In Our Time - Thomas Edison

Episode Date: December 9, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the innovations and influence of Thomas Edison, one of the architects of the modern age.Edison is popularly remembered as the man who made cheap electric light possible. Born in 1847, he began his career working in the new industry of telegraphy, and while still in his early twenties made major improvements to the technology of the telegraph. Not long afterwards he invented a new type of microphone which was used in telephones for almost a century. In the space of three productive years, Edison developed the phonograph and the first commercially viable light bulb and power distribution system. Many more inventions were to follow: he also played a part in the birth of cinema in the 1890s. When he died in 1931 he had patented no fewer than 1093 devices - the most prolific inventor in history. As the creator of the world's first industrial research laboratory he forever changed the way in which innovation took place.With:Simon SchafferProfessor of the History of Science, University of CambridgeKathleen BurkProfessor of History, University College LondonIwan MorusReader in History, University of AberystwythProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, United States patent at number 9,646 is for a device described by its inventor as an apparatus which records and registers in an instant

and with great accuracy, the votes of alleged, legislative bodies, thus avoiding loss of valuable time, consumed in counting and registering the votes and names, as done in the usual manner. The year was 1868, the inventor, a 21-year-old entrepreneur called Thomas Alva Edison. This was his first patent. By the time of his death, 63 years later, he'd registered a further 1092 of them, making him the most prolific inventor in history. His contributions to modern technology are lesion from affordable electric light and power to major improvements to the telegraph and the telephone. He created the phonograph and was one of the fathers of the

cinema. Edison's genius was commercial as well as technical, and it's not just his inventions which have shaped the modern age. With me to discuss Thomas Edison and Kathleen Burke, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of the History of Science and Fellow of Darwin College at the University of Cambridge, and Ewan Morris, reader in history at the University of Aberyst with Kathleen Burke. Before we discuss, Let's talk about the USA into which he was born. What's going on there in the middle of the 19th century? Well, he's born in 1847, which actually is rather a good start,

because the U.S. is just coming out of a profound recession dating from a panic, and just at that point, railways take off. For that time, there's more railways than canals, and within, of course, the next 20 or 30 years, the two coasts are gathered. gathered by railways. It's the beginning of an industrial revolution to the extent that, oh, I don't know, when they had indices of steel production, the U.S. doesn't even figure on it, and by 1910 it's producing more steel than all of Europe combined. Huge agricultural and manufacturing increases begin then, and it's called the second industrial revolution in the states

that they really take off. Population supports all this. Population. in 1840 is 23 million by 1900, it's more than tripled, 76 million. So what Edison is coterminous, one might say, his major part of his active and useful life mirrors the huge development in the United States from a country which has great potential to one which has a claim of being one of the most powerful in the world, at least economically. I think it's Simon Chuffer who said in his notes that in one generation, America did, what it had to take six or seven generations in Europe to do? Yes, but on the shoulders of giants. I've heard this someplace before.

It's based on British financing. What a new country does is borrow the resources of the old. It's based in many respects on European inventions. What the great thing that Edison, as well as Americans, did, was to take ideas and make them work. not only make them work, but make them commercially viable. And Edison was absolutely brilliant in this. It is fascinating the amount of old world money expertise that he's pumped into this new place to their own benefit. We'll come back to that.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847, as you say. Can you tell me a few things about that? Well, his boyhood actually is part of the myth of Thomas Edison. He was called Alva in his youth, incidentally. Thomas became when he was a bit more known. He was born in a small town in Ohio and then moved with his parents a few years later to port her on Michigan. He was the seventh child and a sickly child. The seventh child and a sickly child.

Yes, he was. I'm not sure to what extent either had much influence. But the point is that he grew up in both little towns, which were great artisanal and entrepreneurial areas. and Edison didn't go to school much. He was one of those boys who wanted to know, why, why, why? And when a teacher would say, I don't know, he'd say, why don't you know? He was taken out of school because his teacher told his mother that he was addled. At the age of 12.

