American History Tellers - Edison vs. Tesla | The Business of Discovery | 4

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Thomas Edison is one of the most celebrated inventors in American history, having helped transform a world lit by candles and gas lamps into one powered by electricity. Over his lifetime he was granted more than a thousand patents, and pioneered the very idea of organized innovation at his ground-breaking research and development laboratories. But the story of how he did it is complicated. So, to help us understand Edison’s remarkable achievements, Lindsay is joined by Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He’s the author of Edison: A Life of Invention. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello American history teller listeners. I have an exciting announcement. I'm going on tour and coming to a theater near you. This live show is a thrilling evening of history, storytelling, and music with a full band accompanying me as we look back to explore the days that made America. And they aren't the days that you might think. Sure, everyone knows July 4, 1776. We'll be hearing a lot about that date this year. But there are many other days that are maybe even more influential. So come out to see me live. More shows to be announced soon. So for information on tickets and upcoming dates, go to American History Live.com. That's American History Live.com. Come see my Days That Made America Tour, live on stage. Go to American History Live.com.

From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American history tellers, our history, your story. Few figures in American history reshape daily life as much as Thomas Edison. The world he was born into in 1847 was lit by Canada, and oil lamps for most Americans, and gas lit for the wealthy few. But by the time he died in 1931, electricity flowed through homes and businesses across the country. Edison and the research teams he organized played a major role in that transformation. Over the course of his life, he was granted more than a thousand U.S. patents, but his legacy extends beyond invention. Edison helped pioneer the very idea of organized innovation, building some of the first modern

research and development laboratories in Menlo Park and later West Orange, New Jersey. In the process, he established a model for how the modern world would go about the business of discovery. To help us understand the man behind the myth, I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, an author of several books about Edison, including Edison, A Life of Invention. Our conversation is next. I'm Leon Nefok. What happens when OnlyFans becomes more than just a side hustle. Only Fantasy is an in-depth look at the world's newest profession

and how the rules of human intimacy are being rewritten online. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge all episodes of Only Fantasy, add free only on Audible. Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Ottawa has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic series. How true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast.

However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at 899. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. Paul Israel. Thanks for joining me today on American History Tellers. My pleasure. So Thomas Edison was a tinkerer from a young age.

but where did his curiosity come from? Well, I think that kids tend to be naturally curious, and some retain that and others become less curious over time. So Edison retained his curiosity. I think part of that was, in fact, his education and the environment that he was in. So in the 19th century, it was easy to be not just curious about technology, but to learn it pretty easily since most technology was mechanical. You could literally see how a piece of machinery worked. And then Edison's own education was pretty informal. He was first in a private school when he was about seven or eight.

And then for a variety of reasons, including possibly the family not being able to pay for this private school in Port Huron, where he grew up. He was born in Milan, Ohio. And so his mother began to teach him by focusing on reading. and reading a lot of the books in his father's library. That's one of the reasons why Edison was sort of imbued with the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers, especially Thomas Payne. And his father was an entrepreneur. So one of the things he began to understand was how entrepreneurship worked.

And so between his parents, he developed a love of learning through reading and sort of understanding how one could move from one project to another, not being worried about setbacks, figuring out how to move forward. And I think all those things were really important to his education. You mentioned Edison's getting used to setbacks. This became integral for his innovative approach, this iteration, this tireless perseverance. How did Thomas Edison get involved in scientific inquiry like this? How did he begin to learn how to innovate? Edison as a child and then as a young boy is surrounded by an environment where they're very exciting technologies happening. So when they moved to Port Huron, it's a lumber town, but there's also a shipbuilding going on there.

So Edison's first experiments were when he was a kid, he briefly attended the new public school in Port Huron. and that's where he encountered his first science book, Parker's Natural Philosophy. There was a lot in there about electricity and chemistry. In fact, the frontest piece of the book was the telegraph system. And he and a friend experimented with their own telegraph line. Edison began to think about chemistry since batteries, for example, were chemical batteries, right? So Edison began to learn about electricity and about the telegraph from this experience. And then he decided that he didn't really enjoy working on his father's truck farm out in the hot sun.

