Thomas Edison, Sucker

How easy it is to fall for flimflam

An editorial in The New York Times, Tuesday, October 4, 1910:

Men whose pre-eminence in one or another domain of knowledge is realized by themselves and recognized by everybody else often make amusing and even pathetic displays of overconfidence in their own judgment, when they formulate conclusions in regard to matters lying outside the field of their special competency period.

Sage words from an anonymous editorialist, prompted by an interview with the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison.

Thomas Edison with metaphors

I’ve made a comment or two about Edison in the past, sometimes complimentary, sometimes less so. But when I stumbled across this article, I had to pass it on, even if I start to sound like an Edison obsessive. Because it describes one of the truly great minds of the modern era, a man who powerfully shaped the world we live in, making embarrassingly elementary mistakes.

It’s not schadenfreude the rest of us should feel reading this. It is an unsettling recognition that if Thomas Edison can be fooled by flimflam so easily, ordinary dimwits like you and me really do have to be on our toes.

The editorialist continues:

This curious tendency was well exemplified in the discussion of immortality in the soul by Mr. Edison, which we printed on Sunday, particularly when he told a little experience of his own as evidencing the probable possession by some men of one or more senses lacking in their fellows.

That’s some ugly writing. Allow me to translate: In the interview, Edison described a personal experience which he said proved that some people have psychic powers.

It seems that a mysterious visitor never seen before or since when once went to Mr. Edison's laboratory and excited his wonder by telling names secretly written by one of the inventor’s assistants. To quote from the interview: “He had him write the names in such a manner that he could not possibly by any trick see what he wrote by means of ordinary vision, and he did not touch the piece of paper. But he put his hand upon the man and read off the names correctly, as if they had been held before his eyes.”

Astonished, but not convinced, the sage of Menlo Park, then himself wrote a question — “Is there anything better for a storage battery than nickel-hydroxide?” Without looking at the paper the stranger answered, “there is nothing better,” and went away.

Declaring, whether naively or shrewdly, one hardly knows, the man was right, because there is nothing better, Mr. Edison used this performance as arguing the existence of a mystical sense! He, who knows so well, how his own experiments should be conditioned, was “astounded” by something that can be done in any one of a dozen ludicrously simple ways, not one of which requires the exercise of any power not possessed by any professional magician. And how rash the statement that the man “could not possibly” have seen what was written! — almost as rash as the other statement that for the construction of storage batteries and better material than that now used by Mr. Edison will never be found by himself or anybody else period. He did not seem to see that the answer to his own question involved vastly more than the reading of unseen writing, and by its wild audacity hinted clearly the man that the man was a skillful trickster.”

Magicians and conmen understand, and manipulate, core elements of human psychology. It doesn’t matter how intelligent the mark may be. It doesn’t matter how successful. We are all at risk.

Thank you, anonymous editorialist, for the reminder.