Edison's Infamous Questions

Factual knowledge can be far more than trivia

In May, 1911, most Americans could see in their own lives that technology was remaking American society for the better, and they revered the man they most credited for the transformation.

But Thomas Edison was still capable of causing a controversy.

That’s what he got when a young graduate of Cornell complained to the press about being rejected for employment with one of Edison’s companies. He had been asked a long series of odd questions at his interview. “What is the first line of the Aeneid?” “How is leather tanned?” “What state is the name of a famous violin maker?” There were 113 questions like these. Apparently, the applicant hadn’t done well and was shown the door.

What has any of that to do with the job? he moaned in understandable frustration.

Working from memory, the man reconstructed the questions, which were duly published. That annoyed Edison as it rendered the questions useless.

Edison worked up another list of questions — which were swiftly leaked and published.

This blew up into an improbable controversy, thanks, no doubt, to inflammatory headlines like, “IF YOU CANNOT ANSWER THESE YOU’RE IGNORANT, EDISON SAYS.”

Here is a sample of the questions as they appeared in The New York Times.

Are you ignorant? Well, are you?!

Edison was the rare sort of person who could breeze through a quiz like this because, when he wasn’t working, he was reading. Newspapers, journals, magazines. “About forty pounds of books a month,” he claimed. Edison wanted to hire future Edisons, so he set a test he could pass.

When the story broke, the public mostly shared the feelings of the spurned Cornell man. This isn’t diagnostic of intelligence. It’s trivia.

Academics and intellectuals agreed. In Harper’s, wrote Edmund Morris, Edison’s most recent biographer, Edison was accused of “philallatopism” — or pleasure in exposing the ignorance of others. (The next time you’re at a dinner party, ask others what “philallatopism” means. When they don’t know, nod smugly. You’ll get to enjoy philallatopism and if you are accused of the crime you can defend yourself on the grounds that you were merely illustrating.)

Newspapermen sought comment from the other geniuses of the age. Nikola Tesla said, “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.” In Boston to give a lecture, Albert Einstein was asked some of the questions through a translator. After being asked “what is the speed of sound?” Einstein replied that he didn’t bother to memorize that which is easily found in textbooks. The New York Times was satisfied. “[Einstein] did not tackle the whole proposition,” the reporter summed up, “but so far as he went he failed and thereby became one of us.”

Einstein also delivered a pithy statement that is today a favourite of progressive educators and those websites and social media accounts that promote “inspirational” quotations: “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” (As someone who has investigated the origins of quite a number of famous statements, and discovered how common it is for them to be shortened, smoothed, and polished with each repetition, I find that statement suspiciously pithy. Einstein tended to speak precisely, and in German. Pithy is hard. Pithy with precision is brutal. Pithy with precision in German is unthinkable even for Einstein.)

The controversy became big enough that advertisers sought to capitalize. Here is an ad for Encyclopedia Britannica in The New York Times.

Assailed by the common man and geniuses alike, Edison understandably became defensive. The questions are not intended to be an intelligence test, he insisted. Nor are they a test of reasoning or aptitude. It is “a rough test,” he said, intended to get at what he most valued in people — “alertness of mind…power of observation, and interest in the life of the world.” Or to put it more succinctly, wrote Edmund Morris, it was a test of curiosity.

I had to smile when I read that.

When I lecture about the traits and habits of mind of superforecasters — people who did exceptionally well in the landmark research program Phil Tetlock led, and Phil and I wrote about in Superforecasting — I go through what various tests revealed. That they are above average intelligence (but not extremely so). That they are numerate. That they are quite knowledgable. That they score high in “need for cognition” (that is, they enjoy thinking carefully). And so on. But at the top of my list is curiosity.

When interviewing superforecasters, I had some standard questions. One went something like, “you are often asked to forecast very obscure matters. What’s the first thought you have when you are asked something like, ‘who will win the election in Ghana?”

Perhaps my model of fellow human beings is deficient but I’m pretty sure that if you were to ask one hundred randomly selected Americans “who will win the election in Ghana?” most responses would fall somewhere on a spectrum between “what’s Ghana?” and “who cares?” Not superforecasters.

One superforecaster’s response nicely captured the difference. He shrugged, but not dismissively. “This is a chance to learn something about Ghana,” he said.

This individual was a retired computer programmer. He was wealthy and lived in a lovely house in the perfect little Southern California enclave of Santa Barbara. He could spend his time doing anything he wanted. And what he most wanted to do was learn new things.

That’s curiosity.

Find someone with consistently excellent judgment — in the sense used in the superforecasting research, which is accuracy — and there’s a strong chance you’ve found someone with oodles of curiosity.

