Hello and welcome to how to take over the world. This is Ben Wilson. It's good to be back. Today I'm going to be talking about Thomas Edison, the world renowned inventor and businessman. I'm really glad that I chose to do this episode about Edison because honestly, he's underrated.  I learned a lot while doing this one, and I think you will learn a lot listening to it.

He was an unbelievably prolific inventor,  filing 1093 patents in his lifetime. Among, those are two of the most important inventions of all time. The light bulb and recorded sound. And Thomas Edison is interesting because he is, in many ways the original inventor, entrepreneur, celebrity. There is sort of a playbook.

Now, if you think about someone like bill Gates or Steve jobs or Elon Musk and that playbook for how to be a famous inventor originated with Thomas Edison. He was really the first one to do it.  In fact, Edison's celebrity really surpassed any of those guys. I mean, yeah, bill Gates and Elon Musk, they are famous nowadays, very famous, but Edison was literally the predominant celebrity of his day.

The most famous man and celebrity is almost kind of underselling what he was. He was viewed in these almost mythic, godlike terms. After he died in the USA, there was an effort made to extinguish all the electric lights in the entire country for a minute. As a tribute to Edison. He seemed to represent progress itself, and the idea that man had mastered the elements and could do anything.

Now, Edison was born in this era of incredible change, and he wrote that to levels of celebrity's previously only enjoyed by Kings and conquerors. So I want to study on this podcast is two things. One, Edison, the businessman, and inventor. And how he was able to achieve success in those domains to the extent that he did because it was truly remarkable.

And then secondly, Edison, this celebrity and how he's able to spin the perception of his success into nearly unparalleled fame and influence.  This first episode will cover Edison's life through the invention of recorded sound. And then the second part, which should be coming out in just a week or two, will cover his life from the invention of the light bulb to his death.

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Again, you'll really love them. Wear the shoes that Caesar or Alexander the great would wear if they were alive. Go to Taft, clothing.com and use code how to 10. So let's start at the beginning.  Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11th, 1847 he came from a family, a very contrarian men.

His grandfather had opposed the American revolution and been forced to flee to Canada when the U S successfully gained independence from great Britain, but then his father, Samuel made the opposite mistake and back a failed rebellion in Canada. And was forced to flee back to the U S Thomas was the youngest of seven children, born to a moderately wealthy family.

He was born in Ohio, but mostly grew up in port Huron, Michigan, a frontier town right on the border with Canada, about 50 miles North of Detroit. It was a major transportation hub located right where the st Clair river meets Lake Huron, and also along a major train line growing up, he actually went by his middle name, so his family called him Alva and his friends called him out.

He was a medium height. He stood five foot nine and adulthood, and he was really scrawny as a child, though he eventually filled to a medium build, but the feature that most frequently drew people's comments and attention were his piercing gray eyes as a child. Thomas Edison attended a few months of school, but he was mostly homeschooled by his mother.

And you might think, okay, yeah, frontier town, 1850s. It was normal to be homeschooled, but no, actually most kids went to school. Uh, they went somewhat irregularly. Things were definitely a little different back then, but Edison was unusual in the fact that he attended very little school and was almost entirely homeschooled.

And that's because Thomas Edison was not like the other boys. He didn't fit in naturally. He was, he was kind of odd. A schoolmate wrote years later, quote, I often run across him in town with just as dirty nose and face as the other boys, but he seemed to be thinking of something all the time and not playing much.

Another wrote that. He was, quote. A child that was always doing funny things different from other children, love to be by himself,  and this aloofness was taken for stupidity. Actually, his father later said, was he a remarkably smart boy? Why? No. Some folks thought he was a little adult. I believe teacher told us to keep him in the streets because he would never make a scholar.

All he ate went to sport his brain, and he was puny. He was forever asking me questions and when I would tell him, I don't know, he would say, why don't you know? And it's difficult to know how much of this aloofness and this kind of weirdness was due to his hearing. Addison had progressive deafness that got worse throughout his life, and we don't have good records of when this first started because Edison didn't really like to talk about it.

All we have is a single statement when he said, I haven't heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old.  So it's clear that he had already started to go death as a child, but that doesn't seem to explain all of his social aloofness. He was also just different. He thought different. He acted different from other boys his age.

He had a very analytical mind. As a consequence, he looked at the world kind of like an alien the way some really smart people do. At one point in his childhood, he burned down his father's barn. And when his furious father asked him why, he said, I just wanted to see what it would do. So his deafness combined with his kind of oddness, set him apart and isolated him.

The thing that saved him in the midst of this isolation was his mother. Mrs Edison was a very strong and literary woman. She saw the intelligence in her son, nurtured it, believed in him, and told himself she homeschooled him by buying textbooks and reading through them with young Al.  Edison would later write quote, I use never to be able to get along at school.

I don't know now what it was, but I was always at the foot of the class. My father thought I was stupid, and at last I almost decided I must really be a dunce. My mother was the making of me. She was so true. So sure of me, and I felt that I had someone to live for someone I must not disappoint,   but his mother's education could only take him so far.

And at age 12, young Edison became an independent man, and his young adulthood from 12 up through his teenage years is the most frontier America Mark Twain sounding story you have ever heard in your entire life. In fact, if Mark Twain had written it, you might say it's good, but it's a little much tone it down a little bit.

Um, it starts, like I said, when Thomas is 12 years old and the family falls on hard times due to a big economic recession. So Edison takes a job as a newsboy, eventually selling papers on the train. To and from Detroit,  he had an entrepreneurial streak from a young age and as soon selling other things on the train as well, from candies to fruit and other produce.

As he's doing that, he realizes that the produce is cheaper in the big city of Detroit than it was in his small town. So he starts buying produce in Detroit and taking it home when selling it at a profit, uh, on the streets of port Huron.

And pretty soon he's growing this little business, setting up a couple of fruit stands and hiring out other little boys to Mandarin.

And so it is that age 13 Edison was running a thriving business with multiple under Hage employees. He even bribes the train conductors because technically he's transporting goods on the train without paying, and he bribes them in the best possible way. He goes to their wives and offers them berries and butter at wholesale prices.

So now even the wives of the train conductors. Are caught up in this vast net of underage deception. They're invested in Thomas Edison's succeeding, and so of course, the conductors allow him to continue to transport his goods for free. One of my favorite stories from the stage of Edison's childhood is how he reacts to news about the battle of Shiloh.

This is all happening during the American civil war, and for those of you who don't know, the battle of Shiloh was one of the biggest battles of the war. Edison is in Detroit. When new starts to come in about the battle and he can see that it's a huge sensation, people are following it like it's the super bowl.

So he formulates a plan. He walks into the Detroit free press and buys a thousand copies of their paper.  He doesn't actually have the money to do that, so he buys the paper on credit with no collateral. Essentially they do it because they're charmed by this precocious young kid demanding to buy a thousand papers.

And he then bribes the Telegraph operators to send word to all the towns between Detroit and his home of port Huron that the battle of Shiloh had commenced was underway, and there was more news to follow in today's edition of the Detroit free press, which by the way, will be coming on the evening train.

Well, of course, Edison takes his normal evening train home and he gets to the first stop and there is a mob of people at the train station waiting to buy papers. He had to raise the price from 5 cents of paper to 25 cents a paper just to keep from running out right away. And he ends up making a huge profit on selling all a thousand papers at a markup of 25 cents five times its normal price.

And Edison gets up to all sorts of plots and schemes. As a young teenager at 15 he decides that rather than sell someone else's paper, he's going to start his own. He calls it the weekly Harold. He brings a printing press onto the train. And starts printing in this office that he's made for himself in a little spare room and creates the first ever newspaper printed on a moving train.

The paper does decently well. Actually. It gets a maximum circulation of 400 copies a week, uh, at its height. But even this enterprise is not enough for curious young Edison. He has been experimenting with chemistry sets in his basement, and that was becoming his true passion. In fact, he's so passionate about learning science and chemistry and conducting these experiments that he sets up a chemistry lab on the train.

Um, unfortunately this leads to his Icarus moment when he goes to far reaches too high and the lab catches fire  which not only puts an end to his chemistry experiments, but actually gets him kicked off the train with his chemistry set, his printing press and everything else he's done on the train between port Huron and Detroit as his career as a budding merchant is put to an end, Edison picks up a new interest.

He becomes a Telegraph operator, what they called at the time, a station agent.  And Edison jumps in and immediately becomes obsessed. He spends 18 hours a day

Learning Morse code, learning how to send and receive the dots and dashes that make up Telegraph messaging.

and in short order he becomes a pretty good station agent.

He apparently became a very good receiver, which is of course when you listen to the Morse code and transcribed the messages. But he was always a relatively self self sender, which is funny because you know, he was mostly deaf. You'd think that he would have trouble hearing and transcribing the messages.

But no, that was what he was a good at. In fact, eventually after a few years, he becomes the best in the country. Um, he could receive and transcribe even the fastest messages with few to no errors. But yeah, never was a great sender. And this is enough to really make a name for himself in the community of Telegraph operators around the country.

In 1863, he leaves Michigan and becomes what was called a traveling tramp operator. Um, cause this area was more or less frontier country in America, the American, Midwest, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, all those States were very much still developing and settling. So new towns and cities were popping up all the time and many were growing rapidly.

So it was a very fluid and changing scene. And the areas where station agents were needed was changing all the time. So station agents were hopping from city to city as needs cropped up, often sharing room and board with each other as well as tips. For where to find good whiskey and pretty girls as they moved from city to city.

Hence they were called tramp operators. They actually didn't call themselves that. They called themselves sparkers or lightning slingers, which are both very steampunk. And it's funny to me cause it seems exactly what kids of that age would still call themselves if they were around today.  They were a tight knit group of intelligent and technically skilled 20 somethings.

Who were well educated in a very frontier sort of way. Not a lot of theory and formal university training, but a lot of experimentation and practical knowledge. They were also dealing on a daily basis with some of the most advanced and sophisticated technology in the world at the time.  And this created a perfect storm for experimentation, for learning, for innovation, and also for hi-jinks.

I've talked before about the type of maniacs phenomenon, and it was in full effect here. In fact, this is sort of a textbook example, and it's crazy how much it resembles Silicon Valley in its heyday, both around the frontiers of America, born a generation or two after it was settled. And during a time of really rapid population growth, both had access to the most advanced technology at the time.

Silicon chips in the case of California telegraphs, in the case of Edison and his contemporaries, both scenes were started and run by men in their twenties who were obsessed with tinkering. And both scenes were dominated by playful applications. The new technology, especially for the use of practical jokes.

And in the same way that Steve jobs was kind of the King practical joker and his circle, Thomas Edison was the King practical joker. And his. That's another funny little coincidence that we see. For whatever reason, great innovators are also very often great practical jokers. Most of the practical jokes that Edison and his buddies were doing focused on one thing  physically shocking, unsuspecting bystanders.

Remember, this is a world where electricity is essentially a brand new technology. There was no power grid. Electricity was only used to send Telegraph messages, and your average person had no experience with it whatsoever. So when people get shocked, they have no idea what is happening to them.  And so the Telegraph operators who did understand it had endless fun with this.

There is a story of Edison putting a wire in some shallow water and flipping the current whenever people walk through it and their arms would fly up over their heads and then he turned it off after a couple of seconds. And these people's arms would fall back down to their sides and they look around completely bewildered and what had just happened to them while Edison in his traveling tramp operator buddies are cracking up, looking down from a nearby window.

