November 18, 2025 • 49 mins
What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History.
How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the guy who invented the movies? On Business History, Jacob and fellow former Planet Money host Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of businesses big and small and find out what you can learn from those who founded them.
In this episode: The inventor that transformed America and the world. Thomas Alva Edison registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931—and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technology, music recording and even the movies. But his biggest breakthrough doesn't get nearly enough attention. In many ways, Edison invented modern inventing. Jacob and Robert they trace the life story of a scrappy young boy with bad hearing who almost singlehandedly invented R&D. This is the first of a three part series on Edison—if you want to hear the full series, ad-free, right now, join Pushkin+ on the Business History show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
Find Business History (00:10) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. Today. We are going to play
for you an episode of a new show that I'm
hosting in addition to What's Your Problem. The new show
is called Business History because it's a show about the
history of business. I'm hosting it with Robert Smith, who
some of you might remember I used to work with
(00:36):
at Planet Money. He was a co host at Planet Money.
And the episode we're going to play today is about
Thomas Edison, who is an extremely What's Your Problem kind
of guy, huge figure in the history of technology, very
interesting in many ways. This is actually the first of
a three episode series we're doing about Edison. If you
happen to subscribe to Pushkin Plus, you can listen to
(00:58):
the whole series now. Otherwise they'll come out one episode
a week over the next few weeks in the Business
History Feed, which you can of course get wherever you
are listening to this show right now. So if you
happen to want to see me and Robert in addition
to hear us, you can watch it on YouTube. I
hope you like the show. If you like it, of
course I would love it if you would subscribe. Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Here's the show Business History, Episode two Edison Part one.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
What if that's the segment that's sponsored, sponsored by what
by whoever wants to pay for it. We can talk
about that afterwards. I suppose Thomas Edison died in nineteen
thirty one. He was eighty four years old, and when
(01:48):
he died, the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover,
decided that Edison was such a big deal that the
whole country, the entire United States, needed a moment of mourning.
So Hoover is talking this over with his says, what
should we do to honor Edison? And somebody says, what
if the whole country turns off the electricity for one
(02:09):
minute to honor Thomas Edison, the man who brought electricity
to the masses. And you're laughing for what I think
is an obvious reason, right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Because if you think about it, who needs electricity all
the time?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Right? Everyone?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Everybody, Fire departments, hospital, sanitation systems, They all needed every
minute they need this thing that Edison helped create, electric power, this.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Thing that nobody had, nobody had, you know a few
decades before this crucially right, this itself is testament to Edison. Right,
this fact that if you turn off electricity for one minute,
people will die. And Hoover actually puts out this official
statement where he walks through this thought process that he
(02:54):
and his aides have gone through. He writes, quote, this
demonstration of the dependence of the country upon electrical current
for its life and health is in itself a monument
to mister Edison's genius. And so Hoover decides, Okay, we'll
do this more modest thing where it's like, if you
want to turn off the lights for one minute at
(03:15):
ten PM, and a lot of the country does it, so.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I can imagine the nation city in the dark for
sixty seconds, just waiting to turn the lights back on.
You can hear a fridge whirring in the background. Did
not exist when Edison was born. Maybe the radio's playing
softly that wasn't around. And when the light comes back on,
people could see cars in the streets, planes in the
sky that didn't exist fifty years earlier. You could see
(03:40):
the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Both brand new at the time, as were skyscrapers in general,
because you couldn't build a skyscraper if you didn't have electricity,
because nobody's going to walk. What is it one hundred
stories up right, buildings were like ten stories tall max.
Before electric grids.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
When we look back, Edison's life was probably this moment
in US history where the most progress was made between
the time he was born and the time he died
technological progress, and if you look in such a compressed
period of time, it is unimaginable how much life changed
for people.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Certainly if you were eighty years old, but even if
you were sixty years old, your life was entirely different
by nineteen thirty than it had been when you were
a small child. And you know, to be clear, Edison
wasn't the cause of all of that. He didn't have
anything to do with cars and planes. He didn't really
invent the light bulb, in fact, though people thought he did.
(04:35):
And there was this myth of Edison that was part
of the story. But I think Edison really did do
as much as anybody. He certainly did an incredible amount
to use technology and business to bring about this incredible
change in daily life for hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and I'm Robert Smith. And this is
Business History, a show about the history of business.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So why would call it business history? Because it's about
the history of business. And today we are starting on
a three part series big pretty sure it's going to
be three about Thomas Edison. Edison was this incredible figure
in a lot of ways. He was an inventor, a tinker.
He was like a grinder, you know, workaholic, huge self promoter,
(05:21):
great entrepreneur. Invented the photograph, built the first electric grid
of any size to light up Lower Manhattan, controlled essentially
the entire American movie business. But today, in the first
episode about Edison, I'm going to argue that the most
important thing he did came before any of that, and
it wasn't even any particular thing or system that he invented.
(05:45):
It was this kind of meta breakthrough. It was this
new way of inventing, and it happened early in Edison's life.
It happened before he was thirty years old. So he
came up with a new way of inventing that industrialized invention,
and that really created the template for the modern twentieth
century style of progress. That was his great break.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Which we see even to Internet AI everything. Thomas Alva Edison,
it's one of those people you love saying is middle
name Alva He was born in what was already an
age of miracles. There was the railroad, and there was
the telegraph, and they were shrinking this very notion of distance,
of time and space. It felt like an age that
(06:31):
was on the move, and the spirit of invention, of
innovation was everywhere. And Edison had this particular combination of traits, right.
He was an inventor, that's we learned about in school,
of course, but he was also a hustler, an entrepreneur.
He was interested in new things, but he always asked himself,
what are people willing to pay for?
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah, And it's really striking. You see both of these traits,
the entrepreneur and the inventor of the tinker. You see
them from very early in his life. You see him
from when he's a kid, a little kid. So he's
born in eighteen forty seven in a town called Port Huron, Michigan.
On the show of Lake Huron, I'll be honest with you,
(07:12):
I did not remember as one of the great lakes.
It's one of the greatest of the lakes. You have
got it, have you been.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I was born between Lake Huron and Lake Erie in London, Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have got it. Yeah. So he's
born on the shore of Lake Huron, this little town
out in the middle of nowhere. He barely goes to school,
goes to school for like a few months here and there.
It was a bad distracted student and he's working from
a young age. When he's twelve, he gets a job
selling like candy and newspapers on the train that goes
(07:43):
back and forth from Port Huron to Detroit. He's working
the angles, he's hustling. There's this detail that I love,
which is, you know, when the train gets to Detroit,
he gets a bunch of newspapers to sell on the
way back to Port Huron. And if he has some
unsold papers, when he's almost back to the end of
the line, while the train is still moving at the
edge of town in Port Huron, there's this like sandbank
(08:06):
or something. He throws the bundle of papers off the
train into the sandbank. Then he jumps off the moving
train after him and walks home, selling the papers one
by one.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
These days, we don't let twelve year olds out by themselves,
you know, in the modern era, these guy's jumping off trains.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, and like obviously a bad idea, but in my heart,
I kind of love it, like in my twelve year
old boy heart's seat on the log Yeah yeah, yeah.
So you know he's out there selling newspapers on the train,
off the train, and after a little while he thinks, wait,
I'm just like a chump. I'm out here working for
the man. I could be selling my own papers. And
(08:43):
so he buys a used printing press, puts it into
some space on a baggage car on the train, and
starts printing his own newspaper on the train.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
What is he reporting on? Like the guy in seat
thirteen B. You know he's got a hot tip.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
It's it's not a lot of news. It's that news heavy.
You might call it a newsletter. Yeah, okay, the Weekly Herald,
Thomas A. Edison publisher. It's like one page, but selling
it and making all the profits and keeping all the
profits right, cutting out the middle man. So there's entrepreneur Edison,
and like right next to entrepreneur Edison in that same
(09:20):
baggage car, you see Edison the inventor, because next to
the printing press, he sets up this little chemistry lab.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
So he's got like magnesium and potassium. He's like making
things turn purple.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I'm imagining like things bubbling. I don't I don't know.
There's one thing I do know, which is he has
some phosphorus. And the reason I know he has fosporus, right, oh,
is at some point the phosphorus like spills or whatever
and starts a fire on the train bag, on the train,
on the train car. Yeah, which is like, obviously that's
gonna happen. You have a teenage boy with like dangerous
(09:55):
chemicals out to trade. Of course you're gonna start a fire.
And of course if you do that, you're gonna get fired,
which is what happens to Edison. So he gets fired
and now comes this very Horatio Alger turn and that
is this So not long before the fire and the firing,
Edison has been hanging out at a train station and
(10:16):
there is this little toddler stay with me, who is
out playing on the track and a loose car train
car comes rolling at the toddler and sees it happening,
and he goes it grabs the toddler and brings him
to safety.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
And this story is almost too perfect, right. A runaway
box car toddler on the tracks is Steven Spielberg writ
this apocryphull the word you're looking for. The history he
gave is apocryphal, too good to be true.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Although I looked at this and thought about it, and
I think it is true. You know, there is one
recent biographer of this guy, Randall Strauss, who is like
particularly skeptical of Edison's self mythologizing, and he thinks it's true.
And you can see letters between Edison and the kids dad.
