Thomas Edison and the Female Brain

Accomplished people are not omniscient. Stop encouraging them to think otherwise.

In the course of researching my book on the history of technology, I recently read a long interview with Thomas Edison that appeared in Good Housekeeping.

The year was 1912. Electricity networks were spreading at a furious pace and inventors were delivering new electrical contraptions almost as quickly. The electric fan. The electric iron. The electric washing machine. The electric vacuum. It seemed every day brought word of another electric wonder.

So Good Housekeeping asked the Wizard of Menlo Park, the genius inventor who had done more than any other to usher in this dazzling electric age, what it meant for the future of the household. And women.

Which is strange when you think about it.

Edison was very knowledgable about the science of electricity. He knew as much or more about electrical engineering than any living person. But was he an expert on people and society? No. So why ask him about the future of people and society?

The answer lies in technological determinism: Good Housekeeping has assumed that technology shapes society, not the other way around. So to know what a new technology means for humanity’s future, you don’t ask someone with insight into humanity. You ask someone with insight into technology.

And Edison obliged. Because he, too, was a technological determinist.

Any of this sound familiar? Yeah. Look at all the ink spilled about what AI means for the future of humanity. Who do we go to for answers? The technologists.

The same old, stupid mistake marches on.

But give Edison credit. As you’ll read, Edison offered up an amazing vision of female emancipation and elevation of the whole human race. It’s a virtuoso performance.

Which sounds lovely. But when Edison gets into the particular mechanisms of this emancipation and elevation, things get … awkward. Also entertaining. I laughed out loud over and over.

The lesson here, I think, is two-fold.

One, knock off the technological determinism.

And two, even a man as brilliant and accomplished as Thomas Edison is neither omniscient nor all-wise. When people treat such a man like a universal sage whose every utterance is a pearl from heaven, they kindle the belief that they really do see all. Many excellent minds have been poisoned by such hubris. Look at Elon Musk and Peter Thiel today. Look at Henry Ford in the past.

We really should stop doing that.

Thomas Edison, 1912:

The housewife’s work, in days to come will amount to little more than superintendence, not of Norah, fresh from Ireland, or Gretchen, fresh from Germany, but of simplified electrical appliances; and that is why I said, to start with, that electricity will change the housewives of the future from drudges into engineers.

Edison goes on after this to explain how the price of electricity is dropping rapidly, which is driving the spread of electricity and the invention of new uses. All true.

But then he gets to the implications for humanity.

To diminish the necessity for utilizing man himself, or woman herself, as the motor-furnishing force for this life’s mechanical tasks, is to increase the potentiality of humanity’s brain power. When all our mental energy can be devoted to the highest tasks of which it may be capable, then shall we have made the greatest forward step in this world’s history. To so conserve our energy as to trend toward this eventuality is the tendency of the age.

It is there that electricity will play its greatest part in the development of woman-kind. It will not only permit women to more generally exercise their mental force, but will compel this exercise, and thus insure a brain development in them such as has been prevented in the past.

It will develop woman to that point where she can think straight. Direct thought is not at present an attribute of femininity. In this woman is now centuries, ages, even epochs behind man. That it is true is not her fault, but her misfortune, and the misfortune of the race.

Man must accept responsibility for it, for it has been through his superior physical strength that he has held his dominance over woman and delayed her growth. For ages woman was man’s chattel, and in such condition progress for her was impossible; now she is emerging into real sex independence, and the resulting outlook is a dazzling one.

This must be credited very largely to progression in mechanics; more especially to progression in electrical mechanics. Under these new influences woman’s brain will change and achieve new capabilities, both of effort and accomplishment.

Woman will grow more involved cross fibers and that will mean a new race of mankind.

Edison’s thinking here is a crude sort of Lamarckism. Named for the 18th century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Lamarckism is the idea that the characteristics an organism develops by use during its lifetime are passed on to its offspring. So the blacksmith who develops unusually strong arms from swinging hammers will have children with unusually strong arms. Despite the rise of Darwinism, Lamarckism was still a going concern in scientific circles on in 1912. So Edison wouldn’t have sounded as kooky then as he does now. Arrogant, certainly. The man is forecasting with certainty the evolution of humanity thanks to his own inventions. But maybe not so kooky.

Man is at present little, if any more than half what he might be. The child may be considered the mean between his father and his mother — between the undeveloped female and the developed male. The male has had his full of mental exercise since society first organized; it has been denied the female. To growth, exercise is an essential. An arm which never has been used will show weak muscles. A blacksmith’s arm is mighty because it lifts great weights, strikes heavy blows. Development of brain is not so very different from muscular development. The idle brain will atrophy, as will the idle arm.

The brain of woman in the past has been, to an extent, an idle brain. She has been occupied with petty tasks which, while holding her attention closely, have not given her brain exercise; such thinking as she has had time for, she has very largely found unnecessary because the stronger sex has done it for her. Through exercise men’s brains have developed from the low standard of the aborigine to the high standard of the modern man, and if, in the new era which is dawning, woman’s mental power increases with as great rapidity as that with which man’s has grown, the children of the future the children of the exercised, developed man, and of the exercised, developed woman will be of mental power incredible to us today.

The evolution of the brain of the male human has been the most wonderful of all the various phenomena of nature. When, in the new era of emancipation from the thraldom of the everyday mechanical task, the brain of woman undergoes a similar development, then, and only then, will the race begin to reach its ultimate. Yes, the mental power of the child born in the future will be marvelous, for to it women will make a contribution as great as that of man.

There never was any need for woman’s retardation. Man’s selfishness, his lust for ownership, must be held responsible for it. He was not willing to make woman equal partner in his various activities, and so he held her back from an ability to fill an equal partnership.

Less of this is evident in the development of the Jewish than in that of any other race. The almost supernatural business instinct of the Jew may be, I think, attributed to the fact that the various persecutions of the race have forced it to develop all its strength—its strength of women as well as that of men. Women have, from the beginning, taken part in Jewish councils; Jewish women have shared, always, in the pursuits of Jewish men; especially have they been permitted to play their part in business management. The result is that the Jewish child receives commercial acumen not only from the father’s but from the mother’s side.

This may be taken as an evidence of what may come in future when womankind in general is equally developed with men along all lines.