But Edison wasn't just innovating with his practical jokes. He's all starting to invent. The first thing he comes up with is a clever device that records incoming transmissions so that it can be played back slower  and soon. Inventing becomes an obsession, like a real obsession, like a borderline unhealthy obsession.

In fact, Edison starts to take on an appearance of a junkie. Basically. He sounds remarkably like a drug addict. He's well paid, but he's always broke because he's spending all his money on spare parts and extra batteries. He barely sleeps. He was notorious his whole career for pulling all nighters and only sleeping when he absolutely had to.

He would sit at his work bench and invent and tinker and work until he just passed out or lay down and sleep for an hour or two and then get right back at it. He always looked disheveled and dirty because whenever he did sleep. It was usually him falling asleep in his work clothes at the work bench.

And so he also rarely changes and almost never buys new clothes.  Heel sticks on a really gone to appearance because he's barely ever eating. And if you listen to this podcast, you know, this is one of my hobby horses, um, that all these great men wear light eaters, Caesar, Napoleon, Putin, Steve jobs, all of them that we've covered so far, at least.

And I tried to let this rest. I decided that when I started doing this episode that I wasn't going to bring it up anymore, even if it didn't turn out. Edison was a light eater because I'm starting to sound like a freak who's weirdly obsessed with this one little thing, which is kind of true. But then I started reading the Edmund Morris biography.

And this is the second paragraph of the entire book. Okay. He said, quote from earliest youth, he had half starved himself, even in early middle age, while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fatten on oat cuisine, he would eat no more than six ounces a meal. Generally only four. And drink nothing except a milk and flavored water.

A man can't think clearly. When he's tanking up, he would say, okay, so rant over. But I do want to make the point that Edison was commented by a ton of people by his friends and associates. This was something really remarkable about him, that he ate hardly anything. And so with all these things put together, he's becoming sort of  and invention junkie.

He's obsessed with it, barely eating, barely sleeping. He loves it. He can't get enough of it.  And then he has like an episode. He has a moment that almost eagerly parallels an incident from Julia Caesar's life.   He's studying Michael Faraday's book experimental researches to try and figure out a solution for one of his telegraphic inventions.

And fair day was a very famous English scientist. One day, Edison comes home at 4:00 AM and rather than go to bed, he starts studying. Fair day. Until he bursts out to his roommate quote, I am now 21 I may live to be 50 can I get as much done as heated? I have got so much to do in life is so short. I am going to hustle.

And if you remember, Cesar had an incident where he sees a statue of Alexander the great and burst into tears because Alexander had already accomplished so much by his age. So like Caesar Edison decides he has to hustle the next year in 1868 he moves out to Boston where he drops out from being a station agent and starts a business where he can focus more fully on inventing.

His first invention is an electric vote counter, which totally flops. But then he starts to develop advanced telegraphy technology for the financial sector. You'll remember from the Ross child episode that getting information faster than your peers creates enormous financial opportunities. So he's helping these bankers in Boston, in New York, by creating the first electric stock ticker machine.

But more than anything, by creating various techniques for sending more messages faster.  Uh, he's getting them prices of commodities like gold and also prices of stocks before anyone else. So they can profit off that information.  And so as great as Boston was, if you're going to be working with bankers and finance seers, you gotta be in New York city.

So he moves down from Boston to Newark, New Jersey, which is just across the river from New York and moves his business down there as well.  In 1874, Tom invents his first mass market product. The inductor corium, which is essentially a machine that shocks you. Uh, this being the 1870s, people are like, Oh, awesome.

Just what I need, and actually sells pretty well. It was marketed as something that should be in every family as a specific cure for rheumatism and as an inexhaustible fount of amusement. Look, I know some people tend to glamorize the good old days. I can be guilty of this. But I for one, am grateful to live in an age where people are not so bored that they will sit around an induction coil and shock themselves for hours on end just for entertainment.

His other consumer facing invention was the electric pen. The best way to think about an electric pen is it was like a tattoo pen, except instead of skin, it made perforations in a stensul. You could then roll ink over the Stenzel to make hundreds of copies of a handwritten note. It was actually exactly like a tattoo pen.

The first tattoo pens, even modern tattoo pens were basically made by simply adapting the Edison electric pen to be used on skin.  But the success of these inventions are modest compared to his invention of the quadroplex. Which is a system for sending up to four signals across the same Telegraph line, which is a big deal because it increases the bandwidth of communication a lot, right?

Um, four X is it, the quadruplex is really successful both financially and in terms of raising Thomas Edison's profile amongst fellow scientists and fellow inventors  he gets married in 1871 to a 16 year old by the name of Mary Stilwell.

Which uh, was not as weird back then. Um, being the work addict he is, he works until well after midnight on the day of his wedding. But regardless of his work addiction, these are good years. He's married and in love. The business is doing well. He's got over 70 employees and he's having a great time thinking of new inventions all day.

The quadruplex sells so well that he's got some more money and decides he wants to move out to the country where he can have a little more room to experiment, a little, little more elbow room.  So he moves his laboratory to Menlo park, New Jersey, and Menlo park was essentially the middle of nowhere. It's just 20 miles from Manhattan, but it was a part of New Jersey that had been completely undeveloped up to that time.

So that was what he liked about it. It was close to his clients in New York, but at the same time, kind of out in the country. So Edison moves his operations out of Menlo park, and it's like Disneyland, but for inventors and electricians. But this paradise is broken in 1876 when Edison hears rumors about an invention that threatens to undo all of his hard one success that he got with the quadruplex.

Alexander Graham bell has invented the telephone. Now the times of homes being wired up with telephone wires was still long in the future. Neither Edison nor bell really envisioned this quite yet. They saw the telephone as the evolutionary next step of the Telegraph. And in their minds, what the telephone did promise to do was make Edison's quadroplex obsolete.

Even if you're able to send four Morse code messages at the same time, it's still not as efficient as just being able to pick up a phone and simply tell someone a message. Luckily for Edison, while Bell's telephone was technically capable of carrying sound, it wasn't yet a very practical invention. It couldn't carry messages very far or very clearly.

The sound was really garbled and it got even more distorted the further the signal had to carry. So the race was on to create a functional telephone, something that could actually be used in Telegraph stations.  Edison is as ever completely obsessed with the problem and with inventing. He's working day and night every day to build a new transmitter, and his approach is to just try every material possible until something works.

There are essentially two parts to the transmitter, a hard casing, and a diaphragm. For the casing. He tries graphite, carbon dust, um, led. Anything else that seems like it might do the trick. Uh, and the diaphragm got even weirder. He's testing rubber leather cloth, silk, ivory pig's bladder fish guts. I mean, he's just  trying any substance he can think of to see if it will work for this diaphragm to help carry sound better on this new transmitter.

But it works. I mean, eventually he finds a couple of substances that work and Edison's carbon transmitter vastly improved the telephone. Whereas Bell's original telephone barely allowed you to make out the outlines of what the person was saying on the other end. Edison's transmitter more or less, sounded like a telephone that we're used to.

So it was an enormous improvement. The question was would improve the telephone as much as whatever improvement Alexander Graham bell had been working on since he invented the telephone. He had also been trying to improve it and make it so that. You know, you could, you could hear it and it could sound better.

Bell had not been idle  Western union, which was the Telegraph company that had a near monopoly on all the wires in the United States decided to stage a competition between Edison's transmitter and Alexander Graham Bell's new transmitter, new telephone.  And when they put them head to head, it turned out to be a blowout.

Edison's phone could pick up a whisper from three feet away and transmit at 70 miles, whereas Bell's telephone couldn't even carry a shouted call from New York to Newark. So with that, essentially Edison had won the first round of the telephone battles. And I think there's a really important lesson to be drawn from this victory.

One of Edison's greatest weaknesses turned out to be one of his greatest advantages. In this instance. And that weakness was that he was not a particularly good theoretical scientist. He didn't really know the underlying physics and chemistry all that. Well, I'm not, I'm not trying to say he wasn't like ignorant of the science he did.

He knew the basic principles of science. Um, but he was self-taught. Right. He didn't know the theory nearly as well as his peers who were Harvard educated or who had gone to universities. In London or Paris,  you know, he was by comparison, a tinkerer,  and he compensated for that by acting like a tinkerer.

He experimented like crazy with a telephone and later with the electric light bulb he didn't really try to reason it out. He didn't start with first principles and, and think his way to his inventions. He just dove in and started trying to stuff and he was just unbelievably persistent.

He tried and he tried until he brute force his way into a solution, into an answer. Listen to how he described his own process and the way he viewed genius. Edison said, quote, everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I've got no imagination. I never dream. My so called inventions already existed in the environment.

I took them out. I've created nothing. Nobody does. There is no such thing as an idea. Being brain born. Everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment. The drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The genius hangs around his laboratory day and night.

If anything, he's there to catch it. If he wasn't, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his. Um, it reminds me of an experiment frequently cited and discussed where different groups of people are put in teams and asked to make a tower as tall as they can out of marshmallows, scotch tape and some spaghetti sticks.

And they have 18 minutes to make this tower.  And I did this when I was in a consulting firm, and the famous result from the study is that kindergarteners actually regularly outperform business school students, um, among others, also lawyers and CEOs. Um, and actually when I did this experiment with, with my consulting firm, our tower was shorter than the average tower created by a team of kindergarteners.

Uh, so why would that be? Well, usually adults spend the first five to 10 minutes discussing how they're going to build. And putting together a plan and debating ideas for the best way to build a structure out of these weird substances. And kindergartners don't do that. They just start sticking spaghetti into marshmallows and taping it up and building, and then, you know when their tower collapses, and it usually does, it's only been a couple of minutes.

So they just fix it and adapt on the fly, or they try something different. They try a new way of building the tower. And so they spend less time planning than adults do, and more time just trial and error and they trial and error. They're way too taller towers.  When we did this experiment at the consulting firm, many of us had, you know, these very nice looking towers that were either pyramids or kind of square looking structures that you'd probably imagine, and the team that actually won, they got the highest tower, didn't look anything like that.

It looked like this total freak show of a structure. That they had just kind of, they started experimenting from the very beginning and, uh, it was kind of leaning and weird, but you know, it worked. It was the tallest by far. So anyway, obviously there's a takeaway from all this. Um, I would say that it is plan less, do more.

You have to try and fail and try and fail until you find something that works. Whether that's in business, art, sports, writing, whatever it may be. That was the approach. That worked for Edison, and I think it's the approach that works for most people. Most people spend more time planning and thinking that they need to, and less time just getting in reps, trying, experimenting and failing and figuring out things that do work the hard way.

But okay, back to the start. Back to the life of Edison. So Edison sold the rights to his new transmitter, to Western union for $100,000 which seemed like a ton of money. Um, but alas, it was kind of shortsighted for Edison. Telephones obviously became one of the most important technologies in the years to follow.

And his receiver was actually widely used for the next 100 years. If you went and picked up a phone in the 1960s. It would have a carbon based transmitter based on Edison's patent. So he lost out on millions and millions of dollars by selling that patent to Western union.  Uh, unfortunately, this was kind of typical for Addison.

He was a really great inventor, obviously, but he was not a great businessman. He was. He was okay. I mean, he wasn't like a dunce, but he wasn't, he wasn't in the type of businessman that he wasn't inventor. Um, it was in the midst of working on this transmitter. The Edison made his first truly great world changing discovery.

