Short History Of... - Thomas Edison

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

Thomas Edison was one of history’s greatest inventors, who gave the world not only electric light but other landmark innovations in sound recording and moving pictures. He accumulated more patents in his lifetime than any other, and filled over 4000 notebooks with his work. So, how did this ordinary, home-schooled boy from the American mid-West overcome ill-health and hearing loss to change the world? To what extent was he a lone genius, and how much did he rely on the work of others?  This is A Short History of Thomas Edison. Written by Dan Smith. With thanks to Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University and author of Edison: A Life of Invention. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the 4th of September 1882 in New York, coming on for 7 o'clock in the evening. The last of the daylight is fading, but the Big Apple throngs with life. Street hawkers tout their wares to workers making their way home from their offices. Bars are alive with chatter, and horse-drawn carriages rattle along the streets. In Lower Manhattan, a journalist pushes open the heavy front door of the offices of the New York Times and climbs the stairs to his desk. There he sits down and starts hammering away at a chunky typewriter as his deadline looms. Though he's used to covering all manner of exciting, strange, and sometimes dark stories of the city,

tonight he is writing about events inside his own office. He has just come from number 257 Pearl Street, a couple of blocks away. There, a few hours ago, the famous inventor Thomas Edison flicked the switch at his new electricity generating station, sending a surge of power into the handful of buildings signed up to his latest grand experiment. But it's only now, as the sky outside darkens, that the full impact of Edison's latest and so far greatest invention can be felt. Tonight, there is a network of incandescent light bulbs strung around the Times building and several other of Manhattan's finest institutions. On a usual evening by now, the journalist would be squinting at the page before him.

The newspaper room's gas lamps too dim and unsteady to work comfortably. But Mr. Edison has brought the daytime inside. The newspaper room's gas lamps too dim and unsteady to work comfortably. But Mr. Edison has brought the daytime inside. The journalist rests his fingers on the typewriter's keys and stares in wonder at the bulbs suspended from brass arms jutting out from the walls around his desk. They're glass globes, just four inches long, the shape of a teardrop, broad at the bottom and narrow at the neck. Inside each, a vacuum encases a carbon horseshoe shape, and from this filament, a beautiful

light, filtered by Edison's ground glass shade. The glow is far more brilliant than that provided by gas, and infinitely steadier. No glare, no flicker, no smell. To top it all, much less of a fire hazard. Not a small consideration, the journalist realizes, when you're working among great stacks of paper. Rising from his desk, he goes over and reaches out to touch one of the lamps, withdrawing quickly when he feels its heat. As he searches for the perfect words to describe it to his readers, he notices groups of his colleagues gathering around the office to take it all in. There are gasps of amazement and pockets of intense, awestruck conversation as they marvel at the lights inside the office and those in the buildings across the street. From the generators on Pearl Street, through miles of underground

cabling, through to the elegant fixtures and fittings in the office, Edison has brought large-scale electric lighting safely inside for the first time. With a flourish, the journalist taps out the final paragraph of his article. This is what it feels like to be an eyewitness to history. The moment one man lights up Manhattan. Beginning the commercial electrical age in earnest and changing the world forever. To many, Thomas Edison is one of history's greatest inventors. He left an extraordinary body of work,

details of which he recorded in over 4,000 notebooks and millions of notes and sketches. With more patents to his name in his lifetime than anyone else on earth, he gave the world not only electric light, but other landmark innovations in the realms of sound recording and moving pictures. His original creations and improvements to existing technologies aided businesses and individuals across countless fields. So how did an ordinary boy from the American Midwest overcome ill health, profound hearing loss, and a lack of formal education to change the world? To what extent was he a lone genius,

and how much did he rely on the work of others? And what did his blueprint for research and development contribute to defining the modern world? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of Thomas Edison. It is the 11th of February, 1847, a cold, snowy night in Milan, Ohio. In a seven-room brick house built by her husband, a woman named Nancy gives birth for the seventh time in her life. A baby boy. She and the father, Samuel, name him Thomas Alva Edison. But the baby's proud parents and their three other surviving children will always call him Al

Milan is a town that relies on its canal Samuel owns a small timber mill, processing logs shipped down from Canada But Milan's fortunes are on the wane The new railroads springing up across the country are taking business away from towns like this So when Al is about seven, the Edisons move a hundred miles north to Port Huron in Michigan. Samuel tries his hand at all sorts of enterprises, from farming and carpentry to running a store and even building a viewing tower beside the River Huron, where he charges a 25-cent entrance fee. As for Al, his inquisitive nature is already evident.

