The TL;DR for those too lazy to click and would rather speculate: Edison's reasoning was that he wanted to hire executives who could make decisions quickly and

The TL;DR for those too lazy to click and would rather speculate: Edison's reasoning was that he wanted to hire executives who could make decisions quickly and recall information quickly and reliably. Edison wanted the kind of information access that's available to everyone in this day and age. Since there were no machines to do it, he had to hire people to do it for him. It is difficult for people living today to understand what information was like even 25 years ago. We absolutely look at information differently now because our storage, retrieval, and processing methods have advanced so fast that to look back a hundred years and try to understand their thinking we might as well be looking at the stone age. Try it sometime. Swear off the Internet for a week and try to be productive in your job. As to whether Einstein would have done well at this test, Einstein would have made a lousy business executive, especially by Edison's metric as Einstein was notoriously forgetful. This interesting stuff to me personally. My great-grandfather worked directly for Edison. At one point he managed a brick-making factory. He died long before I came along but I've always wondered what it was like to work closely with Edison.