The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About (The Edison Story Part 1)

26:20What does the National Biscuit Company make? I think they make biscuits. I feel like the Golden Stock Telegraph Company became like GoTelcom in the 80s and now is known as Spritzel. Yeah, Spritzel, but no I for some reason. And so now Edison is in New York, and he is able to stop being a telegraph operator. He's able to quit his job, start his first company, straightforward name, Newark Telegraph Works. Ask me why. Why? Was it located in Newark? And what did they work on? Telegraph. He's hiring workers. He delivers that first stock ticker. And he's also, he's working on all these incremental improvements, right?

27:02Like, not crazy things that are going to make him famous, but he's just making all these tweaks that give little efficiency gains. You know, little better batteries and weird electrical things, right? His company's growing. He gets married, married to a Jersey girl named Mary Stilwell. They buy a house. But Edison is definitely not a family man. He's working. He's always working all the time. In fact, in his first year of marriage, he gets 39 patents. But I'm sure he made it home for dinner. Never. Probably zero times. And then in 1874, he comes up with a big idea. Doesn't sound like a big idea to us, but it is a big idea.

27:46It's a system that lets you send four messages at once on a single telegraph line. Ooh. He calls it the quadruplex. Now, at this point, telegraph was essentially one wire. And you basically tap into one side of the wire. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Person listens on the other end, taps back. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah. And wire is made of copper, right? It's copper wire. So it's expensive. It's expensive, right? And they're running the copper wire all over the country, you know, across the Atlantic Ocean. It costs a lot of money to run all that copper wire, right?

28:21And so if you can get more messages on the same amount of wire, that is a huge efficiency gain, right? That makes things cheaper. Yeah, because it's more efficient. It's something that no one would ever see or notice. But if you're running a company, I mean, that is a huge productivity increase. And I want to just, like, zoom out from this for a moment because, you know, we talk about technology now. We talk about like amazing things and maybe it's scary like AI or whatever, but it's kind of exciting and dramatic. But in the long run, maybe the most important thing that technology does is make stuff cheaper, makes it cheaper to communicate, makes it cheaper to grow food, makes it cheaper to make clothes.

29:06And when everything gets cheaper, everybody gets richer, right? The way we have had material progress is by technology effectively making things cheaper. So shout out to that. And that is what Edison is doing here. He is making the most important communications technology of its day cheaper. So he's on a roll. He's got dozens of inventions at this point. He's been tweaking. He's finally got something that people are going to pay money for. He's got a family, right? But he's not yet this world-changing inventor because there's one last piece of the puzzle any entrepreneur needs, and that is scale.

29:43He needs money. He needs so much money. there's a special name for it? Capital. Yeah, I love that. Needs capital. Like, I don't know, at what point does money become capital? I mean, I know you could say it's like the structure of it, is it? But I feel like nobody calls $100 ,000 money, right? That's not... That is investment capital, yes. Yeah. He, in fact, at one point, writes to the head of Western Union. Western Union is the big telegraph company. He's doing a lot of work for them. He writes to the head of Western Union, I need 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, or$2 ,000. Anyone you would like to advance.

30:19He's actually writing this to the— It's funny. It's good. It's charming. He had this kind of homespun charm people talked about. Like, he was from the Midwest. He had that Midwestern charm. Is that a thing? I think it is. For Edison, it is. Dressed in kind of country clothes, even when he was famous. So he's writing this to the head of Western Union, this big executive, William Orton. And in fact, Orton advances Edison$5 ,000. And then they start to properly negotiate over Edison's big idea, over the quadruplex. Edison wants$25 ,000-plus royalties. Orton, you know, controls Western Union, can kind of do whatever he wants.

