the early nineteenth century the illumination of a city was an extraordinary event, staged to celebrate victory in battle or some other great triumph. By the time Edison died no city that called itself civilized was without electric lights, and rural electrification had begun. It was all his doing.
As every schoolchild knows, Edison invented the phonograph. He did not presume to found a symphony orchestra, or pass himself off as a composer. When he invented the kinetoscope, however--a box for viewing little movies, displayed in arcades--he built a moving picture studio and began making short films of dancing showgirls, prize fight exhibitions, boxing cats, and the electrocution of an unfortunate elephant. Within a very few years Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (the Trust) controlled the patents on nearly all the machinery of film making and was trying for a monopoly on production and distribution.
The Wizard of Menlo Park had trespassed in the realms of Art.
A modern film scholar, outraged at his temerity, has dismissed Edison as a mere hardware merchant. This would be true, if your average hardware merchant happened to have invented the hammer, the wrench, and the Phillips-head screw. No, Edison was a genius; just not an artistic genius. He had no respect for liberal arts and no understanding of the real potential of movies. The swift development of film into the art form it was to become left Edison in the dust. He put up a hell of a fight, though. Some say it was the persecutions of Edison and his hired thugs even more than the weather that drove the independent movie companies from North Jersey to Hollywood, California, a continent away.