So I think the world used to just be more wild, right,
like more dangerous. So yes, I think it's true. But
(11:05):
at this moment it is in fact helpful for Edison
because because the father of the child that Edison rescues
runs the station but also is a telegraph operator, and
so when Edison gets fired, this grateful father teaches Edison
to be a telegraph operator. This is the next phase
(11:28):
of Edison's life, right, Being a telegraph operator proves to
be a huge opportunity for him. But I want to
say one thing first, because it's another big moment, and
that is Edison, by the time he's twelve years old,
is mostly deaf, like not entirely deaf. People can shout
to him and he can hear but the key quote
(11:48):
he has later is I haven't heard a bird sing
since I was twelve years old, which is poignant, especially
for like I was gonna spoiler alert invent the phonograph,
but he said Edison said he didn't mind it. It
helped him focus, helped him like tune out distractions. He
was a very focused man. And there is this actually
lovely detail which is later in his life when he's
like famous and going to lectures, you know in big halls,
(12:10):
when you can't hear what the guy is saying, his
assistant will tap on Edison's leg. We'll tap with the
person is saying in morse code.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
So this is an opportunity for Edison because at this point,
like the telegraph is the cutting edge communication tool, like
it's just exploding at this time. They've just around this
time laid the first transatlantic cable. Suddenly you could communicate instantaneously.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right, You're in the.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Midst of a civil war. People want to know the news,
and suddenly they can know it. They can move troops,
they can know what's happening, and people are just sort
of getting used to this idea of information is not
this rare thing that you print on the newspaper and
deliver the next day. Like information is power, it's instantaneous. Yeah,
Edison learning.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
To be a telegraph operator is him walking into this
great technological moment of his time. And there is this
one particular story that I love about how transformation all
the tele is. It's about a pickpocket gang in London
run by a guy named Fiddler Dick. Govnor watch out
(13:20):
for Fiddler Dick. Uh very good. What Fiddler Dick's gang
does is this, They loiter on a train platform and
then the train pulls in, and you know, it's chaos.
People are getting off the train, people are getting on,
they're moving around, they've got all their stuff out, and
Fiddler Dick and his boys pick the pockets to the
people in the crowd, and then just as the train's
(13:41):
about to pull out, they hop on the train and
head to the next station. And this is an incredible strategy, right,
because if you are on a moving train in say
eighteen forty, there is literally no way to send information
faster than you are traveling. You might as well be
going at the speed of light, because no message is
(14:03):
going to get to your destination before you do, right,
So then you just get off the train at the
next station, and nobody knows anything is a miss. And
then one day in eighteen forty four, a cop in
London sees the Fiddler Dick gang strike right, somebody the
platform's like, whatever, my wallet, whatever, I don't know. Somebot
to stop that boy, and they're on the train and
(14:24):
they're gone. But then the cup is like, oh wait
a minute, we got a telegraph now, and you're just telegraphs.
They head to the next station. Fiddler Dick out of
the boys get arrested. Thank you Telegraph. Here's Fiddler Dick.
You got Fiddler Dick by the telegraph. So this is
the world that Edison is going into. And it means
(14:48):
that if you know how to send and receive Morse code,
you can write your ticket. It's like being a coder
in whatever twenty twenty. What it was the best year
to be a coder? Twenty twenty? Probably right.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I feel like we should just say here, if Netflix
is listening in, we could write the Adventures of Young Edison,
telegraph operator, traveling the nation, solving crime, wading inventions. I
love it, actually, yes, next time on the Adventures of
Young Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Very good it's basically this episode, but with a little
more like murder. Well, sure, that's here's a murder.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Thomas Edison, he's going from town to town, you know,
he's in Indianapolis, Memphis, Louisville, and he'll roll into town,
get a room with some other telegraph operators, and go
to work and make money. And he's spending all his
money still experimenting, buying chemicals and stuff to build batteries.
And there's this moment in Louisville. Actually his room is
(16:04):
above the telegraph office and he spills some acid on
the floor and it eats a hole through the floor
and drips down into like the boss's office below. So
he gets fired, but who cares, right, he's like a
teenager and he has this valuable skill. So he winds
up eventually in Boston as a telegraph operator. And this
is where there's kind of a big turn, the next
(16:24):
big turn in his life.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So in the classic story of an entrepreneur, right, you
need to have the basic skills, you need to have
a bunch of ideas, but you also have to sort
of take a risk. You have to have that moment
of failure before you pivot, and I feel like we're
about to get to that.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yes, that's right, both the failure and the pivot. Right.
So yeah, So it's eighteen sixty nine. Edison is twenty
two years old and he gets his first patent ever,
first of one thousand and ninety three patents he will
get legend in his lifetime legend and this one for him,
it's for an electric vote recorder, right. And so the
(17:02):
idea is he's in Boston, which is the state capital
of Massachusetts, right, and you know the voting is super inefficient, right,
I whatever. The gentleman from whatever, I don't know what, wherever.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
He sees a he sees a pain point there if
someone has to write down eyes and knais.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And so he invents this automatic counting machine and takes
it to I think it takes it to the state House.
He takes it to some legislator, takes it to the
you know, customer, and they're like, look, this is very clever,
but I'll tell you a little secret. We don't actually
want our votes counted instantly, right. We need that time
to go talk to the other legislators see if we
(17:42):
can sway them. Maybe go out in the lobby and
see if any the lobbyists out there want to discuss
our campaign contributions or whatever they called them back then. Right,
So in fact, this is not a problem. It would
it would create a problem for the legislators. They don't
want it, nobody buys it. He has built a thing
that nobody wants.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
And this is a classic lesson for entrepreneurs. I mean
even today in business school, people will come up with
ideas and even make a prototype of it and be like,
look at how amazing this idea is. And you'll be like, well,
does anyone want it? Did you talk to your customers
and like, oh, not yet. But it's clearly genius, so Engavier, right,
(18:23):
it's having genius. Yeah, having a genius idea without a
need for it is nothing. It's like not having it
at all.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah. It reminded me of you know why Combinator, the
famous startup incubator in Silicon Valley. I think their motto
is something like make something people want. And I seem
to recall, although I could not find evidence of this
when I went to look for it, but I seem
to recall that they give entrepreneurs a T shirt if
their business gets to some level of success that says, congratulations,
(18:55):
you made something people want. It's a very simple, elegant lesson,
and it's a lesson that Edison really learns, really internalizes
at this point in his life.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And we'll see this for the rest of his life
when he he interacts with other inventors, right, you know,
he's the king inventor, So he's often brought in to.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Be like, what do you think about this?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And you know, they're showing it off to Edison being like, oh,
isn't this amazing? And he's thinking, all right, how much
can I get for it? Who will pay a nickel
to use this thing? How I get into stores? Like
what's the revenue model? Essentially, and this is one of
the things that makes him a great inventor and a
great businessman.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So Edison takes this lesson and he turns to the
finance industry smart smart, because finance is just literally the
business of money, right, and if you can help people
make more money, they will pay you for that. And
right around this time, people have started using the telegraph
to send real time information about stock prices. This is
(19:55):
basically the invention of the stock ticker is a thing
that has happened.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Which is powerful because if stocks are trading for a
different price, let's just say in London, New York, New York, Chicago,
then that's this huge opportunity to buy cheap and want
place and sell expensive in another place. This arbitrage opportunity.
And having that information means you can spot those opportunities exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
And if you can improve that a little bit, if
you can make it faster or clearer, whatever, people will
make more money. We saw this even into the twenty
first century when people were building crazy, you know, dedicated
fiber optic lines and satellite towers and wild things to
move price information faster. So Edison moves to New York,
of course finance Wall Street and gets a contract from
(20:41):
the Golden Stock Telegraph Company of New York City. Really,
what does that company do? I love old company names, right,
What does the National Biscuit Company make? They make biscuits.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I feel like the Golden Stock Telegraph Company became like
go Telcom in the eighties and and now is known
as Spritzel.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yes, Fritzel, but no I for some reason. And so
now Edison is in New York and he is able
to stop being a telegraph operator, he's able to do
with his job. Start his first company, straightforward name Newark
Telegraph Works. Ask me why why was it located in Newark?
(21:18):
And what did they work on? Telegraph? He's hiring workers,
he delivers that first stock ticker. And he's also he's
working on all these incremental improvements, right, like not crazy
things that are going to make him famous, but he's
just making all these tweaks that give little efficiency gains,
you know, little better batteries and weird electrical things. Right.
(21:43):
His company's growing. He gets married, married to a Jersey
girl named Mary Stillwell, they buy a house. But Edison
is definitely not a family man. He's working. He's always
working all the time. In fact, in his first year
of marriage he gets thirty nine patents, but I'm sure
he made it home for dinner never probably zero times.
(22:03):
And then in eighteen seventy four he comes up with
a big idea. Doesn't sound like a big idea to us,
but it is a big idea. It's a system that
lets you send four messages at once on a single
telegraph line. Calls it the quadruplex.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Now, at this point, telegraph was essentially one wire and
you basically tap into one side of the wirepp peep
person listens on the other end, taps.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Back, and the wire is made of copper. Right, it's
copper wire. So it's expensive. It's expensive, right, And they're
running the copper wire all over the country, you know,
across the Atlantic Ocean. Costs a lot of money to
run all that copper wire, right, And so if you
can get more messages on the same amount of wire,
that is a huge efficiency gain, right. That makes things cheaper. Yeah,
(22:59):
because it's more efficient. It's something that no one would
ever see or notice. But if you're running a company,
I mean that is a huge productivity increase. And I
want to just like zoom out from this for a moment,
because you know, we talk about technology now, we talk
about like amazing things and maybe it's scary, like AI
(23:19):
or whatever, but it's it's kind of exciting and dramatic.
But in the long run, maybe the most important thing
that technology does is make stuff cheaper, makes it cheaper
to communicate, makes it cheaper to grow food, makes it
cheaper to make clothes. And when everything gets cheaper, everybody
gets richer. Right. The way we have had material progress
(23:40):
is by technology effectively making things cheaper. So shout out
to that. And that is what Edison is doing here.
He is making the most important communications technology of its
stay cheaper.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
So he's on a roll. He's got dozens of inventions
at this point, he's been tweaking. He's finally got something
that people are going to pay money for. He's got
a family, right, But he's not yet this world changing inventor.
Because there's one last piece of the puzzle any entrepreneur needs,
and that is scale. He needs money. He needs so
(24:12):
much money. There's a special name for it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Capital. Yeah, he needs capital. Like, I don't know at
what point does money become capital. I mean, I know
you could say it's like the structure of it is it.
But I feel like nobody calls one hundred thousand dollars money, right, that's.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Not that is investment capital.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yes, yeah, he in fact, at one point writes to
the head of Western Union. Western Union is the big
telegraph company. He's doing a lot of work for them.
