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