American Experience (1988) s27e04 Episode Script

[engine sputtering]
NARRATOR:
In mid-October, 1922,
a film crew arrived
in the small town
of West Orange, New Jersey,
to spend some time
with one of the most famous men
in the world:
the phenomenally prolific
American inventor
Thomas Edison.
Over the course of a few days,
the cameras captured
the great man at work,
chatting with employees
and conducting experiments
in his lab,
overseeing tests of packing
materials in his factories
and catching up
on the latest advances
in the device
for which he was best known.
NATHAN MYHRVOLD:
The things that Edison invented
are so omnipresent
in our society.
They've touched the lives of
millions and millions of people
and totally changed them.
We live in a world
that Edison invented.
NARRATOR:
Incandescent light,
sound recording,
motion pictures.
For these and scores
of other inventions,
Edison had justly earned acclaim
as the "Inventor of the Age."
This is a replica
of the first lamp.
NARRATOR:
But no mere machine could
account for his metamorphosis
from inventor to icon.
[whistling loudly]
[chugging]
NANCY KOEHN:
We think we are moving
very, very fast today.
Let me tell you,
all those folks in Manhattan
as Thomas Edison
is walking the streets
thought their bodies
couldn't stand the shock
of how fast they were moving.
NARRATOR:
Poised at the starting line
of America's rush
into the modern world,
Edison became
its standard bearer.
Hello, hello, hello!
NARRATOR:
The impact of his native genius
made infinitely more powerful
by his timing, his canny knack
for self-promotion
and his compulsive need to win.
RANDALL STROSS:
Edison was very competitive.
The more people who tried
to find the answer,
the more tempting it was for him
to take it on.
He was maniacally focused
on maintaining control.
NARRATOR:
In the end, the intensity
of Edison's drive
proved both blessing
and curse,
costing him the allegiance
of a lifelong friend
and control of the industry
to which he'd given life,
even as it guaranteed him
a kind of immortality.
ROBERT ROSENBERG:
There were other great
inventors.
Then there was Edison.
He understood that inventing
is not just having an idea,
and so he made "Edison"
a name to be reckoned with.
[birds cawing]
NARRATOR:
In the late winter of 1876,
the scattered residents
of Menlo Park, New Jersey,
eyed a curious new building
just up the hill
from the train station.
It could easily have been
mistaken for a school
or a Quaker meeting house.
In fact, it was a laboratory,
a 5,000-square-foot facility
entirely dedicated to nurturing
the ideas of one man,
an up-and-coming entrepreneur
by the name
of Thomas Alva Edison.
No private laboratory in the
country was so well equipped.
From the apothecary jars filled
with all manner of chemicals
and organic materials
to the scientific instruments
and shop tools,
Edison had everything
he could possibly need
to make the natural world
bend to his will.
LISA GITELMAN:
He had this keen sense
that he needed different kinds
of resources in order to invent,
and so Menlo Park becomes
a kind of blank slate
on which to come up
with this idea of invention
that's uniquely his.
MYHRVOLD:
Most successful inventors
throughout history
were largely people trying
to accomplish a task.
They had a day job effectively,
and invention was a way
of furthering that.
Edison decided that invention
was his day job.
NARRATOR:
At 29, Edison had
the audacious ambition
of a man who'd come from nothing
and who had everything to prove.
[film reel clicking]
[music playing]
NARRATOR:
His was a classic
American story,
a spectacular rise
from humble beginnings
that soon would be told
and retold and told again.
Born in 1847 and raised
in Port Huron, Michigan,
near the edge of a small country
then on the verge
of becoming great,
Thomas Edison was all pluck
and initiative from the start.
By his own account,
he was curious
to the point of mischief.
He once spent hours sitting
on a neighbor's goose eggs
in an effort to hatch them
and set fire to a barn
"just to see what it would do."
Given just three months
of formal schooling,
he spent the carefree afternoons
of boyhood
reading his way
through the library
and obsessively conducting
chemistry experiments
in the cellar.
Money was tight,
so to finance his dabbling,
he went to work
at the age of 12,
taking a job as a newsboy
on the train that ran daily
between Port Huron and Detroit.
Along the way, in stations
up and down the line,
he became fascinated
with the telegraph,
which was beginning to knit
the growing nation together
as the rails were,
only with lengths
of copper wire.
JOHN STAUDENMAIER:
Is there a more leading edge
thing going on in his world
than telegraphy?
Moving real information
at the speed of light,
with very sophisticated
technologies to make it happen.
He was amazed by it.
He was that kind of kid.
NARRATOR:
Edison's fascination sparked
a quest for mastery.
He taught himself Morse Code
and practiced sending
and receiving telegraph messages
for up to 18 hours a day
before finally landing his first
job as an operator in 1862,
when he was just 15.
[chugging loudly]
By then, he'd become aware that
he was losing his hearing,
the racket of the world
growing increasingly dim.
But with telegraphy, he found
that deafness gave him an edge.
"When in a telegraph office,"
he later recalled,
"I could hear
only the instrument
"directly on the table
at which I sat,
"and unlike the other operators,
I was not bothered
by other instruments."
NEIL BALDWIN:
This condition
made him feel like
he could think more
and he could concentrate more.
He became very introspective.
He often felt like he was alone
even when there were
other people around.
NARRATOR:
For five years, Edison worked
as a press operator,
deciphering the dots and dashes
of the news reports
as they came in over the wires.
But the task, once mastered,
ceased to inspire him.
Given his druthers,
he took the night shift,
which gave him plenty of free
time to read and experiment.
Before long, he was tinkering
with the telegraphic equipment.
PAUL ISRAEL:
Edison didn't have
a lot of formal schooling.