30:52So he's sort of, I think, playing games with Edison, stalling. He goes off to the Midwest for Christmas break. And Edison just has to kind of wait around, right? Has to wait for his big capital infusion. One day, as this is happening, into Edison's little Newark, New Jersey workshop walks Jay Gould. Jay Gould. Legendary. He was a railroad magnet, a big financial speculator. I won't call him an investor. I'm calling him a speculator. He was a classic robber baron. But more than that, you know, there was this whole robber barons, they called them, right? Everybody, you know, thought, oh, they're stealing all our money.

31:31They're manipulating the markets. But even the robber barons hated Jay Gould. He was a robber baron's robber baron. Now, I will say I've toured his mansion recently up on the Hudson River. And the tour guides say he was misunderstood. He was actually a really great guy. But we'll do a future episode. I bet it's a nice mansion. It's a very nice mansion, yes. Yeah, even at the time, right? Even at the time, he was like the villain. He was always trying to corner the market, like take all the gold contracts. Yeah, he tried to corner gold. Yeah, stuff like that. Some economists have argued that he was hated because he went against big company interests.

32:09And in fact, things got cheaper because of him. But we will look at this in a future show. The Robert Barrett who was in it for the little guy. He was going to give that mansion to the poor someday, you know, to be continued. He walks in. And this guy, this famous guy, walks into Edison's little shop. And Gould actually, among other things, controls the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, a rival to Western Union. Jay Gould has heard about the quadruplex. And if you're Edison, it is great news when Jay Gould walks in the door, right? It's like that scene in Bugs Bunny when Bugs Bunny looks at a guy and the whole guy is just a big bag with a dollar sign on it, right?

32:46Big bag of money. Because if Western Union is all you have, if the head of Western Union is jerking around and going off for Christmas break and not giving you any money, you don't have any leverage, right? You basically have to just take what they offer. But now, now there are multiple buyers for what you're selling. Now there are multiple buyers for your quadruplex. And you have leverage. And so the very next day, Edison goes to Gould's mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, goes down to Gould's office in the basement. And Edison actually wrote about this exchange later. Edison wrote, here's what he wrote.

33:21Gould started in at once and asked me how much I wanted. I said, make me an offer. Then he said, I'll give you$30 ,000. And I said, I'll sell any interest I may have for that money, which was somewhat more than I thought I could get. Great negotiating lesson. Always let the other guy say the number first. Because, right, if it's more than you wanted, you just say yes. You just say yes. Thank you. Pleasure doing business with you. So then, of course, Edison gets the money. Gould actually sells a yacht and gives Edison the money from the yacht. Lovely rubber, barren detail. And then, of course, Western Union sues Gould over ownership of the quadriplex.

33:58The lawsuit goes on forever. Edison's inventions are going to end up tied up in lawsuits again and again, right? intellectual property story. But Edison doesn't care this time because he's got his money. What does he do with it? He does the most important thing he's ever going to do in his life. I knew it. He does the thing that is going to transform the very nature of invention. Itself. Itself in the world. And what that thing is, is he moves to the country. He moves to this little failed housing development out in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey called Menlo Park next to the railroad between New Jersey and Philadelphia.

34:37So it's early 1876 by this point. Edison is 29 years old. He's got two kids who he calls Dot and Dash. Oh, it's so nice. Yeah, very sweet. Although it's not like he hangs out with them. What he actually loves is the telegraph. His family moves into this big house that used to be the sales office for this failed housing development in Menlo Park. Some of his workers move into some of the other empty houses. And then on top of this little hill, not far from the train station, I think you can see Manhattan from the top of the hill, I'm not sure. On top of this little hill, he builds the thing, the main thing that is like the manifestation of his big idea.

35:16It's a lab. It's a lab for him and his employees, where they're going to work. And he says, in this building, he is going to come up with, quote, a minor invention every 10 days, and a big thing every six months or so. It's amazing because if you would ask most people at this time, if you ask most people today, they would say invention is one of those things that, you know, comes from God or the greater spirit, you know, the eureka moment, you know, and everyone's story is like, oh, I was out walking when it suddenly came to me fully formed. Like this is the myth of invention. And maybe it happens sometimes this way.