That's right. Well, he was essentially taught at home. And at 12, he went off and became went to work. He was tired of wasting his time learning. in an environment where he couldn't follow. So he's known for reading and reading and reading and experimenting and experimenting. And what he did at 12 was to become a little boy on the train

that sold vegetables and fruits and newspapers. He rapidly went from this to using a press, a laboratory on the train, and this was the beginning. Can I tell you and Morris about that beginning, about the telegraph? Why was he entranspited and how did he get involved in it? The telegraph, in other ways, is one of the key 19th century technologies. And it comes out of this early 19th century culture of electricity

as a culture of display, as a series of technologies of display. Electricity is about producing spectacular effect. And what a number of people start realizing during the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, is that if you can get this to happen away, the point of origin, so to speak, you have a communications technology. And different inventors try to use different aspects of this kind of display culture to show signals far away from the point. So how did he get involved when he was his 12-year-old, 13-year-old, selling fruit and vegetables and newspapers and newspapers on trains? Like many people, like many young teenagers that age, he's fascinated by electricity.

He's around about the age of 11 or 12. he builds his own little telegraph line between his own house and the house of one of his friends. He's an avid reader. He just absorbs the kind of information that's around about this exciting new technology, about the transformation that electricity and telegraphies in the process of... What stage was telegraphy at when he encountered it? By the beginning of the 1860s, cables have been laid across the Atlantic

unsuccessfully at that stage for the first time. The first successful Atlantic cable is laid in 1866. Telegraphy is spreading its network. It's spreading its tentacles across Britain, across Europe, across America. It's transforming the way people think about communication, about distance, about time. And it goes along with the railways.

And I mean, that's really where Edison encounters the telegraph. I mean, he's working on the railways as a newsboy. There's a famous story in 1862 just after the Battle of Shiloh. He heard news of the battle in one station. He got the idea. Go to a telegraph operator. Get the operator to telegraph the headlines, so to speak, down the line. to generate interest.

So that as he went down the line with his copies of the Detroit Free Press, there would be crowds there waiting because they'd already heard the headlines, they wanted to hear the news. So he knew what one might do with the telegraph. He knew that communication mattered. He knew that advertising mattered.

And he knew that the kinds of networks that you need for a successful system. The telegraph was an example of that. What was his personal involvement? How did it, we've talked, where we're beginning to talk about him as an inventor. How, have we any evidence or any reports of how he personally got involved

in having something technically to do with the development of the telegraph? Anecdotally, he moves from being a newspaper boy to an itinerant telegraph operator after, according to the story, he saves the life of a telegraph operator's young boy, the operator offers to train him as an operator. This is a very high status.

this is a very skilled work and as many such young men in their middle-late teams do working on the telegraph I mean he tinkers he's always playing he's trying to find ways of getting the instruments to work better get them to work

the premium is on efficiency the premiums on speed what you need to do is get that information through there as quickly as possible and what Edison starts doing is developing little modifications of the apparatus that get things done more quickly

and allow him to make his life easier as well. So we're talking Sam Schaffer about a teenager at this stage, 14-15, and we know he reads a lot, he likes to invent, he comes from a poor family. You describe his father as an asylum seeker coming from Canada, and then he gets to work for Western Union. He's still only 15 or 16.

which is massive for him. Can you tell us why? Well, as Iwan said, the Telegraph Network, which is the nervous system of American industrialisation, is also one of the most important sites

for American capital formation. It's where you see, in a really dramatic way, a very typical set of business organisations which move from a relatively large number of small firms to a relatively small number of very big firms and Western Union

becomes the controlling interest for a vast proportion of the whole telegraph system of North America. Between the ages of 16 and 20 Edison is a travelling telegraphist. At the age of 20 so in 1867

he moves to one of the Western Union's headquarters at Boston and that introduces him it seems to me to a really important set of resources which are going to a matter for the rest of his career. First of all, he finds himself in the midst of a large number of very similarly inventive people. So one of the things that I would always emphasize about Edison

