On 20 May 1921, excited crowds milled around Boston鈥檚 railway station hoping to catch a glimpse of Albert Einstein, who was making his first visit to America鈥檚 most famously learned city. After an impromptu tour, the physicist was whisked off to breakfast with the city鈥檚 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: 鈥淲hat is the speed of sound?鈥� Einstein was stumped. He didn鈥檛 know off-hand, he admitted. 鈥淓INSTEIN SEES BOSTON; FAILS EDISON TEST,鈥� crowed the next day鈥檚 headlines 鈥� and Thomas Edison (left) claimed his most prominent victim yet in a 鈥渂rainmeter鈥� 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 resum茅 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 country鈥檚 most peculiarly influential and controversial employment test.
If Edison鈥檚 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 Edison鈥檚 test that captured the public鈥檚 attention. 鈥淢en who have been to college I find to be amazingly ignorant,鈥� Edison proclaimed to The New York Times in May 1921. Though he hadn鈥檛 been to college himself, Edison was a great believer in its potential, and he professed bitter disappointment in his job candidates. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 seem to know anything,鈥� 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 鈥� 鈥淴YZ men鈥� in Edison鈥檚 parlance, versus Grade-A men 鈥� were given a week鈥檚 pay and sacked.
鈥淓mployees who failed the test were given a week鈥檚 pay and sacked鈥�
Public reaction was swift: 鈥淲as any man ever kinder to his aged mother because he knew what copra is?鈥� demanded The New York Times. 鈥淟et him burn his questionnaire鈥and] spare himself the mortification of someday seeing some of his XYZ鈥檚 command the plaudits of the world.鈥� Professors and students took umbrage at the implication that colleges should be filling heads with trivia. One fumed that it was 鈥渘ot a Tom Edison test, but a Tom Foolery test鈥�, while a professor at New York University opined that 鈥渁 touching faith in higher education and a profound misunderstanding of its aims are often displayed by men who have succeeded without college training鈥�.
After the complete test was leaked to newspapers, the questions spread across the country in a national craze. 鈥淚f You Cannot Answer These You鈥檙e Ignorant, Edison Says,鈥� 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, 鈥渧alued at $1,000,000鈥�.
Journalists gleefully sprang Edison questions on politicians, professors and captains of industry. New York鈥檚 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 Edison鈥檚 son Theodore, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also failed. 鈥淒ad would find me amazingly ignorant,鈥� the younger Edison admitted.
His father faced a media circus: the Fox movie studio ran mock Edison tests of biblical trivia to advertise its 鈥渟uper-screen spectacle鈥� The Queen of Sheba, while ads for Vogue magazine assured women readers 鈥淣ever mind the Edison questions! All you need to know is how to be becomingly dressed鈥�. 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 employee鈥檚 reliability was linked in part to a good memory and attention to detail. 鈥淥f course I don鈥檛 care whether a man knows the capital of Nevada, or the source of mahogany,鈥� he explained. 鈥淏ut if he ever knew any of these things and doesn鈥檛 know them now, I do very much care about that.鈥�
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 鈥� the pass mark 鈥� 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 鈥渃andidate [who] reasoned that if the active principle of coffee is caffeine, that of tea ought in all fairness to be taffeine鈥�.
Many testing experts found the Edison test crude and wrong-headed. 鈥淚t would be more sensible in testing a man鈥檚 intelligence to ask how he would go about finding the answers to such questions,鈥� 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 schooler鈥檚 b锚te noir: the College Board鈥檚 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 didn鈥檛 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 test鈥檚 potential for cultural bias made it suspect, and it hardly helped that Brigham had previously used the results of the army鈥檚 Alpha test to push for anti-immigrant legislation 鈥� although he later renounced the notion of inferior nationalities. Brigham鈥檚 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 鈥渟uccessor鈥� 鈥� beginning with a competition for a scholarship to MIT. Forty-nine finalists came to Edison鈥檚 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 NASA鈥檚 Nimbus and Landsat satellites 鈥� 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 test鈥檚 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 didn鈥檛 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?