Most of his technical education
came from the practice
of telegraphy.
The telegraph offices
were schools of electricity.
The nature of electricity itself
was something he studied
and learned how to think
about how that system operated,
how he might improve it.
Edison slowly began to think
of himself as an inventor.
KOEHN:
Edison starts, at the core,
the mother lode
of the technological
transformation in America.
That's very, very important
to the way that his mind
and his confidence
and his place at that machine
kind of come together
to launch the rest
of his journey.
[whistling loudly]
NARRATOR:
In early 1869, Edison resigned
his post as a telegraph operator
and at the age of 22
moved to New York
with a few borrowed dollars
in the pocket
of his threadbare suit
to pursue his career
as an inventor.
He spent the next several years
bouncing from one short-lived
partnership to another,
mainly developing
and manufacturing
small lots of telegraphic
devices on contract.
"Sleep," Edison later recalled,
"was a scarce article"
in those days.
But he was meticulous
and tenacious,
and no technical challenge
could cow him.
Charged with perfecting
others' crude machines,
his agile mind spun out
a seemingly infinite array
of variations:
automatic telegraphs
and printing telegraphs
and so-called
multiplex telegraphs,
which were capable of sending
more than one message
at the same time
on the same wire.
The booming industry
rewarded him with confidence,
and also with cash.
As one associate put it,
"If you should tell me you could
make babies by machinery,
I shouldn't doubt it."
By the mid-1870s,
Edison had a growing stack
of successful telegraphic
patents to his name
and enough capital
to finance his dream laboratory
in Menlo Park.
ISRAEL:
Edison took a real risk
in going to Menlo Park.
You had to be pretty bold
to build this new thing--
invention laboratory--
and you were going to become
a professional inventor
who was constantly cranking out
new technology.
But it was because
he had this vision
of how to become
a great inventor.
KOEHN:
This was astoundingly
revolutionary.
You know, "I want to invent.
I'm going to be
about invention," right?
"And I don't really want
to be bothered lots of times
with very much else."
NARRATOR:
It was May of 1876,
and Edison was anxious
to get down to work.
His staff was already in place,
a small group
of experimental assistants
and skilled machinists,
many of whom he'd worked with
for years.
All that remained was
to move in his family:
his wife Mary, whom he'd met
in the spring of 1871
and married
several months later;
and their children,
Marion and Thomas Alva, Jr.,
or as their Morse-loving father
had dubbed them,
"Dot" and "Dash."
Edison installed them
in a spacious house
just down the hill
from the laboratory,
and that, excepting Sundays,
was more or less the last
they would see of him.
NARRATOR:
From the very beginning,
Menlo Park thrummed like a hive.
In the long, open rooms
of the laboratory,
as many as a dozen men
were at work at once
conducting experiments,
cutting patterns,
banging together crude machines.
STAUDENMAIER:
Edison loved the chase.
He wanted to break open
very interesting
and challenging problems
with a lot of promise in them.
GITELMAN:
The drive had something to do
with technical inquiry:
a kind of ambition to know
or to figure out things
that nobody had thought of yet.
It wasn't just like
answering questions
that everybody knew were there
and didn't have answers yet;
it was like even coming up
with the questions
and answering them.
NARRATOR:
Though telegraphic equipment
was still his primary focus,
the plan at Menlo Park,
as Edison put it to a friend,
was to bring out "a minor
invention every ten days
and a big thing
every month or so."
ROSENBERG:
Nobody had the kind resources
that Edison had.
He could say,
"You work on this kind
of carbon,
"and you work on this kind
of carbon,
and you work on this kind
of carbon."
BALDWIN:
He would keep track
of how many hours he spent
in a row on something
and try to beat his last record.
He was very into living
above the store, if you will,
and he really implicitly thought
that everybody else
should be like that.
NARRATOR:
"We work all night experimenting
and sleep till noon in the day,"
Edison's chief experimental
assistant, Charles Batchelor,
told his brother.
"Edison is indefatigable."
STAUDENMAIER:
It was a rowdy group of guys.
It was kind of like
a frat house,
but they had the added thing
of saying,
"We're at the leading edge
of progress right here."
[crowd chatter, band playing]
NARRATOR:
It was an age of marvels,
as any of the nearly
nine million visitors
to the Centennial Exposition
could attest.
Opened on May 10, 1876,
on a sprawling 236-acre tract
in Philadelphia's
Fairmount Park,
the exposition marked
America's dramatic debut
as the world's leading
industrial power.
Here was a steam engine
so massive
that it could run hundreds
of machines simultaneously;
an elevator that enabled a man
to make an eight-story climb
while standing still;
and a battery-operated pen
that produced multiple copies
of a document at one time.
"The American invents
as the Greek sculpted
and the Italian painted,"
the Times of Londonreported.
"It is genius."
But of all the wonders
in evidence that spring of 1876,
none was more astonishing
than Alexander Graham Bell's
telephone,
a revolutionary device
that converted sound waves
into an electrical signal
and promised to replace the
telegrapher's dots and dashes
with the sound
of the human voice.
ROSENBERG:
When Bell unveils his invention,
Western Union turns to Edison
and says,
"This is important.
We'd like you to look
into this."
NARRATOR:
For Edison, there were few
more powerful catalysts
than competition.
"I don't care too much
for a fortune," he once said,
"as I do for getting ahead
of the other fellows."
Bell, college educated
and bankrolled by his future
father-in-law,
was the ideal adversary.
BALDWIN:
Thomas Edison had no real deep
abiding collegial respect
for Alexander Graham Bell.
Alexander Graham Bell existed
as someone to be competed with
and overcome and transcended
and bettered.