And it happened really late at night. Edison would have these great midnight work parties. Generally speaking, the environment at Menlo park was very professional, very buttoned up, and Workman like, but being the insane insomniac that he was, he would often make his men work very late with him and when he did, he would have the nightwatchman bring up a midnight dinner.

The men could relax and converse. It was the one time that he kind of let their guard down and joke around, have a good time while they were at work.  And then after they did this, after this midnight meal, the hours after midnight were often their most creative and led to some of their most productive experiments and big breakthroughs.

And one night, shortly after their midnight dinner, Edison was testing out different materials for the diaphragm of the transmitter. And since he was hard of hearing, Edison had to hold his finger to the diaphragm to feel how much it was vibrating to see how well it was transmitting sound. Because again, you know, he couldn't really hear how well it was transmitting sound.

As Edison was doing this, it kind of dawns on him like, Oh wait, this is making unique vibrations for each sound he makes. So he turns to his assistant Batchelor and says, batch, if we had a point on this, we could make a record on some material, which we could afterwards. Pull under the point and it would give us the speech back.

So that's the way that recording works. Right? And he just kind of intuits this that, huh? If my voice is making these vibrations, will then, if I could make these vibrations kind of solid, then in whatever way I record them, I could just reverse the process and make the sound again. And it's kind of like a big realization to have all at once.

Right? But he does. So he calls his master machinist, a German man by the name of KUSI. And by the way, this guy and bachelor were geniuses, especially Colussy. He was an absolute savant at taking Edison's ideas and turning them into machines.

And so Edison tells this machinists that they're going to try to do this, make an indent on some wax paper, and then pull it back through to see if the noise will reproduce. Uh, KUSI said, this is absurd, but Hey, you know, I'll try it. There's no way this is going to work. But sure. Whatever you say, mr Edison, it's a real statement to their adaptability and ability to move quickly, that they have an experiment rigged up and ready to try in just an hour or so.

Naturaler pulled the wax paper along the wheel, and Edison spoke loudly into a telephone mouthpiece  with a point attached to the back. and he used the stock phrase that they used for experiments such as this. He said, Mary had a little lamb.  They pulled out the wax paper and examined it, saw the marks of the vibrations, and then put it back under the needle at the beginning and  they pulled it along roughly the same speed  and as they did, they heard Edison's voice saying Mary had a little lamb back to them.

Crucey cried out my guts in hemo or in English, my God in heaven, it is like his mind is blown, right? Mascular would later say it was not fine talking, but the shape of it was there. There were cheers and congratulations all the way around. People can't believe it. They have imagine for the first time in history.

Heard recorded human speech  and it can be difficult to understand just how monumental this was. When Edison told his attorney Benjamin Butler about the invention, the ladder's response was my dear Edison. Tell me something more about your wonderful invention in recording the human voice.

It is so remarkable that I do not understand it at all.  His confusion is pretty understandable given that Edison himself struggled to find the words  to describe what he had invented.  He wrote, quote, you probably remember our experimentation about printing the human voice. I have not done that, but I have produced in recording the voice on a paper from which I can reproduce the same voice at any future time.

As you can listen and recognize the voice of the original speaker.  In speaking to the Philadelphia record, a newspaper, Edison's colleague, Edward Johnson, described it similarly. He said that Edison had invented an instrument quote by which a speech can be recorded while it is being delivered on prepared paper, and that it could be redelivered at any time.

I mean, even by today's standards, that kind of sounds like magic. I can record a voice on paper and then make the paper repeat back the same voice and the people at the time, it was like magic. It was a complete sensation. It's difficult to put ourselves in their shoes because now we are so used to seeing and experiencing new technologies that were sort of jaded to it.

I mean, what could be invented now that would truly blow your mind? What was the last invention that you saw it and were just like, Whoa, mouth agape. You couldn't believe what you are seeing or hearing. It's really rare these days. Right? I don't even know what could do that now to us. Maybe like a, a teleportation device or something like that.

And that's kinda like what this was the people at the time.  It really, it, it melted their brains. Uh, there are stories that they test the device with random strangers. They play it for people. And they ask them, what do you hear?  And the people respond,  I have no idea what this is.  I don't know what I hear.

And, you know, the audio was not as high quality as recorded audio, not as high quality as the audio that you're hearing right now. For me. But it was audible, right?

But these people could not decipher the words, and then the person who was playing the audio for them would say, this is a recorded human voice that you're about to hear. And they would play it again. And the person could tell them, every word that the person had spoken is when they heard it the first time.

Their brain could not compute. That they were hearing human speech from a machine. Edison said quote, they do not expect or imagine that a machine can talk and hence cannot understand it's words.  It's just, it's really crazy. It is. It is a, it is crazy how much this invention blew their minds. How incomprehensible it was to them.

In fact, after it was announced, one professor wrote to Edison asking him to repudiate what obviously must be a hoax. He said, quote, the idea of a talking machine is ridiculous, but the article is so ingeniously constructed that some persons are so ignorant of the first principles of science that they are apt to believe it.

True. Unless you deny it. In other words, this scientist  is asking Edison to repudiate reports of this talking machine. Cause obviously that's ridiculous. That could never happen.

Despite these reactions. Edison doesn't immediately recognize how this might be commercialized. Notice that in his letter to his lawyer, he starts by saying, you remember our experimentation about printing the human voice? I have not done that. What Edison was trying to do was print human speech in order to make telegrams easier to send.

Telephones had been invented, obviously, as we've discussed, but these were still being used as more reliable ways to send telegrams , rather than having to tap out messages and Morse code. You could call up the station agent and he would just write down the message as you've said it, and it would later be delivered to the intended recipient.

Uh, in writing, right.  He was trying to invent a way so that you could speak in the words, would simply type themselves out, automated voice transcription, essentially something that is still not totally reliable in 2020, uh, if you ever use voice transcription on your phone or something like that, you know, it makes lots of mistakes.

So he felt like he had only solved half the problem. He had invented a way to record sound. But you could only play it back with sound. You couldn't automatically convert it to writing, which is what he was trying to do. Edison, in his colleagues, failed to anticipate the mass market appeal of their achievement.

Um, they would really gain that perspective accidentally.  and article in the scientific American reported breathlessly on the work of some French researchers who were attempting to record human speech, but they were attempting to do so by measuring the movement of the lips, tongue, mouth, larynx, and so on of, of the speaker, right? So they're trying to measure the way that your mouth and your throat is moving as you speak. And then they were going to try and use that to create a robot that would do basically the same motions, you know, like artificial lips and stuff, uh, with an artificial throat that was like a pipe organ and they would recreate the sounds.

Somewhere else. So, so you could speak, they would measure it. Then they would send that information across telegram and  essentially a robot would recreate your speech on the other end.

We know that this was not a reliable way to record and reproduce human speech. But at the time it seemed rather promising and impressive. The reporters of the scientific American, so they write an article about it saying that it's the bees knees. These friends researchers are really on the verge of remarkable breakthrough and soon they will be able to record and reproduce sound.

How exciting is that? Well, Edward Johnson, who was kind of like Edison's chief marketing officer. Sees this and it really grinds his gears. Right? It really makes him mad that these guys are getting all this press for claiming to be on the verge of something the Edison had actually already accomplished.

So with Edison's permission, he writes a letter to scientific American and basically says, Hey, we already recorded human speech and we can reproduce it at any time. And he sends a diagram of their as yet unnamed contraption, which would come to be known as the phonograph.

This creates an international sensation and people's first reaction is essentially, wait, you're telling us that we can hear the voices of dead people? And that's kind of the first application that people make in their minds is that  if we can record people's speech, then we will be able to hear them continue to talk after they are dead.

Which tells you something about human nature right?   And that doesn't seem so remarkable to us now, right? We're used to hearing the voices of

Pass statesman,  you've heard the voice of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and if you're an American, you've heard all of these actors and actresses from old time movies who are now dead. And that doesn't seem weird to us, but this was really remarkable. And I think one of the reasons why is that for thousands of years across many different places and cultures , soothsayers and magicians, fortune tellers had claimed to be able to speak for the dead via magical or divine powers.

We have , for whatever reason, this  , internal natural urge to connect with our loved ones who have died.  And so that was like kind of a staple of magic.

And now along comes this man who had made that promise real. We're going to be able to hear the voices of dead people from beyond the grave,  if they record something before they die.    no wonder he was soon given the nickname  the wizard of Menlo park.

A few short weeks later on December 7th, 1877, Edison and his colleagues walked into the offices of the scientific American to display a working model of the phonograph. Here's what scientific American wrote about what happened next.  Mr. Thomas a Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned to crank in the machine, inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well and bid us a cordial good night.

These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little contrivance explained and illustrated below. The photograph was obviously then diagrammed below in the article

It was huge news all over the world and though he didn't realize it at the time, this Mark, the beginning of the end of Thomas Edison's life as a private person, he would be a celebrity for the rest of his life. Letters from the adoring public constantly streamed in. And eventually so did interested onlookers who crammed into public viewing areas in the Menlo park lab to catch a glimpse of the legend at work.

Edison soon discovered that he was a natural showman. He was sort of Steve jobs like in his ability to get the press to report breathlessly on any new invention that he had made or even claimed to have made.  In fact, Edison served as a direct inspiration for C jobs  in 1984 when job's pulled the bag off the first Macintosh, it's first words mimic those of the phonograph.

Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.  So anyway, all this leads to a huge international profile and a big platform, but not huge profits. Addison would struggle to find a profitable use for the phonograph for quite a while, and everybody would,

it would be decades before recorded audio found a use that many people would use in their homes and was widely available. Part of this was Edison's fault. He was an inveterate tinkerer. he just couldn't stop trying to perfect the machine . And just kinda get something done and ready for release.

But part of it was also just the technical difficulties inherent in creating a useful product. Edward Johnson wrote quote, the phonograph is creating an immense stir, but I think it impresses people more as a toy than as a practical machine,  which was definitely true.

Around this time, the New York sun released an article titled a marvelous discovery, a man of 31 revolutionizing the whole world, and it was really a hagiography. It was the first of many articles that would portray Edison in an almost legendary light hued closely to an old American stereotype of this wild frontier inventor is first established by Benjamin Franklin about a hundred years earlier.

Edison was portrayed as a plain-spoken, approachable, normal seeming man who nevertheless possessed and almost godlike ability to create technology that revolutionized human life out of thin air. He was usually portrayed as dirty and grinding with grease, chewing tobacco and speaking plain, unaffected language.

And though Edison was definitely trying to portray a certain image, you know, he liked playing up this folksy inventor. Um, the appearance that was in these reports was for all intents and purposes. Correct. He did kind of look like that. Uh, he did love to chew tobacco or chomp on a cigar.

He did in fact, do a lot of the work himself at this time and could often be found at the work bench with dirty shirt, greasy hands. Um, and he was often found in unkempt conditions because he had once again slept at the office. so he is kind of playing up his celebrity, but you know, it's based on, on a truth about who he really was.   but this article spurs even more people to come and see him. Menlo park started to turn into a zoo where he's the main attraction, and at the same time, pressure is mounting from creditors and business associates to find more profitable uses for the phonograph.

So Edison decides that he just needs to get away for awhile and takes a trip to the Western United States. He starts, uh, in Wyoming where he goes to observe a solar eclipse, and he then proceeds to go even further West to California before turning home, making a stop at st Louis on the way.  When he gets back, he tells her porters that the trip was a lot of fun, but he hadn't come back with any ideas for new inventions.

but less than 24 hours after returning, he made three sketches in his notebook  and at the top of the page, he titled them electric light.  On the next episode, we'll dive into Edison's invention of the incandescent light bulb as well as the rest of his life.