When he is eight, he wonders if it is possible that people will ever fly like birds. He notices the way the robins pluck worms from the ground in the garden. It gets him thinking. He extracts some worms himself, mushes them up with some water, and persuades the little girl next door to drink it. Disappointingly, she remains rooted to the ground. But she is violently sick, and Al receives a hiding from his father. Fortunately for the world, it doesn't deter him from further experimentation.

Burdened by poor health, he struggles at school, until his mother decides she can do a better job of his education. Away from the constraints of the classroom, he immerses himself in books that capture his imagination. Paul Israel is director and general editor of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University and author of Edison, A Life of Invention. So as a boy, his mother taught him how to read. He read the books in his father's library, which are largely Enlightenment thinkers. Gibbons followed the Roman Empire, most importantly Thomas Paine, who became a hero of Edison's. In fact, Edison later wrote a short introduction to a collection of Paine's works. And that kind of free-thinking ideas about religion were also ones that were held by Edison. Before long, he is carrying out rudimentary experiments in his bedroom.

Keen to harness his enthusiasm, his parents allow him to set up a basic laboratory in the basement. When he is twelve, he is working for his dad's farm, but he does not much enjoy it. So he gets a job on the Grand Trunk Railroad, selling newspapers and candy on the line between Port Huron and Detroit. The train leaves at seven each morning and doesn't get back to Port Huron until nine at night. In the hours when he's not pacing the carriages selling his wares, he takes himself to the city library and reads. In 1861, the U.S. descends into civil war between the Union North, led by President Abraham Lincoln, and the Confederate South. The country suffers national trauma on an unprecedented scale.

But for Al, it is not all bad news. Sales of his newspapers rocket as passengers want to hear of the latest goings-on. There's a major battle where a number of people from the local community are fighting. And so the newspaper has important stories. So the Detroit press carries a major story. Edison convinces the editor to give him extra papers. And as he has fewer and fewer papers, the cost of the paper goes up. So you see that sort of entrepreneurial capitalist idea sort of emerging. Now a teenager, Al rebrands himself himself as tom one day in early 1862 he is whiling away the hours in detroit when he decides to start producing his own newspaper he persuades the editor of the

free press to let him have a small press he no longer uses and starts to print his own periodical from the baggage car for eight cents month, he gives his readers a supply of local news and gossip alongside public notices, useful commercial information, and the latest train timetables. Soon, he's selling over a couple of hundred copies a week. He also sets up a mini-laboratory on board, though the results are less positive. One day, a chemical experiment bursts into flames. A colleague puts out the conflagration, but Edison receives a bad burn for his efforts, and has his ears boxed as well. Not long after, so he tells it, he notices his hearing is failing, the start of the deafness that will

trouble him all his life. But his hunger for scientific exploration is unstifled, and he becomes fascinated by the burgeoning technology of the electric telegraph. It's a means of sending messages along wires that expanded across America in the 1840s after Samuel Morse invented his famous code of dots and dashes. Edison sees it in use on a daily basis as the railroad stations use it to communicate with each other. He cobbles together a line of his own, connecting his home with that of a friend a mile or so away. Between his own experimentation and his dogged questioning of the professional telegraphers on the railroad, he is becoming quite the expert. One day, while hanging around the telegraphy office at a station on his daily route, the telegrapher's young son gleefully toddles off between some out-of-use carriages.

Suddenly, Edison notices one of the boxcars rolling towards the child, picking up speed with every second. He leaps into action and plucks the boy out of danger just in time. The father, filled with gratitude, asks Edison how he can ever thank him. Edison seizes the opportunity and asks for some private lessons in telegraphy. After that, it's not long before he finds full-time work as a telegrapher, first in the local Port Huron telegraph office and then on the railroad. But then, with the civil war still raging, he decides to take his services on the road to wherever they are most in demand,

spending time in most of the major cities of the Midwest over the next few years. Soon, he has a reputation as one of the best receivers around. He often works for the newspapers, taking stories from the Associated Press overnight, writing them out and delivering them to the offices first thing in the morning. And in this way, Edison learned not just about telegraphy and about electricity, but he also learned about the press and the media. And this served him well later in his career. So there are ways in which he's connected to these two industries that are crucial elements of industrializing America after the Civil War. Sleep plays only a minor role in his life. When he isn't working, he's experimenting and scoping

out new gadgets to invent, or ways to improve existing ones. He looks at ways to develop what is called a repeater, essentially a means of maintaining the strength of an electrical pulse sent down a telegram wire over longer distances. He also explores how to send multiple messages down the same wire at the same time. Now, in his early twenties, he takes a job at the main telegraph office in Boston, a city right at the heart of the new technology. He visits many of the factories making telegraph and other electrical equipment, writing up his experiences in the industry journal The Telegrapher.