ISRAEL:
Edison saw competition
as sort of a crucial spur
to the inventive enterprise.
He said an inventor
needs an enemy.
You know, he thought he was
the best inventive brain around.
And also, he had his laboratory,
which could outdo anybody else.
NARRATOR:
It would take Edison
and his team mere months
to design a device
that trumped Bell's--
a so-called
"carbon button transmitter"
that carried sound
over much longer distances
and turned the telephone into
a commercially viable device.
In the process, Edison stumbled
upon the invention
that would change his life
forever.
It was the summer of 1877,
and the Menlo Park team
was testing various materials
for their acoustic properties.
Edison, though unable
to hear the birds outside,
was nevertheless obsessed
with sound,
its transmission
constantly cycling through
what one colleague described
as his "kaleidoscopic mind."
BALDWIN:
The kaleidoscope refracts the
light in many different ways,
but you're always
within the same framework.
That's exactly how
his imagination worked.
ISRAEL:
You can see
these sort of patterns.
It wasn't just thinking
about different ways
of doing one thing;
it was also about thinking
about how one technology
might contribute to his design
of another technology.
ROSENBERG:
Edison had worked
on a telegraph technology
that made marks on a paper,
so Edison was trying
to figure out a way to do that
for the telephone.
"How can I record this thing?"
He had the basic idea
of the vibrating diaphragm
from the telephone
and he thought, "Oh, I'll put
a needle in the middle of that,
"and then I will take
a strip of paper
"and I will pull that
under this needle.
"And as you speak, it will make
impressions in this paper.
And then you can pull it back
through later and listen to it."
NARRATOR:
Initial experiments
quickly gave rise to sketches
for a crude machine
Edison called a phonograph,
from the ancient Greek,
meaning "writer of sound."
The device was then refined
in fits and starts,
with Edison turning out drawings
and his machinist John Kreusi
creating models to test.
Finally, they settled
on a design
in which a sheet of foil
was mounted
on a hand-cranked cylinder.
STAUDENMAIER:
They're working on this thing
and they were fooling around.
"This is damn interesting.
"Let's see if we can
do something with it.
"I don't know if anybody
will ever use it,
but let's see what we can do."
NARRATOR:
When the machine was finished,
the men in the shop
gathered round,
breathless as Edison recited
into the diaphragm
the classic nursery rhyme
"Mary Had a Little Lamb."
Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow..
NARRATOR:
Then he moved the needle
to the beginning
to see if the rhyme
would play back.
Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
ROSENBERG:
Nobody had ever recorded
anything before.
And it just changes the way
you think about the world,
if you can play
something back again.
MYHRVOLD:
There was a miracle to it
that I think goes beyond
most of the things
that we would currently
experience.
Sound was the most
ephemeral thing we had,
and Edison took it
from being ephemeral
to being concrete
and something that would exist
for the ages.
NARRATOR:
"I was never so taken aback
in all my life," Edison said.
"I always was afraid of anything
that worked the first time."
EDISON [recording]:
I introduce the most
wonderful thing
that I have ever experienced,
and I congratulate you
with all my heart
on this wonderful discovery.
NARRATOR:
The nation's leading technical
weekly, Scientific American,
was the first to publicize
the phonograph,
following Edison's demonstration
of the device
in the journal's New York
offices on December 7, 1877.
EDISON [recording]:
Through the medium
of the phonograph
NARRATOR:
"Here is a piece of metal,"
the paper's editor wrote
in wonder,
"that talks in such a way
that there can be no doubt
but that the inflections are
those of the human voice."
LEONARD DeGRAAF:
All the new technologies
are talked about,
written about
in Scientific American.
And everybody who is important
in these fields,
whether you're an inventor,
an engineer or patent attorney,
you're going to read
Scientific American.
ROSENBERG:
Those physicists and scientists
who were working on sound,
and everybody
who was following that
and knew how complex sound was,
here comes a joker
with a little metal diaphragm
with a needle
in the middle of it,
and he records the human voice.
GITELMAN:
Alexander Graham Bell
and the people who had been
working on sound, you know,
would smack themselves
in the forehead
once they saw how simple it was.
NARRATOR:
"It is a most
astonishing thing to me,"
Bell confessed
to his father-in-law,
"that I could possibly
have let this invention
slip through my fingers."
The brief notice
in Scientific American
set off a stampede.
ISRAEL:
Reporters beat a path
to Menlo Park
to hear this astounding thing.
ARTHUR SULLIVAN [recording]:
I am astonished
and somewhat terrified
at the result
of this evening's experiment.
GITELMAN:
The phonograph
made Edison world-famous
really kind of suddenly.
He did demonstrations,
and the phonograph
just blew people's minds.
But more, I think,
Edison made sure
that he was
a colorful character.
He was an inveterate
self-promoter.
BALDWIN:
He was never there
to welcome you.
He would come in from elsewhere,
like with his lab coat,
and he always wrapped a kerchief
around his neck
and he always had, like,
smudges on his face,
or like, you know, perspiration,
or be mopping his brow
or something.
NARRATOR:
Chairs were quickly offered,
slices of pie handed round,
cigars thrown on the table
and everyone invited
to help themselves.
Edison meanwhile
kept up a steady stream
of jovial patter,
cracking jokes
and touting the myriad wonders
that soon would emerge
from Menlo Park.
STAUDENMAIER:
He had immense self-confidence.
He had a sense of humor.
And he would pull things
out of the air
that people
weren't thinking about
when they asked a question,
and then he'd answer it
in a way that,
"Wow, I never thought of that."
ISRAEL:
There was something
about this guy
that seems to have fit
their vision
of what the great American
inventor ought to be like.
