This honor is
normally given the corporate laboratories and AT&T who
had more formally trained staff and were advertised as
carrying out basic scientific research. Its mission was
to provide the electrical technology for the second decade of
electricity (the 1890s). Yet the time Edison
established the West Orange laboratory the 1880s, the
cutting edge scientific understanding electricity was in
. The laboratory, for
example, was described the stockholders laboratory to
be devoted exclusively original research." Many historians
have used this definition conclude that industrial research
22
laboratories did not exist until the twentieth century. The primary goal the lab was to
produce new electrical products: This placed firmly the
vanguard electrical science. The West Orange laboratory was built support the
technological development the Edison system.
The idea that R&D somehow requires scientific component
has clouded the issue; fails grasp the objectives of
industrial research and the primitive nature electrical
knowledge the nineteenth century. There doubt that the
new industrial research organizations the twentieth century
had highly-skilled staff, many with advanced degrees and
impressive academic credentials.
Edison and his West Orange laboratory have not been
credited with original scientific research, and perhaps
for this reason that other laboratories are thought the
true progenitors modern industrial research.1-24
analysis