is that Edison is the name of a collective. And it's his ability to mobilize that collective and then associate himself with their successes that really distinguishes some of his greatest triumphs. But Alprenorth, the invention of the 19th century was the invention of inventors, really. They were a passion, it was almost a fashion, wasn't it? A passion and a passion for invention. Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, it's often

been said, one of Edison's greatest achievements was that he invented the method of inventing. And in Boston, for example, he spends a great deal of time in a local shop near the Western Union office run by Charlie Williams, which

was a shop where a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs and technicians come together. And one of the technicians and entrepreneurs who also used Charlie Williams shop in Boston was Alexander Graham Bell, who will be a major influence on and rival of Edison in his work on telephony. The other, I think, really significant aspect of his work in Boston.

He wasn't in Boston very long, and then he moves to New York, is his ability, we've spoken about it already, to improve telecommunications incrementally. So lots and lots of apparently small, but in fact decisive and quite profitable, changes to existing systems. And you see this in the range of innovations

that Edison, he's in his early 20s, right, brings to the telegraph system. Some of them are superbly rational and therefore completely unsuccessful. of which the example we started with is a great case. It seemed to Edison that it was obviously rational to automate as far as one could, the process of voting both in Massachusetts Congress and in Washington. And congressman simply told him,

young man, that above all is not an invention we need in Washington, D.C. We want to stroll around. We want to lobby, yes. And curiously enough? Yes, the sort of thing that doesn't happen now. similarly Edison learns from defeat both in Boston and New York

I think another feature of Edison's work is his intense attention to the consumer, to the end user. So the vote recorder doesn't quite work. He develops a stock ticker which is

an automatic telegraph system which prints not just in code but in letters and numbers. And which therefore communicates very, very fast and very reliably, and in a way that many people can understand the stock market quotations on the markets in Boston and then in Wall Street, that turns out to be decisive because it's through that innovation that Edison is not only able to move to New York, but then to achieve enough support from New York investors to set up

on his own, initially across the river in New Jersey and Newark. a kind of prototype of an invention factory. I'd like to come down one moment, some before we do, can you briefly, you've said he tinkered around with the telegrams, but he did, this tinkering led to major developments.

Can you specifically give us this duplex and quadriplex additions and how they played out? So there are three or four changes that Edison and his colleagues introduce, and they're all going to be very important. The first is the idea of a printing telegraph. which he adapts from the stock market ticker, that will be extremely important because he'll have a telecommunication system which can imprint its messages. An automatic telegraph which runs not by the telegraphist as it were coding messages straight to the wire, but by typing onto a paper tape which is then perforated and can be fed through the system.

at fantastically high speeds and its hope, fantastically high accuracy. And then thirdly, most importantly, he introduces multiple telegraph systems, systems which allow you, first of all, to send two messages down the same wire at the same time, that's duplex, and then two messages in either direction at the same time, that's quadruplex. We get a little sense of how cunning, and in a way brilliant Edison is, mixing up technical innovation with commercial advantage by remembering that the New York journalists called him the master of duplicity and quadruplicity. They link together brilliantly the innovations which really make a difference to the profitability of the telegraph system and Edison's

lack of conscience. One of his most famous backers, Jay Gould, a robber baron of the time, said Edison has a vacuum where his conscience should be and this is a robber baron making that judgment so we should know what kind of guy we're dealing with higher praise takes one to no one takes one right Kathleen Burke he left

premises as Simon's indicated in New York and set up this base called Menlo Park which is the first of its kind and became quite extraordinary successful and important can you tell us what he was doing there and why it was important and some indication of, well, anyway,

where we go. Well, it's important for several reasons. He acquired a good sum of money from various activities. Mainly from his inventions. Yes. Selling them on. That's right.

And he invited his father to Menlo Park, who was at that point unemployed, to build a purpose-built laboratory. And it was interesting for various things. First of all, he not only invented he built and commercialized.

It's not just invention. It's also innovation. They're on the same premises. That's the main thing, isn't it? Exactly. The researchers were upstairs, the manufacturers are downstairs waiting for the research to come so they can get their hands on it.

