Agreed, Walt. The story I heard many years ago was that the vacuum tube was a failed attempt at a light bulb, one of many, but the only one that had an interesting enough effect on the electricity passing through it for Edison to go ahead and patent the vacumm tube 'just in case'. As far as I heard, he never did anything else with it. Ever since then, I've noticed that his inventing scope reached out much more broadly than the projects he took on as things he wished to perfect. And with the exception on the phonograph, his chief focus inventions all tended toward bettering the human condition on a global scale, either by improving conditions for business and commerce or by making things in the average home just plain better than they were -- light bulbs, electrical grids, communication devices for business and international business... And yet, there's a quote from the Old Man about the phonograph giving him the most pride of all his inventions (or something like that), which is a bit surprising.
We all know Thom's phonograph was originally intended to replace letter-dictating secretaries and not to provide something so pedestrian as 'entertainment'. If that's the case, I wonder what his original intentions were for movies. best, Robert