Self-taught, good storyteller,
you know,
he's both down-to-the-earth
and also at the same time
the genius, right?
He combines those elements
so nicely.
NARRATOR:
Over the next several months,
as sales agents fanned out
across the country
with demonstration models
of the device,
the phonograph's inventor became
a full-fledged press sensation.
One of Edison's associates
judged it a "mania."
"School girls write compositions
on Edison.
"The funny papers
publish squibs on Edison.
"The daily papers
write up his life.
When shall we get a rest?"
STAUDENMAIER:
Edison's public image
is a mixture of things.
He is on the one hand
a transcendent brain
with a transcendent ability
to discipline and focus.
And then he takes naps
on the floor
and rumples up his suit.
He doesn't put on airs.
ERNEST FREEBERG:
Edison is clearly
a home-grown American,
self-taught Horatio Alger
sort of fellow, an everyman.
That was part of his appeal.
Not a scientific genius,
but somebody who was succeeding
because he had
a native spark of intelligence
and a lot of hard work.
He's a great American story.
KOEHN:
You know, it's not like he had
a team of spin doctors
making this whole story
work a certain way.
But a lot of pieces
fell the right way
in terms of his accessibility
and his appeal
to the American public
at a time of, you know, great,
often frightening,
formidable change.
NARRATOR:
Finally, on April
Fool's Day, 1878,
reporter William Croffut
credited Edison
with having made lunch "out of
the dirt taken from the cellar,"
using a "machine that would feed
the human race."
The spoof was lost
on a good many readers.
Already, the public
had come to regard Edison
as equal parts visionary
and magician,
or as Croffut
famously dubbed him,
"The Wizard of Menlo Park."
MYHRVOLD:
An invention is an idea.
It's an idea that's useful.
Somebody thinks of something
and gives us a new device,
a new approach, a new technique.
And that new idea
suddenly changes the world.
NARRATOR:
They were published
in Scientific American
each and every week throughout
the late 19th century:
lists of new inventions
and announcements of patents
recently awarded.
FREEBERG:
Americans as a whole
were thinking of themselves
as a nation of inventors.
Some joked that
a young American man
would feel guilty
going to his grave
without having won a patent
of his very own.
This was something that
everybody aspired to do.
NARRATOR:
To W.B. Austin of New York,
for his Chimney Ventilator;
to Joseph B. Underwood
of North Carolina,
for a newfangled Coffee Roaster;
to John Senn of Illinois,
for his improved remedy
for Hog Cholera.
ISRAEL:
The newspapers,
you see editorials
about how it was
the patent office now
that represented
American greatness,
not the capitol.
And I think that
beautifully captures
the way in which America
thought about itself,
this growing industrial power
on the verge
of transforming the world.
FREEBERG:
Americans often felt
a little inferior to Europeans.
They didn't have
the great universities,
they didn't have the great arts
and literature tradition.
But in the late 19th century,
Americans said,
"This is what we do.
We are inventors."
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1878,
Edison made a splash
in the U.S. capital,
where he gave back-to-back
demonstrations of the phonograph
for members of Congress and
President Rutherford B. Hayes
and sat for a portrait
by celebrated photographer
Mathew Brady.
By then, news of Edison's
miraculous device
had spread around the world.
Hordes of the curious were
daily descending on Menlo Park.
And Edison, hailed in the press
as "Inventor of the Age,"
already was beginning to chafe
at his celebrity.
RANDALL STROSS:
He is deluged with letters
from strangers
who want things from him.
He creates this category
in his mind
of the begging letter.
It might be money.
It can be other things.
So he found himself writing
several dozen letters a day.
He's also discovering
when one reporter writes
a long, flattering profile,
there are going to be ten others
who want to write profiles
of him,
and he is spending
more and more time
doing the same "Mary Had
a Little Lamb" demonstrations
and not getting any work done.
[chugging and whistling]
NARRATOR:
"The reporters
who come down here
have already unstrung my nerves
so much,"
Edison groused to a friend,
"that I think of taking
to the woods."
Finally, in July,
he did just that,
heading west to Wyoming
with a party of scientists
to study an eclipse.
Mary Edison, now pregnant
for the third time,
was left behind at home.
ROSENBERG:
Mary was a working-class girl.
She was 16 when he met her.
He was 24 years old
and living
for the next contract,
the next invention,
whatever it might be.
BALDWIN:
He was on the ascendancy,
and she almost immediately
found out what it was like
to be married to somebody
who wasn't there.
ROSENBERG:
His idea of a good time
was always a night
in the laboratory.
Then the fame came,
and that could not have been
easy for her.
She just didn't have
the background.
NARRATOR:
Visitors to Menlo Park
noted that Mrs. Edison
was conspicuous
mainly in her absence.
Often, she was ill,
plagued by mysterious headaches,
panic attacks, fatigue.
During the time
that Edison was away,
Mary's nervousness grew so acute
as to require the care
of a doctor.
And though Edison was advised
by his secretary to hurry back,
he nevertheless took more
than three weeks to get home.
Then, as usual,
he headed straight for the lab.
KOEHN:
He is all about his work,
his vision.
It's what made him tick.
You know, there's the dream,
and you get up in the morning
thinking about it,
and you go through the day
obsessing about it.
And you have people
that support you in that,
but those people,
they don't exist
on the same plane as the dream.
NARRATOR:
Back at his workbench, Edison
considered the phonograph
Hello, hello, hello!
which had drawn
the interest of investors
who hoped to market the machine
for business use.
For that,
Edison would have to devise
a more durable recording surface
than tin foil,
and just now, the prospect
did not much interest him.
