Getting Hired by Thomas Edison Once Meant Passing This Near-Impossible Test

You would probably flunk Thomas Edison’s job interview. Don’t worry, so did Albert Einstein.

The year was 1920, and the Edison Manufacturing Company was in a funk. A post-World War I recession put a squeeze on the manufacturer of alkaline primary batteries, kinetoscopes, medical instruments and more. Seeking to kickstart business with bright new executive hires, Edison turned to a recent war-era innovation: standardized testing.

The test Edison came up with consisted of 146 questions he thought applicants for executive positions ought to know. Queries included:

“Who discovered how to vulcanize rubber?”

“What part of Germany do we get toys from?”

“What is the speed of sound?”

The third question undid Einstein’s potential for a perfect score. But Einstein’s public retort might have won the day. He didn’t have the figure offhand, “but it was readily available in textbooks,” he said according to a May 1921 article in The New York Times.

Einstein was hardly the Edison test’s only critic. Rather than serving to further popularize the budding field of mental testing (which fed into contemporary IQ tests), the questionnaire delegitimized testing by “encouraging the development of a question-and-answer craze that became associated with the mental test,” Elizabethtown College professor emeritus Paul Dennis wrote in the Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences in 1984.

The test also prompted “poorly constructed” tests by other businesses, Dennis observed. Edison didn’t help its credibility when he claimed that college-educated men are “amazingly ignorant” after testing his own employees.

One man for whom the test might have worked was Edison. “Clearly he had some kind of photographic or nearly photographic memory, and he treated that as something that everyone should somehow cultivate,” says Edison biographer Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University. “Most of us aren’t capable of doing that.”

Controversy arose after the inventor and entrepreneur began thrusting the Edison test on job applicants, his direct reports and even his own son in early 1921.

During World War I, the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Army teamed up to develop standardized intelligence tests that evaluated the aptitude and emotional disposition of soldiers en masse. Next, standardized testing began to permeate education; more than 100 such tests existed by 1918, according to the National Education Association.

Edison developed his most famous test to detect generalized knowledge in would-be executives, Israel says, though he first developed specialized tests for bookkeepers, mathematicians, chemical engineers and other positions.

As Edison looked to hire executives who would make the best decisions in a pinch—without having to look up the answer—he put a premium on memory. Former lapses among “minor executives” had cost Edison up to $5,000 each (nearly $96,000 in May 2026 dollars), he told Scientific American for its November 1921 issue.

The executive questionnaire also reflected Edison’s concept of intelligence, which he thought boiled down to curiosity and memory. A person acquires knowledge through a lifetime of seeing, hearing and reading, Edison shared with Scientific American, and the “millions and millions of facts which have come into your mind in this way ought still to be there.”

In that regard, Edison showed executive role applicants no quarter. Other questions asked: “Of what kind of wood are kerosene barrels made?” “What pinch pressure at the driving wheels does a 23-ton locomotive require when drawing a load of 100 tons on level track?” “Where is the Assuan Dam [sic]?”

One applicant recounted the ordeal of taking the test to The New York Times in May 1921. “During this time Mr. Edison paced back and forth, irritably demanding why certain results were not being obtained in his factory and denouncing what he termed bone-headed moves on the part of his executives,” the applicant said. “My written answers were given to him, and after a few moments of waiting I was told I had failed and was ‘given the air’ with the other fellows who had also failed.”

The Times and the Boston Sunday Post published the questions and answers to the Edison test for executives in full, causing Edison to have to rewrite the questionnaire.

Albert Einstein was on a two-month U.S. tour to raise funds for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lecture on the theory of relativity when the Edison test captivated the nation. A New York Times reporter captured the scene in Boston when Edison arrived at South Station to a large crowd.

“Of course the famous visitor had to run into the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy,” the reporter wrote. “He did not tackle the whole proposition but, so far as he went, failed and thereby became one of us.”

That the test was already being called a controversy one week after its unauthorized release to the public was a testament to the level of popular backlash against it and its sheer difficulty.

Edison’s youngest son, Theodore, confessed that he “flunked” the test while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Asked if he thought his father could answer the questions, the college sophomore quipped to a reporter, “Sure; didn’t he prepare them?”

The exact number of Edison tests administered is unclear, Israel says, in part because not all applicants scored well enough to have their tests reviewed by Edison. The existence of passing grades is unknown as well, though Israel is in the process of digitizing hundreds of thousands of documents from the Thomas Edison National Historic Park and other collections.

Although Edison repeatedly defended his belief that an exceptional memory is a necessary component of intelligence, he also clarified that the test was only a functional necessity for running his company. For its intended purpose, Edison considered it a success.

“I always welcome criticism. It helps me think and often shows me where I have been wrong,” Edison told reporter Edward Marshall in July 1921. “In this instance it has shown me where I have been absolutely right.”