Until then. Thanks for listening.

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Hello and welcome to how to take over the world. This has been Wilson, and this episode is the second episode about Thomas Edison covering his life from the invention of electric light until his death. And I'm going to do something a little bit different. This go around. I'm going to do this episode two, and then next week I'm going to do something called end notes where I'm just going record sort of my thoughts that didn't fit neatly into the narrative that I laid out in part one and part two.

Um, so it'll just be kind of some ramblings and some extra notes and. You guys can let me know what you think of that. But for this episode, where we're starting at is, if you remember, Edison invented the phonograph and then he went out West. He took this kind of big vacation and came back with ideas about electric light.

Uh, this was in 1878. Addison is 31 years old, , and when Edison invented the phonograph and with it, the entire idea of recorded sound, it was basically by accident. If you remember, he was working on a different problem and it just kind of came to him all at once.

And his invention of the light bulb could not have been more different.  Electric light was something that dozens of people were working on. Everyone kind of knew it was the future. It was just that no one could really figure out how to make it work. And so when Edison starts working on perfecting the light bulb in 1878.

It's the ultimate heat check. Dozens of other men with more impressive academic credentials than him had been working on it for years, and he thinks he can just come in and figure it out. No problem. Right  now, it's important to keep in mind that a form of electric light   actually already been invented by the time Edison came along.

But it wasn't electric light like we know it. They had what were called arc lights. The first arc light was developed way back 20 years previous in 1855 and what it was is essentially a giant open current. So you got two big metal poles and there's a continuous electric current passing from one to the other.

If you've ever seen a welder with one of those big heavy masks in their tools, throwing off this huge bright white light that is actually called arc welding. And arc welding is essentially just using mini arc lights to fuse together metal. So that's really what an arc light is, right? But there's a problem with it.

One is that they are incredibly dangerous, so you got to keep them far removed from pedestrians. The other problem is that they're incredibly bright. So with an ArcLight, the strategy is to put it way up high. And let a single arc light light a block, or even a few blocks. This creates problems because it casts horrible shadows.

And also because you can't really use it for indoor lighting, it's, it's just too bright.  and so these lights were sort of a novelty,  but people were still looking for a better solution, something that they could actually replace candles and  gas lamps with,  which brings us to incandescent lighting.  of course, as you probably know with incandescent lights, instead of using an open current as the light source, like an ArcLight, instead, you send a charge through a filament, heating it up until it starts to glow.

 and again, incandescent lighting had already been discovered far before Edison, at least in principle. But the problem in 1878 was finding a material for the filament of an incandescent bulb that would last for long enough to make it practical. Because if you imagine most things that you heat up so hot that they glow usually either melt or burst into flame.

And even if you had a good substance that would not Mel or burst into flame, most of them would burn out after only a few minutes and a light bulb that needs to be replaced every five minutes is like, that's not practical, right? That's a science fair project. So everyone was trying to figure out how to make a practical incandescent light bulb that would last.

And Edison was not lacking in self-confidence. He was certain that. He could succeed or others had failed. It seemed easy to him. In fact, so easy that he starts telling newspaper reporters that he has this thing figured out. He's got an incandescent light bulb invented. After only a few weeks of working on it.

He comes up with this bulb and it's lasting longer than anyone else's, and he figures, Hey, that was easy. I just amended the light bulb. And so he's telling people, I did it. Electric light bulb invented.  and because he's a celebrity mentor already, you know, he invented the phonograph, which blew everyone's socks off. People are paying attention to it. It becomes huge news.

They're reporting it in the New York times, reporting it in the papers all over the world. Edison has invented. The electric light bulb. And not only that, but Edison has a pretty fleshed out idea of how these new bulbs could be used to make electric light practical for millions of people. Listen to what he wrote, and remember, this is before any of this is invented.

This is just Edison speculating off the top of his dome. In fact, they were still years away from, from anyone getting electric light.  but here's what Addison wrote quote With the process. I have just discovered I can produce a thousand bulbs from one machine. Indeed, the number may be said to be infinite when the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public, which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly protect the process, illumination by gas will be discarded   with 15 or 20 of these dynamic electric machines.

I can light the entire lower part of New York city. Using a 500 horsepower engine.  I propose to establish one of these light centers in Nassau street. Once wires can be run uptown, these wires must be insulated and laid in the ground in the same manner as gas pipes. I also propose to utilize the gas burners and chandelier's.

Now in use in each house, I can place a light meter once these wires will pass through the house, tapping small metallic contrivances that may be placed over each burner . Whenever it is desired to light a jet, it will only be necessary to touch a little spring near it. No matches are required.

again, the same wire that brings the light to you will also bring power and heat.  with the power. You can run the elevator, a sewing machine or any other mechanical contrivance that requires a motor and by means of the heat, you may cook your food.

so this seems like pretty simple stuff to us today because he's just describing a power grid. Yes. You flip a switch and you get light, or you get appliances, you can run a sewing machine, you can get heat through your electricity.

But that was totally revolutionary at the time, right? Because there were no power grids.

so in order to say this, Edison sort of had to imagine this future out of the void, and in order to make it a reality, he was going to have to invent. Not only the light bulbs, but the generators, the wiring, the meters, the appliances, even the light switches.  

first, the key to this entire system of electric light, the first step that would unlock everything else and make it possible. Was finding a light bulb that could last, and Edison had a problem in this regard because the bulb that he had invented, the one he told all these reporters about and sent off a firestorm of publicity, it's a total and complete failure.

He had gone down the wrong path. He was using a zinc and platinum construction, which is cleverly designed, but it doesn't last much longer than anyone else's bulb. It showed promising results at first, so he thought that if he kept tinkering with it, you know, he could, he could figure it out. He could get it to last longer.

But no, uh, that, that particular road he was going down was a total dead end.  And Edison is starting to realize  that he's got absolutely nothing in terms of a light bulb, right? As the media attention is reaching a fever pitch. People are saying the Edison has struck gold twice in a row.

He's invented the phonograph and now the light bulb and are shouting his praises. And everyone is so intrigued to see this new light bulb in action. And again, he's just realizing he's completely wrong. He's got nothing. It's not a great situation to be in. In fact, it's, it's so stressful that he has a complete nervous breakdown.

Uh, he's bedridden for a week and a half with a horribly painful condition called facial neurology. Uh, but luckily there is one thing that he's got. And that's boatloads of money because the richest and most powerful men in the world were tripping over themselves to fund Edison's new venture in discovering electric light.

the financier's that Edison actually goes with our men representing Western union and JP Morgan, they capitalize his new electric light company to the tune of $395,000. Which is the equivalent of about 10 point $5 million in 2020 money.  He's well-funded, but he's on the hook. He has to invent the light bulb.

Now  he's got the eyes of the world on him. If he doesn't, he's humiliated and ruined. And so Edison goes to the strategy that had always worked best for him. Which is to forget the clever theorizing and just experiment and tinker like crazy until he figured something out.  So he staffs up and he and his team try out thousands of different substances to see what will work.

and he continues these experiments over months and months with everyone pressuring him and waiting to see what he will come up with.    Edison reportedly said during this time quote, I think there's no doubt.

I am the busiest man in America.  Which is true. He's got a group of workers that are referred to as the insomnia squad, and people refer to this bizarre situation that you'll visit the lab in Menlo park and it looks like, like a homeless shelter. There are just people fully clothed, sleeping all over the place, under benches, under tables in random corners and closets.

And that's because Edison was completely obsessed with figuring this out.

He had all the pressure of the world on his shoulders, and he expected his employees to feel the same way about it that he did. So there was no regular sleep schedules. You came into the lab, you worked on finding a working light bulb until your body just couldn't take it anymore, at which point you curled up and grabbed an hour or two of Shaddai under some bench somewhere, and then you got back to work.

There were no other priorities and there were no distractions.  Well, actually there was one minor distraction for Edison when a minor scientist by the name of Clarence Blake. Gives a lecture in which he pays tribute to Alexander Graham bell for inventing the telephone without mentioning Edison. Edison goes berserk.

He considered himself essential to the creation of the telephone because of the transmitter that he had invented,  and it was a really big deal. It made the telephone much more usable over much longer distances. And so Edison kind of had a point when he said that he was one of the fathers of the telephone.

So for someone to give a big public speech . Where they only mentioned bell as the sole inventor of the telephone that insulted Edison, and he felt slighted. So when one of Edison's European agents, a guy by the name of George Guerard sends Edison a letter saying, you know what? We need. Is a better receiver for the telephone. Edison jumps at the chance. He takes a couple months away from the light bulb and invents a new chalk receiver that makes a telephone much more functional and capable of receiving messages from far greater distances.

It's a monumental achievement, a stunning success in a very short period of time, and he doesn't just as a sideshow, and then he's right back to the light bulb. And to me, this is kind of like, this is peak Edison. This is him at his powers where he's inventing stuff just to stunt on people, just to show them that he can, you know, he's, he's inventing world changing inventions just to solve petty slights,  

but despite this, the light bulb is still actually not going that great and the news is starting to get out that things are not going well. 14 of the 16 patents that he submitted to the us patent office are rejected as unworkable in the newspapers, who just months ago were reporting that he had solved the problem of the light bulb are now reporting.

The Edison actually has no idea what he's doing,  .

And it's not just the press who are coming after Edison. The scientific community always had a particular hatred for him because he was a highly successful inventor and scientist despite having virtually no formal education, and so they were launching a bunch of invective against him.

In one case, Edison had invented a new dynamo, which is an early form of like generator to generate power for his light bulbs. And  it was weird looking. It was kind of clunky and awkward. And, um, unlike anything else that had been invented in terms of dynamo, it didn't look like a, a good functioning dynamo and the scientific community, just Savage, this new machine, they're brutal in criticizing it.

The Irish physicist and academic John Tyndall said about it, quote,

it is difficult adequately to express the ludicrous inefficiency of the arrangement, but one thing is abundantly certain, and that is

that the person who seriously proposed it was wholly destitute of a scientific knowledge of either electricity or the science of energy.

so it's not what you want people to be saying. But meanwhile, I mean, Edison actually tries to thing and it generates so much energy that it breaks the coils that get hooked up to it.   it's a very raw invention. It needed a bunch of modifications to become practical, but it was a breakthrough in generator design and academics and theoretical scientists just don't give it the time of day.

They're totally dismissive and condescending, and this would be one of the inciting incidents, you know, long feud with the academic and scientific establishment. They generally refuse to give Edison much respect. And he always had some nasty words for what he considered do nothing academics who never actually did or invented anything  and only ever criticized those who actually did get out there and invent things.

Edison has quotes. He says things like, take a whole pile of theoretical scientists that I can name and you will find uncertainty if not in position in half of what they state as scientific truth.  

and with this already, you can definitely see his perspective why he would feel this way.  Well, in the midst of all this pressure and skepticism from the press and infected from the scientific establishment, Edison finally does have his breakthrough with the light bulb   on Tuesday, October 21st.

Edison had his lab assistants test a bulb with a carbonized filament using lamp black and either thread or a fishing line.  The light lasted for 13 and a half hours. Edison wrote Eureka in his laboratory log book.

Now, you probably wouldn't buy a light bulb that was going to last for just 13 and a half hours, but it was enough to demonstrate that, Hey, we're onto something here. We can build on this.

