Lessons from history’s greatest R&D labs

Learning from the First Electrical R&D Labs

I find it exciting that Edison’s Menlo Park lab is a North Star for Answer.AI. I covered Edison’s work in several pieces because I think evergreen lessons can be drawn from his work. But I think a more complete way to incorporate lessons from the 1870-1920 electrical space is to draw on the work of both Edison’s Menlo Park Lab and the young GE Research Lab. The latter operated as a more traditional industrial R&D lab. GE Research’s history holds many lessons to help steer Answer.AI’s problem selection and work on its standard projects. However, exceptionally ambitious projects may draw more heavily on the lessons of Edison’s lab.

(As a note, while Edison General Electric was one of the two companies that merged to become GE — along with Thomson-Houston Electric — Edison had essentially nothing to do with the formation of the iconic GE Research Laboratory.)

Different types of projects characterized the work of the two electrical labs. When it came to electrical work, for years, Edison’s lab and mental efforts were focused on doing everything necessary to bring a single, revolutionary product to market. On the other hand, GE Research usually had many separate courses of research underway at once. These projects all sought to improve the science and production of existing lighting systems, but they were otherwise often unrelated to each other. Additionally, GE’s work could be categorized as more traditional “applied research.” The lab was not actively looking to create a field of technology from scratch as Edison did. GE Research’s projects were often novel and ambitious, but in a different way than Edison’s.

Later, I will explore the types of novelty the GE Research Lab pursued. First, I’ll give the reader a more fine-grained idea of how Edison’s lighting project actually operated.

Lessons from Edison’s Work on Electricity

Edison’s lighting work provides great management lessons for those looking to direct a large chunk of a lab’s efforts toward a single, big idea.

Edison’s major contribution to the field of electricity was not inventing each of the components in his lighting system, but in turning a mass of disparate gadgets, scientific principles, and academic misconceptions into a world-changing system. The burden of doing “night science” — as Francois Jacob refers to it — largely fell on Edison. In the late 1870s, nobody knew much about electricity yet. The existing academic literature had more holes than answers, and many of its so-called “answers” turned out to be wrong or misleading. From this shaky starting point, Edison proceeded. He combined his unique mix of attributes and experience to deliver a world-changing system. These included: knowledge of several adjacent scientific fields, deep knowledge in then-overlooked experimental areas, market knowledge, manufacturing knowledge, and the ability to adequately operate a small research team.

In large part, Edison created his lab as a way to scale himself. As a result, to understand how his lab operated, one needs to know how Edison himself carried out his explorations. Edison was one of the more stubborn experimentalists of all time. He spent most of his waking hours carrying out one experiment or another. While he did pore over scientific literature, for him, nothing was settled until he proved it for himself at the lab bench.

I write in my Works in Progress piece:

Edison respected scientific theory, but he respected experience far more. In Edison’s era of academia as well as today’s, many professors had a certain preference for theory or ‘the literature’ over hands-on improvement. Because of this Edison did not care much for professors. He was even known to go on long diatribes, during which he had assistants open up textbooks, locate scientific statements that he knew to be untrue from experience, and quickly rig up lab demonstrations to disprove them. ‘Professor This or That will controvert [dispute with reasoning] you out of the books, and prove out of the books that it can’t be so, though you have it right in the hollow of your hand and could break his spectacles with it.’

Contained in his head was a database of countless experiments and results that made it seem as if his “intuition” was far beyond his contemporaries. This left him with an unparalleled skillset and body of knowledge. If anyone could feel comfortable pursuing a project that others had previously failed at, it was Edison. Edison’s confidence in his skills was never more on display than when he chose to pursue his lighting work. Many in the scientific establishment knew electric bulb lighting was technically possible, but claimed they had proven that it could never be economical. Edison disagreed.

On top of Edison’s admirable approach to experimentation, he brought a high level of practicality to his process. He knew his inventions needed to make commercial sense in order to make it out of the lab. So, even in early courses of experimentation, he kept factors like manufacturability in mind. He wouldn’t commit much time to something that didn’t make commercial sense. With that being said, Edison wanted to change the world with his technologies more than he wanted to get rich. So, the practical factors he paid aggressive attention to were primarily treated as constraints. He did not optimize for profitability, but he knew his ideas needed to be profitable. Nobody who wanted to optimize for profit would have pursued lighting in the way Edison did. The technical risks were too great.

Edison was able to imagine an ambitious system that required many technical advances. It was so futuristic that maybe only he was capable of coming up with it. But just as impressively, he was able to do it profitably and on schedule. His dogged commitment to experimentation seems to be largely responsible for this. Edison and “the boys” constantly experimented on every piece of the process to improve and learn more about all the sub-systems in Edison’s grand system. They wanted to know how every piece of every sub-system performed in all conditions. I’ll share just two excerpts from my Works in Progress piece as examples.