35:50But for Thomas Edison to say, yeah, we got a schedule here. We got a calendar, like invent, invent, invent. It's taking away the magic, right? It's taking it from this kind of romantic world to the industrial world. And you didn't maybe know if it was possible, but it ended up being possible. So what he builds there is a long two-story wood building, 100 feet long, 25 feet wide, painted white. People say it looks like a schoolhouse or a church without a steeple. And on the ground floor, there's a machine shop. Upstairs, there's a lab. Eventually, people will call this the invention factory, which is a perfect name for it.

36:28But right now, nobody calls it anything, right? Because nobody outside the telegraph industry has even heard of Thomas Edison. He's just some guy moving out to the middle of nowhere. I've seen a replica of this lab in Michigan, outside Detroit, in Henry Ford's museum. He so admired Thomas Edison that he rebuilt the laboratory down to the test tubes and the little bits of wire on the wall. Well, apparently, so my tour guy told me, when Edison saw it, he's like, it's an exact replica, except it's so clean. You know, it was like perfectly clean. But there's a million little things and screws and connectors and all sorts of fabrics and that sort of thing.

37:09In case Thomas Edison or his people at this point had an idea. They didn't have to go to Manhattan to pick up a button. Or a part or anything, right? The core thing this place does is it makes Edison's inventing process frictionless, right? Anytime he thinks of something, he has right there standing next to him, you know, skilled machinists and electricians and like all the parts and machines and chemicals and whatever you can think of. This is the breakthrough. There's this great quote about this from this guy, Paul Israel. He wrote a biography about Edison. He spent decades editing the Edison papers at Rutgers.

37:50He's like a deep Edison scholar. And the quote is that the lab in Menlo Park showed that invention itself could be an industrial process. So, like, this is the great era of industrialization in America, and Edison is industrializing invention. He's gone from Thomas Edison, young Morse code operator, to Thomas Edison inventor, to Thomas Edison Incorporated. He's the guy who runs the factory that makes inventions. And in just a minute, we will hear how the invention factory comes out of the gate with a big one.

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41:11Jacob, I feel like the pieces are in place. Edison has his invention side, his business side. He's got money. He's got the industrialization of invention itself. He has the manifestation of his own mind on a hilltop in New Jersey. And yet, no mention of the light bulb or any of these things that, like, every elementary school student knows about Thomas Edison. It's coming. Okay. It's coming. Although it comes in an indirect way. It comes in a really interesting way. And that is this. So right around the time Edison moves to Menlo Park, there is in fact this historic breakthrough. But it doesn't come from Edison.

41:47It doesn't come from his lab on the hill. It comes from another inventor who's based in Boston. And this invention is granted as patent 174465. And it's called Improvement in Telegraphy. Yawn. Wait for it. The inventor says, my present invention consists of a vibratory or undulatory current of electricity in contradistinction to a merely intermittent or postulator current. And essentially, this inventor says this is a breakthrough because you can send more telegraph messages down the same wire, right? So it's like quadruplex plus. But then, at the very end of the application, literally second to the last paragraph, the inventor writes that the patent covers, quote, the method of and apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described by causing electrical undulations, similar in forms of the vibrations of air accompanying the said vocal or other sound substantially as set forth.

42:47And then last paragraph. In testimony whereof I have here unto sign my name this 20th day of January, A.D. 1876, Alex Graham Bell. Alexander Graham Bell. I love it. I love it when you're reading a famous guy's biography and another famous guy comes in. Team up. Alexander Graham Bell. Watson, come here. I want you. Alexander Graham Bell. He is inventing the telephone right here and he doesn't know it. Right. Amazing. He just thinks he's like coming up with a better way to send telegraphs. And does Edison see this in like Telegraph Weekly or something like that? So Edison tracks new patents. That's like one of the things he does is he just sees all the new patents that come out.

