How to avoid turning staff into lab rats in a hybrid work experiment A small series of trials and assessing their impact on staff is the best way forward about 4 hours ago Andrew Hill Thomas Edison, who developed the first electric light bulb, in his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey in 1931. Photograph: J. Walter Thompson/AP
Thomas Edison’s 14-acre industrial laboratory in New Jersey was an “invention factory”, built on a culture of rigorous experimentation. It is appropriate, then, that the great innovator was honorary chair of the US National Research Council’s unglamorous-sounding Committee on Industrial Lighting in 1924 when it collaborated in one of the most famous, and controversial, series of experiments in industrial history.