He writes to the head of Western Union, I need
ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three or two
thousand dollars anyone you would like to advance he's actually
writing this to that funny it's good, it's charming. He
(24:50):
had this kind of homespun charm people talked about like
he was from the Midwest. He had that Midwestern charm.
Is that a thing? I think it is for Edison?
It is dressed in kind of country clothes, even when
he was famous. So he's writing this to the head
of Western Union, this big executive, William Morton, and in
fact Orton advances Edison five thousand dollars and then they
start to properly negotiate over Edison's big idea over the quadruplex.
(25:13):
Edison wants twenty five thousand plus royalties. Orton, you know,
controls Western Union can kind of do whatever he wants.
So he's sort of I think playing games with Edison, stalling.
He goes off to the Midwest for Christmas break, and
Edison is just has to kind of wait around, right,
has to wait for his big capital infusion. One day,
as this is happening, into Edison's little Newark, New Jersey, workshop,
(25:38):
walks Jay Gould.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Jay Gould legendary. He was a railroad magnet, a big
financial speculator. O't call him investor, I'm calling him a speculator.
He was a classic robber baron. But more than that,
you know, there was this whole robber barons they called him. Right,
everybody you know thought, oh, they're stealing all our money,
they're manipulating the markets. But even the robber barons hated
(26:02):
Jay Gould. He was a robber barons, robber baron. Now
I will say I've toured his mansion recently up on
the Highs and River, and the tour guys say he
was misunderstood. He was actually a really great guy. But
we'll do a future episode. It's a very nice manchion.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Even at the time, right, even at the time,
people was like the he.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Was always trying to corner the market, like like take
all the gold contract.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I tried to corner gold stuff stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Some economists have argued that he was hated because he
went against big company interests and in fact things got
cheaper because of him.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
But we will look at this in the future show.
Robert bart who is in it for the little guy.
He was going to give that mansion to the poor someday,
you know. To be continued. He walks in, this guy,
this famous guy walks into Edison's little shop, and Gold actually,
among other things, controls the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.
Arrival to Western Union, Jay Gold has heard about the quadruplex,
(27:01):
and if you're Edison, it is great news when Jay
Gold walks in the door. Right. It's like that Seven
Bugs Bunny when Bug Funny looks at a guy and
the whole guy is just a big bag with a
dollar sign on it. Right, Because if Western Union is
all you have, if the head of Western Union is
jerking around and going off for Christmas break and not
giving you any money, you don't have any leverage. Right,
(27:22):
You basically have to just take what they offer. But
now now there are multiple buyers for what you're selling.
Now there are multiple buyers for your quadruplex, and you
have leverage. And so the very next day Edison goes
to Gould's mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, goes down
to Gould's office in the basement, and Edison actually wrote
(27:44):
about this exchange later. Edison wrote, Here's what he wrote.
Gould started in at once and asked me how much
I wanted. I said, make me an offer. Then he said,
I'll give you thirty thousand dollars and I said, I'll
sell any interest I may have for that money, which
was somewhat more than I thought I could get.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Great negotiating lesson always let the other guy say the
number first, because right, if it's more than you wanted, you.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Just say yes. You just say yes, thank you, pleasure
doing business with you. So then of course Edison gets
the money. Gold actually sells a yacht and gives Edison
the money from the yacht. Lovely Robert Baron detail, and
then of course Western Union sues Gould over ownership of
the quadrupleags. The lawsuit goes on forever. Edison's inventions are
going to end up tied up in lawsuits again and again, right,
(28:31):
intellectual property story. But Edison doesn't care this time because
he's got his money. What does he do with it?
He does the most important thing he's ever going to
do in his life. He knew it. He does the
thing that is going to transform the very nature of
invention itself itself in the world. And what that thing
is is he moves to the country. He moves to
(28:54):
this little failed housing development out in the middle of
nowhere in New Jersey called Menlo Park, next to the railroad,
between New Jersey and Philadelphia. So it's early eighteen seventy six.
By this point, Edison is twenty nine years old. He's
got two kids who he calls Dot and Dash. Oh yeah,
very sweet, although it's not like he hangs out with them.
(29:16):
What he actually loves is the telegraph. His family moves
into this big house that used to be the sales
office for this failed housing development in Melo Park, some
of his workers move into some of the other empty houses,
and then on top of this little hill not far
from the train station. I think you can see Manhattan
from the top of the hill, not sure. On top
(29:36):
of this little hill, he builds the thing, the main
thing that is like the manifestation of his big idea.
It's a lab. It's a lab for him and his
employees where they're going to work. And he says, in
this building he is going to come up with quote
a minor invention every ten days and a big thing
every six months or so.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It's amazing because if you would ask most people at
this time, if you ask most people today, they would say,
invention is one of those things that you know comes
from God or the greater spirit, you know, the eureka moment,
you know, and everyone's he is like, oh, it was
out walking when it suddenly came to me fully formed,
Like this is the myth of invention, and maybe it
happens sometimes this way. But for Thomas Edison to say, yeah,
(30:19):
we got a schedule here, we got a calendar like invent, invent, invent.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's taking away the magic, right, It's taking it from
this kind of romantic world to the industrial world.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And you didn't maybe know if it was possible, but
it ended up being possible.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So what he builds there is a long, two story
wood building one hundred feet long twenty five feet wide,
painted white. People say it looks like a schoolhouse or
a church without a steeple. And on the ground floor
there's a machine shop. Upstairs there's a lab. Eventually people
will call this the invention Factory, which is a perfect
(30:54):
name for it, but right now nobody calls it anything, right,
because nobody outside the telegraph industry has even heard of
Thomas Edison. He's just some guy moving out to the
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
I've seen a replica of this lab in Michigan outside Detroit,
in Ford's Museum. He so admired Thomas Edison that he
rebuilt the laboratory down to like the test tubes and
the little bits of wire on the wall. Apparently so
my tour guy told me. When Edison saw it, he's like,
it's an exact replica. I accept it so clean, you know,
(31:26):
it was like perfectly clean. But there's a million little
things and screws and connectors and all sorts of fabrics
and that sort of thing. In case Thomas Edison or
his people at this point had an idea, they didn't
have to go to Manhattan to pick up.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
A button or a part or anything. Right, the core
thing this place does is it makes Edison's inventing process frictionless. Right,
anytime he thinks of something, he has right there standing
next to him, you know, skilled machinists and electricians and
like all the parts and machines and chemicals and whatever
(32:04):
you can think of. This is the breakthrough. There's this
great quote about this from this guy, Paul Israel. He
wrote a biography about Edison. He spent decades editing the
Edison papers at records. He's like a deep Edison scholar.
And the quote is that the lab in Menlo Park
showed that invention itself could be an industrial process. So
(32:28):
like this is the great era of industrialization in America
and Edison is industrializing invention.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
He's gone from Thomas Edison Young Morse code operator to
Thomas Edison inventor, to Thomas Edison Incorporated. He's the guy
who runs the factory that makes inventions. And in just
a minute we will hear how the invention factory comes out.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Of the gate with a big one.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Jacob, I feel like the pieces are in place. Edison
has his invention side, his business side, he's got money,
he's got the industrialization of invention itself, he has the
manifestation of his own mind on a hilltop in New Jersey.
And yet no mention of the light bulb or are
these things that like every elementary school student knows about
(33:37):
Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
It's coming, Okay, it's coming, though it comes in an
indirect way. It comes in a really interesting way. And
that is this. So right around the time Edison moves
to Memo Park, there is in fact this historic breakthrough,
but it doesn't come from Edison, doesn't come from his
lab on the hill. It comes from another inventor who's
based in Boston, and this invention is granted as patent
(34:01):
one seven four four sixty five, and it's called improvement
in telegraphy Yon wait for it. The inventor says, my
present invention consists of a vibratory or undulatory current of
electricity in contradistinction to a merely intermittent or postulator current.
And essentially, this inventor says, this is a breakthrough because
(34:21):
you can send more telegraph messages down the same wire,
so it's like quadruplex plus. But then at the very
end of the application, literally second to last paragraph, the
inventor writes that the patent covers quote the method of
and apparatus four transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically as
(34:41):
herein described by causing electrical undulations similar in forms of
the vibrations of air accompanying the said vocal or other
sound substantially as set forth. And then last paragraph in testimony,
whereof I have here unto signed my name this twentieth
day of January eighty, eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Alex Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell, I love it. I
love it when you're in reading the famous biography and
another famous guy comes in.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, came up, Alexander graand Belt Watson come here. I
want you. Alexander Grambell. He is inventing the telephone right here,
and he doesn't know it, right, amazing. He just thinks
he's like coming up with a better way to send telegraphs.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And does Edison see this in like Telegraph Weekly or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And so Edison at tracks new patents. That's like one
of the things he does is he just sees all
the new patents that come out. He reads them and
he sees this, and he thinks, I'm gonna tweak it
so I can send even better telegraph messages. And you know,
he's all set up to do this, right, He's got
his muckers, he's got his lab, he's staying up all night.
(35:50):
And there's this one piece of this new thing that
Alexander Grambell has invented called the diaphragm. It's the thing
that turns sound into vibrations, right, So it vibrates when
sound waves hit that's a thin membrane.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
It vibrates and it creates an electrical current that is
not dots or dashes, but is variable electric current.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yes, and going the other way, it turns the electric
current into vibrations that you can hear. And so one
day Edison is playing with one of these and just
like talking into it, and he feels that it's vibrating
on his hand. As he talks to it, he can
feel the vibrations. It's the middle of the night. He's
having dinner with his boys, with his muckers, probably eating
(36:31):
apple pie. And as he feels this thing vibrating on
his hand, he turns to his chief engineer, this assistant
named Charles Bachelor guy, he calls Batch, and he says,
you know, Batch, if we took one of these diaphragms
and we put something pointy, put like a needle or
something on the bottom of it, and put it on
(36:52):
a piece of paper and talked into it, it would
scratch the paper. It would leave scratch marks on the paper.
And then maybe if we took that paper with the
scratch marks and pulled it back under the needle, would
it make the diaphragm vibrate and send sound back out?