He becomes particularly close to one of the engineering managers who gives him a little space to carry out his own experimental work. And so we begin to see Edison transitioning now from operator to inventor. And in January of 1869, he'd been there roughly nine months. He announces in The Telegrapher that he's leaving his job as an operator to become a full-time inventor.

The city gives him the infrastructure to take his work to the next level. Boston's a financial capital. There were people who were willing to be investors, startup investors in a sense, right? Sort of like we see today with Silicon Valley, taking a chance on somebody who had a bright idea. And Edison was working on several technologies. Among these is an idea for a printing telegraph. Another is for an improved stock ticker, a device to keep businesses constantly updated with the latest market

prices. With Boston boasting a prominent gold exchange, Edison doesn't find it hard to win backers for the project. However, his first patent, granted in 1869 and the first of well over a thousand in his lifetime, is for a vote recorder. Designed to speed up the cumbersome process of voting by elected officials, it fails to gain the support that he predicts. And what he discovered when he tried to market it, apparently took it down to Washington and was told that we don't want to speed up the vote

because we use that time, right, for some horse trading. So during the vote, instead of speeding it up, we actually want to slow it down. It teaches him an important lesson. Make sure your market wants what you intend to create. Undaunted he moves to New York. There, with a colleague from Boston, he establishes a company and is soon immersed in several projects. He caters to businesses wanting to install the telegraph between their various offices and suppliers.

In the autumn of 1871, he expands his entrepreneurial wings by setting up what turns out to be a short-lived telegraphic news service based in Newark, New Jersey. One day, a few weeks after it is open for business, Edison is standing behind the chair of an employee, 16-year-old Mary Stilwell. She is a handsome girl with long, dark hair, twisting and curling down her back. From a working-class family, she is smart and confident. Mr. Edison, she says to him, I can always tell when you are near me. How do you account for that? This, he knows, is his chance. He tells her that he's been thinking about her, and then he drops his bombshell.

Will she marry him? It could hardly be a briefer courtship, but Edison is nothing if not businesslike. He tells Mary to talk it through with her mother, and that they can be married by next Tuesday if it suits. In the end they wait a few weeks and wed on Christmas Day. Back in the corporate world, the head of the New York Gold Exchange contracts him to develop an improved stock ticker. Edison soon realizes how quickly things move here, with companies forever taking over one another

so that the job you have today might be gone tomorrow. But he rides the crests of the waves and signs a development contract with the Golden Stock Telegraph Company that earns him a very healthy $2,000 per year plus royalties on his inventions. Western Union, a giant of the telegraphy world, is fearful of falling behind and buys out golden stock. Despite earning significant sums from Western Union, Edison maintains his independence, carrying on work for a number of other companies too. In 1873, he visits the UK, hopeful of selling some of his creations, but finds they are less well-suited to the British telegraphic systems. He comes back home, aware that he still has much to learn about telegraphy and electricity in general.

He orders up several experimental devices he has seen overseas and creates a small electrical laboratory. And in the premises he already rents in Newark, he establishes a small electrical laboratory. And in the premises he already rents in Newark, he establishes a new chemical laboratory as well. And you see Edison now really focusing a lot of his research on understanding sort of the underlying physics and chemistry that are affecting his efforts to improve telegraph technology. chemistry that are affecting his efforts to improve telegraph technology. Still only in his 20s, Edison has laid down the blueprint for a full service facility, extending from fundamental research to product development to production and sales.

A thoroughly modern setup. Nonetheless, the economy hits a slump, and times get harder. But Edison has an ace up his sleeve. His so-called quadruplex telegraph is capable of sending four signals down the same wire at the same time, two in each direction. A game-changer for whichever company owns it. Western Union believe they have commissioned the work that created it, but Edison has labored on the project with other non-Western Union colleagues.

When the rail magnate and financial speculator Jay Gould looks to pay for a piece of the action, the case is dragged through the courts for months and years. Western Union ultimately prevails, but Edison emerges with a healthy wodge of Gould's cash. He uses some of it to finance moving his family out of Newark, a city notorious for its industrial pollution. He has a two-year-old daughter, Marion, now, and a son, Thomas Jr., on the way. In late 1875, Edison and his father, Samuel, head out to look for a new base. They discover a place called Menlo Park, a failed housing development in central New Jersey. Edison buys some land. His father is skilled in building. They build a two-story wooden laboratory

in Menlo Park. Edison moves his family there. There's an existing house, which is sort of the model house for this failed development. And that is the beginning of the Menlo Park laboratory. But it actually had its beginning with Edison's work in telegraphy, the visit to Britain, which sort of changed the way he thought about invention, and then the development of this laboratory at Newark. invention and then the development of this laboratory at Newark. Edison transplants several of his most reliable assistants from Newark, his boys as he calls them. They call him Old Man, although he's not yet 30.