And so he got a job on the local rail line. There was a new line, the Grand Trunk Railway, between Port Huron that moved down the line to Detroit, which was south of the town he grew up in. And he sold newspapers and magazines, candy and things like that. And over time, he began to collect a little. chemical lab buying materials in Detroit. The Detroit Free Press editor gave him a little printing press, and he actually printed a little newspaper for a while on the train. And so even as a newsboy on the train, he was beginning to experiment. And then there was this event going on at the same time he was doing this, the Civil War. That was obviously a major concern to all the people living in that

area, especially when family members were in battles, and there was one major battle where Edison knew that a lot of the people from the local area were involved in a battalion. And so he got the Detroit Free Press editor to give him extra papers. And as he went down the line and the number of papers dwindled, his price went up. And so he was learning some business values and entrepreneurial values from being on the train. He also grew even more interested in telegraphy from his time working with the Grand Trump Railway. He became a telegraph operator in his teens. Why don't you discuss a little bit about the wild world of telegraph operators then

and how it might have shaped Edison's life of invention? So the telegraph was still a relatively new technology at this time. The first line was established in the mid-1840s, and the telegraph slowly spread through to the Midwest by the time Edison was a young boy. The telegraph was something that was also crucial for the trains. Often, this is what was alluring stations ahead that there was a train coming and a way to prevent trains from running into each other if there was a single track. And along the way were telegraph operators.

Edison would visit their offices and talk to them about telegraphy. And then he got his first job as a telegraph operator in the Port Huron office, which was in a jewelry and clock repair shop. And then shortly thereafter, he got a job as a railway telegrapher on the Port Huron Railway. And over the next four so years, he literally was a itinerant telegrapher moving from place to place in the Midwest. and he became very skilled as a press wire operator. The Associated Press began as a telegraph wire service, and operators like Edison would take the stories down overnight and then deliver them to the newspaper office the next day.

And as well, during these years, he experimented with the technology itself. Let's talk about those experiments. What were some of Edison's first inventions made, I guess, while he was a telegrapher? Right. So probably his first invention was a little practice telegraph where he could, as the signal came in, he could slow down the message so he could practice his receiving skills. And this particular design, he would later adapt to his experiments on what was known as automatic telegraphy, which is a way of recording at very high speed. and then the recording could be played back at a slower speed. One of the main things he experimented on is what were known as repeaters. So the United States is a very big country,

and battery power allowed you to send a signal about 250 miles. If the signal had to go further, then an operator had to retransmit it. And so what people began to develop were repeaters, and Edison had a lot of designs for repeaters, including one that was actually featured in a book on telegraphy as a repeater that could be set up in an emergency situation. And then he also was experimenting on things like ways to send more than one message over a single line. And Edison moves from the Midwest to Boston, where he begins to work on his first important inventions, in particular a stock printer that was used to report gold prices.

This, along with his double transmitter, bring him to New York, where he's involved with the Golden Stock Telegraph Company and develops improvements in stock ticker technology used not just on the stock exchange, but all market exchanges, gold, silver, produce, oil, cotton. This connects him up to Western Union, in part because he's also working on ways of sending two messages at the same time, and he invents something called the Quadruplex, which allows four messages to in each direction. And this and other inventions of the telegraph industry lead Edison to begin to develop a small laboratory in Newark. And by the end of the year, 1875, he decides that he wants to get his family out of the city, which is becoming increasingly

polluted. So then in 1876, Edison graduates to setting up his workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, his most famous location. He was only 30 years old. Describe the place for us. So he finds some land just off the rail line between Newark and Philadelphia in central New Jersey.