Would it recreate the sound?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
And because they have a factory with needles and paper
and diaphragms and all this stuff, they don't need to
wait long to know the answer to this question.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
They don't need to wait at all. Right, all the
dudes in the middle of the night, in the middle
of nowhere in New Jersey are sitting there ready to go,
and so they just do it, right, this whole team
of people. There's a machinist who's sitting there, who walks
over to his whatever machine and like, solder is a
needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm, or however you
get a needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm, and
Bach Bachelor gets some wax paper and cuts it up,
(37:40):
and they build a little wheel, a little system just
right then, right that night, and you know, presumably this
is every night, right, presumably it's always like Edison's like,
how about this? How about that? And most of them
are not very good ideas, but this one, this one
is a good idea. Right. So they hook up the
diaphragm with the needle, so it's touching the wax paper,
and there's this wheel that the paper's on, and so
(38:03):
Bachelor slowly pulls the paper along the wheel under the needle,
and Edison says, into the diaphragm, Mary had a little lamb,
And they take the paper out and they look at
it and it has these little scratch marks on it, grooves,
if you will. And then bachelor puts the paper back
(38:25):
on the wheel with the little scratches, you know, pulls
the paper under the needle past the diaphragm, and as
it's going past the diaphragm, they hear like, er uh damn, eureka.
This is a real eureka. Yeah, this is a real eureka. Right,
Like it's not perfect, right, it doesn't quite work, but
(38:46):
it works. It works. Edison writes in his notebook that day. Basically,
this is an invention that will make it easier for
people at the telegraph office to transcribe messages.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Oh no, oh no, he's still thinking telegraph. His mind's
in the telegraph. He's thinking, oh, yeah, someone in a
telegraph office has to use a pencil and paper to
write things down. We could use this new transcription device
essentially for dots and dashes.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yes, yes, huh. He is still he is still in
the world that he's living in, right, Surprisingly, he is
still in his world. But he gets he gets that
this thing is gonna be big, not to the exclusion
of everything else. He keeps puttering on other things, but
he does have somebody over the next few months make
a list of possible names for his new invention. I
know you love a list. You want to take this one,
(39:33):
all right?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Possible names for this new invention. Autophone, cosmophone, I do
like that one. Acoustaphone, nice and tipophone, liquophone, chronophone, glottophone,
that's nice, clangophone, who laghamophone, aerophone. I feel like they
have a Latin dictionary there in the Park laboratory.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
There's like going through it. Epigraph They don't choose any
of those. Nope, as we know, they choose phonograph, which
I think is Edison's and means something like sound writer.
Right the graph the graph is right there in the name,
which is telling they're really still focused on this kind
of automatic transcription part. They're not thinking music.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
They're not thinking orchestras that someone's going to buy this
at home. No.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
I mean, if anything, they're thinking like when they think
beyond telegraph, they think of like, oh, this is like
a something that business people can dictate letters into. It's
very much like a recording device as opposed to a
playing device at some level. So they're working on it
they're you know, iterating, they're making it a little better.
And a few months later, in December, they decide they're
(40:44):
ready to go public with this idea, and it comes
out in Scientific American, which was a big, big deal
at the time in that sort of technology.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Sure, and the story is called the Talking Phonograph, and
I'll read a little bit of it. Mister Thomas A.
Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine
on our desk and turned to crank, and the machine
inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph,
informed us that he was very well, and but us
a cordial good night.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
People now went bananas. People could not believe that this
was a thing.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It's hard to imagine how big it is that a
mechanical machine is doing.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
What a human does. Yeah, that it talks to use
to you like a person. In fact, a professor who
reads this article writes to Edison and basically says, like,
mister Edison, I'm sure you're an honorable man. You need
to correct this article because it makes it sound like
you have a machine that can record sound and play
it back, and surely, as we all know, that is
not possible.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
It's the kind of thing you'd see at a carnival
in the day, right, the box that streaks, and it's
a small child or something inside the box put you know,
a bunch of hocum.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
But you know it was magic. I mean it was magic.
It was magic. It was magic. He takes it down
to Washington, d C. At this big like scientific meeting,
and so many people want to hear it that they
actually have to take the door off the hinges of
the room where he's displaying it. While he's down there
the White House, he hears that the president wants to
see his new machine. Pop quiz Robert who is the
(42:20):
president in eighteen seventy seven seventy eight Garfield Rutherford behays, oh, class,
I wouldn't have got it, Classic Lake, you're on.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Rutherford behays the things you don't know?
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Things I didn't know. And Rutherford behayes loves the phonograph.
He keeps Edison at the White House like till after
midnight playing with this incredible thing. And this is the
moment when Edison goes from being you know, inventor known
in the telegraph business to being a celebrity. This is
the moment when he becomes known as the Wizard of
(42:53):
Memo Park.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Because this is a leap in technology. It's not just
a little extra something to make telegraph operators more money.
This wasn't just the front page of Telegraph weekly. This
is the front page of the New York World.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, and you know, I think there's something something about
the human voice is important here. Like you know, obviously
there had been portraits and people had had their writings,
but the voice is connected to the breath, right, It
is ephemeral, It dies with you. And like immediately when
this comes out, people are thinking about like, oh, this
(43:26):
machine is going to let people talk to us after
they die, as if they're talking to us from beyond
the grave. This is it's almost supernatural.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
So how does he take something that is magic and
make money off of it?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
This is a great question. So he is not yet
to the point where they can manufacture these at any
kind of scale and sell them for a profit. That's
the obvious thing you would do. Yeah, but the sort
of minimum viable product version of it. They just got
a couple of phonographs. They rent out rooms, sell tickets
(44:00):
and people pay to come and hear somebody like record
themselves singing and then play it back.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
I would totally pay that nickel you would pay it today?
Speaker 1 (44:09):
I would probably we probably did so. Obviously, this is
just kind of a stalling maneuver, right, This is just
what they're doing until the business gets up and running
and there are investors in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company
and they're like, Okay, Edison, let's let's get to scale here,
let's figure out how to manufacture this. And it turns
(44:32):
out this is not Edison's thing. Edison's thing is not
taking his genius invention and operationalizing and building the factory
to build it. You know, he has his invention factory.
He starts working on the telescope of phone, his big
idea for how people I'm like, whatever, hilltops a mile
apart can talk.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
To each other.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
It's amazing. Right.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
He doesn't want to be in the business of like
hiring orchestras and pressing like music and distributing this through
music stores. I mean, that's just like being a businessman
that's not coming up with cool stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
All. Yeah, that's not his thing, but it does mean
he leaves the phonograph by the way side for years
and several years later, Alexander Graham Bell him again actually
improves on Edison's idea for the phonograph, brings it to market,
and this is the wax cylinder. Yeah. He eventually Alexander
Grahm Bell is eventually the one who comes up with
the wax cylinder. Yes, and that does inspire Edison many
(45:28):
years later to sort of follow right to chase Alexander
Graham Bell. And Edison does wind up in the phonograph business,
but he's always behind, ironically, given that he invented it.
Like his other inventions, he's much less clearly the inventor
the ones they're coming, but this one is him unambiguously
and yet and yet he never dominates the industry as
(45:51):
arguably he should have. And then finally, in nineteen twenty nine,
two years before he dies, he just gets out of
the phonograph business altogether, gives up. He's got bigger things.
So what do we make of this story? Jacob?
Speaker 2 (46:03):
At the very beginning, we promised that Edison wasn't just
an inventor, He's an entrepreneur's business man.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
And yet, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
I have been in front of our actual episode. But
so far he doesn't seem to be squeezing every last time.
He doesn't seem to have that ruthless businessman in him.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, no, that's true. You definitely would not call him
a profit maximizer, right. He sort of reminds me of
of this type of founder you see with startups now,
where they're like brilliant and driven and they create this
very innovative company and get it going and then like
a year or two in, somebody from the you know,
(46:43):
venture capital firm, takes him into a back room and
gray hairs. Yeah, the gray hair comes in. Listen, we
love you. You've got a great job getting this company
off the ground. But now it's time to bring in
I'm not gonna call it a grown up, but let's
bring in somebody who's more into operations. Right. Edison is
kind of like that founder.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
He could have been the greatest telegraph operator in the world.
He could have been the greatest telegraph maximizer in the world.
He could have been the phonograph nant and run orchestras
around the country and recorded them and sold them all
the first David Geffen And maybe he knows himself well
enough to know that he has a lot of different interests, right,
He's almost like, I wouldn't say scatterbrain because that seems
(47:23):
like an insult. It's like things are just coming constantly
into his head. You know, at one moment, he's showing
a phonograph to the President of the United States, But
as he's showing the photograph, he's probably thinking, you know
what if you had a giant tube on top of
a mountain that you could yell at other mountains with
other twoes.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
And Retherford behazes's like, what what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (47:44):
I just want you've already done the thing, right, But
that was an actual thing he wanted to do right.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Yeah, if he had been this sort of more narrow
minded prophet maximizer, he probably would have got stuck at
like a sort of local maximum right, Like, maybe he
would have stopped at the photograph and be like, I'm famous,
I'm the phonograph guy. I'm gonna be the phonograph king now.
But this is clearly not what Edison had set out
(48:11):
to do, right. He had set out to create an
invention factory, a place where he can chase his curiosity,
a place where he has all the equipment he needs,
and he has this team and a place crucially where
he can keep coming up with big ideas one after another,
and he is gonna succeed at that.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, inventing the photograph from most people would have been
the big thing, but one great product is fine. But
transforming a whole system, right, transformative technology, the kind of
technology that makes everything change. That's what's about to come.
(48:50):
We should thank Thomas Edison for his scatterbrain nature. Yeah,
and for his ambition, right. His ambition was not to
be the phonograph king. It was to invent greater and
greater things. And really, interestingly, like his whole life, he
keeps thinking, the next thing I invent is gonna be
even bigger. He keeps saying that, even to the point
where he's wrong, right, because that's just who he is.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
He keeps trying to invent bigger and better things.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Next time on Business History, Thomas Alva Edison, age thirty
or so, he's still so young, gets bored with the
phonograph and builds the first big electric grid in the
history of the world and reveals that the great inventor
has a fatal flaw. He falls to in love with
his products. Our showrunner is Ryan Dilly, Our producer is
(49:40):
Gabriel Hunter Chang.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
And our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
I'm Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another
episode of Business History, a show about the history of business.