From the outset, Menlo Park, some 25 miles from New York City, is a hive of technological creativity. miles from New York City, is a hive of technological creativity. The inventions keep on coming, including an electric pen that allows the sender to hand-write a message which is sent down a telegraph line and reproduced on paper at the other end. A forerunner of the fax machine. But Edison's workaholic nature has a price tag, and he sees little of his young family. In March 1876, the U.S. Patent Office grants a patent to a Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell for his invention of the telephone.

As soon as he hears of it, Edison knows that he should have come up with it. Now he fears the telephone will overtake the telegraph altogether. So do Western Union, who set Edison to work on improving Bell's creation. This time, they make sure his contract is watertight. The problem with Bell's device is that you have to speak very loudly into it, and it only works over short distances. Edison identifies the problem as the metal transmitter used in the mouthpiece. While he's sitting at his workbench one day,

an oil lamp breaks. Edison notices the carbon from the oil gathered on the glass. Rolling it on his fingers, it reminds him of modeling clay. He coats Bell's transmitter with the substance and discovers it gives a much clearer signal down the phone line. Once he perfects it, it becomes industry standard. But a new idea is obsessing him. Recording and playing back sound. No one has ever come close, but he feels it's within his grasp. It's the 7th of December, 1877. The New York offices of the prestigious

Scientific American magazine. Edison has just arrived at the office of the owner, Alfred Beach, a no-nonsense fellow inventor in his early fifties. Beach pours Edison a drink and gestures for various members of the magazine's staff, a dozen or more of them, to come and join them. There is the loud scraping of chairs as they rush in, filling the room. They watch on, rapt, as Edison unpacks the case he has brought with him. He lifts out a curious-looking machine and lays it on Beach's desk, captivating his audience with the theatricality of it.

The focal point of the contraption is a brass cylinder covered in tin foil. There is a metal disc with a pin attached to it and a large conical horn. When Edison has finished arranging the kit, Beach shushes his staff. He fixes his eyes on Edison as the inventor introduces the machine, indicating its various parts. Taking a wooden handle in his hands, he cranks the cylinder. It works by mechanically transferring the vibrations created by the human voice via a diaphragm onto the cylinder, which are then read and reproduced as sound. A crackle emanates from the horn, then the unmistakable tones of a human voice. There is an audible intake of breath as the onlookers listen. The machine inquires about their health and asks how they like the recording,

before bidding them a cordial goodnight. Not so long ago, Edison would have been considered some sort of sorcerer, and in a sense, he is. But Beach knows there is no magic involved. Instead, this invention, which he calls the phonograph, is the product of that great concoction that Edison advocates throughout his life. 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. and 99% perspiration.

As the phonograph finishes its rotation, Beach leads his staff in a round of applause. Edison gleefully receives the acclaim and begins to pack up his machine. Beach tells him he will make sure an article appears in the very next edition of the magazine. There can be no doubt, he will make sure an article appears in the very next edition of the magazine. There can be no doubt, he says, that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice. It is the culmination of a whirlwind few months. Edison had been secretly working on the project when word leaked out to the Scientific American who reported he was on the brink of an extraordinary breakthrough.

Though Edison assumes the leak came from one of his boys, he's not too worried. It serves to spur him on. About a month ago, he tested his foil-covered cylinder more in hope than expectation. Reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb, he was amazed when it played back at the first attempt. Mary had a little lamb, its feet were quite as slow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. And it's this invention that makes Edison's reputation, because it astounds people that you can record and play back the human voice. The scientific community is equally astounded by it. But at the same time, the New York newspapers,

once they got wind of this device, would come out to Menlo Park to see it. And they found in Edison a guy who was a really good storyteller and somebody who sort of had a feel for the press. And one of the reporters wrote a story with the headline, The Wizard of Menlo Park, which became, you know, his famous nickname. In April 1878, he is invited to Washington to demonstrate his various devices in front of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress. Then comes an invitation to the White House from President Rutherford B. Hayes, who is so fascinated by Edison's late-night demonstration that he drags the First Lady from her bed to come and see. Whether she is as impressed as her husband is not recorded. But even after an achievement of such magnitude,

