Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb

Thomas Edison was a lot of things – genius businessman, incredible marketing guy, someone with an insane work ethic and no need of sleep. But he an inventor? Not so much. He and his team borrowed the light bulb, perfected it and mass produced it. Then his business and marketing skills did the rest.   

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, not trying to shock you, but Thomas Edison
did not invent the light bulb. I'm Patty Steele. His
brilliant use of someone else's ideas is next on the backstory.
We're back with the backstory. I know there are a
whole lot of inventions credited to Thomas Edison, the light bulb,

(00:22):
phonograph machine to record music and sound, and the motion
picture camera, so it's hard to imagine that some, or
actually most, of what he gets credit for were not
really his ideas. Of course, his status as an icon
was pretty much sealed with his invention of the first
incandescent light bulb. But here's the thing. He definitely wasn't

(00:43):
the guy to create or even demonstrate the first light bulb,
not even close. There were as many as twenty who
came before him. What he was was a masterful businessman
and self promoter. He knew how to take somebody else's work,
use the brilliant minds he had hired to perfect it,
and most importantly, he knew how to market and mass

(01:03):
produce whatever the heck he was building. So get this.
Among the long list of Edison's inventions, almost half of
them are the ideas in visions of other people that
he took credit for. And of course there were a
whole lot of inventors chasing the holy grail lighting up
the night. And this is surprising. Some of the earliest

(01:26):
inventions involving electric light came in the seventeen hundreds. Now
most of those used some combination of chemical gases to
create an electrical charge. Then in the early eighteen hundreds,
even more would be lights showed up. In eighteen oh six,
the British scientists demonstrated a totally electric light in London.

(01:46):
Then in eighteen forty one another brit got the bright
idea to enclose his light in a glass bulb. Yup,
that was the very first light bulb. After that it
turned into a crazy free for all with lots of
inventions and lots of patents, but none of them really
did the whole job. Problem is they used too much
electricity and put out too much heat and not enough light.

(02:09):
They were really expensive and worst of all, they burned
out in a matter of minutes. Then things really began
to change. While Thomas Edison bought patent rights from a
couple of Canadian inventors, yet another guy from England, Joseph
Swan came up with a working light bulb using thin

(02:30):
wire filaments, much like we still have today in some lights,
and that gave him a much bigger claim than most
to inventing a usable light bulb. In fact, he got
a UK patent and his bulb went into wider use
than Edison's. He lit London's entire Savoy Theater with it
the first public building in the world to get fully electrified,

(02:51):
and Swan's own home in the English countryside was the
very first house in the world to be fully lit
using electricity. Now, Swan sued Edison for patent infringement and
he won. But again Edison needed to be the guy,
so he tried to counter sue Swan for infringement, but
he quickly realized Swan would be able to prove the

(03:12):
research and publication surrounding his bulb came before Edison's. In fairness,
Edison did improve the filament for his bulb, so in
order to bypass a long, expensive court battle, the two
of them finally agreed to merge their businesses into a
British company called EdiSwan. I like that name. They literally
owned the British marketplace and get this, some of their

(03:35):
light bulbs still light up now, deep into the twenty
first century, and that gives you a hint into Edison's
phenomenal success. He always found a way to take credit,
or if he couldn't get it out right, he found
a way to share it. Now the thing is sharing
it wasn't really as interesting to him, not his thing.

(03:57):
He told his team he needed all the credit in
order to lock down patents and ultimately market share. So
he'd take somebody's idea, have his team perfect and simplify it,
make it cheaper, and then mass produce and market the
heck out of it. And Edison was a marketing genius
as well as a showman. He knew how to work
the press, cultivating great relationships with reporters, probably taking them

(04:21):
out for drinks and being easily accessible to them so
they could discuss things with him. Insiders say he sometimes
would tell them he had just solved a huge problem
before he really had, just for public response. He loved
that he was considered a magician. That's how he got
the nickname the Wizard of Menlo Park, based on his

(04:43):
hometown laboratory in New Jersey. Now here's the thing. Edison
was really most famous for his insane work ethic. In fact,
you've probably heard one of his most famous quotes. He's
the guy who said genius is one percent inspiration and
ninety nine percent perspiration. He rarely slept more than four

(05:03):
hours a day and really didn't sleep four hours at
a time, and during his lifetime he had almost eleven
hundred patents to his name in the US alone. What
he did invent was team based research, using a lot
of great minds to solve a problem, mass production on
a huge scale, organizing a massive distribution network, and the

(05:25):
ability to lure investors to fund his work. Much of
that virtually unknown in his time. But at the end
of the day, he just didn't invent the light bulb.
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia

(05:47):
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplify Media. We're out
with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for listening to
the Backstory. The pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know