Yes. And also that the fact that he had to shop on the bottom floor is significant, in fact. This in a sense is a symbol of Edison's approach. But what he also did was to bring in not only scientists and inventors, but also the men who could actually make the inventions. What he did, and this is important, is he invented a research group. He was no longer just a single inventor. He was with a group of people, and it was during this period from 1876 to 1881 that he actually made the inventions that not only had probably the most influence, but also made him the so-called

Wizard of Menlo Park. And the other really important aspect there is that his close relationship with the press, with journalists, meant that they took his rather high self-regard and ability to make sound bites and repeated those, which meant that they mobilized public opinion as well. He's not just an inventor on his own, as traditionally they were. He was not only this case, the inventor, he made it, he commercialized it, and he publicized it. And the Wizard of Menlo Park is supposed, suspiciously thought of emanated

from Wenlow Park and from Juan Thomas Anderson himself? Absolutely. The other great thing that the journalists liked is that every midnight, work stopped. They had drinks, they had cigars, they had food, they were sort of impromptu entertainment,

people danced around. Journalists were there, they thought, great, this is a, this is a, a co-holing, of men who worked together and also the other thing, the idea that he worked all the time. But it was midnight. He'd been working them until midnight. That's right. He could take catnaps, like Churchill.

The others just staggered on. He was famous for his so-called 60 hours continuous work, his perseverance, and so forth. And the fact that he also, from Menlo Park, took credit for all the inventions. No one else in that research group was allowed to patent anything. So his 1993 patents, shall we say,

were not necessarily Edison's own work. But one, Ewan Morris, soon after Manlo Parker, he or them made a major breakthrough with regard to the telephone. Can you describe what that was? It's a very nice example, like of the twin aspects of Edison's genius. Bell has just invented the telephone. It's been put on show at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Edison picks up on it and immediately figures out,

what he needs to do to make this a commercial technology, something that really works well and works at a distance. Technically, what Bell has done is essentially find a way of using sound waves to produce a variable current that can then be turned back to sound waves at the other side. Edison realized that's not going to work, that's not commercial. What you need to do is use sound to create variable resistance on an already existing current. So you can send higher currents down the line,

which means you can send it further and more clearly. And he figures out how to do this. You use a carbon transmitter. In this case, does he figure out how to do it? He figures out in principle, this is what you need to do. I mean, it's the insight into what the consumer wants. How is this going to work commercially? And then the power of Menlo Park goes into action.

since he has that research laboratory. He has the capacity to exhaustively research how to make this work as well as possible. So he starts out with powdered graphite and he moves on. His experimenters try everything. They try all kinds of combinations of things, see how they work, see how well.

What they're trying to do is to make this message carry further and clearer and so not just a couple of streets away, but a couple of counters away and then across the continent. Yes, exactly. So you need a higher current, which can't be generated just simply by the voice.

So there needs to be a current, and then you have variable resistance that varies that current, according to the sound of the voice. And in a certain sense, what Edison is very good at doing and what Menlo Park allows him to do is to hit these problems with a sledgehammer.

It's exhaustive, and it's exhausting, They just go through all the permutations. It's what he's going to do later on with the light bulb as well. Try everything. And compare and contrast and see what works well, what mirrors the voice best.

And that takes a lot of collaborative effort, though it all appears under the label of Edison. So I mean, Trevor, he's got himself a lot of money and a lot of good people there. And we've been told it's a model for everything up to Silicon Valley

and Google and that was the model. Can you, in a short burst of time at Menloor Park, just in a few years, an immense amount of work was done. It's almost like a sort of it is a congregation of energy. This happens again and again in civilisations, doesn't it?

A few people get together at a certain time and in a very short time change things radically. I mean, there's a series in that, isn't it? So we're a rather. So can you tell us how they got to the phonograph? Yes, the phonograph is another extraordinary example of the Edison system at work. It's what Edison called his baby.

