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Slate's list of the 25 Americans who combine inventiveness and practicality ...

The oddest exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., is this sealed glass test tube , which may or may not contain the dying breath of Thomas Alva Edison. According to some historians, when Edison was on his deathbed in 1931, Ford asked Charles Edison to capture his father's last exhalation and preserve it for him. The test tube is a legitimate Edison artifact, and Charles Edison appears to have sent it to Ford, but its contents are probably legend. Still, it gets at something profound and touching about the two most important Americans of their age. Ford was Edison's neighbor, friend, and former employee, yet he found Edison's gift for practical innovation so mysterious that he sought to hold the Wizard of Menlo Park's last breath for eternity, perhaps hoping to locate, in the nitrogen and carbon dioxide, the source of Edison's genius—as if the essential nature of America's greatest practical thinker could be captured and bottled and passed on to future generations.

If only it were that easy! Like few people before or since—though Ford himself is probably his closest competitor—Edison combined two radically different kinds of brilliance. Edison was of course one of the greatest inventors of his age, responsible for the phonograph, the stock ticker, the microphone used in telephones, and the practical incandescent light, among other world-changing devices. But Edison also put his inventions—as well as the inventions of others—to work like no one else in history. He founded the first commercial research laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., turning ideas and experiments into valuable consumer products. Having perfected a practical light bulb, he then tried to make it widely useful by inventing the power distribution company. He popularized the Kinetoscope, the first commercially successful way to show motion pictures. The carbon microphone he invented in 1877—and then won a patent war over—was used in Bell telephones until the 1980s. Has any American generated so many new ideas, and put those ideas into practice, as Thomas Edison?

Ford couldn't successfully capture Edison's essence in a bottle. But 80 years later, we can pay it tribute. Today Slate sublime " Approval Matrix .") It occurred to us that the quadrant graph is an excellent way to represent how people (or institutions) balance innovation and pragmatism. The X-axis on our graph represents innovation, ranging from hopelessly pedestrian on the far left to mind-blowingly innovative on the far right. The Y-axis is pragmatism—you could think of it also as "effectiveness"—ranging from the hideously impractical at the bottom to the ruthlessly effective at the top.