November 12, 2025 • 49 mins
Thomas Alva Edison helped transform America and the world. He 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. Join Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith as they trace the life story of a scrappy young boy with bad hearing who almost singlehandedly invented R&D.
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
Pushkin too quick. No, it's perfect push kit.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Stop you got it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Business History Episode two, Edison, Part one.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What if that's the segment that's sponsored, sponsored by what by?
Whoever wants to pay for it.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
We can talk about that afterwards. I suppose.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Thomas Edison died in nineteen thirty one. He was eighty
four years old, and when 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 aides, what should we do to honor Edison?
(01:06):
And somebody says, what if the whole country turns off
the electricity for one 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 1 (01:20):
Because if you think about it, who needs electricity all
the time?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Right?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Everyone? Everybody, fire departments, hospital, sanitation systems, they all needed
every minute. They need this thing that Edison helped create,
electric power.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
This 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
(01:56):
thought process that he and his aides.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Have gone through.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
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 ten PM, and a lot of
(02:20):
the country does it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So 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
(02:43):
the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
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 gonna walk.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
What is it one hundred stories up? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Buildings were like ten stories tall max. Before electric grids.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
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 compression
period of time, it is unimaginable how much life changed
for people. Certainly if you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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. And there was
(03:38):
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 1 (03:57):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and I'm Robert Smith, and this is
Business History, a show about the history of business.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
That's 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 about Thomas Edison. Edison was this incredible figure in
a lot of ways. He was an inventor, a tinkerer.
He was like a grinder, you know, workaholic, huge self promoter,
(04:24):
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.
(04:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
That was his great break which we see even today 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
(05:33):
like an age that 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? Yeah, And it's really striking.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
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
shore of Lake Huron. I'll be honest with you, I
did not remember as one of the great lakes.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
It's one of the greatest of the lakes. You have
got it, have you been. I was born between Lake
Huron and Lake Erie in London, Ontario, Canada. Yeah, yeah,
I wouldn't have got it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
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 back and forth from Port Huron
(06:47):
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,
(07:08):
there's this like sandbank or something. He throws the bundle
of papers off 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 1 (07:18):
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 2 (07:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm out here working for the man.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I could be selling my own papers, And 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 1 (07:57):
What is he reporting on? Like the guy in seat
thirteen B. You know he's got a hot tip. It's
it's not a lot of news. It's not news heavy.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
You might call it a newsletter, yeah, okay, the Weekly Herald,
Thomas A. Edison publisher. It's like one page, but selling it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And making all the profits and keeping all.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
The profits right cutting out the middle man. So there's
entrepreneur Edison, and like right next to entrepreneur Edison in
that same baggage car, you see Edison the inventor. Because
next to the printing press. He sets up this little
chemistry lab. So he's got like magnesium and potassium. He's
like making things turn purple. I'm imagining like things bubbling.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I don't I don't know.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
There's one thing I do know, which is he has
some phosphorus.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And the reason I know he has fosters, right, oh.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Is at some point the phosphorus like spills or whatever
and starts a fire on the train on the train,
on the train car, yeah, which is like, obviously that's
gonna happen. You have a teenage boy with like dangerous
chemicals out the trade, of course they'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
(09:12):
is this. So not long before the fire and the firing,
Edison has been hanging out at a train station and
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.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Safety and This story is almost too perfect, right, A
runaway box car toddler on the tracks is Steven Spielberg
writ this.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Apocryphull the word you're looking for. The history gave is apocryphal,
too good to be true. Although I looked at this
and thought about it, and I think it is true.
You know, there is one recent biographer, this guy Randall Strass,
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 dand so I think the world
(10:01):
used to just be more wild, right, like more dangerous.