43:29He reads them and he sees this and he thinks, I'm going to tweak it so I can send even better telegraph messages. and you know he's all set up to do this right he's got his muckers he's got his lab he's staying up all night and there's this one piece of this new thing that alexander graham bell has invented called the the diaphragm it's the thing that turns sound into vibrations right so it vibrates when sound waves it's a thin membrane it vibrates and it creates an electrical current that is not dots or dashes, but as a variable electric current. Yes. And going the other way, it turns the electric current into vibrations that you can hear.

44:11And so one day Edison is playing with one of these and just like talking into it. And he feels that it's vibrating on his hand as he talks to it. He can feel the vibrations. It's the middle of the night. He's having dinner with his boys, with his muckers, probably eating apple pie. And as he feels this thing vibrating on his hand, he turns to his, like, chief engineer, this assistant named Charles Batchelor, a guy he calls Batch. And he says, you know, Batch, if we took one of these diaphragms and we put something pointy, put like a needle or something on the bottom of it and put it on a piece of paper and talked into it, it would scratch the paper.

44:51It would leave scratch marks on the paper. And then maybe if we took that paper with the scratch marks and pulled it back under the needle, would it make the diaphragm vibrate and send sound back out? Would it recreate the sound? And because they have a factory with needles and paper and diaphragms and all this stuff, they don't need to wait long to know the answer to this question. They don't need to wait at all, right? All the dudes in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey, are sitting there ready to go. And so they just do it, right? This whole team of people. There's a machinist who's sitting there who walks over to his whatever machine and like solders a needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm or however you get a needle onto the bottom of a diaphragm.

45:32And Batch, Batchelor, gets some wax paper and cuts it up and they build a little wheel, a little system just right then, right that night. And, you know, presumably this is every night, right? Presumably it's always like Edison's like, how about this? How about that? And most of them are not very good ideas. But this one, this one is a good idea, right? So they hook up the diaphragm with the needle so it's touching the wax paper. And there's this wheel that the paper's on. And so Bachelor slowly pulls the paper along the wheel under the needle. And Edison says into the diaphragm, Mary had a little lamb.

46:11And they take the paper out and they look at it. And it has these little scratch marks on it. Grooves, if you will. And then Bachelor puts the paper back on the wheel with the little scratches, you know, pulls the paper under the needle past the diaphragm. And as it's going past the diaphragm, they hear like, I am eureka. This is a real eureka. Yeah, this is a real eureka, right? Like, it's not perfect, right? It doesn't quite work. But it works. It works. Edison writes in his notebook that day, basically, this is an invention that will make it easier for people at the telegraph office to transcribe messages.

46:53Oh, no. Oh, no. He's still thinking telegraph. His mind's in the telegraph. He's thinking, oh, yeah, someone at the telegraph office has to use a pencil and paper to write things down. We could use this new transcription device essentially for dots and dashes. Yes. Yes. He is still in the world that he's living in, right? Unsurprisingly. He is still in his world. But he gets that this thing is going to be big. Not to the exclusion of everything else. He keeps puttering on other things. But he does have somebody over the next few months make a list of possible names for his new invention. I know you love a list.

47:28You want to take this one? All right. Possible names for this new invention. Autophone. Cosmophone. I do like that one. Acoustophone. Nice. Antipophone. Liquophone. Chronophone. Glottophone. That's nice. A clangophone, hulagamophone, aerophone. I feel like they have a Latin dictionary there in Menlo Park Laboratory. They're just like going through it. Epograph. They don't choose any of those. Nope. As we know, they choose phonograph, which I think is Edison's and means something like sound writer, right? The graph is right there in the name, which is telling. They're really still focused on this kind of automatic transcription part.

48:11They're not thinking music. They're not thinking orchestras, that someone's going to buy this at home. No. I mean, if anything, they're thinking like when they think beyond telegraph, they think of like, oh, this is like something that business people can dictate letters into. It's very much like a recording device as opposed to a playing device at some level. So they're working on it. They're, you know, iterating. They're making it a little better. And a few months later, in December, they decide they're ready to go public with this idea. And it comes out in Scientific American, which was a big, big deal at the time in this sort of technology.

