interesting blurb on Edison's notes

jesarg

365 days/year * 60 years of taking notes = 21,900 days of taking notes, including holidays and weekends. 5,000,000 pages / 21,900 days = 228 pages of notes per day. Serious writer's cramps.

Dinobot_Slag

Sounds like OCD to me. :)

Jim Crafton

Actually that's a good point. I'll bet that number (5 mil) is wrong. Where on earth would he have had th time to write all this *and* conduct/set up/plan experiments?

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Fernando A Gomez F

Maybe he liked writing with too much space.

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Dinobot_Slag

Some more interesting tidbits on Edison (from Wikipedia article): 1. He married twice, first marriage to a 16 year old at age 24, second marriage to 19 year old at age 39. 2. Nikola Tesla is quoted saying "He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene." Quite a character! :laugh: -- modified at 17:29 Tuesday 16th October, 2007

Christian Graus

ROTFL - Tesla was a cool guy.

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Chris Losinger

how large is a 5,000,000 page book? assume he's writing on 0.005 cm onionskin (aka airmail paper). 2.5M sheets of that is 12500cm thick.

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Ray Cassick

jesarg wrote:

228 pages of notes per day

Depends on how a 'page' is defined... Because of this quote 'He never met a sheet of paper he didn’t like.' I Have a feeling that his 'pages' were more along the lines of paper scraps at times. I keep a small notebook on my desk to make notations in all throughout the day. I scribble notes, draw diagrams, all kinds of things as they come to me just so I don't forget them at some latter point. I don't come close to 228 pages per day, but the point is that my 'pages' are very small (3x5) and sometimes contain no more than a drawing or quick sketch of an idea.

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Mike Hankey

Jim Crafton wrote:

Damn, that's one boatload of notes.

Yes it is! But if he collected all correspondance (in and out), stuff pertaining to his patents (all 1093? of them) and such it wouldn'd take long to gather a bunch real quick! What amazes me is that he organized it well enough he could manually search through it! WOW Mike

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Anthony Mushrow

Don't be so stupid... he could only afford really small peices of paper. :rolleyes: :laugh:

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_Damian S_

Christian Graus wrote:

Tesla was a cool guy

I thought Tesla was a COIL guy... hehe...

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Marc Clifton

Jim Crafton wrote:

Edison's diary (on which he took notes) is over 5 million pages long! 5 Million. Damn, that's one boatload of notes.

The days of true engineering are long gone. :( And we now say the code should be the documentation. What a joke! Marc

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martin_hughes

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. PS Bonus points for the first peron, without consulting the Internet!, who can name the film, character, actor and director.

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_Damian S_

I have no idea.... but it's probably one of those ultra-violent pop-culture type movies like Pulp Fiction...

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celso_cabaleiro

Could be this? movie : The third man. character : Harry Lime actor : Orson Wells director : Carol Reed. :)Where are my bonus?

martin_hughes

You're..... A WINNER! Help yourself to any of the imaginary prizes from my big back of imaginary prizes!

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Tom Delany

Here's a link to an interesting article that talks about that: http://history1900s.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fedison.rutgers.edu%2Fpapers.htm[^] A quote from the article: "Edison and his associates used ledger volumes, pocket notebooks, and unbound scraps of paper on an irregular basis throughout the inventor's career. In 1877, however, Edison instituted a more regular practice for note keeping that, with some refinements, continued throughout his life. At first Edison used 9" × 11" softcover tablets, whose sheets tore away from the top edge. Only a few of these notebooks were retained in their original condition. The majority were taken apart and, together with material on other loose pieces of paper, were organized according to the specific invention to which they related. By the fall of 1878, the number of notes and drawings from Edison's work on the electric light had grown so large that he adopted a standard-size hardbound notebook that would remain intact as a permanent record. Like the tablets, the notebooks were placed around the laboratory and often recorded the work of more than one experimenter. The first of these notebooks dates from November 1878. Edison and his associates continued to use such notebooks for recording experimental work at Menlo Park and at Edison's later laboratories. The archive at the Edison National Historic Site (ENHS) has over 3,000 such notebooks, each measuring 6" × 9" and containing approximately 280 pages." As it stated, Edison had many researchers working for him (I read somewhere that at one point, Tesla was one of them), and they all contributed to the volume of notes. Still, that is a huge volume of information. Especially without the aid of any modern office equipment like computers, photocopiers, etc. Quite an achievement in and of itself.

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