So yes, I think it's true. But 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
(10:27):
telegraph operator. This is the next phase of Edison's life, right,
Being a telegraph operator proves to be.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
A huge opportunity for him.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
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 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 going to spoiler
(10:57):
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, when you can't hear what
the guy is saying, his assistant will tap on Edison's leg,
well tap with the person is saying in morse code.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
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. Right,
You're in the midst of a civil war. People want
(11:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, Edison learning 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 tee is.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It's about a pickpocket.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Gang in London run by a guy named Fiddler Dick.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Govnor watch out for Fiddler Dick. Uh very good. What
Fiddler Dick's gang does is.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
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 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
(12:52):
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 going to get
to your destination before you do, right, So then you
just get off the train at the next station and
(13:12):
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. Somebody stop that boy
and they're on the train and they're gone. But then
the cup is like, oh wait a minute, we got
a telegraph now, and you're just telegraphs a head to
(13:34):
the next station. Fiddler Dick out. The boys get arrested.
Thanks you telegraph.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Here's Fiddler Dick.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
You got Fiddler Dick by the telegraph. So this is
the world that Edison is going into. And it means
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 was the best year to
be a coder? Twenty twenty?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Probably right. 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,
reading inventions.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I love it, actually yes, next.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Time on the Adventures of Young Thomas Edison's good.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's basically this episode, but with a little more like murder. Well, sure,
that's here's a murder.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
And there's this moment in Louisville. Actually his room is
above the.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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 big turn in
(15:28):
his life.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
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. Yes, that's right, both the
failure and the pivot. Right.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And so the idea is he's in Boston, which is
the state capitol 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 1 (16:18):
He sees a he sees a pain point there if
someone has to write down eyes and knais. And so he.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
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 can sway them.
(16:46):
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 1 (17:04):
And this is a classic lesson for entrepreneurs. I mean
even today in.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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 engineer, right, It's yeah, having
a genius idea without a need for it is nothing.
It's like not having it at all. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
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, you made.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Something people want.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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 1 (18:09):
And will see this for the rest of his life
when he interacts with other inventors, right, you know, he's
the king inventor, so he's often brought in to be like,
what do you think about this? 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?
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And this is one of the things that makes him
a great inventor and a great businessman. 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.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
And right around this time, people have.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Started using the telegraph to send real time information about
stock prices. This is Basically, the invention of the stock
ticker is a thing that has happened.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
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 in
one place and sell expensive in another place. This arbitrage opportunity.
And having that information means you can spot those opportunities.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Exactly, 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
(19:44):
the Golden Stock Telegraph Company of New York City.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Really, what does that company do?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
I love old company names, right, What does the National
Biscuit Company make?
Speaker 1 (19:53):
They make biscuits. I feel like the Golden Stock Telegraph
Company became like go Telcom in the eighties and and
now is known as Spritzel.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
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 quit
his job start his first company, straightforward name Newark Telegraph Works.
Ask me why.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Why was it located in Newark? And what did they
work on? Telegraph?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
But I'm sure he made it home for dinner never
probably zero times.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And then in eighteen seventy four he comes up with
a big idea. Doesn't sound like a big idea 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 1 (21:26):
Now, at this point, telegraph was essentially one wire and
you basically tap into one side of the wirepppppeep. A
person listens on the other end tapsack and the wire
is made of copper.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
And I want to just like zoom out from this
moment because you know, we talk about technology now, we
talk about like amazing things, and maybe it's scary like
AI or whatever, but it's it's kind of exciting and dramatic.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
But in the long run.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
The way we have had material progress is by technology
effectively making things cheaper. So shout out to that. And
that is what Addison is doing here. He is making
the most important communications technology of its stay cheaper.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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
(23:15):
much money. There's a special name for it. Capital. Yeah,
he needs capital.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
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 1 (23:29):
Not that is investment capital.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
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 today. Funny, it's good, it's charming. He had
(23:53):
this kind of homespun charm people talked about like he
was from the Midwest. He had that midwestern charm.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Is that a thing?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
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. Edison wants twenty
five thousand plus royalties. Orton, you know, controls Western Union
(24:21):
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, walks
(24:42):
Jay Gould.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
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
(25:05):
Jay Gould. He was a robber Barons robber baron. Now
I will say I've toured his mansion recently up on
the Hudson River, and the tour guiys say he was misunderstood.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
He was actually a really great guy. But we'll do
a future episode mansion. It's a very nice manchion.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, even at the time, right, even at the time,
people was.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Like the he was always trying to corner the market,
like like take all the gold contract. I tried to
corner gold stuff stuff like that. Some economists have argued
that he was hated because he went against big company
interests and in fact things got cheaper because of him.