48:47Sure, sure. And the story is called The Talking Phonograph, and I'll read a little bit of it. Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, and turned a crank. and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. People now went bananas. People could not believe that this was a thing. It's hard to imagine how big it is that a mechanical machine is doing what a human does. Yeah. That it talks to you. It talks to you like a person. In fact, a professor who reads this article writes to Edison and basically says, like, Mr.

49:32Edison, I'm sure you're an honorable man. You need to correct this article because it makes it sound like you have a machine that can record sound and play it back. And surely, as we all know, that is not possible. It's the kind of thing you'd see at a carnival in the day, right? The box that speaks and it's a small child or something hidden inside the box. A child puts your nickel in the box. A bunch of hokum. But, you know, it was magic. I mean, it was magic. It was magic. It was magic. He takes it down to Washington, D.C. at this big, like, scientific meeting. And so many people want to hear it that they actually have to take the doors off the hinges of the room where he's displaying it.

50:07While he's down there, the White House, he hears that the president wants to see his new machine. Pop quiz, Robert. Who was the president in 1877-78? Garfield? Rutherford B. Hayes. Oh, classic. I wouldn't have got it. Classic. Lake Huron. Rutherford B. Hayes. The things you don't know. The things I didn't know. And Rutherford B. Hayes loves the phonograph. He keeps Edison at the White House like till after midnight playing with this incredible thing. And this is the moment when Edison goes from being, you know, inventor known in the telegraph business to being a celebrity. This is the moment when he becomes known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.

50:50Because this is a leap in technology. It's not just a little extra something to make telegraph operators more money. This wasn't just the front page of Telegraph Weekly. This was the front page of the New York world. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's something about the human voice is important here. Oh, interesting. You know, obviously there had been portraits and people had had their writings. But the voice is connected to the breath, right? It is ephemeral. It dies with you. And like immediately when this comes out, people are thinking about like, oh, this machine is going to let people talk to us after they die as if they're talking to us from beyond the grave.

51:29This is it's almost supernatural. So how does he take something that is magic and make money off of it? This is a great question. So he is not yet to the point where they can manufacture these at any kind of scale and sell them for a profit. That's the obvious thing you would do. But the sort of minimum viable product version of it, they just got a couple of phonographs. They rent out rooms, sell tickets, and people pay to come and hear somebody like record themselves singing and then play it back. I would totally pay that nickel. You would pay it today. I would probably pay it today. You probably did.

52:07I probably did. Was there something in Brooklyn? So obviously this is just kind of a stalling maneuver, right? This is just what they're doing until the business gets up and running. And there are investors in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. And they're like, OK, Edison, let's get to scale here. Let's figure out how to manufacture this. And it turns out this is not Edison's thing. Edison's thing is not taking his genius invention and operationalizing it, building the factory to build it. You know, he has his invention factory. He starts working on the telescopophone, his big idea for how people on, like, whatever, hilltops a mile apart can talk to each other.

52:47It's amazing, right? He doesn't want to be in the business of, like, hiring orchestras and pressing, like, music and distributing this through music stores. I mean, that's just like being a businessman. Yeah. That's not coming up with cool stuff all the time. Yeah, that's not his thing. But it does mean he leaves the phonograph by the wayside for years. And several years later, Alexander Graham Bell, him again, actually improves on Edison's idea for the phonograph, brings it to market. And this is the wax cylinder? Yeah, he eventually, Alexander Graham Bell is eventually the one who comes up with the wax cylinder, yes.