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jacob. Today. We are going to play
for you an episode of a new show that I'm
hosting in addition to What's Your Problem. The new show
is called Business History because it's a show about the
history of business. I'm hosting it with Robert Smith, who
some of you might remember I used to work with
(00:36):
at Planet Money. He was a co host at Planet Money.
And the episode we're going to play today is about
Thomas Edison, who is an extremely What's Your Problem kind
of guy, huge figure in the history of technology, very
interesting in many ways. This is actually the first of
a three episode series we're doing about Edison. If you
happen to subscribe to Pushkin Plus, you can listen to
(00:58):
the whole series now. Otherwise they'll come out one episode
a week over the next few weeks in the Business
History Feed, which you can of course get wherever you
are listening to this show right now. So if you
happen to want to see me and Robert in addition
to hear us, you can watch it on YouTube. I
hope you like the show. If you like it, of
course I would love it if you would subscribe. Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Here's the show Business History, Episode two Edison Part one.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
What if that's the segment that's sponsored, sponsored by what
by whoever wants to pay for it. We can talk
about that afterwards. I suppose Thomas Edison died in nineteen
thirty one. He was eighty four years old, and when
(01:48):
he died, the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover,
decided that Edison was such a big deal that the
whole country, the entire United States, needed a moment of mourning.
So Hoover is talking this over with his says, what
should we do to honor Edison? And somebody says, what
if the whole country turns off the electricity for one
(02:09):
minute to honor Thomas Edison, the man who brought electricity
to the masses. And you're laughing for what I think
is an obvious reason, right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Because if you think about it, who needs electricity all
the time?
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Right? Everyone?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Everybody, Fire departments, hospital, sanitation systems, They all needed every
minute they need this thing that Edison helped create, electric power, this.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Thing that nobody had, nobody had, you know a few
decades before this crucially right, this itself is testament to Edison. Right,
this fact that if you turn off electricity for one minute,
people will die. And Hoover actually puts out this official
statement where he walks through this thought process that he
(02:54):
and his aides have gone through. He writes, quote, this
demonstration of the dependence of the country upon electrical current
for its life and health is in itself a monument
to mister Edison's genius. And so Hoover decides, Okay, we'll
do this more modest thing where it's like, if you
want to turn off the lights for one minute at
(03:15):
ten PM, and a lot of the country does it, so.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I can imagine the nation city in the dark for
sixty seconds, just waiting to turn the lights back on.
You can hear a fridge whirring in the background. Did
not exist when Edison was born. Maybe the radio's playing
softly that wasn't around. And when the light comes back on,
people could see cars in the streets, planes in the
sky that didn't exist fifty years earlier. You could see
(03:40):
the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Both brand new at the time, as were skyscrapers in general,
because you couldn't build a skyscraper if you didn't have electricity,
because nobody's going to walk. What is it one hundred
stories up right, buildings were like ten stories tall max.
Before electric grids.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
When we look back, Edison's life was probably this moment
in US history where the most progress was made between
the time he was born and the time he died
technological progress, and if you look in such a compressed
period of time, it is unimaginable how much life changed
for people.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Certainly if you were eighty years old, but even if
you were sixty years old, your life was entirely different
by nineteen thirty than it had been when you were
a small child. And you know, to be clear, Edison
wasn't the cause of all of that. He didn't have
anything to do with cars and planes. He didn't really
invent the light bulb, in fact, though people thought he did.
(04:35):
And there was this myth of Edison that was part
of the story. But I think Edison really did do
as much as anybody. He certainly did an incredible amount
to use technology and business to bring about this incredible
change in daily life for hundreds of millions of people.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and I'm Robert Smith. And this is
Business History, a show about the history of business.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So why would call it business history? Because it's about
the history of business. And today we are starting on
a three part series big pretty sure it's going to
be three about Thomas Edison. Edison was this incredible figure
in a lot of ways. He was an inventor, a tinker.
He was like a grinder, you know, workaholic, huge self promoter,
(05:21):
great entrepreneur. Invented the photograph, built the first electric grid
of any size to light up Lower Manhattan, controlled essentially
the entire American movie business. But today, in the first
episode about Edison, I'm going to argue that the most
important thing he did came before any of that, and
it wasn't even any particular thing or system that he invented.
(05:45):
It was this kind of meta breakthrough. It was this
new way of inventing, and it happened early in Edison's life.
It happened before he was thirty years old. So he
came up with a new way of inventing that industrialized invention,
and that really created the template for the modern twentieth
century style of progress. That was his great break.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Which we see even to Internet AI everything. Thomas Alva Edison,
it's one of those people you love saying is middle
name Alva He was born in what was already an
age of miracles. There was the railroad, and there was
the telegraph, and they were shrinking this very notion of distance,
of time and space. It felt like an age that
(06:31):
was on the move, and the spirit of invention, of
innovation was everywhere. And Edison had this particular combination of traits, right.
He was an inventor, that's we learned about in school,
of course, but he was also a hustler, an entrepreneur.
He was interested in new things, but he always asked himself,
what are people willing to pay for?
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah, And it's really striking. You see both of these traits,
the entrepreneur and the inventor of the tinker. You see
them from very early in his life. You see him
from when he's a kid, a little kid. So he's
born in eighteen forty seven in a town called Port Huron, Michigan.
On the show of Lake Huron, I'll be honest with you,
(07:12):
I did not remember as one of the great lakes.
It's one of the greatest of the lakes. You have
got it, have you been.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I was born between Lake Huron and Lake Erie in London, Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have got it. Yeah. So he's
born on the shore of Lake Huron, this little town
out in the middle of nowhere. He barely goes to school,
goes to school for like a few months here and there.
It was a bad distracted student and he's working from
a young age. When he's twelve, he gets a job
selling like candy and newspapers on the train that goes
(07:43):
back and forth from Port Huron to Detroit. He's working
the angles, he's hustling. There's this detail that I love,
which is, you know, when the train gets to Detroit,
he gets a bunch of newspapers to sell on the
way back to Port Huron. And if he has some
unsold papers, when he's almost back to the end of
the line, while the train is still moving at the
edge of town in Port Huron, there's this like sandbank
(08:06):
or something. He throws the bundle of papers off the
train into the sandbank. Then he jumps off the moving
train after him and walks home, selling the papers one
by one.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
These days, we don't let twelve year olds out by themselves,
you know, in the modern era, these guy's jumping off trains.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, and like obviously a bad idea, but in my heart,
I kind of love it, like in my twelve year
old boy heart's seat on the log Yeah yeah, yeah.
So you know he's out there selling newspapers on the train,
off the train, and after a little while he thinks, wait,
I'm just like a chump. I'm out here working for
the man. I could be selling my own papers. And
(08:43):
so he buys a used printing press, puts it into
some space on a baggage car on the train, and
starts printing his own newspaper on the train.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
What is he reporting on? Like the guy in seat
thirteen B. You know he's got a hot tip.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
It's it's not a lot of news. It's that news heavy.
You might call it a newsletter. Yeah, okay, the Weekly Herald,
Thomas A. Edison publisher. It's like one page, but selling
it and making all the profits and keeping all the
profits right, cutting out the middle man. So there's entrepreneur Edison,
and like right next to entrepreneur Edison in that same
(09:20):
baggage car, you see Edison the inventor, because next to
the printing press, he sets up this little chemistry lab.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
So he's got like magnesium and potassium. He's like making
things turn purple.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
I'm imagining like things bubbling. I don't I don't know.
There's one thing I do know, which is he has
some phosphorus. And the reason I know he has fosporus, right, oh,
is at some point the phosphorus like spills or whatever
and starts a fire on the train bag, on the train,
on the train car. Yeah, which is like, obviously that's
gonna happen. You have a teenage boy with like dangerous
(09:55):
chemicals out to trade. Of course you're gonna start a fire.
And of course if you do that, you're gonna get fired,
which is what happens to Edison. So he gets fired
and now comes this very Horatio Alger turn and that
is this So not long before the fire and the firing,
Edison has been hanging out at a train station and
(10:16):
there is this little toddler stay with me, who is
out playing on the track and a loose car train
car comes rolling at the toddler and sees it happening,
and he goes it grabs the toddler and brings him
to safety.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
And this story is almost too perfect, right. A runaway
box car toddler on the tracks is Steven Spielberg writ
this apocryphull the word you're looking for. The history he
gave is apocryphal, too good to be true.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Although I looked at this and thought about it, and
I think it is true. You know, there is one
recent biographer of this guy, Randall Strauss, who is like
particularly skeptical of Edison's self mythologizing, and he thinks it's true.
And you can see letters between Edison and the kids dad.
So I think the world used to just be more wild, right,
like more dangerous. So yes, I think it's true. But
(11:05):
at this moment it is in fact helpful for Edison
because because the father of the child that Edison rescues
runs the station but also is a telegraph operator, and
so when Edison gets fired, this grateful father teaches Edison
to be a telegraph operator. This is the next phase
(11:28):
of Edison's life, right, Being a telegraph operator proves to
be a huge opportunity for him. But I want to
say one thing first, because it's another big moment, and
that is Edison, by the time he's twelve years old,
is mostly deaf, like not entirely deaf. People can shout
to him and he can hear but the key quote
(11:48):
he has later is I haven't heard a bird sing
since I was twelve years old, which is poignant, especially
for like I was gonna spoiler alert invent the phonograph,
but he said Edison said he didn't mind it. It
helped him focus, helped him like tune out distractions. He
was a very focused man. And there is this actually
lovely detail which is later in his life when he's
like famous and going to lectures, you know in big halls,
(12:10):
when you can't hear what the guy is saying, his
assistant will tap on Edison's leg. We'll tap with the
person is saying in morse code.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
So this is an opportunity for Edison because at this point,
like the telegraph is the cutting edge communication tool, like
it's just exploding at this time. They've just around this
time laid the first transatlantic cable. Suddenly you could communicate instantaneously.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right, You're in the.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Midst of a civil war. People want to know the news,
and suddenly they can know it. They can move troops,
they can know what's happening, and people are just sort
of getting used to this idea of information is not
this rare thing that you print on the newspaper and
deliver the next day. Like information is power, it's instantaneous. Yeah,
Edison learning.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
To be a telegraph operator is him walking into this
great technological moment of his time. And there is this
one particular story that I love about how transformation all
the tele is. It's about a pickpocket gang in London
run by a guy named Fiddler Dick. Govnor watch out
(13:20):
for Fiddler Dick. Uh very good. What Fiddler Dick's gang
does is this, They loiter on a train platform and
then the train pulls in, and you know, it's chaos.