And sure enough, two months later, by new year's Eve, they have 59 reliable lamps to show off at Menlo park. With bulbs that can last for over 600 hours. They throw a great big party, and it's really the arrival of the electric light bulb.  I mentioned this party because

it's at this party that Edison has. One of my favorite quotes, um, at the party, someone asks Edison if he is a genius and he responds.  You know well enough, I am nothing of the sort unless we accept the theory. The genius is prolonged patients. I'm patient enough to be sure,  and I would just like to point out that that that kind of actually is exactly what genius is.

Prolonged patients, a good amount of intelligence married to an unfailing energy and level of effort.

, you may have heard the other saying genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. And it sounds kind of corny, but that is actually a Thomas Edison quote. And if you can kind of remove the cliche aura around it, I think it's, it tells you a lot about what it takes to do something great about genius and about who Edison was.

 Now I'd just like to take a second to talk about the nature of this discovery, because on its surface, it isn't this earth shattering thing. It isn't this breakthrough. It didn't blow people's minds in quite the same way that recorded sounded. And that's because Edison didn't strictly invent electric light or even the incandescent light bulb.

So you'll see some people out there who say, Oh, you know, Edison was a fraud, and a greedy businessman who really just stole his inventions from other people and claim them as his own,  which is a nice story, right?

It fits a certain narrative of the greedy capitalist, but it's just not remotely true. Edison absolutely deserves credit for inventing the light bulb. Yes. Other people made other important contributions in the field. But who deserves credit? I mean, on October 21st, 1882, no one had electric light, uh, basically, , and after that date, they were on the road, , to that becoming a reality and to giving electric light to millions of people.

So when people try to claim the Edison doesn't deserve credit for the light bulb and for electric light, I think of the line from the movie, the social network. When Mark Zuckerberg says. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.  I just, I feel that way about the light bulb.

If someone else had invented the light bulb, they would have invented the light bulb,  and these claims are not new. People at the time tried to downplay his achievements or even downright denied them, especially members of the academic and scientific community. As I was mentioning earlier, when Edison applied for patents in London.

His lamp was dismissed as, quote, a hopeless failure, wrong in design, wrong in principle, useful only in showing how singularly devoid of sound, scientific knowledge, a clever practical man might be.  I mean, that's above and beyond what is necessary to shoot down what they thought was a failed Bible. Right.

And add to that, that they were wrong. It was working. Um, the Frenchman, Dumont cell, they're our greatest scientists on the subject of electric light. Said that all should regardless suspicion, the pompous announcements that come our way from the new world and even in America. Professor Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of technology called Edison's bulb, a conspicuous failure.

All of these experts claim that the incandescence of Edison's light bulb. Was clearly fake and sure to burnout after a few hours if only given closer inspection and an honest test, and you can't blame them too much. I mean, Edison is the same guy who was claiming that he had invented the light bulb years ago, so his claim probably did deserve some skepticism, but the condescension was over the top.

And of course they were wrong. He had figured it out.

  Edison referred to electric light as the greatest adventure of my life, akin to venturing on an uncharted sea.  And even after the invention of the light bulb, that adventure was just starting out.  A light bulb is just a bulb, and if you have nothing to plug it into, it's not going to do you much. Good. So Edison and his company had already started working on things like generators and a delivery system, but now they really kicked into high gear working on these things.

The number of patents that Edison and his team submit during this time period is staggering. They're coming up with and patenting dynamos and engines to create energy wires to transport the electricity systems for laying out and distributing it. Lamps, bulbs, and appliances that can be used with it.

Safety fuses and centrifical governors to control the running of motors  as demand Rose and fell meters to measure the usage of electricity and more . At this point in his career, Edison was receiving a new patent roughly once every four days, which is just mind boggling.

Again, inventing the light bulb was a monumental task, something no one else had been able to achieve, but developing everything else around it to deliver power to people's homes was no less of an achievement. In fact, it's probably a, an even bigger achievement, and it required an enormous amount of intelligence and ingenuity, not just from Edison, but from his team as well.

He definitely didn't do it all himself. Crucey who you'll remember as Edison's brilliant machinist from last episode was really crucial in developing the insulated copper wiring that would transport energy to homes all over the world.  Crucey also basically invented the grid prior to his invention.

Edison's idea was to send out energy, like a tree branching off into smaller and smaller wires as it gets closer to individual homes. Well, Crucey comes up with a grid system that reduced the need for copper by seven eights and really made electric light economical.  It was a really elegant, really efficient invention

So it definitely wasn't a one man show. But at the same time, I think Edison deserves a lot of the credit for the accomplishments of his subordinates. He did a lot to push them and guide them towards solutions. He was a great, not just an inventor, but leader. This was expressed well by one of his junior electrical engineers who had joined the company.

A couple years later. He said,

quote, the effect that Edison produced on me was rather extraordinary when I saw this wonderful man who had no training at all, no advantages, and did it all himself. And saw the great results by virtue of his industry and application. I felt mortified that I had squandered my life.

So, you know, this young engineer felt really inspired by seeing how much Edison could do and felt inspired himself to try and, you know, try and match that.

and so  in case you didn't guess that young engineer who was working for mr Edison was a guy by the name of Nikola Tesla. Uh, I'll get into their relationship. They're supposed rivalry and some of their similarities and differences in a separate episode because I think it merits a longer conversation.

.

Although I will just say here that the idea of a rivalry between the two of them is sort of overblown.  

But even with the assistance of this big team of brilliant engineers who assisted Edison. The whole electrifying a city for the first time thing took a lot of effort and it took a long time, two years later,  they still hadn't installed anything. And people start to get anxious naturally, you know, Hey, when are we actually going to get electric power?

And especially the finance ears are like, okay, wintering to start seeing a return on this capital.  One of the big obstacles was getting the approval of corrupt New York city officials. So Edison comes up with a pretty brilliant plan. He gets chief alderman, John C. Morris, and other New York city officials.

To come to Menlo park where Edison gives them a long lecture during which they start to get a little annoyed and very hungry

and then he leads them upstairs to a pitch black room  as they stand there waiting in this dark room, soft golden electric lights slowly come on, revealing an extravagantly set dinner table. And white gloved waiters standing at attention the wine and the bourbon flowed. And by the end of the night, John C.

Morris was telling the table the Edison was entitled to the thanks of the world for bringing this light to such perfection that it can now be made to take the place of gas and assuring everyone that he was now an advocate of electric light. You could count on him.  the next day.

Addison had a permit to bring incandescent electric light to 51 blocks of downtown Manhattan.

Around this time, Edison decides that he can't really afford to be way out in Menlo park. So he moves his family up to New York city and establishes a new operating base and starts work , on a power plant facility on Pearl street.  He also establishes a new company. He wanted to manufacture all of his own machinery,  but his board of getting into manufacturing.

So he starts to, Edison machine works as a separate company, which turned out to be a pretty good call as that little company would go on to become what we know as general electric, which was a pretty big deal for quite a long time.   Edison was juggling all these different constraints, inventing and patenting the technology, building and manufacturing, all the different components necessary for all this to finally happen, but delay after delay piled up.

and then finally on Monday, September 4th, 1882. Edison turned the lights on on New York city.  He actually has them turned on at 3:00 PM so that no one would notice if they didn't work.  But by 7:00 PM people start becoming aware, Whoa, wait, the electric lights are on all over the city.

It was a total transformational moment in the history of the world. But it was also a little anticlimactic. There were a few news reports about it. No parties, no celebrations, just steady, practical, warm light.  But it was enough for Edison who said, quote, I have accomplished all that I promised. Now, Edison has a really, really packed life.

He invented a lot and did a lot over a long period of time. Um, none of it probably matches the Heights of inventing the phonograph and the electric light. So I'm gonna do sort of a quick overview of the rest of his life before going back and diving deep on a few stories.  Things started to go really well for Edison's electric business, but then in 1884 he had the worst year of his life, a giant financial crisis hits the U S and sinks him into debt, and around the same time his wife dies  at the time, no one could, or no one would say what exactly it was that she died from.

But in retrospect, it's pretty clear that she sadly died of a morphine overdose

over the next couple of years. Edison managed to pull himself out of financial crisis, and by 1886 he's in a really good situation  with more than 300,000 lamps in his circuit and booming revenue and profits. He also remarried in 1886 to a woman by the name of Mina Miller, and it's a great year for him.

Business is doing well. He's in love, he's teaming with invented energy and even has time to patent an important non-electric light invention, the phone of Lex, but there's something else that happens in 1886 that should have concerned him on November 2nd a patent was filed for alternating current electricity, which would allow power to be sent over distances, far longer than Edison's direct current system  and at power levels that were much higher.

Despite these advantages, Edison decides not to take advantage of AC power. He said this was because AC was dangerous and could kill people.  which to be fair to Edison was true. AC was in fact much more dangerous than DC.  

But it didn't matter all that much. The people, when it provided much more benefit for far cheaper than his DC electric light,  

the Westinghouse company with Nikola Tesla, who had left Edison as one of its chief engineers, takes up the mantle of AC power. And acquires the rights to it in the United States. By the end of 1888 Westinghouse is crushing Edison electric in terms of subscribers.

At the same time, Edison nearly bankrupts himself again by putting money into an improved phonograph business.  In the late 1880s Edison starts to put more and more control of his existing business into the hands of professional managers so that he can focus more time on inventing.   Consequently, in the late 1880s Edison makes integral contributions to the development of moving pictures, but we now call cinema or movies.

And in 1892 Edison is forced out as the director of his electric light company and decides to go into of all things mining.

He establishes this enormous mine called the Ogden mine in New Jersey and develops all these crazy mining and refining technologies to try and make this mind competitive, even though the aura at this location was significantly less pure   , than other mines in the United States.

He keeps selling off ownership of his other companies, especially general electric,  in order to fund this mining operation, which is crazy. He's just sinking good money after bad for this reason. There are multiple people who become fabulously wealthy from Edison's inventions.

There's basically a small group of millionaires and billionaires, , most famously Samuel Insull, but Edison isn't one of them. He keeps pouring money from his profitable businesses into his unprofitable ones. Edison was never really poor during his life, but he was never rich either. He was basically always a minor millionaire.

Whenever he achieved a ton of success, he poured a bunch of money from that into these new ventures where he could tinker and invent new things,

but then often lost a bunch of money for him. , and that's because for Edison, money was never the point. You might remember from the last episode that he was literally addicted to inventing like a junkie who only makes money in order to buy more drugs. Edison only made money to pour it back into unprofitable ventures where he could invent new things.

And so his mining business is just a total money pit. He's losing astronomical amounts of money, but he just keeps pouring more and more money into it. Until he literally can't lose anymore. He basically hits rock bottom and people refuse to fund the mine anymore.   Despite this, he never really cared. He was never bitter about the mine.

In fact, he had the time of his life. He was inventing cool new mining equipment and would later write quote. I never felt better in my life. Hard work, nothing to divert my thought. Clear air, simple food. It was very pleasant.

On a return visit to the mine after it had failed, he was able to cheerfully joke,   I put $3 million down that hole in the ground and never heard it hit bottom  

after he leaves the mine, he comes back and partially resumed control. Off phonograph, electric light, and moving picture businesses over the years. He also makes important new inventions in the areas of cement, manufacturing, x-ray technology, and most profitably with the development of rechargeable batteries.

These were used in cars, submarines, and dozens of other uses.  Speaking of car batteries, one of the most productive relationships of Edison's life came with a young engineer who worked for him early in his career. The young man named Henry Ford expressed to Edison a desire to keep tinkering on combustion engines, which Edison encouraged.