It was the Menlo Park development that he cared about most, that he invested most time in, and with which in interesting ways his name stays associated. also reminds us that the reason why the Menlo Park system, or one reason why the Menlo Park system is so effective, is because they were running a number of projects simultaneously. And he could move the workforce between projects with extraordinary speed. Bell's telephone appears in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876. The Edison Telephony system is more or less completed by the spring of 1877. That's nine months. later. Within another six months, Edison has produced the first sound recording device, the phonograph. That rate of innovation is extraordinary, but it speaks to the way in which this very mobile team within the laboratory could see how a problem in one area was a solution in another. That's the phonograph story. One of the problems about telephony and telegraphy was

how it was going to be possible to record and preserve incoming messages so that telegraphists and telephonists could then analyze them. It seemed clear to Edison and his chief assistant Charles Batchelor that if you could somehow record the sound, preserve the sound, the vibration at the earpiece of a earpiece of a... telephone, then that would enable telephonists and telegraphists to work more efficiently. That meant capturing the vibrations that the telephone system picks up at the earpiece. The system that Edison was using was using some kind of chalk.

He'd already, after all, had his team working on the automatic telegraph, which is a system in which you inscribe signs automatically from electric cards. and he knew that some kind of barrel or cylinder with sensitive paper and then tin wrapped round it would automate that recording. Combining those elements gives you the first phonograph, a system in other words which is no longer recording incoming signals down a telephone or a telegraph but actually recording sound waves. Then the publicity machine went to work in an extraordinary way during the autumn of 77 so that the wizard of Menlo Park had done it again. Kathleen, Catlin, but can you take us to the public reaction of this phonograph and how he, well, they embraced it.

He didn't have to do much publicity. They didn't have to do it. Well, you told us. Well, they had to know about it before they could want it, of course. He strides into the office of the, of an important editor. and puts it on the table. There's a crank. The editor turns the crank.

And the room was filled with people to the extent, you know, they thought the floor would go. He takes it to Washington, has a public demonstration. And what are they hearing? Well, they're hearing a very sort of crackly saying, a demonstration of Edison saying, this is the phonograph. This is, you know, speaking to.

It's the foundation of a, way of recording speech so the others can hear it. And he takes it to Washington and National Academy of Sciences to show this and the doors have to be taken off the hinges. He takes it to the White House and Congress and President Hayes hears it and Hayes keeps him there till 3 a.m. He takes it on demonstrations around the country. He's mobilized publicity so that there are adverts in the paper showing the American family gathered around the phone and listening to it. But one drawback of this mind like a fly going from idea to idea, he then puts it aside for about 10 years and people forget about it. And it's not until he

understands there's competition that he actually starts serious work to make it more than just a demonstration model. So there are drawbacks to being in this group and going from one invention to another. But the fact that he was able to mobilize so that people knew it was. was there, meant that when he then did it commercially, there was a public. So, and then he hopped across, well, I don't know the exact schedule of this, but Catlin talked about mind like a fly in one way. It was very, very, very big brain fly. Anyway, he started to work on an electric light. He didn't invent the light bulb, but here, so what had happened before he came on the scene?

This will turn out to be really the decisive development at Menlo Park in all sorts of ways. It had been known since the early 1800s that one could generate illumination using electric current in two ways. Either by simply producing a spark that produces something like an arc lamp, very bright, extremely intense, very hard to maintain for any length of time. or by passing an electric current through a wire whose resistance was high enough for the wire to start glowing. That's called incandescence. Now, both of those demonstrations

had been performed by Humphrey Davy in London in the first decade of the 1800s. At the Royal Society. And the object lesson here is that experimenters, natural philosophers, electricians, chemists, and many others, had worked both on the problems of incandescence and on the problems of arc light

for more than seven decades after Humphrey Davy without building an effective long-range networked system. And that was Edison's and his gang's great achievement. Ewan Morris, can you tell us what his solution was to this problem that seemed to be electric light? Edison realized that arc lights weren't really what he was looking for. They weren't going to be commercially successful in the way that he wanted his system to be commercially successful. So incandescence was the way to go. And he again did what the Menlo Park system did, essentially.