But we all look at this in a future show.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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.
(26:04):
And if you're Edison, it is great news when Jay
Gold walks in the door.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
It's like that Seven Bugs Bunny, when Bunny 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, You basically have to just take what
they offer. But now now there are multiple buyers for
(26:31):
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 about this exchange later. Edison wrote, Here's what
he wrote. Gould started in at once and asked me
(26:53):
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 1 (27:05):
Great negotiating lesson, always let the other guy say the
number first, because right, if it's more than you want.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
It, you 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.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
The lawsuit goes on forever.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Edison's inventions are going to end up tied up in
lawsuits again and again, right, intellectual property story. But Edison
doesn't care this time, because he's got his money.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
What does he do with it?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
He does the most important thing he's ever going to
do in his life.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
He knew it.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
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 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
(28:07):
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. 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 Mello Park, some of his workers
(28:28):
move into some of the other empty houses, and then.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
On top of this little hill not far.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
From the train station. I think you can see Manhattan
from the top of the hill, not sure. On top
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
(28:58):
every six months or so.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
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 story 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
(29:21):
to say, yeah, we got a schedule here, we got
a calendar like invent, invent, invent, it's.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Taking away the magic, right, it's taking it from this
kind of romantic world to the industrial world.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
And you didn't maybe know if it was possible, but
it ended up being possible.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
So what he.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
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 name for it, but
(29:58):
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 1 (30:07):
I've seen a replica of this lab in Michigan outside
Detroit in Refords Museum. He 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,
(30:28):
you know, it was like perfectly clean. But there's a
million little things and screws and connectors and and 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 2 (30:46):
A button or a part or anything.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
You can think of. This is the breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
There's a 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
(31:31):
like this is the great era of industrialization in America,
and Edison is industrializing invention.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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 of the gate.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
With a big one.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
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 any
of these things that like every elementary school student knows
(32:39):
about Thomas Edison.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's coming, Okay, it's coming, though it comes in an
indirect way.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It comes in a really interesting way. And that is this.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
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 one seven four four
sixty five, and it's called improvement in telegraphy.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yhon, wait for it.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
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 you can send more telegraph messages
down the same wi so it's like quadruplex plus. But
then at the very end of the application, literally second
(33:34):
to last paragraph, the inventor writes that the patent covers
quote the method of and apparatus four transmitting vocal or
other sounds telegraphically as 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
(33:55):
then last paragraph in testimony, whereof I have here unto
signed my name this twentieth day of January eighty, eighteen
seventy six. Alex Graham Bell.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Alexander Graham Bell, I love it I love it when
you're in a reading famous guy's biography and another famous
guy comes in. Yeah, came up. Alexander graandve Belt Watson,
come here. I want you Alexander Graandbell.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
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 1 (34:27):
And does Edison see this in like Telegraph Weekly or
something like that. So Edison at.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
And there's this one.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Hit It's a thin membrane. It vibrates and it creates
an electrical current that is not dots or dashes, but
a variable electric current.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
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
(35:34):
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
(35:55):
a piece of paper and talked into it, it would
scratch the paper. It would leave scratch marks on the paper.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And then maybe if we took.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
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 1 (36:13):
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. They
don't need to wait at all.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
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 batch Bachelor gets some wax paper and cuts it up,
(36:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
How about this? How about that?
Speaker 2 (36:54):
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 Bachelor slowly pulls the paper along
the wheel under the needle and says into the diaphragm.
Mary had a little lamb. And they take the paper
(37:20):
out and they look at it and it has these
little scratch marks on.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
It, grooves, if you will.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
And then Bachelor puts the paper back 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.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
This is a real eureka. Yeah, this is a real eureka.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Right, Like it's not perfect, right, it doesn't quite work,
but it works.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
It works. Edison writes in.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
His notebook that day, Basically, this is an invention that
will make it easier for people at the telegraph office
to transcribe messages.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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. Yes, yes, huh. He is
still he.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
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 leve a list.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
You want to take this one, all right? Possible names
for this new invention. Autophone, cosmophone, I do like that one. Acoustaphone,
nice antipophone, liquophone, chronophone, glottophone, that's nice, clangophone, who laghamophone, aerophone.
