From my previous articles, we know that creativity and entrepreneurial capacity connote work and teamwork respectively and cannot work independently. In this article, creativity and capacity represent entrepreneurial roots, while deliverables such as entrepreneurial ideas, inventions, innovations (radical and incremental), improvement, etc., are the fruits of entrepreneurial undertakings.
In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the surface of the soil, but roots can also be aerial or aerating, that is, growing up above the ground or especially above water.
Entrepreneurship is a function of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial roots provide anchorage and courage for the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial success is anchored on creative thinking ability and the responsibility of capacity building. Entrepreneurial fruits are products of entrepreneurial seeds such as Strategy, Idea, Leadership, Inspiration, Collaboration, Opportunity and Networking (SILICON).
Silicon Valley – the valley of entrepreneurial fruits
The term refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, a global center for high technology and innovation.
The SILICON of Thomas Alva Eidson and John Pierpont Morgan
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman, while John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier and investment banker. J.P. Morgan had an interest in and saw the potential in electricity. He and Thomas Edison had a long history which began when Morgan helped to finance Edison’s early experiments in electricity. In 1881, Morgan decided to go further and had Edison electrify his house. Then the next year, Morgan had him electrify his office building.
Edison’s Miracle of Light
On September 15, 1878, a group of New York reporters traveled to Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to hear his most startling announcement to date. In just six weeks, he told them, illumination by gaslight would be obsolete. He would create a vast, new industry to provide electric power that would light up America – and revolutionize the world. “When I am through, only the rich will be able to afford candles,” he said. Gas stocks plummeted overnight. J.P. Morgan hastily provided the 31-year-old inventor with the capital he needed to carry out his daring scheme.
When the first electric lights cast their golden glow over Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve 1880, a crowd of 3,000 people gathered in awe. Edison, the worker of miracles, had triumphed. Historian and author Carolyn Marvin says, “Victorians saw the electric light and the effect of electricity as having an almost religious power. Edison was both godlike because he could manipulate the lightning and a very dark and satanic figure for the same reason. “He could challenge God’s order.”
In the months that followed, Edison and his team grappled with the tough job of designing and producing, by hand, the necessary components of a viable electrical system: sockets, fuses, switches, power meters, and generators. In New York he built the first commercial electric utility near Wall Street. The time had come to start mass production, but when Edison approached his investors for more money, they turned him down flat. Nothing more, they said, before their initial investments had paid off.
“The issue is factories or death!”, raged Edison, and raised the funds himself. At 3 p.m. on September 4, 1882, Edison threw the switch that would start up America’s first power plant, serving a square-mile area that included some very wealthy and influential customers: J.P. Morgan, the Stock Exchange, and the nation’s largest newspapers. “I have accomplished all that I promised,” the inventor said.
It would take another two years for the public to trust electricity enough to purchase orders for plants in other cities. Edison promoted electric light as being clean, healthy, and efficient — unlike foul-smelling, dangerous gas — and had reason to think the public believed him.
Cables insulated with beeswax and paraffin had been laid under the streets, but before long problems surfaced: horses were shocked trotting down wet streets, and workmen electrocuted. Across the country, the Edison system was meeting with widespread resistance. He embarked on a flamboyant advertising campaign to assuage public fears. At the Philadelphia Electrical Exposition, Edison hired a minstrel who tap-danced across an electrified floor while his helmet lit up in rhythm to his feet. In New York, he staged an “Electric Torch Light Parade” in which 400 men marched through Manhattan – wearing light bulbs on their heads and power lines down their sleeves that were connected to a horse-drawn, steam-powered generator. The message came across loud and clear: electricity was safe. In 1887 Edison set up the Edison General Electric Company, and J.P. Morgan paid nearly two million dollars to buy into it.
The world’s greatest inventor had become a prosperous industrialist. No longer did his photographs show a rumpled, unshaven country boy, but instead, a smartly tailored, urban gentleman. His wife, Mary, had died, leaving 40-year-old Edison with three children to raise. He soon married a beautiful young woman, Mina Miller. Edison’s hearing had been deteriorating since he was 11; he taught his second bride Morse code so they could communicate by tapping on one another’s wrists.
In 1890 Edison became involved in the “battle of the currents.” His system depended on low-voltage direct current (DC), which was capable of sending electricity little more than a mile. But industrialist George Westinghouse had developed a far-reaching system that used high-voltage alternating current (AC), and a former employee of Edison’s, Nikola Tesla, invented AC motors and generators that threatened Edison’s domination of the electrical industry. In a last-ditch effort to save the business he had created, Edison took advantage of an unusual opportunity to discredit Westinghouse. He gave his full endorsement to a plan to use 1,000 volts of AC — from a Westinghouse generator – to execute criminals sentenced to death in New York State.
The first execution turned into a grisly spectacle, damaging Edison’s reputation. The board of Edison General Electric decided to adopt AC power, and dropped Edison’s name; the company was now called “General Electric.” Edison would refuse to set
foot in any General Electric plants for the next 30 years, but his ability to reinvent himself matched his scientific prowess. In the second half of his life he would invent the first motion picture camera, improve his phonograph, and become America’s first entertainment mogul. “People will forget,” he stated with typical bravado, “that my name ever was connected with anything electrical.”
Minds, not machines produce entrepreneurial fruits. Innovation and advances in technology are traceable to “SILICON valley”.
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