I once attended a dinner hosted by a Silicon Valley VC who, after dessert, sat down with Bill Gates on a little dais and proceeded to pepper his guest with seemingly random questions. For an hour and a half, Gates talked at length about the most disparate subjects imaginable. And in every one, he sounded astonishingly well-informed and thoughtful. Of course I am not well-informed and thoughtful on all those subjects, so I was suspicious of my judgement. Maybe, I thought, Gates is just an exceptional bullshitter. But then Gates was asked to riff on a subject that, by coincidence, I had been studying intensively, full-time, for a year — and he quickly convinced me he knew vastly more about it than I did.

I’m pretty sure Bill Gates would pass Edison’s test. In fact, reading Morris’ description of Edison’s relentless curiosity, I was astonished at how perfectly it fit Gates. Swap out “Edison” for “Gates” and whole passages would still work.

So I think just as highly of curiosity as Edison did.

But how exactly do you test for it?

No, do not Google “curiosity test.” The Internet is stuffed with rubbish.

The superforecasters were assessed — with well-validated tests — for what psychologists call “fluid” and “crystallized” intelligence. The former is the ability to reason. It’s what is measured with standard IQ tests like Raven’s Progressive Matrices. But “crystallized intelligence” is “knowledge” to you and me. Superforecasters scored high on both tests.

Scoring high on crystallized intelligence is a decent indication that they are curious people, for a simple reason. We all accumulate knowledge as we proceed through life. But the highly curious person — the sort of person who says, “this is a chance to learn something about Ghana” — will collect far more knowledge over the years and decades than the sort of person who has little interest in matters beyond immediate concern. Measuring “crystallized intelligence” doesn’t measure curiosity. But it does measure a by-product of curiosity. And that makes it’s a rough but decent proxy.

Edison’s thinking was not wrong, although his execution left much to be desired. His questions were far too often picayune (“what state is the name of a violin maker?”) or overly precise. We can be confident Albert Einstein knew a thing or two about the speed of sound even though he couldn’t fetch the precise figure from memory (or rather figures, since the answer varies by conditions) so asking him to recall a precise figure tested little beyond his ability and willingness to commit to memory things which do not need to be committed to memory. That’s a great test for Jeopardy contestants; it’s a bad way to measure curiosity. Instead of “what is the speed of sound?” Edison could have asked something like “how do the speeds of sound and light compare?” That would have directed the question closer to core concepts — providing a much more meaningful test of whether someone is familiar with sound and light.

Of course I’m not writing this to complain about Edison’s treatment by the press more than 100 years ago. What concerns me are the objections put to Edison — which are still very much alive today.

To grossly simplify, one of those objections is reasonable. Another is not.

The reasonable objection is basically a moderate reading of Einstein’s famous (and suspiciously pithy) maxim: Education absolutely should be about far more than stuffing facts into memory. Unfortunately, at many times, in many places, this seeming truism was not observed, and education has amounted to little more than rote instruction. Memorize this list, that list, another list, regurgitate for the test, graduate. That’s foolish. The core of education must be learning to think.

The unreasonable objection is an extreme reading of the same maxim: Mere facts have little or no value. After all, who cares what the speed of sound is? Or anything else on Edison’s list? You can look it up if you need it. Or today, Google it.

If that sounds so extreme that no intelligent person would ever think it, I invite you to have a look at the history of education: For more than a century, many of the more radical progressive educators have pushed just such views. (For more, see E. D. Hirsch’s 1987 classic, Cultural Literacy. I know Hirsch is controversial, and I’m not a fan of all he did in applying his thinking. But I do believe his core insight is correct.)

What those who think this way didn’t (and don’t) recognize is that we can’t reason and imagine and create — much less engage in public forums — empty-handed. Einstein may not have committed the precise speed of sound to memory, but we can be sure he knew a hell of a lot about what sound is, why it is as slow as it is, why light is so much faster, and much else. So, yes, if in the course of his work he needed to know precisely what the speed of sound is, he could look up the number. But the only way he could know that he needed to know the precise speed of sound was by working with other factual knowledge he had mastered and committed to memory.

Granted, then, the heart of education is indeed learning to think. But in order to think, we must master facts and commit many to memory, which makes the development of “crystallized intelligence” an essential part of education, too. It’s also an inevitable product of a curious mind at work — and curiosity, one would think, is something we can all agree should be cultivated whenever and however possible.

Yes, Edison’s questions were a little odd. But he was on to something. And I don’t care how many 1911 editorialists and letter-writers I piss off by saying so.

One last thing

I love etymology so I wanted to know where “philallatopism” came from. After I wrote this, I Googled it. And got four hits.

Four. In all the Internet. That’s crazy. I swear you could get more hits by entering a handful of randomly selected letters. Even stranger, all four hits were published after the Edmund Morris biography was published and/or came directly from it.

I tried variant spellings. Nothing. I searched the Harper’s archive. Nothing.

I have no explanation. I’d be delighted if those of you who are etymologically inclined, or more adept at digital searches of archives than I, can shed some light.

In the meantime, I will eschew the pleasure of sneering at my dinner party guests if they don’t know what “philallatopism” means.