On 20 May 1921, excited crowds milled around Bostonâs railway station hoping to catch a glimpse of Albert Einstein, who was making his first visit to Americaâs most famously learned city. After an impromptu tour, the physicist was whisked off to breakfast with the cityâs mayor and the governor of Massachusetts. Afterwards, as the diners relaxed over cigars, reporters lobbed the celebrated genius a question more fit for a teenager: âWhat is the speed of sound?â Einstein was stumped. He didnât know off-hand, he admitted. âEINSTEIN SEES BOSTON; FAILS EDISON TEST,â crowed the next dayâs headlines â and Thomas Edison (left) claimed his most prominent victim yet in a âbrainmeterâ craze that revolutionised public attitudes towards aptitude tests.
EARLY in 1921, New Yorkers who answered an anonymous job ad in The New York Times received a curious reply: they were to go to Newark, New Jersey, take an early-morning bus on the West Orange line to Thomas A. Edison Industries, and ask at the front desk for a Mr Stevenson. No letter of introduction or resumĂ© was required. Applicants who followed the mysterious instructions found themselves ushered inside a laboratory and subjected to a barrage of 163 seemingly random questions: Is Australia larger in area than Greenland? Of what wood are kerosene barrels made? What is copra? Those looking up in bewilderment might have noticed Thomas Edison himself overseeing his latest invention: the countryâs most peculiarly influential and controversial employment test.
If Edisonâs recruitment strategy was novel, mental testing was not. Fifty years earlier, the explored ways of testing mental ability, which he believed followed a Gaussian bell curve, with most scorers falling near the average, tapering off on either side. Testing received a further boost in the US after the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled jobseeker, which prompted the Civil Service Reform Act and the introduction of competitive exams for many federal jobs.
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Yet the most prominent early mental tests were for measuring not ability, but disability. The Binet test of 1905 was first used in France to identify children with special needs, though it was soon co-opted for measuring children of all abilities. During the first world war, the US army introduced its Alpha test to check the abilities of its literate recruits. Of the 1.7 million recruits tested, the top two scorers proved to be a former lumberjack and a professor at Yale.
But it was Edisonâs test that captured the publicâs attention. âMen who have been to college I find to be amazingly ignorant,â Edison proclaimed to The New York Times in May 1921. Though he hadnât been to college himself, Edison was a great believer in its potential, and he professed bitter disappointment in his job candidates. âThey donât seem to know anything,â he grumbled. The home-schooled inventor revealed that as well as testing prospective employees, he had also subjected those already working for him to the 163-question test he had concocted himself. Employees who failed â âXYZ menâ in Edisonâs parlance, versus Grade-A men â were given a weekâs pay and sacked.
âEmployees who failed the test were given a weekâs pay and sackedâ
Public reaction was swift: âWas any man ever kinder to his aged mother because he knew what copra is?â demanded The New York Times. âLet him burn his questionnaireâŠ[and] spare himself the mortification of someday seeing some of his XYZâs command the plaudits of the world.â Professors and students took umbrage at the implication that colleges should be filling heads with trivia. One fumed that it was ânot a Tom Edison test, but a Tom Foolery testâ, while a professor at New York University opined that âa touching faith in higher education and a profound misunderstanding of its aims are often displayed by men who have succeeded without college trainingâ.
After the complete test was leaked to newspapers, the questions spread across the country in a national craze. âIf You Cannot Answer These Youâre Ignorant, Edison Says,â declared one Pennsylvania newspaper, while police in Massachusetts picked up a deranged young man claiming that he was on the run from assassins who were after his book of Edison test answers, âvalued at $1,000,000â.
Journalists gleefully sprang Edison questions on politicians, professors and captains of industry. New Yorkâs governor failed; so did the mayor of New York City, its police commissioner and, rather alarmingly, its superintendent of schools. One particularly enterprising reporter tracked down Edisonâs son Theodore, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also failed. âDad would find me amazingly ignorant,â the younger Edison admitted.
His father faced a media circus: the Fox movie studio ran mock Edison tests of biblical trivia to advertise its âsuper-screen spectacleâ The Queen of Sheba, while ads for Vogue magazine assured women readers âNever mind the Edison questions! All you need to know is how to be becomingly dressedâ. Others were more seriously interested in its value: within days, the Eastman Kodak company announced a similar test for its employees, and the elite Groton School in Massachusetts extended its use to applicants.
Yet Edison insisted his test sprang from his belief that an employeeâs reliability was linked in part to a good memory and attention to detail. âOf course I donât care whether a man knows the capital of Nevada, or the source of mahogany,â he explained. âBut if he ever knew any of these things and doesnât know them now, I do very much care about that.â
Edison could point to his results as proof that he had isolated a specific mental ability, rather than a bell curve. Of 718 men who took the test, only 57 scored more than 70 per cent â the pass mark â and 32 of those scored more than 90 per cent. Rather than a well-populated middle ground, those tested appeared split between A-men who could answer the questions, and XYZs who believed Bengal was the capital of Maine, that tides caused the phases of the moon, and the âcandidate [who] reasoned that if the active principle of coffee is caffeine, that of tea ought in all fairness to be taffeineâ.
Many testing experts found the Edison test crude and wrong-headed. âIt would be more sensible in testing a manâs intelligence to ask how he would go about finding the answers to such questions,â pointed out Harvard psychologist A. A. Roback. And yet the attendant publicity was a fillip for the budding testing industry. The state of New Jersey soon awarded a top civil service job solely on the results of a 3-hour questionnaire; the winner, as it happened, was a former Edison A-man. The administrator of the New Jersey test, Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, went on to play a leading role in the introduction of what has become every American high schoolerâs bĂȘte noir: the College Boardâs Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Like the Edison test, the SAT stripped knowledge from context or process: only right and wrong answers mattered. How one reached them didnât count. And like Edison, the College Board sought to measure aptitude rather than any elusive quality that might be labelled intelligence. Critics argued that the testâs potential for cultural bias made it suspect, and it hardly helped that Brigham had previously used the results of the armyâs Alpha test to push for anti-immigrant legislation â although he later renounced the notion of inferior nationalities. Brighamâs SAT went on to become a permanent feature of American higher education.
Edison himself joined in the reinvention of his test for college applicants. In 1929, now 83, he announced a nationwide search for his intellectual âsuccessorâ â beginning with a competition for a scholarship to MIT. Forty-nine finalists came to Edisonâs factory for an ice-cream social, a day out at Coney Island, and a day-long final exam conducted by the inventor himself, and marked by an all-star panel including Edison, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and George Eastman. The winner was Wilber Huston from Seattle. After recovering from the shock of being dubbed , Huston went on to become mission director for the launch of NASAâs Nimbus and Landsat satellites â proving that Edison could at least pick a rocket scientist out of a crowd. And though both the test and its creator soon passed into history, the fashion for mass short-answer testing that they popularised remained.
The Edison testâs most famous flunker never did see its point, though. When he was caught out by reporters in Boston in 1921, Albert Einstein replied patiently that he didnât bother carrying information like the speed of sound around in his head. Why go to the trouble, he told them, when he could just look it up in a book?
