Business: The Sad State of Innovation

New ideas are stifled by red tape and corporate timidity

Candles and kerosene lamps flickered that Sunday night as the lab assistant connected two wires leading from the bottom of a glass bulb to a set of storage batteries. The piece of carbonized cotton sewing thread inside the bulb suddenly lighted up. In dozens of earlier experiments, the filament had blazed a few minutes before breaking, but this time it continued to glow. Forty hours later the bulb was still alight, and Thomas Alva Edison boasted to his staff: "If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred." Man had entered the age of electricity.

On Oct. 21 a crowd of scientists, industrialists and other celebrities will gather amid the historic buildings at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Edison's banishment of darkness. In Edison's laboratory—disassembled in Menlo Park, N.J., by his good friend Henry Ford, then crated and shipped to Dearborn along with seven railroad cars full of the clay soil on which it sat—the audience will watch a re-enactment of the scene. Madeline Edison Sloane, the inventor's great-granddaughter, will throw the switch that opened a new era. As the German historian Emil Ludwig described the original event, "When Edison snatched up the spark of Prometheus in his little pear-shaped glass bulb, it meant that fire had been discovered for the second time, that mankind had been delivered again from the curse of night."

The centennial of Edison's great achievement comes at a time when American innovative genius, so well personified by Edison, has begun to fade. The nation that produced Robert Fulton, Robert Goddard, Edmund Land and many others now has far fewer folk-hero tinkerers. Laments James G. Cook, president of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation: "Over the past decade, America has been losing its traditional leadership in technological innovation. Our Edison-like spirit of inventiveness seems to be going the way of the gas lamp."

Most of the important indicators are pointing down. The number of patents granted to U.S. citizens dropped from 56,000 in 1971 to 44,482 last year. Spending on research and development, which peaked at 3% of G.N.P. in 1964, was only 2.2% last year. While the U.S. percentage has been decreasing, West Germany's has averaged 3% annually since 1971, and last year increased to 3.2%. Japan's has risen from 1.3% in 1965 to 1.9% in 1977. Says Paul E. Gray, president-elect of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "We have lost a certain edge in technological innovation."