The environment and culture set up by Thomas Edison in his labs and Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might be strikingly similar in many ways.

So how does “The Wizard of Menlo Park” (New Jersey) compare to a couple guys who’s company’s Menlo Park location was clear across the country and a hundred years later? (For a short time in ‘98-’99 Google’s office was located in Menlo Park California) We can take a look at the objectives, practices, and general attitudes of both of these companies to find the answers.

Edison and the others at his lab created inventions and then set up companies to profit off of them. If you take a look at Google Labs, they are doing something similar with their own twist. Google has their Adwords and Adsense that they are able to leverage into many of their products, giving a revenue stream to that product. At Google, all employees are given an amount of time where it is required to work on their own projects. Every now and then we can see the larger and more developed of these projects and ideas appear at Google Labs.

The culture that was found with Thomas Edison’s workers ‘the boys’ allowed a lot of flexibility to move around from project to project. If one project was getting nowhere, you could simply open up a different notebook and jump into a whole new problem and pick up from where someone else was stumped. I can’t quite say for sure how much freedom Google gives to employees in moving around like this, but within the company sharing ideas, collaborating and otherwise transferring knowledge is highly encouraged.

Both Edison and Google place a high value on constant experimentation, testing, and improving everything; however there is a bit of cultural variance in how it was to be approached. If you wanted to go into Thomas Edison’s lab and experiment, you were welcome to. The only thing that was really required of you was to pay for the materials that you used and to clean up after yourself. Getting to know the other inventors and getting their input was an added perk.

When it comes to Google, in order to play around in their labs, you simply need to click on a link. All around the you can run tests and investigate all kinds of things online for free. If you want to go even further, you can put together programs and applications fairly easily that interact with their online software. If you don’t know how to program, with a quick search, they could help you out with that too.

Now it doesn’t really seam that the General Electric company that we know today still follows these ideas, but at one time back when it was called Edison General Electric, it was much closer to how Google operates a century later. It’s certainly not a coincidence that both GE and Google are so strong now when they both had such great beginnings. I think it’s fair to say that with Google being only a little more than a decade old, they haven’t quite written all of their beginnings yet.