People are getting off the train, people are getting on,
they're moving around, they've got all their stuff out, and
Fiddler Dick and his boys pick the pockets to the
people in the crowd, and then just as the train's
(13:41):
about to pull out, they hop on the train and
head to the next station. And this is an incredible strategy, right,
because if you are on a moving train in say
eighteen forty, there is literally no way to send information
faster than you are traveling. You might as well be
going at the speed of light, because no message is
(14:03):
going to get to your destination before you do, right,
So then you just get off the train at the
next station, and nobody knows anything is a miss. And
then one day in eighteen forty four, a cop in
London sees the Fiddler Dick gang strike right, somebody the
platform's like, whatever, my wallet, whatever, I don't know. Somebot
to stop that boy, and they're on the train and
(14:24):
they're gone. But then the cup is like, oh wait
a minute, we got a telegraph now, and you're just telegraphs.
They head to the next station. Fiddler Dick out of
the boys get arrested. Thank you Telegraph. Here's Fiddler Dick.
You got Fiddler Dick by the telegraph. So this is
the world that Edison is going into. And it means
(14:48):
that if you know how to send and receive Morse code,
you can write your ticket. It's like being a coder
in whatever twenty twenty. What it was the best year
to be a coder? Twenty twenty? Probably right.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
I feel like we should just say here, if Netflix
is listening in, we could write the Adventures of Young Edison,
telegraph operator, traveling the nation, solving crime, wading inventions. I
love it, actually, yes, next time on the Adventures of
Young Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Very good it's basically this episode, but with a little
more like murder. Well, sure, that's here's a murder.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Thomas Edison, he's going from town to town, you know,
he's in Indianapolis, Memphis, Louisville, and he'll roll into town,
get a room with some other telegraph operators, and go
to work and make money. And he's spending all his
money still experimenting, buying chemicals and stuff to build batteries.
And there's this moment in Louisville. Actually his room is
(16:04):
above the telegraph office and he spills some acid on
the floor and it eats a hole through the floor
and drips down into like the boss's office below. So
he gets fired, but who cares, right, he's like a
teenager and he has this valuable skill. So he winds
up eventually in Boston as a telegraph operator. And this
is where there's kind of a big turn, the next
(16:24):
big turn in his life.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So in the classic story of an entrepreneur, right, you
need to have the basic skills, you need to have
a bunch of ideas, but you also have to sort
of take a risk. You have to have that moment
of failure before you pivot, and I feel like we're
about to get to that.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yes, that's right, both the failure and the pivot. Right.
So yeah, So it's eighteen sixty nine. Edison is twenty
two years old and he gets his first patent ever,
first of one thousand and ninety three patents he will
get legend in his lifetime legend and this one for him,
it's for an electric vote recorder, right. And so the
(17:02):
idea is he's in Boston, which is the state capital
of Massachusetts, right, and you know the voting is super inefficient, right,
I whatever. The gentleman from whatever, I don't know what, wherever.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
He sees a he sees a pain point there if
someone has to write down eyes and knais.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
And so he invents this automatic counting machine and takes
it to I think it takes it to the state House.
He takes it to some legislator, takes it to the
you know, customer, and they're like, look, this is very clever,
but I'll tell you a little secret. We don't actually
want our votes counted instantly, right. We need that time
to go talk to the other legislators see if we
(17:42):
can sway them. Maybe go out in the lobby and
see if any the lobbyists out there want to discuss
our campaign contributions or whatever they called them back then. Right,
So in fact, this is not a problem. It would
it would create a problem for the legislators. They don't
want it, nobody buys it. He has built a thing
that nobody wants.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
And this is a classic lesson for entrepreneurs. I mean
even today in business school, people will come up with
ideas and even make a prototype of it and be like,
look at how amazing this idea is. And you'll be like, well,
does anyone want it? Did you talk to your customers
and like, oh, not yet. But it's clearly genius, so Engavier, right,
(18:23):
it's having genius. Yeah, having a genius idea without a
need for it is nothing. It's like not having it
at all.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah. It reminded me of you know why Combinator, the
famous startup incubator in Silicon Valley. I think their motto
is something like make something people want. And I seem
to recall, although I could not find evidence of this
when I went to look for it, but I seem
to recall that they give entrepreneurs a T shirt if
their business gets to some level of success that says, congratulations,
(18:55):
you made something people want. It's a very simple, elegant lesson,
and it's a lesson that Edison really learns, really internalizes
at this point in his life.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And we'll see this for the rest of his life
when he he interacts with other inventors, right, you know,
he's the king inventor, So he's often brought in to.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Be like, what do you think about this?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And you know, they're showing it off to Edison being like, oh,
isn't this amazing? And he's thinking, all right, how much
can I get for it? Who will pay a nickel
to use this thing? How I get into stores? Like
what's the revenue model? Essentially, and this is one of
the things that makes him a great inventor and a
great businessman.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So Edison takes this lesson and he turns to the
finance industry smart smart, because finance is just literally the
business of money, right, and if you can help people
make more money, they will pay you for that. And
right around this time, people have started using the telegraph
to send real time information about stock prices. This is
(19:55):
basically the invention of the stock ticker is a thing
that has happened.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Which is powerful because if stocks are trading for a
different price, let's just say in London, New York, New York, Chicago,
then that's this huge opportunity to buy cheap and want
place and sell expensive in another place. This arbitrage opportunity.
And having that information means you can spot those opportunities exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
And if you can improve that a little bit, if
you can make it faster or clearer, whatever, people will
make more money. We saw this even into the twenty
first century when people were building crazy, you know, dedicated
fiber optic lines and satellite towers and wild things to
move price information faster. So Edison moves to New York,
of course finance Wall Street and gets a contract from
(20:41):
the Golden Stock Telegraph Company of New York City. Really,
what does that company do? I love old company names, right,
What does the National Biscuit Company make? They make biscuits.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I feel like the Golden Stock Telegraph Company became like
go Telcom in the eighties and and now is known
as Spritzel.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yes, Fritzel, but no I for some reason. And so
now Edison is in New York and he is able
to stop being a telegraph operator, he's able to do
with his job. Start his first company, straightforward name Newark
Telegraph Works. Ask me why why was it located in Newark?
(21:18):
And what did they work on? Telegraph? He's hiring workers,
he delivers that first stock ticker. And he's also he's
working on all these incremental improvements, right, like not crazy
things that are going to make him famous, but he's
just making all these tweaks that give little efficiency gains,
you know, little better batteries and weird electrical things. Right.
(21:43):
His company's growing. He gets married, married to a Jersey
girl named Mary Stillwell, they buy a house. But Edison
is definitely not a family man. He's working. He's always
working all the time. In fact, in his first year
of marriage he gets thirty nine patents, but I'm sure
he made it home for dinner never probably zero times.
(22:03):
And then in eighteen seventy four he comes up with
a big idea. Doesn't sound like a big idea to us,
but it is a big idea. It's a system that
lets you send four messages at once on a single
telegraph line. Calls it the quadruplex.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Now, at this point, telegraph was essentially one wire and
you basically tap into one side of the wirepp peep
person listens on the other end, taps.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Back, and the wire is made of copper. Right, it's
copper wire. So it's expensive. It's expensive, right, And they're
running the copper wire all over the country, you know,
across the Atlantic Ocean. Costs a lot of money to
run all that copper wire, right, And so if you
can get more messages on the same amount of wire,
that is a huge efficiency gain, right. That makes things cheaper. Yeah,
(22:59):
because it's more efficient. It's something that no one would
ever see or notice. But if you're running a company,
I mean that is a huge productivity increase. And I
want to just like zoom out from this for a moment,
because you know, we talk about technology now, we talk
about like amazing things and maybe it's scary, like AI
(23:19):
or whatever, but it's it's kind of exciting and dramatic.
But in the long run, maybe the most important thing
that technology does is make stuff cheaper, makes it cheaper
to communicate, makes it cheaper to grow food, makes it
cheaper to make clothes. And when everything gets cheaper, everybody
gets richer. Right. The way we have had material progress
(23:40):
is by technology effectively making things cheaper. So shout out
to that. And that is what Edison is doing here.
He is making the most important communications technology of its
stay cheaper.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
So he's on a roll. He's got dozens of inventions
at this point, he's been tweaking. He's finally got something
that people are going to pay money for. He's got
a family, right, But he's not yet this world changing inventor.
Because there's one last piece of the puzzle any entrepreneur needs,
and that is scale. He needs money. He needs so
(24:12):
much money. There's a special name for it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Capital. Yeah, he needs capital. Like, I don't know at
what point does money become capital. I mean, I know
you could say it's like the structure of it is it.
But I feel like nobody calls one hundred thousand dollars money, right, that's.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Not that is investment capital.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yes, yeah, he in fact, at one point writes to
the head of Western Union. Western Union is the big
telegraph company. He's doing a lot of work for them.
He writes to the head of Western Union, I need
ten nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three or two
thousand dollars anyone you would like to advance he's actually
writing this to that funny it's good, it's charming. He
(24:50):
had this kind of homespun charm people talked about like
he was from the Midwest. He had that Midwestern charm.
Is that a thing? I think it is for Edison?
