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By Root 2337 0

melancholy and madness twisted the brain. The roots of this idea were old. “Oh! how near are genius and madness!” Denis Diderot had written. “… Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.” It was a side effect of the change in focus from God-centeredness to human-centeredness. The very notion of revelation, in the absence of a Revealer, became disturbing, particularly to those who experienced it: “… something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning… .” Genius now suggested Charles-Pierre Baudelaire or Ludwig van Beethoven, flying off the tracks of normality. Crooked roads, William Blake had said: “Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”

An 1891 treatise on genius by Cesare Lombroso listed some associated symptoms. Degeneration. Rickets. Pallor. Emaciation. Left-handedness. A sense of the mind as a cauldron in tumult was emerging in European culture, along with an often contradictory hodgepodge of psychic terminology, all awaiting the genius of Freud to provide a structure and a coherent jargon. In the meantime: Misoneism. Vagabondage. Unconsciousness. More presumed clues to genius. Hyperesthesia. Amnesia. Originality. Fondness for special words. “Between the physiology of the man of genius, therefore, and the pathology of the insane,” Lombroso concluded, “there are many points of coincidence… .” The genius, disturbed as he is, makes errors and wrong turns that the ordinary person avoids. Still, these madmen, “despising and overcoming obstacles which would have dismayed the cool and deliberate mind—hasten by whole centuries the unfolding of truth.”

The notion never vanished; in fact it softened into a cliché. Geniuses display an undeniable obsessiveness resembling, at times, monomania. Geniuses of certain kinds—mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers—seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity. Nevertheless, the lunatic-genius-wizard did not play as well in America, notwithstanding the relatively unbuttoned examples of writers like Whitman and Melville. There was a reason. American genius as the nineteenth century neared its end was not busy making culture, playing with words, creating music and art, or otherwise impressing the academy. It was busy sending its output to the patent office. Alexander Graham Bell was a genius. Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse were geniuses. Let European romantics celebrate the genius as erotic hero (Don Juan) or the genius as martyr (Werther). Let them bend their definitions to accommodate the genius composers who succeeded Mozart, with their increasingly direct pipelines to the emotions. In America what newspapers already called the machine age was under way. The consummate genius, the genius who defined the word for the next generation, was Thomas Alva Edison.

By his own description he was no wizard, this Wizard of Menlo Park. Anyone who knew anything about Edison knew that his genius was ninety-nine percent perspiration. The stories that defined his style were not about inspiration in the mode of the Newtonian apple. They spoke of exhaustive, laborious trial and error: every conceivable lamp filament, from human hair to bamboo fiber. “I speak without exaggeration,” Edison declared (certainly exaggerating), “when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true.” He added that he had methodically disproved 2,998 of them by experiment. He claimed to have carried out fifty thousand individual experiments on a particular type of battery. He had a classic American education: three months in a Michigan public school. The essential creativity that led him to the phonograph, the electric light, and more than a thousand other patented inventions was