Hollywood produced a number of biographical movies during the 1930s, mostly of scientists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers. The films stuck more or less closely to the historical facts. This particular example is a little bland. Thomas Alva Edison (1847 - 1931) was not an adventurer. He was an inventor, a kind of combination engineer and entrepreneur.
Since Edison wasn't somebody like Henry Stanley, the African explorer that Spencer Tracy had played earlier, nobody gets shot and no one's head is wrenched off. The most dramatic moment occurs when Tracy, as Edison, is bent over his new electric light and the filament burns out. Tracy's face drops a little.
Now, Edison's life was NOT entirely uninteresting but Hollywood must observe certain conventions. The man must be entirely honorable. There must be no ambiguity about that. And he must be guided by a vision almost divine in its generosity.
We may have no mention of the fact that Edison married Mary when she was a girl of sixteen. Yum yum. And we may mention that he was a school drop out but not that he knew little of mathematics or theory, that he was a born tinkerer who scorned figuring things out ahead of time, in favor of a method of successive approximations. Edison must retain his good nature through the course of many failures and his workers must be devoted to him, so much so that they'll labor at their benches for nothing.
We can't let it be known that he was a mean, stingy, dishonest son of a gun. "One of Edison's assistants was Nikola Tesla. Tesla claimed that Edison had promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in making improvements to his DC generation plants. Several months later, when Tesla had finished the work and asked to be paid, he said that Edison replied, 'When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke.' "Tesla immediately resigned. With Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the payment would have amounted to over 53 years' pay and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Another account states that Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week." That quote is from Wikipedia, and other sources have promoted similar stories of Edison's cheapness. What he did, he did because it was of commercial value, and he took credit for work done by his employees. He was even involved in a corporate fight over who would get to install the circuitry in the first electric chair.
All that is beside the movie's point, which is that the guy, however Dickensian he might have been, produced all sorts of stuff we take for granted today. And -- here's what gets me about Edison and all these other characters who were putting together electronic equipment -- nobody knew what electricity was. It was all done long before physicists like Millikan and Rutherford began to analyze the structure of the atom. They couldn't have dreamed that electricity was a stream of electrons jumping at the speed of light from one atom to the next through a conductor. The electron hadn't been discovered yet.
I don't think of this as one of Spencer Tracy's more memorable movies. As in most other movies of its genre, he starts out with ten cents in his pocket and winds up being honored by the whole world. There's not that much in between for Tracy to sink his teeth into. In all fairness, though, it must be said that he looks very sad when that filament burns out on him.
Since Edison wasn't somebody like Henry Stanley, the African explorer that Spencer Tracy had played earlier, nobody gets shot and no one's head is wrenched off. The most dramatic moment occurs when Tracy, as Edison, is bent over his new electric light and the filament burns out. Tracy's face drops a little.
Now, Edison's life was NOT entirely uninteresting but Hollywood must observe certain conventions. The man must be entirely honorable. There must be no ambiguity about that. And he must be guided by a vision almost divine in its generosity.
We may have no mention of the fact that Edison married Mary when she was a girl of sixteen. Yum yum. And we may mention that he was a school drop out but not that he knew little of mathematics or theory, that he was a born tinkerer who scorned figuring things out ahead of time, in favor of a method of successive approximations. Edison must retain his good nature through the course of many failures and his workers must be devoted to him, so much so that they'll labor at their benches for nothing.
We can't let it be known that he was a mean, stingy, dishonest son of a gun. "One of Edison's assistants was Nikola Tesla. Tesla claimed that Edison had promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in making improvements to his DC generation plants. Several months later, when Tesla had finished the work and asked to be paid, he said that Edison replied, 'When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke.' "Tesla immediately resigned. With Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the payment would have amounted to over 53 years' pay and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Another account states that Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week." That quote is from Wikipedia, and other sources have promoted similar stories of Edison's cheapness. What he did, he did because it was of commercial value, and he took credit for work done by his employees. He was even involved in a corporate fight over who would get to install the circuitry in the first electric chair.
All that is beside the movie's point, which is that the guy, however Dickensian he might have been, produced all sorts of stuff we take for granted today. And -- here's what gets me about Edison and all these other characters who were putting together electronic equipment -- nobody knew what electricity was. It was all done long before physicists like Millikan and Rutherford began to analyze the structure of the atom. They couldn't have dreamed that electricity was a stream of electrons jumping at the speed of light from one atom to the next through a conductor. The electron hadn't been discovered yet.
I don't think of this as one of Spencer Tracy's more memorable movies. As in most other movies of its genre, he starts out with ten cents in his pocket and winds up being honored by the whole world. There's not that much in between for Tracy to sink his teeth into. In all fairness, though, it must be said that he looks very sad when that filament burns out on him.