It is dressed in kind of country clothes, even when
he was famous. So he's writing this to the head
of Western Union, this big executive, William Morton, and in
fact Orton advances Edison five thousand dollars and then they
start to properly negotiate over Edison's big idea over the quadruplex.
(25:13):
Edison wants twenty five thousand plus royalties. Orton, you know,
controls Western Union can kind of do whatever he wants.
So he's sort of I think playing games with Edison, stalling.
He goes off to the Midwest for Christmas break, and
Edison is just has to kind of wait around, right,
has to wait for his big capital infusion. One day,
as this is happening, into Edison's little Newark, New Jersey, workshop,
(25:38):
walks Jay Gould.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Jay Gould legendary. He was a railroad magnet, a big
financial speculator. O't call him investor, I'm calling him a speculator.
He was a classic robber baron. But more than that,
you know, there was this whole robber barons they called him. Right,
everybody you know thought, oh, they're stealing all our money,
they're manipulating the markets. But even the robber barons hated
(26:02):
Jay Gould. He was a robber barons, robber baron. Now
I will say I've toured his mansion recently up on
the Highs and River, and the tour guys say he
was misunderstood. He was actually a really great guy. But
we'll do a future episode. It's a very nice manchion.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Even at the time, right, even at the time,
people was like the he.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Was always trying to corner the market, like like take
all the gold contract.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I tried to corner gold stuff stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Some economists have argued that he was hated because he
went against big company interests and in fact things got
cheaper because of him.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
But we will look at this in the future show.
Robert bart who is in it for the little guy.
He was going to give that mansion to the poor someday,
you know. To be continued. He walks in, this guy,
this famous guy walks into Edison's little shop, and Gold actually,
among other things, controls the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.
Arrival to Western Union, Jay Gold has heard about the quadruplex,
(27:01):
and if you're Edison, it is great news when Jay
Gold walks in the door. Right. It's like that Seven
Bugs Bunny when Bug Funny looks at a guy and
the whole guy is just a big bag with a
dollar sign on it. Right, Because if Western Union is
all you have, if the head of Western Union is
jerking around and going off for Christmas break and not
giving you any money, you don't have any leverage. Right,
(27:22):
You basically have to just take what they offer. But
now now there are multiple buyers for what you're selling.
Now there are multiple buyers for your quadruplex, and you
have leverage. And so the very next day Edison goes
to Gould's mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, goes down
to Gould's office in the basement, and Edison actually wrote
(27:44):
about this exchange later. Edison wrote, Here's what he wrote.
Gould started in at once and asked me how much
I wanted. I said, make me an offer. Then he said,
I'll give you thirty thousand dollars and I said, I'll
sell any interest I may have for that money, which
was somewhat more than I thought I could get.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Great negotiating lesson always let the other guy say the
number first, because right, if it's more than you wanted, you.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Just say yes. You just say yes, thank you, pleasure
doing business with you. So then of course Edison gets
the money. Gold actually sells a yacht and gives Edison
the money from the yacht. Lovely Robert Baron detail, and
then of course Western Union sues Gould over ownership of
the quadrupleags. The lawsuit goes on forever. Edison's inventions are
going to end up tied up in lawsuits again and again, right,
(28:31):
intellectual property story. But Edison doesn't care this time because
he's got his money. What does he do with it?
He does the most important thing he's ever going to
do in his life. He knew it. He does the
thing that is going to transform the very nature of
invention itself itself in the world. And what that thing
is is he moves to the country. He moves to
(28:54):
this little failed housing development out in the middle of
nowhere in New Jersey called Menlo Park, next to the railroad,
between New Jersey and Philadelphia. So it's early eighteen seventy six.
By this point, Edison is twenty nine years old. He's
got two kids who he calls Dot and Dash. Oh yeah,
very sweet, although it's not like he hangs out with them.
(29:16):
What he actually loves is the telegraph. His family moves
into this big house that used to be the sales
office for this failed housing development in Melo Park, some
of his workers move into some of the other empty houses,
and then on top of this little hill not far
from the train station. I think you can see Manhattan
from the top of the hill, not sure. On top
(29:36):
of this little hill, he builds the thing, the main
thing that is like the manifestation of his big idea.
It's a lab. It's a lab for him and his
employees where they're going to work. And he says, in
this building he is going to come up with quote
a minor invention every ten days and a big thing
every six months or so.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
It's amazing because if you would ask most people at
this time, if you ask most people today, they would say,
invention is one of those things that you know comes
from God or the greater spirit, you know, the eureka moment,
you know, and everyone's he is like, oh, it was
out walking when it suddenly came to me fully formed,
Like this is the myth of invention, and maybe it
happens sometimes this way. But for Thomas Edison to say, yeah,
(30:19):
we got a schedule here, we got a calendar like invent, invent, invent.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's taking away the magic, right, It's taking it from
this kind of romantic world to the industrial world.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
And you didn't maybe know if it was possible, but
it ended up being possible.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So what he builds there is a long, two story
wood building one hundred feet long twenty five feet wide,
painted white. People say it looks like a schoolhouse or
a church without a steeple. And on the ground floor
there's a machine shop. Upstairs there's a lab. Eventually people
will call this the invention Factory, which is a perfect
(30:54):
name for it, but right now nobody calls it anything, right,
because nobody outside the telegraph industry has even heard of
Thomas Edison. He's just some guy moving out to the
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
I've seen a replica of this lab in Michigan outside Detroit,
in Ford's Museum. He so admired Thomas Edison that he
rebuilt the laboratory down to like the test tubes and
the little bits of wire on the wall. Apparently so
my tour guy told me. When Edison saw it, he's like,
it's an exact replica. I accept it so clean, you know,
(31:26):
it was like perfectly clean. But there's a million little
things and screws and connectors and all sorts of fabrics
and that sort of thing. In case Thomas Edison or
his people at this point had an idea, they didn't
have to go to Manhattan to pick up.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
A button or a part or anything. Right, the core
thing this place does is it makes Edison's inventing process frictionless. Right,
anytime he thinks of something, he has right there standing
next to him, you know, skilled machinists and electricians and
like all the parts and machines and chemicals and whatever
(32:04):
you can think of. This is the breakthrough. There's this
great quote about this from this guy, Paul Israel. He
wrote a biography about Edison. He spent decades editing the
Edison papers at records. He's like a deep Edison scholar.
And the quote is that the lab in Menlo Park
showed that invention itself could be an industrial process. So
(32:28):
like this is the great era of industrialization in America
and Edison is industrializing invention.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
He's gone from Thomas Edison Young Morse code operator to
Thomas Edison inventor, to Thomas Edison Incorporated. He's the guy
who runs the factory that makes inventions. And in just
a minute we will hear how the invention factory comes out.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Of the gate with a big one.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Jacob, I feel like the pieces are in place. Edison
has his invention side, his business side, he's got money,
he's got the industrialization of invention itself, he has the
manifestation of his own mind on a hilltop in New Jersey.
And yet no mention of the light bulb or are
these things that like every elementary school student knows about
(33:37):
Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
It's coming, Okay, it's coming, though it comes in an
indirect way. It comes in a really interesting way. And
that is this. So right around the time Edison moves
to Memo Park, there is in fact this historic breakthrough,
but it doesn't come from Edison, doesn't come from his
lab on the hill. It comes from another inventor who's
based in Boston, and this invention is granted as patent
(34:01):
one seven four four sixty five, and it's called improvement
in telegraphy Yon wait for it. The inventor says, my
present invention consists of a vibratory or undulatory current of
electricity in contradistinction to a merely intermittent or postulator current.
And essentially, this inventor says, this is a breakthrough because
(34:21):
you can send more telegraph messages down the same wire,
so it's like quadruplex plus. But then at the very
end of the application, literally second to last paragraph, the
inventor writes that the patent covers quote the method of
and apparatus four transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically as
(34:41):
herein described by causing electrical undulations similar in forms of
the vibrations of air accompanying the said vocal or other
sound substantially as set forth. And then last paragraph in testimony,
whereof I have here unto signed my name this twentieth
day of January eighty, eighteen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Alex Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell, I love it. I
love it when you're in reading the famous biography and
another famous guy comes in.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, came up, Alexander graand Belt Watson come here. I
want you. Alexander Grambell. He is inventing the telephone right here,
and he doesn't know it, right, amazing. He just thinks
he's like coming up with a better way to send telegraphs.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And does Edison see this in like Telegraph Weekly or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And so Edison at tracks new patents. That's like one
of the things he does is he just sees all
the new patents that come out. He reads them and
he sees this, and he thinks, I'm gonna tweak it
so I can send even better telegraph messages. And you know,
he's all set up to do this, right, He's got
his muckers, he's got his lab, he's staying up all night.
(35:50):
And there's this one piece of this new thing that
Alexander Grambell has invented called the diaphragm. It's the thing
that turns sound into vibrations, right, So it vibrates when
sound waves hit that's a thin membrane.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
It vibrates and it creates an electrical current that is
not dots or dashes, but is variable electric current.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yes, and going the other way, it turns the electric
current into vibrations that you can hear. And so one
day Edison is playing with one of these and just
like talking into it, and he feels that it's vibrating
on his hand. As he talks to it, he can
feel the vibrations. It's the middle of the night. He's
having dinner with his boys, with his muckers, probably eating
(36:31):
apple pie. And as he feels this thing vibrating on
his hand, he turns to his chief engineer, this assistant
named Charles Bachelor guy, he calls Batch, and he says,
you know, Batch, if we took one of these diaphragms
and we put something pointy, put like a needle or
something on the bottom of it, and put it on
(36:52):
a piece of paper and talked into it, it would
scratch the paper. It would leave scratch marks on the paper.
And then maybe if we took that paper with the
scratch marks and pulled it back under the needle, would
it make the diaphragm vibrate and send sound back out?