I feel like they have a Latin dictionary there in
(38:56):
the Park laboratory. There's like going through it.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
They're not thinking music. They're not thinking orchestras that someone's
going to buy this at home.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
No. 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.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So they're working on it.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
They're you know, iterating, they're making it a little better.
And a few months later, in December, they decide they're
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 1 (39:55):
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 a crank, and the machine
inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph,
informed us that he was very well, and but it's
a cordial good night.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
People now went bananas. People could not believe that this
was a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
It's hard to imagine how big it is that a
mechanical machine is doing what a human does.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Is not possible.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
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 hokum.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
But you know it was magic. I mean it was magic.
It was magic. It was magic.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
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 president in eighteen seventy seven seventy
(41:25):
eight Garfield Rutherford behaves, oh, class, I wouldn't have got it.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Classic Lake you're on.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Rutherford behays, the things you don't know, 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
(41:55):
becomes known as the Wizard of Memo Park.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
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 2 (42:09):
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
(42:29):
machine is going to let people talk to us after
they die, as if they're talking to us from beyond
the grave.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
This is it's almost supernatural. So how does he take
something that is magic and make money off of it?
This is a great question.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
So he is not yet to the point where they
can manufacture these at any kind of scale and sell
them for a profit.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
That's the obvious thing you would do.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, but the sort of minimum viable product version of it.
They just got a couple of phonographs they rent out
rooms sell tickets and people pay to come and hear
somebody like record themselves singing and then play it back.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
I would totally pay that nickel, you would say today
it would probably be it probably did.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
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 out this is not Edison's thing. Edison's
(43:38):
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 (43:54):
To each other.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
It's amazing. Right. 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 3 (44:08):
All.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
And this is the wax cylinder. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
He eventually Alexander Grahm Bell is eventually the one who
comes up with the wax cylinder. Yes, and that does
inspire Edison many years later to sort of follow right
to chase Alexander Grahmbell. 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 that are coming, but this
(44:46):
one is him unambiguously and yet, and yet he never
dominates the industry as 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.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
He's got bigger things. So what do we make of
this story? Jacob? At the very beginning, we promised that
Edison wasn't just an inventor, He's an entrepreneur, businessman, And
yet so far I have been in front of our
actual episode, but so far he doesn't seem to be
squeezing every last dime. He doesn't seem to have that
(45:23):
ruthless businessman in him. Yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
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, venture capital firm takes him
(45:47):
into a back room.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
And Gray Hairs. Yeah, Gray Hair comes in. Listen, we
love you.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
He's 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.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Edison is kind of like that founder.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
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 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
(46:26):
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, and Retherford Behazes' is like, what what are
(46:46):
you talking about? I just want to photograph. You've already
done the thing, right, But that was an actual thing
he wanted to do. Right. Yeah, if he had been.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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
phonograph and be like, I'm famous, I'm the phonograph guy.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
I'm gonna be the phonograph king now.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
But this is clearly not what Edison had set out
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 1 (47:31):
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.
(47:53):
We should thank Thomas Edison for his scatterbrain nature. Yeah,
and for his ambition. Right.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
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. He keeps trying to invent bigger
(48:19):
and better things.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
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
(48:43):
Gabriel Hunter Chang.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
And our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm
Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another episode
of Business History, a show about the history of business
Robert Smith. As you know, there is nowhere in Pushkin's
office to make a video to make a video podcast,
which is unfortunate.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
We tried and it was described as two gray men
in a gray box, and reasonably so fortunately for us.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
In an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office,
there is the showroom of a company called Buzzy Space.
This is a company is where we're sitting right now,
and what they do is they design furniture and acoustic
solutions that make I'm reading here workplace is more comfortable,
more creative, and more fun.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I would even say cozy. Their furniture is like sort
of curved and interesting colors, and I guess keeps things quiet.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yes, honestly, I wish our office was this showroom. You
can find more at Buzzy dot Space. That's buzz I
dot Space.