The first is from Edmund Morris’ biography of Edison. It recounts how thoroughly Edison and his trusted aid, William Batchelor, were in carrying out round after round of filament experiments:

For week after week the two men cut, planed, and carbonized filaments from every fibrous substance they could get — hickory, holly, maple, and rosewood splints; sassafras pith; monkey bast; ginger root; pomegranate peel; fragrant strips of eucalyptus and cinnamon bark; milkweed; palm fronds; spruce; tarred cotton; baywood; cedar; flax; coconut coir; jute boiled in maple syrup; manila hemp twined and papered and soaked in olive oil. Edison rejected more than six thousand specimens of varying integrity, as they all warped or split…

In the dog days, as heat beat down on straw hats and rattan parasols, the idea of bamboo suggested itself to him. Nothing in nature grew straighter and stronger than this pipelike grass, so easy to slice from the culm and to bend, with its silicous epidermis taking the strain of internal compression. It had the additional virtue, ideal for his purpose, of being highly resistant to the voltaic force. When he carbonized a few loops sliced off the outside edge of a fan, they registered 188 ohms cold, and one glowed as bright as 44 candles in vacuo.

This approach went far beyond bulb filaments. The following excerpt describes the work of one of Edison’s lead mechanics in turning the Menlo Park yard into a 1/3 scale model of what they would later install in Lower Manhattan. I write:

[Kruesi, Edison’s mechanic] along with a group of engineers and a team of six diggers, turned the excess land of the lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey…into a one-third-scale model of Edison’s first lighting district in lower Manhattan. This team tested and re-tested the electricity delivery system, digging up Menlo Park’s red clay to lay and re-lay an experimental conduit system. The team carried out countless tests to ensure that they found materials to efficiently carry the electric current while also keeping the delicate materials safe from water and ever-present New York City rats.

The entire process was marked by the classic trial-and-error of the Edisonian process. The first subterranean conducting lines and electrical boxes the group laid were completely ruined by two weeks of rain — despite being coated with coal tar and protected with extra wood. While the diggers dug up the failed attempt so the damage could be examined, Kruesi and a young researcher…studied and tirelessly tested unbelievable numbers of chemical combinations — making full use of the laboratory library and chemical room — until, finally, a blend of ‘refined Trinidad asphaltum boiled in oxidized linseed oil with paraffin and a little beeswax’ was found that protected the electrical current from rain and rats. >

Edison built his own style of dogged experimentation into the culture of his lab. Since the lab was meant to scale Edison, this makes perfect sense; he was a man with far more ideas than hands. So, he hired more hands. Edison did not search far and wide to hire the world’s best research minds, and many of those he employed did not even have scientific backgrounds. This didn’t matter much to Edison because most of them were employed to undertake courses of research that he had directed them to pursue. A couple of his Menlo Park employees had advanced scientific degrees, but far more did not. For the most part, the lab and its activities were steered by Edison and his ideas. As a result, the productivity of his lab followed wherever his attention went. After some time working on a project area, Edison would often grow antsy and wish to move on to the next thing — he craved novelty. The lab’s resources and extra hands would move with him. As we’ll see in the next section, this stands in stark contrast to how the GE Research Lab recruited and chose problems.

Menlo Park’s electrical activities provide a great management playbook for what it looks like to direct a lab’s efforts toward a single, major system. If Answer.AI does not want to go all-in on one thing, it can still find a way to apply this playbook to a certain focused team of employees while leaving the others to tinker around with exploration-stage ideas. In Edison’s less-focused experimentation periods, his lab served as more of an “invention factory,” doing this sort of fiddling. Additionally, Edison’s preference for application and commitment to experimentation over theory in a young area of science can surely provide Answer.AI some inspiration.

Of course, Edison did some things better than others. Edison’s most easily-spottable “deficiency” is that his lab was largely dependent on him. Without him and his big ideas, the lab would have probably ground to a halt. While Edison’s technical vision, practicality, and experimental approach are absolutely worthy of emulation, the lessons of GE Research should probably be added into the mix as well. GE operated as more of a prototypical industrial R&D lab with an approach quite suited to the fact that the science of electricity was beginning to mature in the early 1900s.

Lessons from the Young GE Research Laboratory

The young GE Research lab took a different approach to electricity research than Edison. The lab worked on many unrelated projects at once, recruited more talented researchers, and allowed these talented researchers more freedom to exert the scientific method on commercializable projects. The lab did not undertake projects that were as purposely futuristic as Edison did. Nobody from the lab earned nicknames like “the Wizard of Menlo” or “the Wizard of Recorded Sound.” But early GE Research was still responsible for a Nobel Prize and making the light bulb a much-improved, more cost-effective technology.

