Edison was then working as a telegraph operator in Boston. His Electrographic Vote-Recorder let each member of a legislature cast a yes or no by moving a switch at his desk, while the device recorded the votes and totals automatically, replacing a slow roll call. He took it to Washington to demonstrate. A congressional committee chairman told him, "Young man, that is just what we do not want."
Edison had spent years moving between night-shift telegraph jobs across Ontario, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Massachusetts, tinkering constantly, sometimes to the annoyance of his employers. In Boston, from 1867 to 1869, he began to invent in earnest, and the vote recorder was the first idea he took to the Patent Office.
Technically it worked. Politically it was a failure. The time taken by a roll call was not a flaw to legislators but a tool: a slow vote gave the minority room to delay, bargain and persuade. A machine that tallied votes in seconds threatened those tactics, and Congress rejected it.
Edison drew a lesson he applied for the rest of his career: find out whether people want an invention before building it. He went on to register 1,093 U.S. patents, including the phonograph and a practical incandescent light bulb. The House of Representatives did not adopt electronic voting until January 1973, more than a century after his demonstration.
Key people: Thomas Edison