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Speaker 1: All right, not trying to shock you, but Thomas Edison

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Speaker 1: did not invent the light bulb. I'm Patty Steele. His

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Speaker 1: brilliant use of someone else's ideas is next on the backstory.

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Speaker 1: We're back with the backstory. I know there are a

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Speaker 1: whole lot of inventions credited to Thomas Edison, the light bulb,

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Speaker 1: phonograph machine to record music and sound, and the motion

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Speaker 1: picture camera, so it's hard to imagine that some, or

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Speaker 1: actually most, of what he gets credit for were not

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Speaker 1: really his ideas. Of course, his status as an icon

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Speaker 1: was pretty much sealed with his invention of the first

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Speaker 1: incandescent light bulb. But here's the thing. He definitely wasn't

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Speaker 1: the guy to create or even demonstrate the first light bulb,

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Speaker 1: not even close. There were as many as twenty who

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Speaker 1: came before him. What he was was a masterful businessman

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Speaker 1: and self promoter. He knew how to take somebody else's work,

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Speaker 1: use the brilliant minds he had hired to perfect it,

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Speaker 1: and most importantly, he knew how to market and mass

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Speaker 1: produce whatever the heck he was building. So get this.

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Speaker 1: Among the long list of Edison's inventions, almost half of

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Speaker 1: them are the ideas in visions of other people that

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Speaker 1: he took credit for. And of course there were a

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Speaker 1: whole lot of inventors chasing the holy grail lighting up

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Speaker 1: the night. And this is surprising. Some of the earliest

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Speaker 1: inventions involving electric light came in the seventeen hundreds. Now

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Speaker 1: most of those used some combination of chemical gases to

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Speaker 1: create an electrical charge. Then in the early eighteen hundreds,

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Speaker 1: even more would be lights showed up. In eighteen oh six,

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Speaker 1: the British scientists demonstrated a totally electric light in London.

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Speaker 1: Then in eighteen forty one another brit got the bright

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Speaker 1: idea to enclose his light in a glass bulb. Yup,

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Speaker 1: that was the very first light bulb. After that it

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Speaker 1: turned into a crazy free for all with lots of

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Speaker 1: inventions and lots of patents, but none of them really

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Speaker 1: did the whole job. Problem is they used too much

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Speaker 1: electricity and put out too much heat and not enough light.

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Speaker 1: They were really expensive and worst of all, they burned

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Speaker 1: out in a matter of minutes. Then things really began

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Speaker 1: to change. While Thomas Edison bought patent rights from a

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Speaker 1: couple of Canadian inventors, yet another guy from England, Joseph

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Speaker 1: Swan came up with a working light bulb using thin

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Speaker 1: wire filaments, much like we still have today in some lights,

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Speaker 1: and that gave him a much bigger claim than most

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Speaker 1: to inventing a usable light bulb. In fact, he got

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Speaker 1: a UK patent and his bulb went into wider use

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Speaker 1: than Edison's. He lit London's entire Savoy Theater with it

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Speaker 1: the first public building in the world to get fully electrified,

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Speaker 1: and Swan's own home in the English countryside was the

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Speaker 1: very first house in the world to be fully lit

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Speaker 1: using electricity. Now, Swan sued Edison for patent infringement and

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Speaker 1: he won. But again Edison needed to be the guy,

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Speaker 1: so he tried to counter sue Swan for infringement, but

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Speaker 1: he quickly realized Swan would be able to prove the

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Speaker 1: research and publication surrounding his bulb came before Edison's. In fairness,

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Speaker 1: Edison did improve the filament for his bulb, so in

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Speaker 1: order to bypass a long, expensive court battle, the two

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Speaker 1: of them finally agreed to merge their businesses into a

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Speaker 1: British company called EdiSwan. I like that name. They literally

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Speaker 1: owned the British marketplace and get this, some of their

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Speaker 1: light bulbs still light up now, deep into the twenty

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Speaker 1: first century, and that gives you a hint into Edison's

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Speaker 1: phenomenal success. He always found a way to take credit,

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Speaker 1: or if he couldn't get it out right, he found

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Speaker 1: a way to share it. Now the thing is sharing

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Speaker 1: it wasn't really as interesting to him, not his thing.

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Speaker 1: He told his team he needed all the credit in

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Speaker 1: order to lock down patents and ultimately market share. So

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Speaker 1: he'd take somebody's idea, have his team perfect and simplify it,

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Speaker 1: make it cheaper, and then mass produce and market the

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Speaker 1: heck out of it. And Edison was a marketing genius

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Speaker 1: as well as a showman. He knew how to work

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Speaker 1: the press, cultivating great relationships with reporters, probably taking them

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Speaker 1: out for drinks and being easily accessible to them so

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Speaker 1: they could discuss things with him. Insiders say he sometimes

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Speaker 1: would tell them he had just solved a huge problem

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Speaker 1: before he really had, just for public response. He loved

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Speaker 1: that he was considered a magician. That's how he got

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Speaker 1: the nickname the Wizard of Menlo Park, based on his

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Speaker 1: hometown laboratory in New Jersey. Now here's the thing. Edison

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Speaker 1: was really most famous for his insane work ethic. In fact,

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Speaker 1: you've probably heard one of his most famous quotes. He's

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Speaker 1: the guy who said genius is one percent inspiration and

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Speaker 1: ninety nine percent perspiration. He rarely slept more than four

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Speaker 1: hours a day and really didn't sleep four hours at

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Speaker 1: a time, and during his lifetime he had almost eleven

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Speaker 1: hundred patents to his name in the US alone. What

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Speaker 1: he did invent was team based research, using a lot

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Speaker 1: of great minds to solve a problem, mass production on

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Speaker 1: a huge scale, organizing a massive distribution network, and the

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Speaker 1: ability to lure investors to fund his work. Much of

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Speaker 1: that virtually unknown in his time. But at the end

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Speaker 1: of the day, he just didn't invent the light bulb.

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Speaker 1: I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia

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Speaker 1: and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our

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Speaker 1: executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplify Media. We're out

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Speaker 1: with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for listening to

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Speaker 1: the Backstory. The pieces of history you didn't know you

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Speaker 1: needed to know