What dominated his thoughts
in that late summer of 1878
was something that had been
knocking around in his mind
for a while:
an invention suggested
by three quick sketches
he'd made in his notebook
and labeled "Electric Light."
STAUDENMAIER:
You can go back 3,000 years
and you have artificial
lighting devices.
So what does that tell you?
For a very long time,
people wanted to have a way
to see in the very dim light
of night.
ROSENBERG:
Gaslights had been in homes
for some time.
They had certain drawbacks.
The obvious one is
it's an open flame.
The not-so-obvious one
is that they're filthy.
FREEBERG:
Gas seemed the cutting edge,
but it was
a terrible technology.
It sucked the oxygen
out of the air,
overheated rooms,
spewed a sort of acidic vapor.
All sorts of accidental leaks
caused asphyxiation.
It was a terrible problem.
So people put up with an
enormous amount of inconvenience
to have this light.
But Edison and others
recognized
that if they could create
a light that was safer,
that was cleaner,
that they could tap
into an enormous market.
NARRATOR:
On September 14, 1878,
while talking with one
of the reporters
who now regularly
hung around Menlo Park,
Edison lifted the curtain
on his next big thing.
In a matter of a few days,
he told the astonished scribe
from the New York Sun,
he would do what no one
had ever been able to do:
devise a way to bring
electric light indoors.
For fully 70 years,
it had been understood
that light could be produced
by electricity.
But the only
commercial technology
that so far had been developed
was arc lighting--
a method that forced a current
to jump between two carbon rods
and produced a light so blinding
it could only be used outdoors,
or else in very large
public spaces.
FREEBERG:
The problem with arc light
was that it was so bright
that people could not bear
to be around it.
Even if they set it up
in city parks,
people would sometimes
use umbrellas
to shield themselves
from the intensity of the light.
NARRATOR:
The alternative was
the incandescent bulb,
a technology that first
had been patented in 1841,
six years before Edison
was born,
and still,
nearly four decades later,
had yet to be made viable.
FREEBERG:
It's not hard
to invent a light bulb
that lasts for just 15 seconds.
The problem is to get it to last
for many, many hours.
The trick was
to find something
that would incandesce
and not burn up.
STAUDENMAIER:
This was a hot challenge.
All kinds of people wanted in.
Both sides of the Atlantic,
there were a lot of people
working on this.
ISRAEL:
I think as Edison began to look
at what people had done,
he realized, "You know what,
I can figure out
how to do this."
NARRATOR:
Although he'd done no more
than a couple days' worth
of preliminary experiments,
Edison was sure
he'd cracked the problem.
"I have it now!"
he crowed to the Sunreporter.
"Scientists have all been
working in the same groove,
"and when it is known how I have
accomplished my object,
"everyone will wonder
why they never thought of it,
it is so simple."
GITELMAN:
Lots and lots of people
around the world
were working on electric light.
People announcing to the press,
"Eureka, I have it!"
But you know, the press
was kind of focused on Edison.
NARRATOR:
Edison kept on grabbing
headlines over the next month,
claiming to have conceived
of not merely a long-lasting
incandescent bulb,
but also an entire
electrical power system,
which would be both cheaper
and safer than gas.
In short order,
gas stocks plunged
and financiers began lining up
at the Wizard's door,
all because of a germ
of an idea.
GITELMAN:
So he sort of mobilized
his worldwide fame
to find financial backers
for half-baked notions
that he didn't know
were going to work out at all.
ISRAEL:
When he began to talk about it
in the press,
people say,
"I want in on this,"
and they come to Edison and say,
"We want to give you a bunch
of money to solve this problem."
NARRATOR:
Until patents were filed,
Edison declined to provide
much detail about his plans.
But he made a bold promise:
in a matter of weeks,
he would set Lower Manhattan
aglow with incandescent light.
No pronouncement had ever been
more spectacularly premature.
At Menlo Park, weeks turned
all too quickly to months.
As Francis Upton,
a new hire in the laboratory,
put it in a letter
to his father:
"The electric light goes on
very slowly."
It was then
the late summer of 1879,
almost a year after Edison
had announced his intention
to light New York.
FREEBERG:
Many newspapers reported that
they were trying to do something
that really could not be done.
They looked at Edison
and said that
he really doesn't understand
the basic underlying challenges
of creating
an incandescent light,
that it is scientifically
impossible,
and the world was clearly
starting to denounce Edison
as a stock manipulator
and a fraud
and somebody who got lucky
with the phonograph,
but was out of his depth
at this point.
He wasn't going to be able to
deliver on the electric light.
NARRATOR:
The criticism irked Edison,
not least because he
and his team at Menlo Park
had been working more or less
around the clock,
and most especially because it
unnerved some of his investors,
a cabal of wealthy businessmen
led by Wall Street banker
J.P. Morgan.
FREEBERG:
They had invested
a lot of money.
They were beating the doors,
wanting to get some evidence
that this was actually
going to work.
STAUDENMAIER:
Edison understood
he had to keep sweet-talking
the Wall Street people
that were backing him
and who kept saying, "So?"
GITELMAN:
There were occasions when he had
financiers out to Menlo Park
to give them a flattering
behind-the-scenes demonstration
of what they were working on.
There was impatience,
but there was also
a lot of expectation.
You know,
you might as well have
a little bit of money
riding on Edison
because he was going
to do something.
NARRATOR:
Edison had no doubt
that he would succeed.
What he needed was time.
"There is a wide difference
between contemplating
an invention," he later said,
"and putting the manufactured
article on the market."
ROSENBERG:
When he set out to work
on electric lighting,
he realized pretty early
that the vision
encompassed everything,
and that this was
going to be a slog.