And that's where he sets up this new laboratory. It's a wooden building. It has a machine shop in the bottom half of the building. Upstairs is an electrical and chemical lab. And by this time,

he is working for Western Union. He convinces the company to provide him with $100 a week to help support the work of the machine shop and the machinists that are there. He only has five people, three machinists, tells you how important the machine shop is for iterating designs. Edison could come up with the design, the machine shop could make it, they could experiment with it and then modify it, and two experimenters. And he's working on additional telegraph technologies. One of the those becomes what we know today is a telephone at that time is called a speaking telegraph. Edison doesn't invent the first telephone, a guy named Alexander Graham Bell does, and in 1876

at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, it becomes one of the big things, right, the demonstration of the telephone there. And Western Union is increasingly interested in having Edison work on this new technology. And one of the things that comes out of his work on the telephone is a way to record telephone messages, because Edison thinks about it like a telegraph, and recording and playback would be important. And this becomes an entirely independent invention called the phonograph, the first ever system for recording and playing back sound. What impact did the phonograph have on Edison's work at Menlo Park? The phonograph changes everything. It's what makes Edison famous.

It attracts investors associated with the Bell Company, who set up the Edison-speaking phonograph company. He begins to hire more experimenters and more machinists. And so this is in 1878 that Edison gains this new fame. And by the end of the year, he's beginning to think about something called electric lighting. If the phonograph makes him famous, it's the electric light research and development that transforms Menlo Park. from what one reporter called an invention factory to really the first industrial research and development laboratory in the United States.

In October of 1878, Edison is describing to the press that he thinks he solved the problem of creating an electric light system and providing small incandescent indoor lights. And people connected with the telegraph industry, especially Western Union, are the first. to invest in this, and they set up a company called the Edison Electric Light Company. And one of the things that happens is that Menlo Park Laboratory grows. There had been maybe about a dozen men at Menlo Park by the end of 1878. He begins to hire new researchers. And he hires a German scientific

instrument glassblower. And they set up a small little building for the glassblower. There's a carpenter shop, a big brick machine shop, and a number of experimenters expands. He's got 25, then 30, and then as they finally reach a point where they have a basic lamp design and basic generator design by the fall of 1879, Edison exhibits his new lamp, and he actually sets up a pilot station in Menlo Park on the model of what he wants to build in. New York. I'm Leon Nefak, best known as the co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco. I had, of course, heard of OnlyFans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism,

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And in case you guys don't know what Onlyfans is, ask your husband. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started an OnlyFans account. I'm not his sister, just to clarify. It turns out a lot of what I thought I knew about OnlyFans was wrong. I felt like I wasted 3.5 years

for something that wasn't real. What happens when connection comes with a price tag? Listen to OnlyFantasy wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes of OnlyFantasy ad free right now only on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app or on Apple Podcasts. Before the electric light,

the phonograph was Edison's most famous invention. And as I think about it, until the electric light, all of his work was in communications and kind of auditory communications, but he had hearing loss. How might that have influenced his invention in innovation?

So, yes, this is one of the ironies of Edison's career, is how much someone who had some hearing difficulties, it was progressive, it got worse over time, how much he was involved in technologies that involve sound. So he used to say that he saw his hearing difficulties as an advantage.

So when he was a telegraph operator, it allowed him to focus on the dots and dashes of the telegraph instrument because he wasn't hearing other noise in the room, right? And then as an inventor of the phonograph, of improved telephone technology, in some respects his hearing was treated as a test instrument. His ability did hear something meant that it was both articulated and loud enough that it should work in a commercial setting. So we know that Edison kept copious records of the work underway at Menlo Park

and his other lab at West Orange. This wasn't just because he liked to take notes, though. Talk a bit about how he was savvy in applying for patents, to secure and promote his innovations. One of the things that Edison learned very early in his career as a telegraph inventor, the fellow who was the president of the Golden Stock Telegraph Company, which was the main company using those small printing telegraph stock tickers for various market reports, took Edison to his patent attorney.

And the patent attorney had Edison write down all the things he was working on at the time. And the last page of the book has this very interesting notation that he clearly was told by the patent attorney. Hereafter, I will keep a complete record of all inventions, right? In the U.S. system, it's not first to file, which is what it was in many European countries, such as England. In the U.S., it was first to invent. And so part of that was proving that you invented something before a competitor did. And one way to do that was to keep a very good record of your experimental work. And so Edison learned this lesson.