Pushkin too quick. No, it's perfect push kit.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Stop you got it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Business History Episode two, Edison, Part one.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What if that's the segment that's sponsored, sponsored by what by?
Whoever wants to pay for it.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
We can talk about that afterwards. I suppose.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Thomas Edison died in nineteen thirty one. He was eighty
four years old, and when 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 aides, what should we do to honor Edison?
(01:06):
And somebody says, what if the whole country turns off
the electricity for one 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 1 (01:20):
Because if you think about it, who needs electricity all
the time?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Right?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Everyone? Everybody, fire departments, hospital, sanitation systems, they all needed
every minute. They need this thing that Edison helped create,
electric power.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
This 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
(01:56):
thought process that he and his aides.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Have gone through.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
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 ten PM, and a lot of
(02:20):
the country does it.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So 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
(02:43):
the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
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 gonna walk.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
What is it one hundred stories up? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Buildings were like ten stories tall max. Before electric grids.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
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 compression
period of time, it is unimaginable how much life changed
for people. Certainly if you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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. And there was
(03:38):
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 1 (03:57):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and I'm Robert Smith, and this is
Business History, a show about the history of business.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
That's 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 about Thomas Edison. Edison was this incredible figure in
a lot of ways. He was an inventor, a tinkerer.
He was like a grinder, you know, workaholic, huge self promoter,
(04:24):
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.
(04:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
That was his great break which we see even today 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
(05:33):
like an age that 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? Yeah, And it's really striking.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
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
shore of Lake Huron. I'll be honest with you, I
did not remember as one of the great lakes.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
It's one of the greatest of the lakes. You have
got it, have you been. I was born between Lake
Huron and Lake Erie in London, Ontario, Canada. Yeah, yeah,
I wouldn't have got it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
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 back and forth from Port Huron
(06:47):
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,
(07:08):
there's this like sandbank or something. He throws the bundle
of papers off 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 1 (07:18):
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 2 (07:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm out here working for the man.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I could be selling my own papers, And 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 1 (07:57):
What is he reporting on? Like the guy in seat
thirteen B. You know he's got a hot tip. It's
it's not a lot of news. It's not news heavy.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
You might call it a newsletter, yeah, okay, the Weekly Herald,
Thomas A. Edison publisher. It's like one page, but selling it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And making all the profits and keeping all.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
The profits right cutting out the middle man. So there's
entrepreneur Edison, and like right next to entrepreneur Edison in
that same baggage car, you see Edison the inventor. Because
next to the printing press. He sets up this little
chemistry lab. So he's got like magnesium and potassium. He's
like making things turn purple. I'm imagining like things bubbling.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I don't I don't know.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
There's one thing I do know, which is he has
some phosphorus.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And the reason I know he has fosters, right, oh.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Is at some point the phosphorus like spills or whatever
and starts a fire on the train on the train,
on the train car, yeah, which is like, obviously that's
gonna happen. You have a teenage boy with like dangerous
chemicals out the trade, of course they'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
(09:12):
is this. So not long before the fire and the firing,
Edison has been hanging out at a train station and
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.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Safety and This story is almost too perfect, right, A
runaway box car toddler on the tracks is Steven Spielberg
writ this.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Apocryphull the word you're looking for. The history gave is apocryphal,
too good to be true. Although I looked at this
and thought about it, and I think it is true.
You know, there is one recent biographer, this guy Randall Strass,
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 dand so I think the world
(10:01):
used to just be more wild, right, like more dangerous.
So yes, I think it's true. But 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
(10:27):
telegraph operator. This is the next phase of Edison's life, right,
Being a telegraph operator proves to be.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
A huge opportunity for him.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
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 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 going to spoiler
(10:57):
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, when you can't hear what
the guy is saying, his assistant will tap on Edison's leg,
well tap with the person is saying in morse code.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
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. Right,
You're in the midst of a civil war. People want
(11:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, Edison learning 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 tee is.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It's about a pickpocket.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Gang in London run by a guy named Fiddler Dick.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Govnor watch out for Fiddler Dick. Uh very good. What
Fiddler Dick's gang does is.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
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 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
(12:52):
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 going to get
to your destination before you do, right, So then you
just get off the train at the next station and
(13:12):
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. Somebody stop that boy
and they're on the train and they're gone. But then
the cup is like, oh wait a minute, we got
a telegraph now, and you're just telegraphs a head to
(13:34):
the next station. Fiddler Dick out. The boys get arrested.
