But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. Not all these inventions worked or made money. Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself.

What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles.

But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. There were ideas long before there were light bulbs.

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