And that's why there are about 4,000 notebooks, not just Edison's, but everybody that worked for him kept notebooks. And we don't even have all the notebooks that were kept by all the other researchers. Some of them walked off with theirs. So this is why we have a great record of the experimental work that went on in Newark, in Menlo Park and then at West Orange. Edison understood the value of these records, but he also learned, and in part this was because he was in the telegraph industry,

where people like the head of Golden Stock and then later the President of Western Union began to see controlling the technology through patents was a way to prevent competitors from entering into the industry, right? Didn't always work, but it gave those companies, advantage. And this is something Edison learned. And so one of the things he did was he patented variations on an invention, realizing that he could use that to protect his patent position and that of his companies. So after the phonograph, after the light bulb and with the race to electrify entire cities now underway, this is the introduction of Nikola Tesla. He went to work

with Edison Machine Works. And there's this, I guess, popular image of Edison. as a savvy businessman who's best at patenting things, as we just described, but Nikola Tesla as a genius who's just overrun by men like Edison. How accurate is this story? Right. So here's how I like to describe the difference between Edison and Tesla. Edison was somebody who was very good at understanding how to move new technology into a commercial phase, how to do the development work, not just the inventive work,

by the development work, to move it from the laboratory out into the real world and how to continue a process of innovation to make it work. From the start, Edison is never really a lone inventor. It's always collaborative, right? So he has experimenters that he works with very closely. They work closely with the machinists to design and improve the instruments to test them. So it's basic applied research rather than basic scientific research design to gain insights into nature, more to gain insights into the technology itself and the sciences around it, like electromagnetism, for example. Tesla was more a kind of idealist inventor. This actually comes out of the work of W. Bernard Carlson at the University of Virginia.

Bernie wrote a book about Tesla that was published in 2013, and he points to the way in which Tesla was happy to reach a state where he could demonstrate that his idea could work in the laboratory, but was much less skilled at figuring out how to bring it out of the lab into the real world. And so oftentimes the technologies that Tesla had, he spent years working on them, but they never reached. a commercial phase. The one technology where Tesla was successful was with his alternating current motors and then later the polyphase alternating current distribution system. Alternating current worked on higher voltages than Edison's direct current. You needed fewer stations. You could distribute electricity over a much greater area with very high voltages and then step those voltages down so they'd be safe once they reached into buildings. The reason that Tesla's work in this area succeeded was because the Westinghouse company employed its own inventors and engineers who were

able to take Tesla's ideas and figure out how to make them commercially viable. Tesla told this story about his motor about how he knew it would work and would wear well over time because he's, he ran it in his head over and over, imagining the wear and how the motor worked. Edison did that in practice with real devices, and that's what the Westinghouse engineers did as well. So there's the sort of difference between Tesla, the sort of idealist inventor and someone like Edison, who's really more an inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. So it seems the real rivalry then was between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse who backed Tesla. So what was their rivalry like?

When Westinghouse established his first alternating current station, he had a number of very skilled inventors and engineers working for him who developed that system, and they drew also on work that was going on in Europe at the same time. So in 1886, the first Westinghouse station appears in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Edison begins to pay attention to AC and does some investigation. And there are a couple of things he's very concerned about. One is the AC system works at these very high voltages, and that can be unsafe if not dealt with by the way in which the system is developed and designed. And so Edison writes this memo about AC in which he says, sooner or later Westinghouse is going

will electrocute someone. And one of the things you have to understand at this very moment is that the higher voltage arc light systems that were used for street lighting in American cities were strung along the streets. The wires were strung along the street right next to telegraph and telephone wires. And there were occasional accidental electrocutions of linemen from telegraph and telephone companies whose lines crossed with an arc light. And so this fear of the electrical system was real on the part of many people.

And Edison was concerned about this. The other thing was the AC system had these transformers and other elements that Edison thought would add to the cost. Now, what he didn't recognize is that the advantage of AC is that you could build larger central stations that could distribute power over longer distances. it meant you didn't need a station every couple of miles in a city like New York. So between the Pearl Street station that has some built in lower Manhattan and then another station around 23rd, another station a little farther north of that

in order to power the bottom half of Manhattan, the AC system could build one larger station and distribute that power. And this was especially important as you begin to get the electrification of the suburbs, which are growing at this period. You don't want central stations if you live in a nice suburb because you have steam engines and the smoke from them and the noise. And so AC had some real advantages. And Edison never really recognized that those advantages would make his DC system less desirable for central stations. It doesn't mean that DC disappeared. In fact, D.C. was used for what were known as isolated plants for individual buildings.

