Common knowledge now with the Internet? Yes. At the time? No.
Those were difficult and discriminating questions at the time.
This is a time when poor girls who couldn't afford stockings wouldn't be allowed to go to school and the majority of people didn't have indoor plumbing let alone the luxury of books. Heck, 6% of possible candidates of the country were immediately eliminated because they would have not been able to read or write in any language, let alone know the arithmetic, physics, etc, required.
They're significantly less discriminatory than you would think.
Keep in mind that he's not interviewing every single person in the country, he's interviewing college graduates.
Not only was having a college education not as prevalent as it is now, the sole fact that the people who are taking this test have graduated from college eliminates every single one of the "discriminatory" accusations you are making. If anything, the college admissions process (an obvious prerequisite of the test) is discriminatory, not the test itself.
What is the point that you are trying to make? If somebody did not know how to read or write, they were not a suitable candidate anyway, and that's not discriminatory against illiterate people, like looking for someone with a maths degree is not discriminatory towards people without one.
I don't think you know what the word "discriminatory" means:
Adjective
Making or showing an unfair or prejudicial distinction between different categories of people or things.
You may say that it is not practical to not be discriminatory. You can also say that it is not immoral to be discriminatory. Both of those may or may not be true.
However, it is certainly discriminatory to use a test that is biased towards educated white men with college degrees and access and time to read newspapers.
Yes it is, if you're hiring them for shoving shit around. If you hire for an engineering position (what was this Edison guy doing anyway?), then those fancy writing and math skills and whatnot might be quite necessary.
Those were difficult and discriminating questions at the time.
This is a time when poor girls who couldn't afford stockings wouldn't be allowed to go to school and the majority of people didn't have indoor plumbing let alone the luxury of books. Heck, 6% of possible candidates of the country were immediately eliminated because they would have not been able to read or write in any language, let alone know the arithmetic, physics, etc, required.