GITELMAN:
We remember famously
the light bulb,
but of course you've got
to screw the light bulb
into a socket.
The socket has to be wired.
The system has to be metered.
There has to be a generator.
It's really a massively
complex system to put in place
to get that light bulb
to go off.
I mean, I don't think he,
going in,
realized how complicated it was.
KOEHN:
I think he has that sense
that if you take this
energy form and you tame it,
and then you distribute it
in one central place,
think of the network of people
that can turn a knob
and get light.
This isn't a dreamy
and gauzy kind of vision.
It's a vision of,
"This can happen.
What do we do next?"
NARRATOR:
Already, the project
had completely transformed
Menlo Park.
A new state-of-the-art
machine shop had been built,
development of the various
components of the system
had gotten underway,
and dozens of men had been added
to the payroll--
among them, the new hire Upton,
a 26-year-old
Princeton-educated physicist
whom Edison nicknamed "Culture"
for his fancy
educational pedigree.
MYHRVOLD:
Upton was a more trained,
learned man.
Edison was a little bit
merciless,
kind of teasing him about it.
And at one point,
Edison asked him to calculate
the volume of a light bulb.
Upton draws the light bulb
and he approximates it
as a sphere and a cone
and a cylinder
and he's calculating away,
and while he does this,
Edison fills the thing
full of sand and pours it out
and effectively does
an empirical measurement.
You know, showing his own
sort of natural brilliance.
NARRATOR:
Upton took the ribbing
in stride,
awed by what he called
Edison's "intuitions."
In fact, intuition
was just the first step.
Equally crucial was
the inventor's understanding
of electrical laws,
which had set him on a quest
for a very particular
sort of bulb.
Over the previous months,
a variety of substances with
the properties Edison was after
had been rigorously tested
as filaments
and dozens of bulb prototypes
designed.
Still, as Upton put it
to his father,
"We have not as yet
what we want."
MYHRVOLD:
Edison is famous for saying
that he didn't fail;
he just found thousands of ways
that didn't work.
And to him,
that was a progress
on the path
of getting something that would.
NARRATOR:
By the summer of 1879,
the Menlo Park team
was gaining on its object.
First came the creation
of a high-vacuum bulb,
so superior
to any other ever produced
that Edison was moved
to share his results
with the Association
for the Advancement of Science.
Then came a series
of promising experiments
with carbon filaments.
ROSENBERG:
Now the scientific world
has taken notice.
They may not see him
as a great scientist,
but the smart ones knew enough
to respect that he was really
good at solving problems.
NARRATOR:
Finally, in the wee hours
of October 22, 1879,
a bulb was fitted
with a filament
of carbonized cotton thread
and, as had become laboratory
custom, was left to burn.
And so it continued to do,
hour after hour,
for more than
13 and a half hours.
[birds chirping]
Upton, returning
to the laboratory at daybreak,
was amazed to find the light
still on.
ISRAEL:
All of a sudden, the possibility
of a successful lamp
became apparent to everybody
in the laboratory.
They realized,
"Hey, this is the solution."
NARRATOR:
"If it can burn
that number of hours,"
Edison said
amid the cheers of his men,
"I know I can make it burn
a hundred."
"There will be a great sensation
when the light is made known
to the world,"
Francis Upton reported
to his father,
"for it does so much more than
anyone expects can be done."
Now, from the New York papers,
came word of the public
unveiling of Edison's light,
to be held at Menlo Park
on New Year's Eve, 1879.
[whistling]
ISRAEL:
All of a sudden,
hundreds of people
descend on Menlo Park.
They have to put special cars
on the trains
in order to accommodate
all the people
that want to see this new marvel
of Edison's.
You can imagine
what it must have been like.
You're coming out
from New York on a train.
It's a dark night,
fields kind of snow-covered.
You get to Menlo Park,
it's kind of up on the hill
from the railroad track,
and you see these lights
up there.
It must have looked like
a fairyland almost to people,
coming out in the dark of night
to this place
that was lit up in a way
they'd never seen before.
NARRATOR:
20 lampposts lighted their walk
from the depot,
while the laboratory itself
was "brilliantly illuminated,"
one reporter noted,
with some 30 bulbs
that glowed long into the night.
FREEBERG:
The light bulb symbolized
the ability
to push back the night.
Turning night into day,
which had been a primordial
limitation on humanity,
was amazing and transformative.
NARRATOR:
"There can be no particle
of doubt in anyone's mind,"
raved the New York Herald,
"that the electric light
is a success,
and a permanent one."
JILL JONNES:
Put yourself back
into this world
where everything
to do with light was a flame,
and imagine that
all of a sudden,
one day, that changes.
ISRAEL:
There was a sense in which we
were entering a brave new world.
That's what Edison represented,
you know, the world to come.
[chugging]
MYHRVOLD:
Any new invention,
any really powerful idea,
is going to provoke awe
and wonder
and a certain amount of anxiety.
In the 19th century,
technology was making
radical changes.
NARRATOR:
By the early 1880s,
machines had begun to usher
America into the modern world,
warping time in a way that
just a generation before
would have seemed unimaginable.
The journey from New York
to San Francisco,
which once had taken months,
now could be accomplished
in a matter of days,
and a news story written
in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday
was printed
in the Wednesday papers
in cities thousands
of miles away.
In the office and the factory
as well as on the farm,
machines made the task at hand
quicker,
even as electric light
promised to prolong the day.
STAUDENMAIER:
Ordinary people feel like they
are a part of a god-like force
that is sweeping up
a backward world
and turning it into
an immensely sophisticated,
fast-moving, exciting place.
I think at the same time,
it is scaring the hell
out of those same people.
They don't understand
how things work anymore.
Where is the world going?