In fact, more people in the 19th century experience incandescent lighting from a building that had its own power station than from central stations. It's really not until the 1920s that you really begin to get the emergence of what would later become the modern grid. And a lot of those were D.C. stations. And in fact, the last DC station decommissioned by Con Ed was decommissioned in 2007. It was running motors that drove elevators up and down apartment buildings because those kind of motors work better as DC than they do AC. And in fact, even today, right, DC is what powers all of our laptops and phones and other small electrical devices. and now increasingly what they're discovering is high voltage DC is actually better for long-distance distribution than high-voltage AC.

So DC actually still has a place in our electrical system. But even ultimately Edison's own company switched over to AC at the time. That must have been a big deal for him. Yeah, it was. So what happens because the Edison company resists, and it's really Edison, because there are people in the company saying we need AC, Edison resists that, and there's a second company, Thompson-Houston, that is also developing AC technology at this time. And the two companies had discussions about merging at various points. And in 1892, early in the year, the investors in Edison Electric, which had become Edison General Electric, and the Thompson-Houston Company decide to merge.

And what happens is that the people who are running Thompson Houston take over the company. And this new company is called General Electric. The Edison name disappears. Edison is put on the board of directors, but really has nothing to do with the running of the company. After that, he goes on to many other projects over the last 40 years of his life. But what's significant is that this marks the transition to AC for central stations. And in 1893, the Chicago Columbian Exposition, both General Electric and Westinghouse compete, Westinghouse wins the award. And then two years later, Westinghouse uses Tesla's polyphase AC distribution system to win the award. for a new power station at Niagara Falls, where the electricity is sent down to Buffalo.

And suddenly, the potential of AC to create a much larger electrical grid that can power a much bigger area becomes evident. And this marks the transition from small central stations and individual plants for buildings to the growth of the grid that we all. all used today. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Ottawa has all the stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self.

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Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. So then here we are with Edison fundamentally losing the war of the currents. AC is ascendant. His name is removed from his company. He moves to a new workshop facility at West Orange.

What is he doing now after this period? Well, he built West Orange in 1887 and opened in 1888. He was still in the electrical industry at the time. And in fact, it was the R&D facility for the Edison General Electric Company.

But once GE is formed, Edison decides that he's going to move on to other projects. He had some that he was already working on. The biggest one for the period of the 1890s is an effort to use electromagnetic separation to be able to take low-grade iron ore from the played out iron mines of the East Coast and produce iron for the steel mills. That project, a fully automated mining operation and processing operation. Tactically successful, it fails because a huge new iron deposit in the Great Lakes region of Lake Superior is discovered, the Masabi range.

So it fails. He takes the technology that you've been using for rock crushing and applies it to the production of sand for cement and investigates the cement industry and designs new, technology, including a much improved rotary kiln that becomes the industry standard. He develops an automated plant out in western New Jersey. The original Yankee Stadium is built with Edison Portland cement. Two other projects of the 1890s, the phonograph became a commercially viable technology, and Edison helps defound the modern sound recording industry. And through the 1890, and into the first three decades of the 20th century, Edison's phonograph is a crucial part of that technology. Now, there are competitors, such as the Victor Company. Edison competes with his cylinder

against the Victor disc. Eventually, Victor wins out as the shift is made to electric recording with the development of vacuum tube technology and electronics. And then the other technology that he spent a lot of time on beginning in the 1890s through World War I is the motion picture industry. Edison develops the first commercial camera and viewing system. Later, this becomes a industry that grows. Edison is in the industry until World War I, and then he gives it up. He's never really quite sure what the market is for motion pictures. And so his company kind of fades away in a sense. And then also, in the first decade of the 20th century, he develops the first alkaline storage battery for electric automobiles. There were actually more electric automobiles in the first few years

of the 20th century than internal combustion cars. And they ultimately lose out as Henry Ford develops his mass production system for automobiles that drives the cost of internal combustion cars down, but also World War I where electric vehicles are not. useful on the battlefield and all the companies shift to production of gas-powered automobiles. There are still a few things like delivery trucks that use batteries, but electric cars don't really re-emerge until the 1960s and 1970s, and we're still on the cycle of the development of that industry as it re-emerges after more or less disappearing during Edison's time. So these are the technologies Edison continues to work with.