Would it recreate the sound?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
And because they have a factory with needles and paper
and diaphragms and all this stuff, they don't need to
wait long to know the answer to this question.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
They don't need to wait at all. Right, all the
dudes in the middle of the night, in the middle
of nowhere in New Jersey are sitting there ready to go,
and so they just do it, right, this whole team
of people. There's a machinist who's sitting there, who walks
over to his whatever machine and like, solder is a
needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm, or however you
get a needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm, and
Bach Bachelor gets some wax paper and cuts it up,
(37:40):
and they build a little wheel, a little system just
right then, right that night, and you know, presumably this
is every night, right, presumably it's always like Edison's like,
how about this? How about that? And most of them
are not very good ideas, but this one, this one
is a good idea. Right. So they hook up the
diaphragm with the needle, so it's touching the wax paper,
and there's this wheel that the paper's on, and so
(38:03):
Bachelor slowly pulls the paper along the wheel under the needle,
and Edison says, into the diaphragm, Mary had a little lamb,
And they take the paper out and they look at
it and it has these little scratch marks on it, grooves,
if you will. And then bachelor puts the paper back
(38:25):
on the wheel with the little scratches, you know, pulls
the paper under the needle past the diaphragm, and as
it's going past the diaphragm, they hear like, er uh damn, eureka.
This is a real eureka. Yeah, this is a real eureka. Right,
Like it's not perfect, right, it doesn't quite work, but
(38:46):
it works. It works. Edison writes in his notebook that day. Basically,
this is an invention that will make it easier for
people at the telegraph office to transcribe messages.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Oh no, oh no, he's still thinking telegraph. His mind's
in the telegraph. He's thinking, oh, yeah, someone in a
telegraph office has to use a pencil and paper to
write things down. We could use this new transcription device
essentially for dots and dashes.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yes, yes, huh. He is still he is still in
the world that he's living in, right, Surprisingly, he is
still in his world. But he gets he gets that
this thing is gonna be big, not to the exclusion
of everything else. He keeps puttering on other things, but
he does have somebody over the next few months make
a list of possible names for his new invention. I
know you love a list. You want to take this one,
(39:33):
all right?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Possible names for this new invention. Autophone, cosmophone, I do
like that one. Acoustaphone, nice and tipophone, liquophone, chronophone, glottophone,
that's nice, clangophone, who laghamophone, aerophone. I feel like they
have a Latin dictionary there in the Park laboratory.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
There's like going through it. Epigraph They don't choose any
of those. Nope, as we know, they choose phonograph, which
I think is Edison's and means something like sound writer.
Right the graph the graph is right there in the name,
which is telling they're really still focused on this kind
of automatic transcription part. They're not thinking music.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
They're not thinking orchestras that someone's going to buy this
at home. No.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
I mean, if anything, they're thinking like when they think
beyond telegraph, they think of like, oh, this is like
a something that business people can dictate letters into. It's
very much like a recording device as opposed to a
playing device at some level. So they're working on it
they're you know, iterating, they're making it a little better.
And a few months later, in December, they decide they're
(40:44):
ready to go public with this idea, and it comes
out in Scientific American, which was a big, big deal
at the time in that sort of technology.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Sure, and the story is called the Talking Phonograph, and
I'll read a little bit of it. Mister Thomas A.
Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine
on our desk and turned to crank, and the machine
inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph,
informed us that he was very well, and but us
a cordial good night.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
People now went bananas. People could not believe that this
was a thing.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It's hard to imagine how big it is that a
mechanical machine is doing.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
What a human does. Yeah, that it talks to use
to you like a person. In fact, a professor who
reads this article writes to Edison and basically says, like,
mister Edison, I'm sure you're an honorable man. You need
to correct this article because it makes it sound like
you have a machine that can record sound and play
it back, and surely, as we all know, that is
not possible.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
It's the kind of thing you'd see at a carnival
in the day, right, the box that streaks, and it's
a small child or something inside the box put you know,
a bunch of hocum.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
But you know it was magic. I mean it was magic.
It was magic. It was magic. He takes it down
to Washington, d C. At this big like scientific meeting,
and so many people want to hear it that they
actually have to take the door off the hinges of
the room where he's displaying it. While he's down there
the White House, he hears that the president wants to
see his new machine. Pop quiz Robert who is the
(42:20):
president in eighteen seventy seven seventy eight Garfield Rutherford behays, oh, class,
I wouldn't have got it, Classic Lake, you're on.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Rutherford behays the things you don't know?
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Things I didn't know. And Rutherford behayes loves the phonograph.
He keeps Edison at the White House like till after
midnight playing with this incredible thing. And this is the
moment when Edison goes from being you know, inventor known
in the telegraph business to being a celebrity. This is
the moment when he becomes known as the Wizard of
(42:53):
Memo Park.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Because this is a leap in technology. It's not just
a little extra something to make telegraph operators more money.
This wasn't just the front page of Telegraph weekly. This
is the front page of the New York World.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, and you know, I think there's something something about
the human voice is important here. Like you know, obviously
there had been portraits and people had had their writings,
but the voice is connected to the breath, right, It
is ephemeral, It dies with you. And like immediately when
this comes out, people are thinking about like, oh, this
(43:26):
machine is going to let people talk to us after
they die, as if they're talking to us from beyond
the grave. This is it's almost supernatural.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
So how does he take something that is magic and
make money off of it?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
This is a great question. So he is not yet
to the point where they can manufacture these at any
kind of scale and sell them for a profit. That's
the obvious thing you would do. Yeah, but the sort
of minimum viable product version of it. They just got
a couple of phonographs. They rent out rooms, sell tickets
(44:00):
and people pay to come and hear somebody like record
themselves singing and then play it back.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
I would totally pay that nickel you would pay it today?
Speaker 1 (44:09):
I would probably we probably did so. Obviously, this is
just kind of a stalling maneuver, right, This is just
what they're doing until the business gets up and running
and there are investors in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company
and they're like, Okay, Edison, let's let's get to scale here,
let's figure out how to manufacture this. And it turns
(44:32):
out this is not Edison's thing. Edison's thing is not
taking his genius invention and operationalizing and building the factory
to build it. You know, he has his invention factory.
He starts working on the telescope of phone, his big
idea for how people I'm like, whatever, hilltops a mile
apart can talk.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
To each other.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
It's amazing. Right.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
He doesn't want to be in the business of like
hiring orchestras and pressing like music and distributing this through
music stores. I mean, that's just like being a businessman
that's not coming up with cool stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
All. Yeah, that's not his thing, but it does mean
he leaves the phonograph by the way side for years
and several years later, Alexander Graham Bell him again actually
improves on Edison's idea for the phonograph, brings it to market,
and this is the wax cylinder. Yeah. He eventually Alexander
Grahm Bell is eventually the one who comes up with
the wax cylinder. Yes, and that does inspire Edison many
(45:28):
years later to sort of follow right to chase Alexander
Graham Bell. And Edison does wind up in the phonograph business,
but he's always behind, ironically, given that he invented it.
Like his other inventions, he's much less clearly the inventor
the ones they're coming, but this one is him unambiguously
and yet and yet he never dominates the industry as
(45:51):
arguably he should have. And then finally, in nineteen twenty nine,
two years before he dies, he just gets out of
the phonograph business altogether, gives up. He's got bigger things.
So what do we make of this story? Jacob?
Speaker 2 (46:03):
At the very beginning, we promised that Edison wasn't just
an inventor, He's an entrepreneur's business man.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
And yet, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
I have been in front of our actual episode. But
so far he doesn't seem to be squeezing every last time.
He doesn't seem to have that ruthless businessman in him.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, no, that's true. You definitely would not call him
a profit maximizer, right. He sort of reminds me of
of this type of founder you see with startups now,
where they're like brilliant and driven and they create this
very innovative company and get it going and then like
a year or two in, somebody from the you know,
(46:43):
venture capital firm, takes him into a back room and
gray hairs. Yeah, the gray hair comes in. Listen, we
love you. You've got a great job getting this company
off the ground. But now it's time to bring in
I'm not gonna call it a grown up, but let's
bring in somebody who's more into operations. Right. Edison is
kind of like that founder.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
He could have been the greatest telegraph operator in the world.
He could have been the greatest telegraph maximizer in the world.
He could have been the phonograph nant and run orchestras
around the country and recorded them and sold them all
the first David Geffen And maybe he knows himself well
enough to know that he has a lot of different interests, right,
He's almost like, I wouldn't say scatterbrain because that seems
(47:23):
like an insult. It's like things are just coming constantly
into his head. You know, at one moment, he's showing
a phonograph to the President of the United States, But
as he's showing the photograph, he's probably thinking, you know
what if you had a giant tube on top of
a mountain that you could yell at other mountains with
other twoes.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
And Retherford behazes's like, what what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (47:44):
I just want you've already done the thing, right, But
that was an actual thing he wanted to do right.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Yeah, if he had been this sort of more narrow
minded prophet maximizer, he probably would have got stuck at
like a sort of local maximum right, Like, maybe he
would have stopped at the photograph and be like, I'm famous,
I'm the phonograph guy. I'm gonna be the phonograph king now.
But this is clearly not what Edison had set out
(48:11):
to do, right. He had set out to create an
invention factory, a place where he can chase his curiosity,
a place where he has all the equipment he needs,
and he has this team and a place crucially where
he can keep coming up with big ideas one after another,
and he is gonna succeed at that.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, inventing the photograph from most people would have been
the big thing, but one great product is fine. But
transforming a whole system, right, transformative technology, the kind of
technology that makes everything change. That's what's about to come.
(48:50):
We should thank Thomas Edison for his scatterbrain nature. Yeah,
and for his ambition, right. His ambition was not to
be the phonograph king. It was to invent greater and
greater things. And really, interestingly, like his whole life, he
keeps thinking, the next thing I invent is gonna be
even bigger. He keeps saying that, even to the point
where he's wrong, right, because that's just who he is.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
He keeps trying to invent bigger and better things.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Next time on Business History, Thomas Alva Edison, age thirty
or so, he's still so young, gets bored with the
phonograph and builds the first big electric grid in the
history of the world and reveals that the great inventor
has a fatal flaw. He falls to in love with
his products. Our showrunner is Ryan Dilly, Our producer is
(49:40):
Gabriel Hunter Chang.
Speaker 1 (49:41):
And our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
I'm Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another
episode of Business History, a show about the history of business.
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