Thanks you telegraph.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Here's Fiddler Dick.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
You got Fiddler Dick by the telegraph. So this is
the world that Edison is going into. And it means
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 was the best year to
be a coder? Twenty twenty?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Probably right. 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,
reading inventions.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I love it, actually yes, next.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Time on the Adventures of Young Thomas Edison's good.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's basically this episode, but with a little more like murder. Well, sure,
that's here's a murder.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
We'll be back in just a minute.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
And there's this moment in Louisville. Actually his room is
above the.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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 big turn in
(15:28):
his life.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
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. Yes, that's right, both the
failure and the pivot. Right.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And so the idea is he's in Boston, which is
the state capitol 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 1 (16:18):
He sees a he sees a pain point there if
someone has to write down eyes and knais. And so he.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
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 can sway them.
(16:46):
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 1 (17:04):
And this is a classic lesson for entrepreneurs. I mean
even today in.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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 engineer, right, It's yeah, having
a genius idea without a need for it is nothing.
It's like not having it at all. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
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, you made.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Something people want.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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 1 (18:09):
And will see this for the rest of his life
when he interacts with other inventors, right, you know, he's
the king inventor, so he's often brought in to be like,
what do you think about this? 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?
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And this is one of the things that makes him
a great inventor and a great businessman. 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.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
And right around this time, people have.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Started using the telegraph to send real time information about
stock prices. This is Basically, the invention of the stock
ticker is a thing that has happened.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
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 in
one place and sell expensive in another place. This arbitrage opportunity.
And having that information means you can spot those opportunities.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Exactly, 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
(19:44):
the Golden Stock Telegraph Company of New York City.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Really, what does that company do?
Speaker 2 (19:48):
I love old company names, right, What does the National
Biscuit Company make?
Speaker 1 (19:53):
They make biscuits. I feel like the Golden Stock Telegraph
Company became like go Telcom in the eighties and and
now is known as Spritzel.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
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 quit
his job start his first company, straightforward name Newark Telegraph Works.
Ask me why.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Why was it located in Newark? And what did they
work on? Telegraph?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
But I'm sure he made it home for dinner never
probably zero times.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And then in eighteen seventy four he comes up with
a big idea. Doesn't sound like a big idea 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 1 (21:26):
Now, at this point, telegraph was essentially one wire and
you basically tap into one side of the wirepppppeep. A
person listens on the other end tapsack and the wire
is made of copper.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
And I want to just like zoom out from this
moment because you know, we talk about technology now, we
talk about like amazing things, and maybe it's scary like
AI or whatever, but it's it's kind of exciting and dramatic.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
But in the long run.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
The way we have had material progress is by technology
effectively making things cheaper. So shout out to that. And
that is what Addison is doing here. He is making
the most important communications technology of its stay cheaper.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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
(23:15):
much money. There's a special name for it. Capital. Yeah,
he needs capital.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
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 1 (23:29):
Not that is investment capital.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
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 today. Funny, it's good, it's charming. He had
(23:53):
this kind of homespun charm people talked about like he
was from the Midwest. He had that midwestern charm.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Is that a thing?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
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. Edison wants twenty
five thousand plus royalties. Orton, you know, controls Western Union
(24:21):
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, walks
(24:42):
Jay Gould.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
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
(25:05):
Jay Gould. He was a robber Barons robber baron. Now
I will say I've toured his mansion recently up on
the Hudson River, and the tour guiys say he was misunderstood.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
He was actually a really great guy. But we'll do
a future episode mansion. It's a very nice manchion.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, even at the time, right, even at the time,
people was.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Like the he was always trying to corner the market,
like like take all the gold contract. I tried to
corner gold stuff stuff like that. Some economists have argued
that he was hated because he went against big company
interests and in fact things got cheaper because of him.