He needed to find out what's the commercial solution to this? It's not just simply a matter of producing a lot. light bulb. It's a matter of producing a light bulb that will work in lots of different places and is going to be commercialable, it's going to be marketable. And that's what he works on. How do you make this cheap? How do you make this something that can be mass produced? And he has his experimenters again trying everything and everything and everything. Somewhere in God Almighty's warehouse, he says, there is going to be a substance that does it. And eventually it turns out to be a strand of bamboo fibre of all three.

things that suspended in the vacuum of a light bulb will glow at the appropriately cheap rate to make this system work. He was also developing Katlinburg. He wanted a power distribution system because he finds the bamboo and various other people involved. Turns it in a horseshoe. He gets 1,500 hours and it started at an hour or two and so on. So we have, and this has to be a vacuum.

All these things are hands-on upstairs in the research laboratories, and then he develops it and distributes it. He now has this distribution system. We run into what's called the War of the Currents. Can you bring us in on that? It's quite, I think it's quite fun myself. Edison had a system called DC, okay, current that was useful around areas, but wasn't good at being transmitted along wires. Westinghouse had a system of AC alternating current,

and the question was which was going to be dominant, because alternating current would go, you could transmit it over long areas. And there was, well, as you said, the savage war of the standards, as it were, and the question was who was going to triumph? And the interesting bit was the cats and the dogs and the horses and the elephants,

which was that he had to try to demonstrate that alternating current was not as safe as his own DC. And what he did was to pay kids to collect, 25 cents each, to collect a lot of stray dogs and cats. Well, dogs, really, on the streets of slums, and he took them to the laboratory. A lot of violence isn't going to like this.

Well, what can I say? You have to be hardened as a historian. And what they did was to show, tried to show that AC current electrocuted these dogs at a better rate, that DC was safer. One thing this brought up was the New York Board of Correction thought, gosh, hanging people isn't a good thing. Maybe we can electrocute them. And Edison supported this because he said, right, if these people were electrocuted by AC, that would show consumers, that it's dangerous to have it into your house. essentially AC won over this anyhow. But he went so far as to electrocute a killer elephant.

And indeed, if you can actually still see pictures of this dying and then dead elephant on the ground. But the thing was that he was so, although he was against capital punishment, he wasn't really keen on killing dogs in front of people, this particular fight shows Edison it is most driven I think and eventually he lost because AC was no more dangerous

of course and it had it was cheaper and you could do more with it and at this point as we've said before the US is expanding and it was necessary to get this power over a wider space. Do you want to come in Simon? Yeah I mean just to

make the obvious point that this is an example of the extremely intimate relationship in the Edison system between advertising and publicity that understands public opinion as consumption and the effect of the technological changes that his group are introducing. At exactly the same time as this is happening after all, the Edison Power and Light system is becoming international. This is not just an east coast of the United States phenomenon on the contrary. The first central generating station of an Edison type

built in the world was built on Hoban Viaduct in London, not in New York City, as part of an extraordinarily successful public demonstration by his representative on Earth, Sam Insull,

right in the middle of the British Imperial Capital where there were lots of rival claimants to and entrepreneurs of electric power and light. And the Edison system in a sense, arrives on Hoban Viaduct

as a piece of theatre. And I think the theatricality of Edison's demonstrations. How was it theatre? It was theatre because he was able, or Insull and the technicians, were able to extraordinarily

quickly set up a relatively large scale relatively intense, power and light distribution system in the centre of London. And one reason why they wanted to do this was because they had a very important competitor, whom I want to name Joseph Swan, brilliant Newcastle chemist and entrepreneur, who'd invented a rather more effective light bulb system than Edison and whose patents and licenses meant that Edison's corporations were forced to merge with those of Swan to produce a larger corporation, Edis Swan.