Elting Morison wrote the following on the lasting impact of GE Research’s early decades:

There seems little doubt that…much that was done in Schenectady in electrical engineering and some parts of physics was both better done and more interesting than what was being done in those fields in any American university.

In its heyday, even great researchers like Karl Compton hoped to shift their academic departments to operate more like GE Research.

While GE did simultaneously pursue diverse projects, there was a unifying thread holding all of the projects at GE Research together. Each project aimed to improve the quality and profitability of GE’s products and manufacturing. Under that unifying theme, all kinds of projects were encouraged. Much of the research was very applied, particularly in the early years when the lab was still proving itself.

William Coolidge was one of the lab’s most talented applied researchers in its early years. Coolidge joined the lab in 1905, part-time while teaching courses at MIT. Coolidge had the kind of toolkit typical of many MIT professors in that era. He had a far greater grasp of the science of physics and metallurgy than somebody like a blacksmith; he was simultaneously far closer to a blacksmith than one would ever expect a university researcher to be. With this differentiated toolkit, he did science in a way that was not typical of academics. In describing the process that led to his successes at GE, he claimed that he was, “guided in the main by experiment itself rather than by metallurgical knowledge.”

Willis Whitney, the founding Director of GE Research and former MIT professor, recruited Coolidge to build on findings Whitney himself had made. Whitney’s initial course of research had found an improved metalized carbonized cellulose filament for bulbs. Whitney’s results proved very profitable for the lab. It seemed reasonable that an actual metal filament could perform even better. Whitney thought Coolidge and his metal-working skills were well-suited to pursue the area further.

Coolidge expertly applied practical skills in concert with scientific knowledge to pursue the problem. Elting Morison described a small sample of Coolidge’s workflow:

He suspended tungsten powder in an amalgam of bismuth, cadmium, and mercury. He then passed the resulting substance through tiny dies — drawing it — and obtained a silvery pliable wire. At that time, he thought he had reached ductility and the search was over. But when a current was passed through this wire the mercury, cadmium, and bismuth distilled out, leaving, unfortunately, a nonductile tungsten. But it also proved to be tungsten in the purest state he had yet produced.

I continue in my FreakTakes piece, writing:

He eventually iterated his way to a workable process where…the more pure tungsten was put through a specific combination of metal-working processes at a temperature that worked that produced rods of tungsten about 1 mm in diameter. These 1mm rods could then be drawn and re-drawn through rods of decreasing size until you were left with wires of tungsten .01 mm in diameter. When put in the vacuum-sealed bulb, electricity ran through the tungsten filaments and demonstrated an efficiency of 1 watt per candle — extending the life of a bulb up to 27x.

Within 5 years, 85% of all lamps would be made from tungsten. As the project went on, more and more research chemists and technical assistants grew to be involved in the wide-ranging steps and combinations involved in Coolidge’s experiments. But it worked. GE had the factories re-fit and deployed the new bulb. Coolidge moved on to other research.

The success of Coolidge’s hybrid work style, not dissimilar to Edison’s, is surely a useful data point to Answer.AI. But GE Research also did work that went far beyond Coolidge’s technically adept, applied science. The lab was fantastic at making use of talented individuals who were very academic. Irving Langmuir was a prime example. I described his interests in my original piece:

It should be noted…Langmuir did not even care about lightbulbs. Well, I guess that is not technically true. The bulb interested him because 1) he thought a metal like tungsten was cool because it could accept really high temperatures which opened up options to the scientist working with it and 2) these vacuum-sealed bulbs provided a pristine environment for controlled scientific investigations.

To Langmuir, light bulbs were primarily a playground in which to do his science. But Willis Whitney knew how to take an individual like that and direct his energy towards productive ends. The lab deployed a principle that I call extending a “long leash within a narrow fence” to basic researchers like Langmuir.

The way the lab facilitated this was rather simple. On his first day, Langmuir was told to walk around the applied end of the lab and ask people about their projects. Whitney permitted him to undertake any course of investigation of any phenomenon he wanted, but it had to be directly related to an existing problem/limitation/constraint that the applied folks were working through. These applied folks were working on projects that rather directly plugged into GE’s operations, so there was minimal risk of Langmuir’s work not amounting to anything useful if he succeeded and found answers. With that assurance of applicability, Langmuir was given extensive timelines to find answers to open questions.

Langmuir’s first course of research focused on the constant bulb-blackening problem common to bulbs at the time. The problem was generally attributed to a bulb’s imperfect vacuum. Langmuir found this problem to be a great excuse to carry out a course of experimentation he found interesting. Morison described Langmuir’s thought process as follows:

If residual gases — imperfect vacua — produced a bad effect — blackening — here was a fine opportunity to study the effects produced by different gases introduced one by one into the bulb. What he wanted to do, he told Whitney, was simply to plot the interactions of various gases exposed at low pressures to very high temperatures in the filament. Nobody knew very much about this phenomena and he wanted to look into it simply “to satisfy [his] own curiosity.”

