“When the Cat is Away the Mice Will Work”: Thomas Alva Edison and the Insomnia Squad

Abstract

Over the past one hundred years, the phrase ―Insomnia Squad‖ has evolved from an inside joke among a few of Thomas Edison‘s laboratory staffers into a term of popular culture, familiar even to school children. Yet very little has been written about the seven experimenters who constituted the task force that Edison assembled in September 1912, why the inventor chose these particular individuals to assist him, the nature of the problem with which he was grappling, or how it was ultimately resolved. Edison and his assistants worked night and day for five weeks with only a minimal amount of sleep, yet no adequate explanation has been offered as to why the inventor drove his men so hard. This article, based on the documents in the microfilm and digital editions of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, reveals that this period of intense activity coincided with a family crisis, as Edison‘s wife Mina rushed to Akron, Ohio, to tend to her dying mother, while her inventor husband raced to perfect the Diamond Disc record before he was called away to attend the funeral. With a million dollars worth of phonographs piled up in the warehouse and no records to sell along with them, Edison and his men pushed round the clock to work out the bugs in the manufacturing process and bring the Diamond Disc to market. Although seven experimenters assisted Edison, only six appear in the group photograph that was taken at the end of the marathon session. The identity of the seventh ―Insomniac‖ is revealed at the end of the article.