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Thomas Edison founded General Electric, but he'd have trouble getting a job there today. The man who invented the light bulb, phonograph and motion picture had been expelled from school at age 7, and never returned to formal education.
Even if he had overcome his wimp resume, Edison would still be unable to hold a job at a major corporations.
The great inventor drank plenty of a contemporary spiced wine, Vin Mariani. It didn't slow him down -- he seldom slept more than two hours a night.
The explanation would come when young Tom Edison went in for his blood and urine tests. As soon as the results arrived, he'd be shown the door, if not the paddy wagon. Vin Mariani was spiked with cocaine.
William Stewart Halsted is nowise as famous as Edison,
but if you've lived through a major operation, you can
thank Halsted, known to medical historians as the father
of modern surgery.
He championed a sterile operating room as well as the wearing of rubber gloves. He pioneered surgical procedures that minimized tissue damage, a vast improvement on the butchery that had gone on before in operating rooms. To instill his techniques, he founded the first school of surgery in the United States, at Johns Hopkins University in 1890.
If Halsted showed up today to practice his profession, any modern hospital would call the DEA after the mandatory blood test. As brilliant, careful and innovative a surgeon as he was, Halsted had a problem -- a daily habit of 200 milligrams of morphine.
American journalism has never bothered to select a
patron saint, but if there were one, he would be H.L.
Mencken, the man who wrote: The only way a newspaperman
should look at a politician is down,
and No man ever
went broke underestimating the taste of the American
public.
He was city editor of a metropolitan newspaper in 1900, just before he turned 20. His forceful writing, in Walter Lippmann's view, made Mencken the most influential private citizen in the United States.
If Mencken showed up at today's Denver Post, hat in hand
and looking for work, he'd probably not even get an
interview. No college degree, for one thing. For another,
Mencken boldly and openly consumed a powerful drug that
was, during much of his career, totally forbidden by state
and federal law -- alcohol. For yet another, the Post is
now a smoke-free environment,
and Mencken cherished
his cigars, claiming that it was impossible to write
without a smoldering stogie.
This modern way of judging people for employment leads to interesting speculation.
Why, yes, Dr. Einstein, we know you've won a Nobel
prize and revolutionized physics. But we can't offer you a
position at the University of Colorado. Your pipe offends
the governor.
No, Sigmund, you can't complete your residency. In
fact, you're getting thrown off the hospital staff. Every
time we test, we find cocaine in your blood.
I heard that this guy was a smart attorney, one of
the best. Then I read Reinventing the Corporation, and
what it said about how stupid smokers are. No way am I ever
going to hire that chain-smoking Clarence Darrow to
represent me. Did you know he never even went to law
school? I'll get somebody good instead.
Often I read dismal economic news. American goods are of shoddy quality. Productivity declines. Innovation tapers off.
Many observers blame the loss of the work ethic.
Others wonder at the changing composition of the work
force, while some blame management techniques. Recently, it
has been fashionable to blame drugs and tobacco.
But when you study on it, the real reason that Japan and everybody else are beating us is obvious.
Their companies worry about what employees do -- whether they're doing quality work at a price their customers can afford.
That was the attitude in this country when it became a world leader, during the careers of Thomas Edison and Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken and thousands of other uneducated substance abusers whose sole virtue was that they were good at what they did.
Today, however, American companies start by insisting on meaningless credentials. And then, instead of paying attention to their services and products, they monitor their employees' chemistry. Our goods may be shoddy and we may not invent much any more, but I suppose we can take pride in one thing. American workers will soon have the cleanest urine in the world.
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