Langmuir carried out this course of research over three years. There were many gases and temperatures to test, which took time. But unforeseen results constantly took Langmuir off in different directions. Exploring these unforeseen results often entailed new courses of experiment altogether. With his long leash, Langmuir was able to figure out that imperfect vacua were not what caused bulb blackening at all. Rather, it was that tungsten vapor particles were finding their way onto the wall of the bulb. Temperature was the issue.

He also discovered that different gases markedly changed the rate of evaporation. One extreme example was nitrogen, which reduced the evaporation rate by 100-fold. However, adding nitrogen to the bulbs caused the electrical efficiency of the system to decrease drastically. So, the existing bulb design with nitrogen added was less cost-efficient than the normal bulbs. But Langmuir was undeterred. This was progress.

Existing fundamental research in this area led him to believe that this efficiency issue could be alleviated by increasing the diameter of the filament. Further experimentation proved this to work. He also found that coiling the filament in a certain way could mitigate the heat loss issue. The final result was a novel bulb that used an inert gas instead of a vacuum to reduce bulb blackening. Along with the coiled tungsten filament, this new bulb only required .5 watts per candle and lasted three times longer than any other bulb.

Once he passed the bulb project onto the engineering team at GE Research, Langmuir set his sights on an anomaly he had come across talking with the lab’s more applied staff. The bulbs in the lab had a design that depended on only a few milliamperes of current flowing across the space between one end of the filament and the other. Langmuir noted this anomaly in a letter to Scientific Monthly, writing:

This fact seemed very peculiar to me, for the work of Richardson and others had indicated that at temperatures as high as those used in the tungsten-filament lamp, currents of many amperes should flow across the space. In other words, according to the then-accepted theory of the electron emission from hot filaments, a serious difficulty should have been encountered in the construction of tungsten-filament lamps. The fact that we did not meet any such difficulty therefore seemed to me a peculiar fact that should be investigated.

In the brief course of exploration that followed from Langmuir, he discovered what is now known as the space-charge effect. This work combined with follow-on work from Coolidge to produce an entirely new kind of GE X-ray tube.

Under this “long leash within a narrow fence” guideline, Irving Langmuir would go on to be partially responsible for a handful of new and improved product lines at GE. Additionally, the knowledge he created with his tungsten filament work went far beyond padding GE’s balance sheet. Over the course of his project, he noted that the way tungsten vapor condensed did not gel with existing academic theory. His subsequent exploration of this phenomenon led Langmuir to be credited with founding the field of surface chemistry. Langmuir earned himself a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

There was a symbiosis in the GE lab between Langmuir types and the Coolidge types — the latter skillset being more standard in the lab. I imagine Answer.AI will have no shortage of Coolidge-like individuals: bright, Kaggle Grandmaster-type individuals who understand academic theory but whose specialty is in expertly applying their craft in dirty, practical situations. Someone like Jeremy Howard will likely have great intuition about how to utilize these individuals. The GE playbook — with its “long leash within a narrow fence” principles — can help Answer.AI think through how to deploy basic researchers in its operations

Langmuir’s career at the GE Research Lab provides a clear roadmap for how to optimally leverage a basic researcher’s energies in an applied context. Langmuir getting paid to investigate any anomalies would likely have satisfied his curiosity. However, it was his investigation of the right anomalies that made this a beneficial arrangement for GE Research.

In general, there is a time and place to apply insights from either Edison’s playbook or GE’s. The maturity of a given research field or technology area has a strong hand in dictating which set of principles is more applicable. Edison came first and had to shoulder the burden of developing an extensive technical system to power the “killer app” that was his bulb. GE Research had the benefit of working on an existing technology area with moderately developed science and existing user technology (thanks to Edison), but the technology still needed a lot of work to become reliable and economical.

A lab can simultaneously employ both playbooks. Even most of Edison’s projects were modest in relation to his lighting work. When inventing for existing fields, such as telephony, Edison contained his inventive streak to working within existing technical systems. He knew nobody would rebuild entirely new telephone infrastructure just because the young inventor had rigged up a moderately improved but completely different version. When adding to Bell’s telephone, he simply invented a carbon transmitter that could plug directly into the system. This device made voices come through much clearer. That was it: one gadget that cleanly plugged into the existing system. Technologies like these may not be as earth-shattering as Edison’s lighting system, but they were still enough to make him a world-famous inventor in his own time.

It was about impact. In optimizing impact, I thoroughly suspect Answer.AI to make great use of the playbooks of both of these small industrial research giants.