But we all look at this in a future show.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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.
(26:04):
And if you're Edison, it is great news when Jay
Gold walks in the door.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
It's like that Seven Bugs Bunny, when Bunny 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, You basically have to just take what
they offer. But now now there are multiple buyers for
(26:31):
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 about this exchange later. Edison wrote, Here's what
he wrote. Gould started in at once and asked me
(26:53):
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 1 (27:05):
Great negotiating lesson, always let the other guy say the
number first, because right, if it's more than you want.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
It, you 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.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
The lawsuit goes on forever.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Edison's inventions are going to end up tied up in
lawsuits again and again, right, intellectual property story. But Edison
doesn't care this time, because he's got his money.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
What does he do with it?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
He does the most important thing he's ever going to
do in his life.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
He knew it.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
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 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
(28:07):
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. 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 Mello Park, some of his workers
(28:28):
move into some of the other empty houses, and then.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
On top of this little hill not far.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
From the train station. I think you can see Manhattan
from the top of the hill, not sure. On top
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
(28:58):
every six months or so.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
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 story 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
(29:21):
to say, yeah, we got a schedule here, we got
a calendar like invent, invent, invent, it's.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Taking away the magic, right, it's taking it from this
kind of romantic world to the industrial world.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
And you didn't maybe know if it was possible, but
it ended up being possible.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
So what he.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
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 name for it, but
(29:58):
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 1 (30:07):
I've seen a replica of this lab in Michigan outside
Detroit in Refords Museum. He 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,
(30:28):
you know, it was like perfectly clean. But there's a
million little things and screws and connectors and and 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 2 (30:46):
A button or a part or anything.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
You can think of. This is the breakthrough.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
There's a 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
(31:31):
like this is the great era of industrialization in America,
and Edison is industrializing invention.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
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 of the gate.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
With a big one.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
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 any
of these things that like every elementary school student knows
(32:39):
about Thomas Edison.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
It's coming, Okay, it's coming, though it comes in an
indirect way.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It comes in a really interesting way. And that is this.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
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 one seven four four
sixty five, and it's called improvement in telegraphy.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yhon, wait for it.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
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 you can send more telegraph messages
down the same wi so it's like quadruplex plus. But
then at the very end of the application, literally second
(33:34):
to last paragraph, the inventor writes that the patent covers
quote the method of and apparatus four transmitting vocal or
other sounds telegraphically as 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
(33:55):
then last paragraph in testimony, whereof I have here unto
signed my name this twentieth day of January eighty, eighteen
seventy six. Alex Graham Bell.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Alexander Graham Bell, I love it I love it when
you're in a reading famous guy's biography and another famous
guy comes in. Yeah, came up. Alexander graandve Belt Watson,
come here. I want you Alexander Graandbell.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
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 1 (34:27):
And does Edison see this in like Telegraph Weekly or
something like that. So Edison at.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
And there's this one.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Hit It's a thin membrane. It vibrates and it creates
an electrical current that is not dots or dashes, but
a variable electric current.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
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
(35:34):
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
(35:55):
a piece of paper and talked into it, it would
scratch the paper. It would leave scratch marks on the paper.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And then maybe if we took.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
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 1 (36:13):
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. They
don't need to wait at all.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
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 batch Bachelor gets some wax paper and cuts it up,
(36:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
How about this? How about that?
Speaker 2 (36:54):
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 Bachelor slowly pulls the paper along
the wheel under the needle and says into the diaphragm.
Mary had a little lamb. And they take the paper
(37:20):
out and they look at it and it has these
little scratch marks on.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
It, grooves, if you will.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
And then Bachelor puts the paper back 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.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
This is a real eureka. Yeah, this is a real eureka.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Right, Like it's not perfect, right, it doesn't quite work,
but it works.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
It works. Edison writes in.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
His notebook that day, Basically, this is an invention that
will make it easier for people at the telegraph office
to transcribe messages.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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. Yes, yes, huh. He is
still he.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
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 leve a list.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
You want to take this one, all right? Possible names
for this new invention. Autophone, cosmophone, I do like that one. Acoustaphone,
nice antipophone, liquophone, chronophone, glottophone, that's nice, clangophone, who laghamophone, aerophone.