Edison understood that
there was no halting
this incredibly broad,
incredibly powerful
kind of wave of change
that was sweeping over America.
STAUDENMAIER:
People are saying,
"We can trust this guy
"about a world that we don't
know how to trust exactly.
We can trust this guy."
KOEHN:
He was so admired,
and a lot of that
was just the incredible interest
he compelled
by virtue of what he did
at a moment when the modern
world was being done.
Edison is the machine
in the garden, right?
Chooo, let's go.
And a lot of Americans
grabbed onto that,
held on tight
and surged forward.
NARRATOR:
In February 1881,
Edison left his workbench
at Menlo Park behind
and began spending his days
in New York,
in an elegant brownstone
at 65 Fifth Avenue,
wired with some 200 lamps
to serve as both showplace
and headquarters
for the Edison
Electric Light Company.
By then, the inventor's pledge
to electrify Lower Manhattan
had been stalled
for more than two years,
while his team grappled
with the challenges
of designing the world's first
electrical power grid.
"My light is perfected,"
Edison said.
"I'm going into the practical
production of it."
With his family ensconced
in a suite of rooms
in a nearby hotel,
the inventor plunged in.
FREEBERG:
This was not a science
experiment;
this was a business,
trying to get
a significant return
on a significant amount
of capital investment.
So Edison had to follow
the light bulb
all the way
to its full realization.
NARRATOR:
On Pearl Street, in the heart of
Manhattan's financial district,
two adjoining warehouses
now would be transformed
into Edison's
central power station,
equipped with six
steam engine-dynamo sets
weighing some 30 tons each,
as well as switchboards
and control instruments
and a bank of 1,000 lamps
for testing the system.
Meanwhile, nearly 80,000 feet
of copper conductors
would be laid
below the surrounding streets.
Ultimately, Edison planned
to supply electricity
to a swath of city blocks
a mile square
and provide light
to every subscribing home
and business in the district
with the simple flip
of a switch.
JONNES:
It was massive,
all of the different problems
that he had to solve,
but being Edison, he just
very steadily pushed through.
NARRATOR:
First, New York City officials
had to be convinced
of the wisdom of running
electric current underground
before they awarded Edison the
permit to tear up the streets.
Lamps, meters and the other
system components
had to be mass-produced,
and it fell to Edison
to oversee the factories.
It was, as his secretary noted,
"a gigantic undertaking,"
one that required the inventor
to be administrator,
manufacturer
and salesman all at once.
And on top of everything,
there were the "money men,"
as Edison called them,
who never failed
to provide distraction.
JONNES:
J.P. Morgan not only puts his
money into Edison's company,
he decides that he personally
is going to showcase
this new amazing technology
in his own mansion.
So he lets Edison,
who's up to his eyeballs
with all these other problems,
know that he would like
someone to come
and set up what was known
as an isolated unit
at Morgan's house.
Morgan's house is lit up,
and Morgan had these
various soirees to show it off,
and many other rich people
contracted
to have Edison come in
and do these isolated units.
NARRATOR:
The isolated units proved
profitable, but a pain.
Neighbors complained
about the roar of the machinery,
which usually was placed in
the customer's cellar or stable
or else in a pit
under the back garden.
Wires crossed
or short-circuited,
and fires broke out.
At least one
hysterical housewife
demanded the entire installation
be removed.
Still, the orders
came pouring in.
ISRAEL:
These isolated plants boomed.
There are thousands of them.
That was the way in which the
company was making its money,
but Edison's vision
was a central station,
and Edison wanted
to make that happen.
NARRATOR:
Although the demands on Edison's
time were relentless,
whenever he could,
he slipped out of his suit
and away from the office
and headed farther downtown,
to Pearl Street.
There, in the shadow
of the rising Brooklyn Bridge,
his crews were at work,
frantically digging trenches,
laying mains
and troubleshooting equipment.
By the summer of 1882,
the project was finally
nearing completion.
KOEHN:
You had to be able to not just
marshal the science,
but then put the people
and the money, the capital,
and the organizations together,
and the politics.
I can't think of another figure
who could operate
on all those different levels.
NARRATOR:
On the afternoon
of September 4,
the switch at Pearl Street
was thrown
and hundreds of lamps throughout
the so-called First District
simultaneously began to glow.
Edison's power grid
had successfully lighted one
square mile of Lower Manhattan.
It seemed only a matter of time
before it would light the world.
Nearly four years had passed
since Edison had promised
to bring electricity
into people's homes--
four years full of obstacles
and pressure
and the persistent,
pioneering work of hundreds.
Now that he had achieved
what many thought impossible,
the garrulous inventor was
almost too worn out for comment.
"I have accomplished
all that I promised,"
Edison said to a reporter.
And for once,
he left it at that.
KOEHN:
He hated anything
that took him away
from the tinkering and
the thinking and the inventing,
but he kept doing it.
He says,
"I know how to do this
and with God as my witness,
I'm going to do this."
And so that stubbornness
gets us to this
extraordinary accomplishment
that really, really, really
changed the world.
NARRATOR:
It was the middle
of July 1884--
and for Edison, just another
long day of work in New York--
when word from Menlo Park
arrived.
Mrs. Edison had taken to her bed
in the house
they still owned there.
She was desperately ill.
Mary's puzzling ailments
had long been a source of stress
in the Edison household.
But in her grief over
the recent death of her father,
she had seemed more fragile
than ever.
A doctor had been called, but
there was little he could do.
At 2:00 in the morning
on August 9, Mary Edison died.
She was 29.
ISRAEL:
There's a good possibility
that she may have died
from morphine overdose.
She appears to have had
some serious complications
from her third pregnancy,
which created a lot of pain.
