Though Edison became rich and famous for his phonograph and his filament for the electric light bulb, some of his less heralded inventions were arguably as influential on the course of modern life. One of those was a new use for a compressed carbon “button,” which he discovered in 1877 could be placed inside the mouthpiece of a telephone to dramatically improve the quality and power of voice transmission. (He had first tried lead, copper, manganese, graphite, osmium, ruthenium, silicon, boron, iridium, platinum, and a wide variety of other liquids and fibers.) A decade later Edison improved upon the carbon button by proposing instead the use of tiny roasted carbon granules, derived from coal, in the vocal transmitter. These discoveries made the telephone a truly marketable invention.

Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing inventions work better than anyone had thought possible. But how they worked was to Edison less important. It was not true, as his onetime protégé Nikola Tesla insisted, that Edison disdained literature or ideas. He read compulsively, for instance—classics as well as newspapers. Edison often said that an early encounter with the writings of Thomas Paine had set his course in life. He maintained a vast library in his laboratory and pored over chemistry texts as he pursued his inventions. At the same time, however, he scorned talk about scientific theory, and even admitted that he knew little about electricity. He boasted that he had never made it past algebra in school. When necessary, Edison relied on assistants trained in math and science to investigate the principles of his inventions, since theoretical underpinnings were often beyond his interest. “I can always hire mathematicians,” he once said at the height of his fame, “but they can’t hire me.”

And it was true. In the boom times of the Industrial Revolution, in the words of one science historian, inventing products such as the sewing machine or barbed wire “required mainly mechanical skill and ingenuity, not scientific knowledge and training.” Engineers in the fields of mining, rubber, and energy on occasion consulted with academic geologists, chemists, and physicists. “But on the whole, the industrial machine throbbed ahead without scientists and research laboratories, without even many college-trained engineers. The advance of technology relied on the cut-and-try methods of ingenious tinkerers, unschooled save possibly for courses at mechanics institutes.” Indeed, by the time Mervin Kelly began his studies at the Missouri School of Mines around 1910, any sensible American boy with an eye on the future might be thinking of engineering; the new industrial age mostly needed men who could make bigger and better machines.

And yet the notion that scientists trained in subjects like physics could do intriguing and important work was gaining legitimacy. Americans still knew almost nothing about the sciences, but they were beginning to hear about a stream of revelations, all European in origin, regarding the hidden but fundamental structure of the visible world. Words like “radioactivity,” “X-rays,” and, especially, “quanta”—a new term for what transpired within the tiny world of molecules—started filtering into American universities and newspapers. These ideas almost certainly made their way to Missouri, where Kelly was paying his rent in Rolla—a room on the third floor of the metallurgical building—by working with the State Geological Survey for $18 a week numbering mineral specimens. During one of his summer breaks he took a job at a copper mine in Utah, an experience that repelled him permanently from a career as a mining engineer and pushed him closer to pure science. After graduating he took a one-year job teaching physics to undergraduates at the University of Kentucky. The school also gave him a master’s degree in that subject. After that, he headed north to Chicago.

Excerpted from ‘The Idea Factory’ – by Jon Gertner, pages 12-13