I feel like they have a Latin dictionary there in
(38:56):
the Park laboratory. There's like going through it.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
They're not thinking music. They're not thinking orchestras that someone's
going to buy this at home.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
No. 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.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So they're working on it.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
They're you know, iterating, they're making it a little better.
And a few months later, in December, they decide they're
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 1 (39:55):
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 a crank, and the machine
inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph,
informed us that he was very well, and but it's
a cordial good night.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
People now went bananas. People could not believe that this
was a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
It's hard to imagine how big it is that a
mechanical machine is doing what a human does.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Is not possible.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
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 hokum.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
But you know it was magic. I mean it was magic.
It was magic. It was magic.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
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 president in eighteen seventy seven seventy
(41:25):
eight Garfield Rutherford behaves, oh, class, I wouldn't have got it.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Classic Lake you're on.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Rutherford behays, the things you don't know, 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
(41:55):
becomes known as the Wizard of Memo Park.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
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 2 (42:09):
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
(42:29):
machine is going to let people talk to us after
they die, as if they're talking to us from beyond
the grave.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
This is it's almost supernatural. So how does he take
something that is magic and make money off of it?
This is a great question.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
So he is not yet to the point where they
can manufacture these at any kind of scale and sell
them for a profit.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
That's the obvious thing you would do.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, but the sort of minimum viable product version of it.
They just got a couple of phonographs they rent out
rooms sell tickets and people pay to come and hear
somebody like record themselves singing and then play it back.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
I would totally pay that nickel, you would say today
it would probably be it probably did.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
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 out this is not Edison's thing. Edison's
(43:38):
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 (43:54):
To each other.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
It's amazing. Right. 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 3 (44:08):
All.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
And this is the wax cylinder. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
He eventually Alexander Grahm Bell is eventually the one who
comes up with the wax cylinder. Yes, and that does
inspire Edison many years later to sort of follow right
to chase Alexander Grahmbell. 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 that are coming, but this
(44:46):
one is him unambiguously and yet, and yet he never
dominates the industry as 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.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
He's got bigger things. So what do we make of
this story? Jacob? At the very beginning, we promised that
Edison wasn't just an inventor, He's an entrepreneur, businessman, And
yet so far I have been in front of our
actual episode, but so far he doesn't seem to be
squeezing every last dime. He doesn't seem to have that
(45:23):
ruthless businessman in him. Yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
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, venture capital firm takes him
(45:47):
into a back room.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
And Gray Hairs. Yeah, Gray Hair comes in. Listen, we
love you.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
He's 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.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Edison is kind of like that founder.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
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 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
(46:26):
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, and Retherford Behazes' is like, what what are
(46:46):
you talking about? I just want to photograph. You've already
done the thing, right, But that was an actual thing
he wanted to do. Right. Yeah, if he had been.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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
phonograph and be like, I'm famous, I'm the phonograph guy.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
I'm gonna be the phonograph king now.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
But this is clearly not what Edison had set out
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 1 (47:31):
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.
(47:53):
We should thank Thomas Edison for his scatterbrain nature. Yeah,
and for his ambition. Right.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
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. He keeps trying to invent bigger
(48:19):
and better things.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
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
(48:43):
Gabriel Hunter Chang.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
And our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm
Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another episode
of Business History, a show about the history of business
Robert Smith. As you know, there is nowhere in Pushkin's
office to make a video to make a video podcast,
which is unfortunate.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
We tried and it was described as two gray men
in a gray box, and reasonably so fortunately for us.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
In an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office,
there is the showroom of a company called Buzzy Space.
This is a company is where we're sitting right now,
and what they do is they design furniture and acoustic
solutions that make I'm reading here workplace is more comfortable,
more creative, and more fun.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I would even say cozy. Their furniture is like sort
of curved and interesting colors, and I guess keeps things quiet.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yes, honestly, I wish our office was this showroom. You
can find more at Buzzy dot Space. That's buzz I
dot Space.
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