Edison is still hungry for the next big success. He throws himself into the realm of electric lighting in 1878. Most of the progress in this field is around arc lighting. The British chemist Humphrey Davy invented the arc lamp earlier in the century, a system that produces a bright, harsh light by passing a current between two carbon rods. It was a leap on from the candles, oil, and gas lamps that predated it. But it has many drawbacks. The lamps are noisy and smelly, and produce sparks that represent a significant fire hazard, making them ill-suited for indoor use. Edison sets himself the challenge of designing an entirely new system, boldly announcing that he plans to light up Manhattan's financial district in just a few

weeks' time. There's just one problem. He has absolutely no idea how he will do it yet. The boast, though, is not merely bravado. Such is Edison's reputation by this point that his claim doubtless frightens some potential competitors from even joining the race. He also tempts a small army of investors who stump up sufficient funds for him to establish a new company. The Edison Electric Light Company blazes into life in October 1878. He now sets about perfecting the incandescent light bulb, a bulb that uses electricity to heat up a filament until it glows. It is slow work though, and he misses his promised deadline. The bulb is only part of the problem. So when Edison begins working on electrical lighting, there are other people

who've been working on it for 40 years, incandescent lamps. They had focused on the lamp as the problem. Some had experimented with generators, a couple had thought about systems. But Edison's the first one to kind of put everything together and say, oh, well, in order to invent a lamp, I need to design the system that it's going to fit into, so I know what the parameters are for the lamp that I'm going to design. He needs to design the electricity generators, figure out how the cabling can be safely and economically put underground, what materials to use, how the switches will work,

how to create a vacuum within the bulbs how to screw the bulbs in everything the pressure builds with each month some days he sits at the organ he has had installed and plays it two-fingered waiting for inspiration it's an expensive business between october of 1878 and March of 1881, that company spends $130,000 on experimental work. That's roughly $3 to $4 million in today's money. It's an immense amount for a completely untried technology, entirely experimental. Slowly, but surely, he makes progress. One of the greatest conundrums is what to use for the filament.

Platinum looks promising, but it's prohibitively expensive. He experiments with everything from bamboo to human hair to the thread from a spider's web. Over three thousand materials in all. In the end, he hits upon sewing thread covered in carbon and baked to a specific temperature. A year into the life of his electric company, he has a light bulb that lasts thirteen and a half hours. His next attempt goes for 100 hours. At Christmas, he lights up Menlo Park with 100 lamps and welcomes 3,000 visitors to his modern wonder of the world. Then he goes into commercial production.

After the lengthy process of getting permission to dig up the streets of Manhattan, the work is finally completed in the summer of 1882, ready for the big switch-on witnessed in the office of the New York Times in September. Suddenly you can have lighting around the clock, right? I mean, the 24-hour day emerges in part because we have electric lights, and that's true of factories. And so you begin to see that. Theaters, another place where fires were a hazard, they switch over to electric lighting. Hotels, right? So gas lighting, besides the fire safety, if somebody didn't turn off that gas lamp properly, some gas

might leak into the room and they'd die, right? Be carried out the next day. So electric lighting is safer. And so these are all things Edison can use in marketing. And it's one of the reasons why his system begins to be adopted by a bunch of different industries. But there is darkness to come too. But there is darkness to come, too. In 1884, Edison's wife Mary dies, ending a marriage frequently fraught because of his absence. A year later, he meets Mina Miller, the striking, educated 19-year-old daughter of a millionaire inventor and entrepreneur.

Just as with Mary, the courtship is rapid, but perhaps because of her own family background, Mina seems better able to cope with Edison's workaholic tendencies. She even takes to communicating with him in Morse code. In 1886, they marry and move to a grand property, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey. It will go on to have three children together, to add to the three Edison already has. Glenmont becomes a place to be seen, with Mina, almost 20 years his junior, delighting in playing the host. The family visitor's book includes such famous names of the age as Orville Wright, Helen Keller, and Henry Ford, the latter describing his stay as two of the best days I ever spent.

Edison transfers his center of operations from Menlo Park, which now covers an area equivalent to two city blocks, to just up the road in West Orange. By now, he is rich enough to build something even bigger, with a grand library, machine workshops and a suite of research labs, including one for his own exclusive use. It opens in November 1887 and at times houses as many as 30 different subsidiary companies, employing thousands of workers. Although he is the undisputed figurehead of the enterprise, there can be no

pretense that he is a one-man band. His approach to work is predicated on collegiate effort, and he strives hard to bring the most creative thinkers and creators into his fold. Though his staff are responsible for crucial developments, the fact of the matter is that Edison builds a team on the understanding that the fruits of their labors become his property. There will be much debate as to how much Edison fairly collaborates and how much he unfairly appropriates. It is a gray area.

