Romanticizing the past in order to trivialize the present. (Updated)

Here, blogger Alex Knapp (from Outside The Beltway fame, also from my high school) argues that we need a new group of innovators to create the future. We need forward thinkers, and there are currently precious few because the intellectuals are going to the business sector and not the science and engineering sector.
Here, as I mentioned before, Sir James Dyson, famous for inventing bagless vacuum cleaners, argues that the world needs more engineers, more inventors, and a new "Space Race."
We see these "Tesla is so great, we need another Tesla. Edison was a genius, we need another Edison." arguments almost with calculated regularity.

But what is happening with science history is the same thing that happens with sports history. People in the present romanticize the past and in doing so, trivialize the accomplishments being made in the present. The fact is, if you want to truly understand Edison's genius, rather than reading about how he had over 1,000 patents, instead read this fair and balanced biography, which points out that although Edison was bright, he was also uneducated and many of his inventions came through brute force experimentation, not mused introspection. Although Edison's number of patents is astounding, what also is astounding is how easily people have forgotten that at Menlo Park Edison had over a hundred brilliant men and women working for him, including at one time Alexander Graham Bell and the aforementioned Nikola Tesla. Einstein's genius was not his scientific abilities but rather his ability to turn someone else's research into a marketable product.

In any case, it's so convenient to forget certain details and build these mountainous men out of Franklin, Tesla, Edison, and others, because it makes for a good story. It's not exciting to read about 120 men working 16 hour days experimenting with every type of silicon and carbon filament they could produce until they eventually found one that would emit quality light at high temperature (to improve upon an already invented light bulb concept)...it's much more exciting to imagine Edison, alone at some workshop bench, when an incandescent lightbulb design pops into his head and he builds it, a titanic genius rogue scientist badass with no peers who lit up the world. Nor does the image of Edison creatively and altruistically making human life better encompass the aggressive way he would destroy his competitors, either by buying their companies and closing them, disseminating propoganda, or staging stunts to show how dangerous his competition's inventions were.

Similarly, people point to Franklin's almanacs and kite experiment and say "what a genius!" but they don't mention that hundreds of other scientists were also experimenting with electricity at that point, and his theory of electron flow from negatively charged to positively charged electrodes was one of many plausible theories of the time.

In sports, we trivialize the accomplishments of athletes (who are breaking records constantly) and romanticize the historical athletes, assuming that the old heroes of the sport were unequivocal in their skill. To hear people talk, you'd think Babe Ruth was the only person competent with a bat. My friend likes to say "Deion Sanders was the greatest cover corner of all time. He covered one half the field, and the quarterback would still throw to the other half."
Although it is true that Deion was really, really good at football, it is wild hyperbole to claim that he did the above activity, or that quarterbacks would ignore his half the field. But what my friend is doing is romanticizing Deion into an impossible-to-equal player so that the greatness of current defensive backs in the NFL is trivial.

In short, before we start attacking the current gamut of scientists and engineers as mindless drones, we need to pause and look less romantically, and more empirically, at the facts. More patents are being issued today than were issued ever before. Technologies are emerging faster than consumers can buy them (I haven't even gotten a flat panel tv yet and already anything less than "1080i" is obsolete junk), and more than ever, science plays a part in everyday lives.
But the present tense makes it hard to sort through the millions of engineers and scientists and pick out that one or two people to supersize. It's much easier to look back and see Edison as the lone inventor-genius with no present day equal, rather than the capitalistic captain of a ship full of geniuses who in many instances achieved greater scientific breakthroughs than he did.

UPDATE: I suppose I should add that Thomas Alva Edison is not only one of my greatest heroes, but I scavenged my initials, T.A.E., from him. When I go fishing, I try to channel Edison's fishing trips he often too to the dock below his Florida home, where he would sit for hours in silence and brainstorm possible innovations. When I think about what kind of scientist-engineer I want to be, it is without question Edison. The idea that I'd lead a team of brilliant minds to make the world a better place is an extremely attractive one. But then again, I'm romanticizing him too.


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