Edison vs. Tesla | The Business of Discovery | 4

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1:08Dr. Paul Israel:Few figures in American history reshaped daily life as much as Thomas Edison. The world he was born into in 1847 was lit by candles 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.

1:50Dr. Paul Israel: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, and author of several books about Edison, including Edison, A Life of Invention. Our conversation is next. I heard a rumor that the CIA poisoned my granddad. Gordon Banks, the world's number one goalkeeper. It happened in Mexico, supposedly, at the World Cup in 1970. Sounds crazy? I'm an investigative journalist on the hunt for evidence.

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3:11Dr. Paul Israel: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?

3:21Lindsay Graham: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.

4:12Lindsay Graham: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 Paine. 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.

4:53Lindsay Graham:And I think all those things were really important to his education.

4:58Dr. Paul Israel: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?

5:14Lindsay Graham:Edison, as a child and then as a young boy, is surrounded by an environment where there are very exciting technologies happening. So when they move to Port Huron, it's a lumber town, but there's also 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 funnest piece of the book was the telegraph system. And he and a friend experimented with their own telegraph line.

5:55Lindsay Graham: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.

6:42Lindsay Graham: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.

7:23Lindsay Graham: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.

7:34Dr. Paul Israel: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?

7:50Lindsay Graham: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 alerting 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.

8:37Lindsay Graham:And then shortly thereafter, he got a job as a railway telegrapher on the Port Huron railway. And over the next four or so years, he literally was an 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.

9:21Dr. Paul Israel:Let's talk about those experiments. What were some of Edison's first inventions made, I guess, while he was a telegrapher? Right.

9:28Lindsay Graham: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.

10:14Lindsay Graham: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.

11:10Lindsay Graham:And 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, two 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.

11:43Dr. Paul Israel: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.

11:54Lindsay Graham:So he finds some land just off the rail line between Newark and Philadelphia and 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 a design, the machine shop could make it, they could experiment with it and then modify it.

12:42Lindsay Graham:And two experimenters. And he's working on additional telegraph technologies. One of those becomes what we know today as a telephone. At that time, it was 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.

13:30Lindsay Graham: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.

14:29Lindsay Graham:In October of 1878, Edison is describing to the press that he thinks he's 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 the Menlo Park Laboratory grows. There'd 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.

15:15Lindsay Graham:There's a carpenter's shop, a big brick machine shop, and the 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 a 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.

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17:58Dr. Paul Israel: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 and innovation?

18:15Lindsay Graham: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 a inventor of the phonograph of improved telephone technology, in some respects, his hearing was treated as a test instrument. His ability to hear something meant that it was both articulated and loud enough that it should work in a commercial setting.

19:11Dr. Paul Israel: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.

19:25Lindsay Graham: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.

20:15Lindsay Graham: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.

20:55Lindsay Graham: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 Goldenstock 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. Didn't always work, but it gave those companies an 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.

21:38Dr. Paul Israel: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?

22:03Lindsay Graham: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, but 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.

22:49Lindsay Graham:So it's basic applied research rather than basic scientific research designed 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.