Edison created a new institution for invention, these laboratories at Menlo Park. Edison is both the director of research and the inventor, right? People are understood to be working out his ideas. So there's the sense in which there was not a collaboration between equals. People were working out Edison's idea, even when they made major innovations in his laboratory. So it's a problem. And part of that is driven by the patent system. There's a lot of uncertainty in the law about not only who owns the rights to those inventions, but also who gets credit for the inventions,

as you have teams of people working. I would say that he clearly took a lot of credit for himself. Regardless, Edison is the undisputed poster boy of science and innovation during America's Gilded Age. during America's Gilded Age. It is 1889 and France is hosting the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a world fair that the French government hopes will spark the slumbering economy into life. An entire pavilion is devoted to Edison's inventions, with a new and improved phonograph playing poetry recitals

and songs as its centerpiece. There is a complete lighting station too, decked out in lights of red, white, and blue. Visitors flock to the exposition in their millions, with Edison's display second only to Gustav Eiffel's newly constructed tower. second only to Gustav Eiffel's newly constructed tower. In August, Edison himself makes an appearance. Mina has been keen for him to take a holiday, noticing how weary he seems as he recovers from burns suffered in a recent lab accident. But Paris is anything but restful. With glamorous Mina, sporting dresses that cost $3,000 and more, they are the It couple, invited to far too many dinners and meet-and-greets with dignitaries.

Eiffel makes him a guest of honor at his tower, and Edison is, rather surreally, greeted by a group of Native American dancers in town with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Edison is no longer merely an inventor and entrepreneur, but an ambassador for his nation. Edison is illustrative of what America was giving the world. In the 18th century, it was government represented by the capital. And in the 19th century, it was these new inventions that were transforming the world represented by the Patent Office. And so you begin to see how Edison now is standing in for this idea

of the United States as this very innovative place that was changing the world. His success with electrical lighting, however, leads him to perhaps the greatest controversy of his career, the so-called current wars. For a few years, Edison is the king of electricity. But then a rival emerges. Edison uses a system called direct current, or DC. Edison uses a system called direct current, or DC. But over in Europe, a rival system, alternating current, or AC, is being developed and it proves to be very efficient for long-distance transmission. A man named George Westinghouse imports AC to America and hires Edison's former employee Nikola Tesla to help make improvements. By 1888, AC is posing a serious

threat to Edison's business, but he does not take it sitting down. He identifies all the weaknesses he can with a rival system, claiming it is of inferior design and infringes various of his patents. Most damagingly, he says it is dangerous. This is a genuine concern for Edison, who knows that electricity needs to win the trust of wary consumers. He feeds a press frenzy on the back of several fatalities caused by contact with high-voltage AC power lines. Telegraph and telephone repairmen find themselves at particular risk as pole-mounted AC lines often cross with theirs. Edison secretly colludes with other players in the electrical market to chip away at Westinghouse's reputation. There are a series of unseemly public experiments, for instance, where an array of animals, including dogs, calves, and horses, are electrocuted using AC current, ostensibly to show the dangers. But the conflict peaks just after 6.30 a.m.

on the 6th of August 1890 at Auburn in New York State. Sat alone on a hard bench, his back against the whitewashed walls of his small room, William Kemmler is dressed smartly in his suit and tie. Up since five, he has eaten his breakfast and is taking a moment to pray. He has a big day ahead. As he thinks of what lies beyond the heavy door that faces him, a knot of apprehension grows in his gut, but he is determined to maintain his poise, now of all times. A key turns in the lock and the door creaks open. A man in uniform ushers William to his feet and bids him to follow. William runs a hand through his beard and nods his acknowledgement.

He knows that this will be the last time he walks over the threshold. A street peddler from Buffalo, New York, of German extraction, Kemmler is an inmate of Auburn Prison. The previous March, he was recovering from a drinking binge when he murdered his common-law wife, Tilly, with a hatchet. Now, here he is, on the day of his execution. His footsteps and those of his guard echo down the passageway to the execution chamber. Until recently, Kemmler had expected to die by the hangman's noose. But change is afoot.