53:21And that does inspire Edison many years later to sort of follow, right, to chase Alexander Graham Bell. And Edison does wind up in the phonograph business, but he's always behind, ironically, given that he invented it. Like his other inventions, he's much less clearly the inventor, the ones that are coming. But this one is him unambiguously. And yet, and yet, he never dominates the industry as arguably he should have. And then finally, in 1929, two years before he dies, he just gets out of the phonograph business altogether, gives up. He's got bigger things. So what do we make of this story, Jacob?

53:58At the very beginning, we promised that Edison wasn't just an inventor. He's an entrepreneur. He's a businessman. And yet so far, I am making fun of our actual episode. But so far, he doesn't seem to be squeezing every last dime. He doesn't seem to have that ruthless businessman in him. Yeah. No, that's true. You definitely would not call him a profit maximizer, right? He sort of reminds me of this type of founder you see with startups now, where they're like brilliant and driven, and they create this very innovative company and get it going. And then like a year or two in, somebody from the, you know, venture capital firm takes them into a back room.

54:40Gray hair. Yeah. The gray hair comes in. Listen, we love you. You've done a great job getting this company off the ground. But now it's time to bring in, I'm not going to call it a grown up, but it's bring in somebody who's more into operations. Edison is kind of like that founder. He could have been the greatest telegraph operator in the world. He could have been the greatest telegraph maximizer in the world. He could have been the phonograph magnet and run orchestras around the country and recorded them and sold them all. The first David Geffen. And maybe he knows himself well enough to know that he has a lot of different interests.

55:15He's almost like, I wouldn't say scatterbrained because that seems like an insult. It's like things are just coming constantly into his head. You know, at one moment he's showing a phonograph to the president of the United States. But as he's showing the photograph, he's probably thinking, you know, what if you had a giant tube on top of a mountain that you could yell at other mountains with other tubes? And Rutherford B. Hayes is like, what? What are you talking about? I just want to see the photograph. You've already done the thing, right? But that was an actual thing he wanted to do, right?

55:46Yeah. Yeah. If he had been this sort of more narrow-minded profit maximizer, he probably would have got stuck at like a sort of local maximum, right? Like maybe he would have stopped at the phonograph and be like, I'm famous. I'm the phonograph guy. I'm going to be the phonograph king now. But this is clearly not what Edison had set out to do, right? He had set out to create an invention factory, a place where he can chase his curiosity, a place where he has all the equipment he needs and he has this team, and a place, crucially, where he can keep coming up with big ideas one after another. And he is going to succeed at that.

56:23Yeah, inventing the photograph for most people would have been the big thing. but one great product is fine, but transforming a whole system, right? Transformative technology, the kind of technology that makes everything change, that's what's about to come. We should thank Thomas Edison for his scatterbrain nature. Yeah, and for his ambition, right? His ambition was not to be the phonograph king. It was to invent greater and greater things. And really interestingly, like his whole life, he keeps thinking the next thing I invent is going to be even bigger. He keeps thinking that even to the point where he's wrong, right?

57:07Because that's just who he is. He keeps trying to invent bigger and better things. Next time on Business History, Thomas Alva Edison, age 30 or so, he's still so young, gets bored with the phonograph and builds the first big electric grid in the history of the world and reveals that the great inventor has a fatal flaw. He falls too in love with his products. Our showrunner is Ryan Dilley. Our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. And our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another episode of Business History. A show about the history of business.

57:47Robert Smith, as you know, there is nowhere in Pushkin's office to make a video, to make a video podcast, which is unfortunate. We tried and it was described as two gray men in a gray box. And reasonably so. Fortunately for us, in an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office, there is the showroom of a company called Buzzy Space. This is a company. It's where we're sitting right now. And what they do is they design furniture and acoustic solutions that make, I'm reading here, workplaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. I would even say cozy. Their furniture is like sort of curved and interesting colors and I guess keeps things quiet.

58:29Yes. Honestly, I wish our office was this showroom. You can find more at buzzy.space. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online only to pause at checkout because you wonder if you trusted enough to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of fraud protection. So no matter where a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal open. Built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com.

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