He builds a huge factory complex in West Orange, New Jersey, has another one a few miles away that includes his chemical laboratories. And so Edison is both a inventor entrepreneur and increasingly a captain of industry. In this period of losing out to AC and losing his name off his company, was Edison personally bitter? So the question of whether Edison was bitter is one that I think, you know, there's some uncertainty about what his initial reaction to this was. There are conflicting news reports, some saying Edison favored the merger, others that he opposed it. But in later comments, right, so the person who was his private secretary at the time guy named Alfred Tate later talked about Edison was very embittered and felt like the company no longer had his name associated with it. He says something like, you know, apparently I never knew anything about electricity. And then later on in newspaper reports,

you see Edison saying, I'm going to do something even bigger now than the electrical system. That was his process for mining low-grade iron ore. He thought that would be his next big project. And it was, even though it failed. But Edison essentially left the electrical industry behind it. So I think there was a way in which he was somewhat bitter about what had happened. So we spend a fair amount of time going through Edison's remarkable career, but I wonder what you might personally consider to be his most important invention or innovation. Well, I think ultimately his most important innovation and influenced what came after is the Industrial Research and Development Laboratory. Edison created a model that others took and improved upon so that by the 19-teens,

increasingly industrial research laboratories are emerging in many industries. And by the end of the 1920s, almost every major industry has its, the companies in them have industrial research laboratories. There are some leading ones like General Electric and Bell Labs, but many other industries have this kind of process for developing the technologies that they're using. You know, if there's one central thing that's sort of most important about Edison's career, it's that. And then I would say next would be the sound recording industry. It's the one that he stayed with the longest.

And, you know, it clearly changed the way we think about sound, right, as instead of being something that disappears, it's something that would be captured. And then finally, the electrical industry, because Edison designs the essential electrical system, you know, most of the elements of it, even before AC, are part of Edison. So those are the big three, if I were to say, what are the most important things that Edison worked on? Throughout his career, Edison was on the vanguard of several very different technologies, but almost always in communications. And he could be compared to what we are experiencing now in Silicon Valley.

I wonder what you think of the comparison between entrepreneurial innovators of his age and ours today. So I think there are some very definite parallels, right? So Silicon Valley in its earlier years was very much a startup place. And that's what happened with Edison and Electric Light and sound recording and movies. All those things were startups. And lots of other companies emerge that compete. And then what happens is what happens in the electrical industry in the 1890s after the formation. of General Electric, Westinghouse and General Electric decide that they're just going to cross-license each other,

and they drive every other company out of the business, which is essentially what's happened in Silicon Valley. All those startups get eaten up by the big guys, and so we have oligopoly power, where there are a few big firms, and they eat everybody else up. Well, Paul Israel, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. My pleasure. That was my conversation with Dr. Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He's also the author of Edison, A Life of Invention.

In our next series, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we explore the most extraordinary struggle in our nation's history, the American Revolution. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1775, British regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, and the shot heard around the world that day would change everything. For the next eight years, American men and women would fight, suffer, and sacrifice in order to forge a new nation, one built on the idea that power lay with the people. Follow American History Tellers on the Audible app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of American History Tellers ad-free by joining Audible.

And to find out more about me and my other projects, including my live stage show coming to a theater near you, Go to not that Lindsaygram.com. That's not that Lindsaygram.com. From Audible Originals, this is the fourth and final episode of our series, Edison versus Tesla. American History Tellers is hosted, edited and produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker, senior producers Alita Rosansky and Andy Beckerman, managing producer Desi Blaylock, music by Throm, sound design by Molly Bach,

Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin, head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.