And it was as part of that competition that Edison and his men, especially in Seoul, I think, understood that publicity is nine-tenths of the law. Ian, sorry, Ewan. I mean, this kind of exhibition is really central to electrical technology throughout the 19th century. You did not expect to have your son turned showman. You know, that's what an early telegraph pioneer

writes to his father when, you know, To sell these products, you have to put them on show. They're part of 19th century exhibition culture, and that's central to the notion of what an inventor is during the 19th century as well. An inventor is somebody who merges very easily into showmanship. And showmanship is part of what sells invention and what the market for invention is as well. Catherine.

Well, the prime example of that is in 1879 in Menlo Park. He has whole roads lined with these lights, these new light bulbs. He, journalists, not only from America, but from all over the world, 3,000 people, extra trains being put on by the railway, to demonstrate the fact not only you've got a little bulb in your house, you can actually light up cities and, in a sense, the world. And it's from that that he gets finance from J.P. Morgan and others. The fact that he can tap the important developmental finance is, again,

You've got the ideas. You've got the incredible showmanship, as Iron says. And then you've got the finances and the resources to do something with it. He's exhausting us. And we haven't got all that much time left, but he did move into the cinema. Can you tell us quite briskly how he got in and what he did? He has his eye for the main chance. He's seen the success of the phonagre.

He's looking for a way to produce an optical version, if you like, that. He's optical illusions, putting on shows, putting on spectacular light extravaganzas of various ways. You know, things like the magic lantern, optical illusion devices like the Zoe Trope, the phenokistice scope, all these devices with strange names. You know, these are popular, marketable products.

And reproducing the moving image in some form and others, you know, it's the holy grail of these kinds of these kinds of inventions. And Edison comes up with what he calls the kinetoscope. There were predecessors of Myrbridge is one of them, there are many others, yes. Yes, I mean, he's working in a tradition of optical display. And again, I mean, one of the things that sort of runs through Edison's career is, you know, the way he manages to produce sensations, if you like, at various kinds,

at a distance from the point of origin. That's what the phonograph does. That's what the kinetoscope does. It's a large box with perforated film. That's largely one of Edison's. innovations running through at a rate so that... Dixon did it, but an English photographer called Dixon did it, but Edison took credit, right?

That's what Edison is very good at. And you look into the little window in the box. It's a peep show. And what goes along with that for his, is the production of ideas about how to market it. He initially thinks of what he's going to sell, is the machine, is the apparatus. And then he realizes he needs to be able to sell something to show,

so he has to get into what we would now think of as motion picture production as well. It's managing those different aspects of the system. Is he significant, sorry. Is he significant, Simon, in the development of motion pictures? Yes, I think he's very significant. I mean, partly because of his resistance to some of the innovations and technologies that will later seem to be self-evident. As Ewan says, Edison's model was initially the peep show parlour,

the Nickelodeon, and it's only later that Edison and his companies realize that what we would now think of as a movie theatre is the right way to go. But above all, it's Edison and his commercial allies who form up not just the technologies of projection and of the film studio, but also the standard Hollywood ownership model. That's to say the large, oligopolistic consortium that buys rights and commissions movie production. Edison's firms were extremely good at not just marketing films, but also getting their hands on them. Sometimes Edison's men would simply steal movies in Paris or London and ship them and pirate them in the states. And that seems to me to set a very interesting precedent for the way the film business works.

Kathleen, in our ends or our beginnings, could you give us an idea of how his reputation rests now? It rests on two things, well, three things in particular. First of all, as the inventor of the light bulb, they think in America, as the father of the motion picture industry, as the producer of sound that can be heard outside of the mouth, as it were. But he's also iconic as the quintessential rags de riches boy, that is to say what you did was that you worked hard,

you didn't go out at night, you studied bookkeeping, and then you had luck. Traditionally, the boss's daughter, and you'd save her, and that way you had your both your pluck and your luck. So he's seen as an exemplification of how you actually make your life, and he becomes, of course, the philosopher of this. to do, Kathleen Burke, Simon Schiafner, Ewan Morris. Next week, Taoism, thanks for listening.

If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.