As the door of the dreaded room creaks open and he enters His eyes fall on the chair in the center of the room It is high-backed With formidable-looking leather straps around the middle On the armrests and at the base Kemmler is to be the human guinea pig for the state's new mode of execution The electric chair. It's the macabre brainchild of New York dentist Alfred Southwick, who based the design on the chair he

uses in his surgery. When Southwick wrote to Edison in 1887 for advice on how best to adapt the chair, Edison had said it was a terrible idea and he preferred to abolish capital punishment altogether. But Southwick persisted, and seeing an opportunity to humiliate his great rival, Edison advised him that Westinghouse's alternating current would be the surest way to ensure death. He even pulled strings to ensure the electric chair uses Westinghouse's AC. to ensure the electric chair uses Westinghouse's AC. Now, William Kemmler is strapped into the chair as a sea of faces watches on. Struggling to maintain his calm, he addresses them, saying that the newspapers have been printing a lot of stuff about him that isn't true.

Then he wishes them all the good luck in the world. I believe I am going to a good place, he says. The warden attaches two electrodes to his shaven head and motions to the executioner, or state electrician as he is officially known, to prepare to turn the power on. Take it easy, William says, and do it properly. I'm in no hurry. It is too much for one of the witnesses, who slips out of the chamber to the corridor,

breathing deeply to fend off his nausea. There is a moment of silence. Then the buzz of the current in the chamber next door. The lights momentarily flicker, and the man thanks God there is a door between him and what is going on in that room. For 17 seconds, William convulses as a thousand volts courses round his body.

When the current is turned off, two doctors declare him dead. Then someone notices the heave of William's chest. His heart is beating. Great God, he is alive, someone shouts. Kemmler is subjected to another surge of power, measuring 2,000 volts. This second time, in the grimmest of circumstances, his ordeal is over. Though Kemmler may be a brutal killer, he is also the victim of a commercial war spiraling out of control. Whatever justice should look like, few are convinced that they have seen it done well today. No one emerges from the current wars with much credit, and there is evidence of dirty tricks on all sides. But over time, the press frenzy dies down, and raw economics takes over. Edison

is gradually sidelined from the battle through a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions. series of corporate mergers and acquisitions. His company is ultimately subsumed into General Electric by 1892, and it in turn merges with its chief AC rival to create a new company controlling three-quarters of the American electrical market. AC ultimately wins the day for its greater efficiency, and the curtain comes down on the unedifying battle for commercial supremacy. Back at West Orange, Edison busies himself with new projects, but he keeps returning to his phonograph, in many ways his most beloved baby. Against stiffening competition from rivals, he perseveres with his cylinder, convinced it offers the best opportunity for ever better quality recording.

In its early days, Edison envisaged the phonograph as principally for business, a sort of early dictating machine. But along with many others, he has realized its entertainment potential too. Soon there are nickel-in-the-slot machines in saloons and bars up and down the country, raking in a fortune as punters queue to listen to the latest recordings. But once that novelty wears off, he struggles to find his market. Phonographs are very expensive, costing $100 or more, so that only the wealthy can afford them. By the time technological improvements lower the cost, costing $100 or more so that only the wealthy can afford them.

By the time technological improvements lower the cost, Edison has made a serious misjudgment. He concentrates his efforts on encouraging his employees to record the voices he thinks are best suited to the technology, rather than recording the acts people most want to listen to. rather than recording the acts people most want to listen to. So, Edison was very good at what we might call the entrepreneurial innovative stage of introducing new technologies. Edison was much less successful when he was the driving force in the companies. He completely misunderstood the market because he thought about high fidelity. High fidelity has always been a very small part of the sound recording industry. And for Edison, it was what he focused on. And so the issues around popular music, people who buy popular music aren't that concerned about high fidelity.

And so there's a way in which Edison's failure to let go of his invention puts his company at a disadvantage. And this is the same thing that had happened with the electrical industry, and it's what happens with motion pictures as well. Nevertheless, Edison is about to astound the world again, with two creations in development since the late 1880s. world again with two creations in development since the late 1880s he calls them the kinetograph and the kinetoscope the world's first commercially viable motion picture camera and projector machines that do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear in truth much of the credit for the day-to-day development rests with his trusted assistant, William K. L. Dixon, although he is unacknowledged in the patents. It's early 1894 in West Orange,

and Dixon sits in the director's chair in what is the world's first film studio. It's a strange building, small and cramped, the interior covered in black tar paper. In the ceiling is a huge window that opens to let in the sunlight necessary to film. Edison calls it the Dog House, but his team gives it the nickname that really sticks The Black Mariah, a nod to the dingy police vans used to transport criminals The studio sits on a turntable, so that it can be rotated towards the sun Dixon gives the equipment a final check Then ushers the woman who has been waiting patiently in the corner towards a mark on