Addison and Ford struck up a strong relationship that would last Edison's lifetime.

And Ford really, really looked up to and admired Edison and continued to fund some of his less profitable ventures. Even when Ford kind of knew that, that he was probably not going to see a return on these investments. He just really, you know, admired Edison as like , the Saint Louis father of invention who gave him his start and would do anything for him.

So it was a very productive relationship for both of them in different ways  toward the end of his life. Edison spent time trying to come up with inventions for the U S Navy, but none of them were ever implemented,   after that, the last major initiative of Edison's life, which he undertook in his late seventies and early eighties was trying to find a domestic source of rubber in the United States, but he wasn't able to complete that work before he died.

During his lifetime, Edison invented the phonograph, the practical light bulb, the rechargeable nickel battery. The kinetoscope, the electric pen, the electric stock ticker, the underwater microphone, the fluoroscope, and he was a key innovator in mining motion pictures, cement and chemical manufacturing, telepany and telegraphy.

He also founded one of the great American companies of the 20th century general electric and established many other crucial international companies. That brought light and electricity to millions.   He did this despite growing up in obscure circumstances with no formal education and a disability deafness that he never made a big deal about and hardly ever mentioned.

To me, the biggest lesson of Edison's life is finding something that you are passionate about. The way he was passionate about inventing. This is a little bit different from doing what you love. As people say. In a subtle but important way. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes from my favorite TV show, a show called Patriot.

Where one of the lead characters says,

quote, you are what you can't stop doing. What that means is if we discover what someone is passionate about. Then that person and that thing will intersect.

Passion involves compulsion.  people and what they love don't always intersect. People in their compulsion's do.  So if you're trying to be successful, lean into doing what you feel compelled to do because if you do, it's like a superpower. You can overcome any obstacle, deal with any setback.

None of it matters because you get to wake up every morning. And do the thing that you are compelled to do, the thing that you are borderline addicted to.  

So, for example, in 1914 an enormous fire swept through Edison's laboratories and manufacturing plants in New Jersey, damaging or destroying more than half the buildings and doing millions of dollars in damage, really destroying his company. He could only watch as the fire spread from building to building each new chemical or material that burned being set apart by a different color of fire.

And so what was Edison's response to this total catastrophe that destroyed his business? He pulled aside his son and said, quote, get your mother and her friends over here. They'll never see a fire like this again.  And when someone from the advertising department said, mr Edison, this is an awful catastrophe for you.

He responded, yes. Maxwell a big fortune has gone up in flames tonight. But isn't it a beautiful site?

One other story that I found highly instructive about Edison came from a lunch he had with Henry Ford  and a man by the name of Daniels. It's very bizarre, but here is what Daniels wrote and keep in mind. This happened with Edison was in his late sixties.  Daniels wrote quote, I do not suppose anything so strange ever occur to the luncheon in New York and elsewhere.

After the first course, Edison pointing to a large chandelier with many gloves in the middle of the room said, Henry, I'll bet anything you want that I can kick the globe off. That chandelier  hung high toward the ceiling. Ford said he would take the bet.  Addison Rose pushed the table to one side of the room, took his stand in the center.

And with his eye fixed on the globe, made the highest kick I have ever seen a man make and smash the globe into smithereens. He then said, Henry, let's see what you can do.  The automobile manufacturer took careful, lame, but his foot missed the chandelier by a fraction of an inch. Edison had one, and for the balance of the meal or until the ice cream was served.

He was crowing over Ford. You are a younger man than I am, but I can out kick you. He seemed prouder of that high tech than if he had invented a means of ending the U boat warfare.

And that last sentence is a reference to something he was working on during world war one during the time of the story. So does that story remind you of anyone I know who it reminds me of? Admittedly, I've just been watching some of the last dance on ESPN, but it sounds just like Michael Jordan to me, getting way too competitive over totally small and meaningless stuff, but like MJ, Edison had this compulsion to win, to be the man in charge.

The man on top. He said as much when he said, quote, I don't care so much about making my fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.

I'd like to finish up with two last stories from his life. You know, I like to draw comparisons between people on this podcast.  so, I particularly enjoyed this little anecdote. a journalist asked Edison, whose voice out of all the people in history he most would have liked to have heard?

 Napoleon Edison replied. Instantly, the journalist responded in her approving tone. Well, the voice I should most like to have heard is that of our savior.  Edison thought for a moment and said, well, you know, I like a hustler.   The last story I want to share comes from the very end of Edison's life.

Just two years before his death, he was getting old and finally slowing down. It was the 50th anniversary of his incandescent light bulb and a huge international celebration was planned.

as part of it. Henry Ford had the entire lab complex from Menlo park, which was long since abandoned dissembled and put back together in Dearborn, Michigan. As essentially a museum. Ford had Edison's old lab completely restored to exactly how it looked when he invented the light bulb. He even went so far as to track down the old chemical manufacturers who had stocked his lab so that he could have the shelf stock with the exact same chemicals.

And materials as Edison had had at the time.   He also excavated the top foot of soil from Menlo park and had it shipped out so the old laboratory could even sit on top of the same soil as it had  when the 80 year old Edison entered his old lab. It took his breath away.

Where do you suppose they got them all? He asked, they're all here. Every one of the chemicals I had at Menlo park.  He paced around for a few minutes and then sat down at a work bench   with tears in his eyes. He said, I could sit right down here and go to work with my old tools.   He attended a party and gave a speech later that night, but in the morning he was uncharacteristically exhausted.

The exhausted old man needed arrest. He turned to his assistance and said. I'm tired of all this glory. I want to get back to work.  

thank you for listening to this episode of how to take over the world next week. As I mentioned, I'm going to try something different and release an end notes episode. We're going to talk about some of the random stories and thoughts that I couldn't get into this episode. I'll also be talking a little bit more about Edison versus Tesla, the current Wars, and more.

Hello and welcome to how to take over the world. This is Ben Wilson. Before we get into the episode today, I do want to say a big thank you to everyone who has left reviews on Apple podcasts. We just got over a hundred reviews and those do a ton to surface the podcast and help other people find it. So thank you.

I really appreciate the support. Also, all of you who've been sending me emails of support and letting me know how much the podcast means to you, it means a ton to me to hear from you when you send me those emails and those messages. So thank you. I appreciate it and it really does help fuel me and keep this going.

This is a new kind of episode. It's going to be a little bit more free flowing. A little more relaxed, a little more loose ,

where this came from was I was looking at all of my notes that I had written for the Thomas Edison episodes, and I realized that I had about 60 pages of notes and I had written.  And I had used about 30 of them for the two episodes, which meant I had nearly half of my work go unused. So I thought to myself, why not use that in some form or fashion?

So these are notes. This is stuff about Edison that didn't really neatly fit into the narrative, but I still thought was interesting. So it's going to not have the same structural flow. It's not necessarily going to follow his life in chronological order. It's literally just kind of a.  A stream of consciousness of some things that I thought as I was studying the life of Thomas Edison.

So before we dive into all that, let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.  So I wanted to start off talking about what is by far one of Edison's most underrated inventions. And that is the word hello.  , if you think I'm joking, I'm not, I double and triple check this just cause it seems so unbelievable to me.

Um, but it's true.  Thomas Edison invented what is now one of the most fundamental words in English language.

Before Thomas Edison, when people saw each other, they would say, greetings, good day, salutations. I don't know. They said other things, they generally did not say hello. It did exist as a word. It was pronounced differently. It was pronounced usually halloo  and it was usually used as an expression of surprise.

So, uh, you can hear that still sometimes. That's someone I don't know. For whatever reason, I think of it in a British accent, someone saying hello, you know, like they get surprised by something. And that was the way that this word, Hulu was used as an expression of surprise. , but then in the old, old days of telephones, when they were essentially still used as a tool for Telegraph operators. They needed a way to,   get each other's attention  because they didn't have ringers yet. So really they just had open lines between Telegraph stations. So if you needed to get in contact with someone, you just shouted. And so they needed something to shout. Alexander Graham bell suggested the word, uh, Hawaii.

it's, I would love to live in the alternate universe where that becomes the standard greeting between people. But Edison suggested that they use this word Hulu, but that was, you know, the vowels are kind of soft. It didn't carry that well, so he changed the vowels to.  Hello, because you can shout that really easily and be heard really easily.

So Telegraph operators start using this when they want to be heard from station to station. So, Hey, I've got a message for someone. I pick up the telephone and I yell, hello, hello, until someone picks up. And then I give them the message. Of course, when telephones made their way to the general population, then people started using that  in their homes when they picked up the telephone.

Hello. And then it just made its way into the language as the default greeting. Hello.  and so that word traces its roots directly back to Thomas Edison. I think that's just indicative of the way that Edison has had a huge impact on all of our lives in a way that we don't necessarily think about and we often take for granted.

Okay. Let's talk really quickly about the Edison versus Tesla angle. Uh, something I've received a lot of questions about.

As I mentioned in the last episode, a Tesla started working for Edison in 1884. He got right to work on a problem on a dynamo, on a boat. The Edison had been having a lot of problems with, and he stays up all night and he's able to figure out the problem and solve it. Edison supposedly remarks the bachelor.

This is a damn good man. Uh, so he had good things to say about him. Then he had good things to say about him throughout his career. They respected each other as geniuses.

Of course. Tesla was very inspired by Edison, as you might recall from last episode. They did have a falling out when Tesla stopped working for Edison. There's a disagreement about money. , essentially Tesla thought that Edison had promised him $50,000.  Tesla is this new immigrant and he's just off the boat.

He goes in for his first meeting with Edison and you know, they're talking about stuff. And Tesla says, well, what happens if, if I invent something that even you can't invent? And Edison goes, look, buddy, if you can invent something that I can't event, you can have $50,000  edison is joking. He, you know, he was not flush with cash at this time.

He didn't have $50,000 to give, but Tesla is a very recent immigrant. His English is not great and he doesn't get the joke right. He thinks that Edison is serious. All he hears us. Well, I invent something that Edison. Can't then, uh, or hasn't, then I get $50,000. So when he does, uh, cause he, you know, he's a genius himself.

He invented something that Edison didn't invent. He goes and says, where are my $50,000? And Edison says, you know,  There are no $50,000. That was a joke. And a Tesla leaves in a Huff. But, uh, they, they didn't exactly reconcile. They were never like friends, but they were cordial throughout their careers.

And I think Tesla came to understand that Edison wasn't serious and he had misinterpreted this because Tesla did have kind things to say about Edison, uh, which you wouldn't expect if he felt like he was truly ripped off by a dishonest man.

They did have tremendously different approaches, which they talked about sometimes, and look, they were rivals. They were both competitive guys who took a lot of pride in their work. Pestle said of his approach.  I did not need any models nor drawings or experiments. I could do it all in my mind. The way I unconsciously developed a new method of for materializing inventions and ideas is exactly the opposite of the purely experimental method of which undoubtedly Edison is the greatest and most successful exponent.

I liked one quote that described their differences.  let's say, quote, Tesla's was a more original genius than Edison. He surrounds himself with a halo of electric light and calls purple streams from the soil.

His aim is to hook man's machinery directly to natures. And, , I think that statement that Tesla's was a more original genius than Edison, , is, is certainly accurate from a certain viewpoint. I think Tesla was probably smarter from a pure IQ horsepower standpoint than Edison was.

But, you know, obviously Edison had the more successful career, had more inventions.

which is why I always say the energy and work ethic matter more than intelligence in the long run. I also think that Edison's approach, which was this experimental method,   rather than Tesla's more theoretical way of doing things is a better approach.

