The School of Invention

Between Franklin's kite in 1752 and the Wright brothers' twelve seconds in the air in 1903, Americans took out patents at a rate no other country matched. Morse sent the first telegraph message in 1844; Bell spoke into the first telephone in 1876; Edison lit a street in New Jersey in 1879; Tesla's alternating current ran the Chicago fair of 1893. Most of them knew, disliked, sued or borrowed from one another. The idea of putting them in a single room is a fiction, but it is a fiction about a real century.

Raphael painted The School of Athens between 1509 and 1511 on a wall of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. Under a vast coffered vault open to the sky, the philosophers of the ancient world gather around Plato and Aristotle, who walk toward us down the center, one pointing up and one gesturing level. It is the great picture of thinking as a crowd scene.

The vault is the same; the crowd has changed. Franklin, in brown, comes down the center steps with a finger raised where Plato pointed, and Edison walks beside him holding a lit bulb. Tesla sits on the steps below with a sketch on his knee and a coil at his feet, where Raphael put the brooding Heraclitus. At left men bend over a telegraph key and a dynamo; at right two men hold a flying machine between them, and another lounges against a wagon wheel. Liberty stands in the left niche, Justice in the right.

Raphael's architecture was a promise that what happened beneath it counted as learning. It makes the same promise here, for a different kind of genius.