the ground. She takes up position, adjusting her long, plaited hair that sits beneath a cowboy hat. She wears a dress that reaches just below her knees, its arms adorned with tassels. In her hands is a Marlin 91.22 caliber rifle. Dixon asks her if she's ready. She nods, concentration etched on her face. He feeds foot after foot of celluloid film into the bulky camera, then sets it rolling. The air fills with the rapid click of sprockets moving the film along at a rate of some 40 frames per second. The woman fires off an astonishing 25

rounds in less than half a minute. Shards of glass tinkle to the floor as targets explode. Dixon smiles contentedly. This is exactly the footage he wants. Because this is Annie Oakley,

star of Buffalo Bill's Travelling Wild West show and the most famous lady sharpshooter in America. And Dixon has her pegged to become a movie star. For the next display of skill, Annie's husband Frank, himself a famous gunman, lends a hand. Smartly dressed in shirt and waistcoat, he kneels on the floor and tosses up a succession of balls. One after the other, Annie explodes them in midair. Most satisfyingly for Dixon, his camera captures the smoke as it explodes from the rifle barrels. Another first in cinematic history. Altogether, he records about 90 seconds of Annie in action. When she is finished, she uncocks her weapon and hands it to Frank. Will that do?

She asks Dixon. He assures her that it will. She nods, then nonchalantly opens the door of the Black Mariah and steps out into the daylight. Another day, another movie, Dixon thinks to himself. By the end of the year, the Black Mariah will have been the setting for some 75 films featuring everything from strongmen acts, cockfights and magicians to trapeze artists and dancers, some of a distinctly adult nature. Edison is never wedded to the kinetoscope like he is to the phonograph. In the end, he withdraws from the movie business altogether. His inventor's eye is not entirely a match for

the aesthetic and dramatic talents of other emerging film companies. dramatic talents of other emerging film companies. In the popular view, the kinetoscope is perhaps the last great game-changer of his career, the grand finale of The Master Magician. But the truth is that his productivity does not decline. He spends much of the 1890s developing technology for mining and processing low-grade ore. However, its commercial value collapses when vast reserves of high-grade ore are discovered in the Midwest. But now, more than ever, he demonstrates his skill at turning a negative into a positive.

So Edison was somebody who did learn from failure in some ways and not in others. So where he learned from failure was on the technical side. For him, there was no such thing as a failed invention. It was a way to learn more that could move him towards a successful invention. He realizes the rock-crushing equipment he has developed produces high-quality sand ideal for cement production So he moves into that business instead becoming one of the country's major manufacturers The original Yankee Stadium is among those buildings constructed with Edison Portland cement

He also works on the idea of an electric car a vision far ahead of its time, but his old employee and friend, Henry Ford, ensures that the combustion engine wins the day. Edison, though, remains unbowed, realizing that the shipping, mining, and railroad businesses can all make use of the batteries. In fact, it becomes the biggest money spinner of his career. Most fellas try a few things and then quit, he says. I never quit until I find what I'm after. Even when fire ravages his West Orange complex in 1914, he orders an immediate rebuild. Then, as the First World War erupts, Edison, now in his 60s and the

grand old man of American industry and invention, takes up the government's invitation to head up the Naval Consulting Board. He develops, among other things, technology to detect German U-boats that disrupt transatlantic trade at the cost of thousands of sailors' lives. The work only really stops in 1931, when time catches up with him. Suffering from diabetes and a stomach ulcer, he collapses at home in August 1931 and never recovers. On the 18th of October, aged 84, he dies. There is a private funeral three days later, and President Herbert Hoover asks the public to dim their lights at 10 that evening. One minute of darkness to honor the man who had brought the world into light.

Edison materially changed the world in previously unimaginable ways. Though the contributions of some of his co-collaborators remain largely unacknowledged to this day, the great technological leaps to which he dedicated his life are impossible to overstate. But perhaps his greatest impact on the modern world is on how we think. Edison changes invention from the creation of new patented technology to a process of innovation. So conceptualizing a technology, inventing it through a process of research and development, including basic applied research that draws on scientific knowledge and scientific experimenters, to a development stage that is directly connected

to manufacturing and use. And so I think that's the way to think about Edison, the guy who taught us how to innovate in a sense, right? Transforming invention into innovation. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the Renaissance. This is the thing about why this Renaissancenaissance takes off in a way that previous renaissances didn't. There is a little bit of a paradox because we always think about the renaissance as being the rebirth of classical culture, but it couldn't have happened without this really, really modern piece of technology that was never heard of in ancient Rome. So it is to some extent about bringing together the ancient with something that's very, very new. It was an information revolution which is comparative to the development of the internet. It really changed society that much in terms of the potential for circulation of knowledge.

That's next time.