And I think that's another reason why Edison had more success, despite probably on an objective level, being less intelligent than Tesla was.  I think one thing that kind of demonstrates the difference between them is an incident in 1895 Nikola Tesla saw his entire lab burned down. , much as you'll remember, Edison did.

And, um Edison was very   about seeing his, uh, lab burden down. Tesla was not, , he said,

and I quote,

I am in too much grief to talk, what can I say?

The work of half my lifetime, very nearly all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, everything has gone. I must begin over again.  ,  so you can see from that that Tesla, even though he was this genius, probably didn't have quite the same grit and determination that Edison did. Not quite, he did start over again. And so I would say he did have a lot of that. But you know, Edison was sort of extraordinary in that regard. And, uh, to speak to their relationship a little bit.

Uh, Tesla also said after this, you know, great fired his lab quote I ever received a letter from mr Edison offering me the use of his workshop in which to continue my experiments. He has shown me the greatest kindness and consideration. I do not think, however, that I will accept the offer.  So anyway, it was sort of a, it was a competitive, but you know, also sort of friendly relationship.

I like to think of it as like professor X and Magneto or something like that.  Speaking of Tesla, I find it hilarious that Elon Musk named his company Tesla because Elan is so much like Edison, , in big ways and in like funny little ways as well. Both spent time in Canada in their teenage years. But then became successes in the United States. ,

both are known for their tireless work effort and a demanding leadership style. Both are known for wanting to control every aspect of sourcing and manufacturing. Both made meaningful contributions to battery technology. One of Edison's biggest dreams actually that he never got to see through was he wanted to create an electric car, a mass market, electric car.

Uh, of course, Elon did popularize the electric car. both are definitely experimentalists. Um, rather than, you know, theoretical guys.  the story about Elon that reminds me most of Edison was when Elan started the boring company. I don't know if you've heard this, but the boring company is Elan's company for. Digging tunnels. Uh, he, one day has to go into work and is just so frustrated by the traffic in Los Angeles where his company is based.

And so he decides, you know, it'd be logical rather than having to meet with all this traffic, just having tunnels so that we could go underground and, and avoid all that traffic. So what does Elon do when he has this idea? He starts the boring company and literally just starts digging a hole in the parking lot and then starts digging and digging, and then they start digging over and they just kind of, as they go, start figuring out better and better technology for digging these holes and digging these tunnels.

And that's kind of how Edison would do it too. You know? First just start experimenting, start figuring it out, and eventually you'll figure it out rather than, you know, sit down with some textbooks and try and figure it out. From a theoretical standpoint, what would be best.

It also, there's similarities. Uh, get down to smaller stuff too. Uh, you know, I mentioned their time in Canada also, you know, in contrast to Tesla's very well known celibacy,  both Edison and Ilan have had multiple children by multiple women. Uh, both even kind of look alike if you ask me.

So anyway, I thought the similarities are too much. I'm sure someone has to have asked you on about it. Right. And so I went Googling, I looked, and sure enough, Elon did an interview, and  here's what he had to say about his relationship to Edison. In an interview,

so there you go. I do think that Elon is probably the closest living thing that we have to Edison. , and you know, he acknowledges that he, he takes some inspiration from, from Edison's life, which is not surprising to me.

Speaking of comparisons, uh, obviously another easy comparison to make is with Steve jobs.  both had a propensity for starving themselves and for weird diets, Steve jobs would have periods of his life where he would only eat apples. And Edison had a period in his life where he would only drink milk.

That's the only food or drink that he would consume. Uh, so that's again, kind of a. A weird similarity between the two. They also had this flair for showmanship.  that was very akin.

and then, , another connection that I just think is funny is that, you know, Edison did not invent, but he did perfect the telephone. And similarly, Steve jobs did not invent the smartphone, but he kind of perfected it and made it this new mass market thing with a, with the iPhone.

And when Steve jobs introduced the iPhone, he did so with a commercial call. What else? Hello?

. This commercial featured famous movie moments where people answer a phone and say hello, and then it shows the iPhone and just says hello on the screen. And I'm sure that it was unintentional to pay tribute to a word that Edison invented,

but I find that meaningful in a cosmic sort of way that he did kind of accidentally pay tribute to Edison.  Okay. Uh, other notes. Um, okay. So Edison was like a classic mad scientist. He was always blowing himself up, poisoning himself.  he nearly killed himself all the time. So, uh, he nearly choked himself on poison gas.

He nearly radiated himself to death with x-rays. He nearly blinded himself by staring at lights. He electrocuted himself multiple times. He set himself on fire, burned himself with acid. He held things that blew up in his hands, including tons and tons of light bulbs. Um, in fact, it's my conspiracy theory that he probably made himself death with an experiment gone wrong.

you know, the famous quote that he had about when he went deaf is he said  that he hadn't heard a bird chirp since he was 12.  And I find it odd that he targeted it to that exact date in the story about what did make him death, um, was kind of always changing, right? There there, there is no good answer. Uh, different diseases, different conditions were put forth and Edison himself said different things.  but you know, he said, I haven't heard a bird chirp since I was 12 years old, and that's right when he was starting to get all these chemistry experiments and experiment in his basement, and there are reports, he said his mother said that he blew out the windows in the basement multiple times.

He was always blowing stuff up.  and, and blowing out the windows. And of course that's what he did on the train that got him kicked off the train. So it's my, I think it's kind of a conspiracy theory, I guess. Uh, cause I haven't heard anyone else say this, but I think it's possible that he at least made his deafness worse by blowing out his eardrums in an experiment, uh, when he was a young boy when he was 12 or 13 years old.

, so there you go. But I just find it funny that, uh, he was like this classic mad scientist who was nearly always killing himself. His hair was always, you know, singed and standing on end. And, uh, he was that like classic mad scientist experimenting, blowing stuff up.  Some of my favorite quotes that I didn't get to put in a famous Edison quote that he would say all the time is all things come to him who hustles while he waits.

Uh, which I think is something good to remember. All things come to him who hustles while he waits quote from someone else. Uh, an MP from Ireland named TP O'Connor. Said quote, he's like a great school boy. The simplicity of genius was never before so remarkably illustrated, and I like that. The simplicity of genius, and I like to think about that.

Sometimes the genius does not come from being involved in all of these things and being able to be everyone everywhere. No genius comes from simplicity, comes from focus on a single thing and becoming the best at that one thing.  one other quote that I liked was from Francis Upton who said, the one great impression of my years in Menlo park was how impenetrable the veil of the future seems to be when new problems are to be solved and how simple the result often is.

When the darkness of ignorance is lighted by the genius of one man. ,

one story that I had to cut that I really liked and actually probably wish I had left in his from the time when he was demonstrating his light bulb in New York city, and it's in this great concert hall and the dynamo is not yet perfected.

There's no power grid. So how has he powering this thing? Well, next door, they literally have a. Coal burner, that they're using to generate electricity. And so at some point during the demonstration, the lights start to go a little bit dim. And so Harrison's going home now, what's going on? So he goes next door, and the guy who was on the job had fallen asleep, who was supposed to be loading coal to keep this thing fired, to keep this thing powered, to keep the lights on next door.

And so as in, you know, he takes off his jacket and starts shoveling coal. To keep the lights on. I like that story because it demonstrates kind of how hands on and how basic the technology was. Right? and I just think it's cool to think about that era of technology and everything was so tactile and kind of hands on

one other kind of small story.  Speaking of tactile and hands on that I didn't get to mention was. You know, Harrison is doing all this work on the photograph and he can barely hear, and especially late in life, he's working on perfecting the phonograph and coming out with new versions of it. And at this point, this guy is really deaf.

I mean, really can not hear much. people have to shout into his ear in order to be heard. So how does he hear the music that's coming out of his phonograph? How does he know if it sounds good or not?  And so what he would actually do is they had wood casing and he would bite the wood and the sound would vibrate through his teeth into a skull.

And that's how he would hear. And the consequence of this was, that's a different way of hearing. Right?  it just sounds different. And so the decisions that he made about the phonograph and about the music that was being played on it. We're, uh, we're kind of bad. But he was so confident that he understood.

He knew what was, what sounded good and what didn't sound good. but he insisted on making those decisions. , even though he had this really weird way of listening to the phonograph of, of biting the photograph, of biting the wood around it.

Um, , next, my review of the current war, uh, which is a movie that came out last year, I think it came out late 2019. That is about the rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse, uh, and features Tesla very heavily.

So it's supposed to be, um.  Kind of historical fiction. Right.  And, um, so I guess I'm not going to discuss every historical inaccuracy of the movie, cause I just don't want to be that guy. Uh, there are a lot.  so just know that, um, so that if you're watching it and you say, Whoa, it says that Edison's wife died of an incurable brain disease. , but I heard on how to take over the world, but she died suddenly of a morphine overdose.  I'm right. The movie's wrong. They just, I don't begrudge them that.

It's a movie. They have to make it an interesting narrative. so they deviate a lot. A lot of the dates are wrong. A lot of the people are kind of, they have to mash them together and all sorts of stuff. Right. So, uh, I'm not gonna correct every single historical inaccuracy, but just some things, I guess overall.

Uh some thoughts I had. Number one, they make Edison this amazing family man, and as I've told you. He was really doting, , and loving towards his wife and children, wives and children. But he was never home. I mean, he was at the office, he was at the workstation all the time. And so, especially, you know, second wife, Mina would talk about how   she would bring her children and go in to see Edison, and she'd be so mad at him.

But he had this like charm thing that if you hear people talk about really charismatic people, I've heard people say this about bill Clinton, who's a former president of the United States, that he would, he can turn this charm on and he just focuses all his attention on you, like a laser beam. And people who hate him, who hate his guts just find themselves instantly won over.

And Edison had this too. Amina would go in and she's mad because she hasn't seen him in like two weeks. He's been sleeping at the office. He just hasn't come home. She's mad. And she walks in there with her kids, say, Hey, look at your children. Say hi to them. Spend some time with them. And he just shifts all his attention to her.

She says, Mina, I'm so happy to see you. And immediately the anger is gone. He melts her. , and so he was this like really super loving, doting husband and father. When he was around, which was like never.  so anyways, I think the movie probably makes him seem a little more present than he actually was.

Another thing that's funny to me, I just have to point this out. Samuel insole in the movie, they make this like meek little secretary who is Edison's pawn and does whatever Edison wants. Edison actually at various times felt very betrayed by insult because he became this nigga millionaire. In part by doing some stuff, some business decisions that probably had to be made.

But he cut Edison out of a lot of the decision making at general electric. And he was like a very strong personality, , who kind of took no prisoners. And so it's funny to see him portrayed as this like, yes, sir. Yes, mr Edison, whatever you want, sir.

And just on the nature of personality, like I just think they make Edison in the movie scene. Uh, to adapt at social situations. I don't think they quite got right. The like addictive nature of Edison's personality. If he was doing anything except for inventing, , he was just, he wanted to get it out of the way.

He wanted to get back to inventing.

Another weird thing about the movie is their insistence that no one died from alternating current. Uh, except for people who were executed in the electric chair. , it's just not true at all. I mean,  in the early days of electricity when they were stringing up wires, people died relatively frequently and people died all the time from electric power.

It was a new and dangerous technology. So, um, I'm not sure why the movie went that direction.

And they also don't get into what was a huge part of the war between Westinghouse and Edison, which was a patent lawsuit. A Westinghouse lost the patent lawsuit and had to pay Edison $15 million. For violating the basic light bulb patent, , which essentially took the, the current Wars, as they call them.

this war between Edison electric and Westinghouse, Westinghouse was destroying Edison, and then Edison wins this patent battle, and Edison has paid $15 million, which was a ton, a ton of money, which kind of turns it into a draw. So I find it funny that they didn't mention that patent lawsuit, but that was also an important part of it.

One thing that they do demonstrate I didn't talk about  was Edison's assistance in developing the electric chair. A William Kemmler was the first man given the electric chair. And it was a disaster. , they thought it would be like this quick, painless thing, flip the switch and boom, he's that instant, painless.

Great. Uh, what actually happened was they flipped the switch and it took two minutes to kill the guy. , the body hair on his body was singeing off and it was making people sick. spectators were starting to throw up, who would come to watch and observe the execution.

, and it just like, it was gruesome, the way that he eventually died. Like essentially they fried him. That's how he died.  from like being cooked from being heated up from the inside out. So really, really gruesome. They, they kind of worked on it. They got higher voltages. Electric chair did eventually, I guess, get a little more humane.

but, but not much. There's a reason that people don't die really from the electric chair anymore. It was not a great form of execution.   probably not exactly a proud moment of Edison's life that he, uh, that he worked on that ,  one question that people have asked me a couple of times was about his marriages.

And his marriages, um, were not the happiest because he was around so infrequently. Uh, his wives sometimes felt a little bit abandoned, which is obviously very easy to understand. I would say that his first marriage was worse because Mary didn't know what she was signing up for. Right. Edison wasn't famous at the time, so he kind of charmed her.

She said, yes, she married this guy and all of a sudden.  She's thrust into the spotlight of being married to this world famous man, and he's never around, and she didn't know that was going to be part of the equation.  whereas MENA, when she married Edison, he was already famous and she knew what she was signing up for.

Uh, maybe not the extent of it. She was certainly still annoyed frequently that he was not around as much as she would like. And it's just difficult to deal with celebrity. And she was in the spotlight a lot, but you know, I think she dealt with it better than Mary for that reason. She kinda knew what she was getting into.

His children. Um, his sons from his first marriage, William and Tom, were, uh, they were a thorn in his side for his whole life. They were always making trouble. They embarrassed him. They married kind of disreputable women.  they would make all these claims that, you know, especially Tom Thomas Edison, jr would sell the rights to his name because then people would just take any old invention and say, Hey, you know, this is the Thomas Edison, and then very little letters jr this is the Thomas Edison.

Lamp, this is the Thomas Edison, whatever, and uh, and trying to scam people into buying it, these kind of low quality products. So Tom was going around selling his name.  Edison had to like, threaten to Sue his son to get him to stop. So yeah, William and Tom troublemakers never really made much of their lives.

his sons from his other marriage were much more helpful.  So Charles was one of those sons. He was like the most interesting man in the world. He was not only a very successful business executive, he wrote poetry and composed songs and was was kind of a ladies man early in his life. He eventually became the governor of New Jersey,  and he was the CEO of Edison inc for a while and was a very successful CEO.

Did well and uh, had a working relationship with his father.  His other son, Theodore, was the only son who really followed his dad's path in becoming an inventor and Theodore, while not as prolific as his father was, a very gifted mentor, had over 80 patents, I think, in his life. So he did well for himself as well.

In terms of the daughters. Marion,  who was a daughter from his first marriage, married a guy in Germany, and, uh, that marriage didn't last. So eventually she came back to the United States. Never had children, never had a career. Um, so her life was, was a little bit sad.

And then his daughter, Madeline from his second marriage, , was very intelligent, very ambitious, was actually probably the most like Thomas Edison, frankly, um, did not have a career, decided to get married. Instead, she married a very successful airplane manufacturer. Successful businessman. And she had four children of her own.

She's actually the only Edison grandchild to have children, which is kind of funny to me that five of his six children did not have children of their own.  But, uh, but Madeline did.

Um, another similarity. Elon Musk, Thomas Edison was very interested in solar power and figuring out how to harness it and store it. And Edison was something of a, uh, environmentalist. They didn't really have environmentalist back then in the same way that we do now. Uh, it was kind of just emerging as a school of thought.

But, uh, listen to this quote from Edison, I think it's interesting. He said, quote, someday some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus's scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if someone doesn't get at it. This scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick.

To think of it is so wasteful. We should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh no. We burn up wood and coal as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters. Not as if we owned the property.

There must surely come a time when he empower will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen for it cannot be destroyed.  End quote .

One other thing that I thought about interesting. Someone has a quote, they mentioned the peculiar nocturnal brightening of the human owl  and yeah, I like this idea of referring to Edison as a, as a human owl.  , not only did he work really weird hours, really late hours, but he actually did some of his best work, , between the hours of like 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM.

Uh, and I don't know particularly why that is, but I do think that he got some sort of high  off of working when other people were not working.  There's a famous quote I've heard that I like, I've heard it variously attributed to, so I don't know who really said it first,  but the quote is, when you are not practicing, remember someone somewhere is practicing and when you meet him, he will win.

And so I think the Edison probably felt that way. It sure seems like it. That Henny moment, he wasn't inventing. Someone else was, and so he wanted to make as few of those moments as possible. He wanted to be there at the lab bench when no one else was,

and if that seems totally unsustainable. Uh, it is, uh, if you don't do it right.  remember, Edison didn't just work all the time.  He did work all the time for long stretches, but then he would also take these multi-week vacations out West or down to Florida.

And so I do think it's important to think about that of Metta balance. You know, I think that probably balance in any given day is overrated. You don't necessarily need to eat a balanced breakfast and work out every day and do yoga and meditation and all these things that people tell you you should do every day.

I don't think you necessarily need to, but it's important to balance it out over time. So if you're going to be a workaholic for a week or two,

which is something I'll often do, especially when I'm turning out these episodes, you know, I just will, will not sleep much and I'll do my day job and then I'll straight go to working on this. And uh, go to bed really, really late, wake up really, really early. But then I'll spend the weekend sleeping a lot, a lot, a lot, and just relaxing and doing nothing.

And . Edison kind of did this in the most maximalist sort of way. He just worked all the time, all the time. And then when he went on vacation, he went for weeks and sometimes months.

One, one small note. Edison went on a grand tour of Europe with his family, and one of the things that he commented was that Europeans were, were too fat. , he was disgusted by how, you know,  grotesquely obese, how fat all of these people were, which to me is just so funny that,  Americans were criticizing how that Europeans were a hundred years ago.

Oh, how the times have changed. one other kind of small note, I guess I wanted to make. Is that.  Thomas Edison's mother  homeschooled him, educated him, and to me, he was kind of the perfect example of a Puritan woman. So if you don't know Puritans, where this religious sect that came from England settled in new England, the area we now know is new.

England kind of started in Massachusetts and spread out from there. And they were very, very religiously observant, extremely strict.

and very highly educated.   You can look them up. They're the pilgrims that you hear about sometimes. Uh, if you, if you live in America, the people that were there at Thanksgiving, right? Those are the Puritans.  and, um. Edison comes from very, very Puritan stock. , and his mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister. So, uh, yeah, like very, very Puritan.  And I commented this to someone that, you know, that doesn't, his mom was like the perfect Puritan woman, super educated, always, you know, teaching him.

And they went, Whoa. Puritan women were educated and I thought that they were like super oppressed and under lock and key because. Uh, of Handmaid's tale.  And I guess they use kind of like Puritan  imagery in Handmaid's tale. I don't know. I haven't seen the show, so I'm not gonna criticize it too much, but I do just want to comment that if this is something that is portrayed in Handmaid's tale, that Puritans were somehow extremely oppressive of women.

I mean, Puritans were just like oppressive, right? Uh, they were super, super strict. , in a lot of different ways, but it was one of the peculiarities of their culture that Puritan women were highly educated. It was a very egalitarian society. And so that's just not accurate. I think that's a misconception that a lot of people have.

And the other thing about Puritans, I mean, I think Edison is like the end result of a couple of hundred years of like Puritan interbreeding because Puritans were obsessed. With working these people. Just thought that was how you demonstrated, you know, your faith and belief to God was, was hard work.

and they really valorize that in their culture. In Puritan society, it was a crime to do nothing.  Like literally you could just be doing nothing. And that was a crime cause you weren't working. Right. So you get a couple of hundred years of Puritans. Intermarrying and hand, uh, having this culture. And then you get the daughter of a Methodist minister, you know, from peer 10 stock, she marries a, another peer of 10.

She has a son. And then you have this guy who is completely obsessed with working, right? He's a complete, he's a workaholic and invents his whole life. So,  you know, I. I don't think it's an accident that a, the Edison was like this. When you take into consideration where he came from and the, the culture and the history of, of the Puritan people, uh, if you want to learn a little bit more about this, um, and how kind of Puritan culture in some ways still shapes America.

A really interesting book. It's called Albion seed that talks about that. I highly recommend it.

But yeah, Thomas Edison, super Puritan, even though he wasn't religious, super Puritan.

a couple other things. One is industrial sabotage. Industrial espionage. Both were extremely common during Edison's time. So, um you know, he's inventing the light bulb, especially when he's having public demonstrations. People from Westinghouse, people from other companies are just walking into Menlo park and just unscrewing light bulbs and taking them.

And, uh, in fact, it gets, it gets really bad. They have these public demonstrations and they can't tell the difference between Westinghouse people who are stealing them for, uh, for espionage purposes. And just, you know, bystanders who want a souvenir and take the chance to, to lift a Edison light bulb. Uh, but this was a big problem.

It was a, it was a different time, like during the current war is when Westinghouse and Edison are both trying to electrify New York city. You know, it got really, uh, it got dirty, you know, with people intimidating each other and beating each other up and, and business was really like bare knuckles back then.

That's not something I talked a lot about because. Edison himself didn't have a lot of involvement in it, but I do think it's a really interesting aspect of, of that time period, and if you want to learn more about it, the book, the current war is, is good.

And so his last days of night, there's another interesting book about that time period.

the last thing, and then I'll end on this, even though it's kinda early from his life,

here's a quote from Edison. So his very, very first you mentioned the first thing that he successfully patents is the electric vote recorder.  And so Edison is a nobody, right? So how are you going to make an electric vote recorder to show off for the patent office? He has to. Make it. Um, and so he literally has to, you know, the casing for the thing.

Of course he can do the electronics. He's a Telegraph operator. He's working with electronics all the time, but he has to like carve the casing for this thing. So he does, he carves the wood and makes the casing for this thing. And he has a quote that he said later in life, he said, to become a good inventor, you must first know how to use a Jack knife.

In other words, like you gotta know how to do the nitty gritty, dirty details of inventing. You can't just sit there with your head in the clouds and think up new things, right? Get out the knife and start carving wood.  And that reminded me of a quote from Pablo Picasso.  He said, quote, when art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning.

When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.  And, uh, I think that's very true. So, uh, if you want some parting advice on the life of Thomas Edison, uh, I think it's, you know, make yourself useful. don't be one of those people who thinks about a forum and structure and meaning. And I always have my head in the clouds because I am a big thinker, you know, learn a skill, be useful to other people and, and build off of that. Build your way up. Um,  okay. That's it. This was a little bit rambling. a little bit different.

let me know what you thought in terms of the future. Uh, we've got some Catherine the great episodes coming. I'm finally turning that into a full series, and then Alexander degree after that.  Until then. Thanks for listening.

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