In that era, opium and morphine
were used in almost every drug,
and accidental overdoses
were not uncommon.
But you know, her death
was pretty sudden.
NARRATOR:
Edison had hurried home
barely in time to say goodbye.
His daughter Marion later
would recall waking to find him
at his wife's bedside,
"shaking with grief."
STROSS:
We can speculate
that Edison felt guilt
for having spent
all these years,
the entirety
of their married life,
removed from the household,
immersed in the world
of the lab.
And now it was all over.
NARRATOR:
Under other circumstances,
Edison might have immersed
himself in work,
but he had no inventive project
to consume him.
Electric power had unraveled
the creative fraternity
of Menlo Park,
as his trusted lieutenants
had scattered
to manage his various
lighting concerns.
Edison himself
had spent the two years
since the launch of Pearl Street
working tirelessly
to extend his system,
and though the effort
had made him a millionaire,
money for its own sake
did not much interest him.
[chugging]
NARRATOR:
Edison was 37 years old now
and suddenly a widower
with three children to raise.
Just weeks after Mary's death,
he left the boys
in her mother's care,
and with 12-year-old
daughter Marion in tow
headed for the International
Electrical Exhibition
in Philadelphia
and a rendezvous with
an old friend, Ezra Gilliland.
ISRAEL:
They had known each other
as telegraphers.
They actually practiced
their telegraph skills
by transmitting
Shakespeare's plays.
So Ezra Gilliland is his
best friend for many years.
And in 1884,
they meet in Philadelphia
and decide that they're
going to go off
and become kind of
an inventive partnership.
NARRATOR:
Collaboration brought
a renewed companionship,
and in the winter of 1885,
a meandering leisure trip
together south.
In Florida, on a whim,
Edison bought 13 riverside acres
in Fort Myers
and gave half the plot
to his old friend.
The two would build vacation
homes there, side by side.
STROSS:
Briefly, Edison makes himself
emotionally more open
than he had ever been before.
It's as if he had resolved
to leave the world of work
and try a different style
in approaching life.
NARRATOR:
It was through Gilliland
that Edison was introduced
to Mina Miller,
the 19-year-old daughter of a
prominent Ohio industrialist.
Edison, then 38,
was instantly smitten.
Before long, the young Miss
Miller had become an obsession.
"Got thinking about Mina
and came near to being run over
by a streetcar,"
he wrote in a diary.
"If Mina interferes much more,
will have to take out
an accident policy."
Reunited finally
while on holiday
at Gilliland's summer home,
Edison taught Mina Morse code,
tapping out messages on her hand
so they might communicate
privately even when in company.
He proposed in the same manner.
ROSENBERG:
Unlike his first wife,
Mina grew up in a very
sophisticated world.
She was the daughter of someone
who was himself an inventor.
She'd moved in society circles.
She knew what it meant to be
around famous people
and had a better sense
than a lot of women would have
of what it would be like
to marry one.
BALDWIN:
She realized he was Mr. Edison,
she realized
he was a big shot,
but she had her own interests,
and she had much more
of a sense of herself.
NARRATOR:
With marriage came a new house,
a grand 23-room mansion
in West Orange, New Jersey.
Three more children--
a daughter and two sons--
would eventually join
the Edison family.
Now that his domestic life
was settled,
the inventor was anxious
to get back to his first love.
ISRAEL:
The way in which Edison thought
about himself as a family man
is best captured by a letter
to his second wife.
He writes, "You and the children
and the laboratory
are the most important things
in my life."
And I think the inclusion
of laboratory tells you a lot.
I would argue
that the laboratory
probably ought to be
at the top of that list.
NARRATOR:
"I want none of the rich man's
usual toys,"
Edison once told a reporter.
"I have no time for them.
What I want is
a perfect workshop."
NARRATOR:
When it opened
in December 1887,
Edison's "perfect workshop" was,
in his own words,
"the best equipped
and largest laboratory extant."
Occupying a corner lot
on Main Street,
just down the hill
from his new home,
the complex included
a sprawling central structure
that, at 60,000 square feet,
was ten times larger
than Menlo Park.
In addition to machine shops
and chemical
and experimental rooms,
there was a vast technical
library and a stockroom
furnished, as the proud
inventor quipped,
with "everything
from an elephant's hide
to the eyeballs
of a United States Senator."
"My plan,"
he told a prospective backer,
"contemplates to working
on only that class of inventions
"which require but small
investments for each.
No cumbersome inventions
like the electric light."
Edison was fairly bursting
with ideas.
His catalogue of
"Things doing and to be done"
in the new laboratory
ran to five full pages
and included everything
from artificial silk
to a snow compressor
to ink for the blind.
KOEHN:
You can't work
as much as he did,
in as many different spheres,
with as much zeal as he did,
if you don't have some real fire
burning inside there.
And that fire has to be
a passion for what he was doing
and literally the act
of doing it.
He loves his mind.
He loves slipping into it.
For him, it was exactly
what made him come alive,
what gave him his mission.
And I can only imagine him
lying on his cot, right,
at the back of the lab,
having one of his catnaps,
and then waking up and going,
"Oh, this is what
I was thinking about,
and here's how I'm thinking
about it differently now."
And, you know,
being in his element
by being in the kind of
very, very interesting,
very, very active black hole
of his thinking.
NARRATOR:
Edison had hoped to make
a fresh start
in his new laboratory.
Instead, he would find
his pursuit of new inventions
eclipsed by old ones,
and his perpetual reach
for the top rung
this time would carry him
straight to the bottom.
ARTHUR SULLIVAN [recording]:
It is the most wonderful thing
that I have ever experienced.
NARRATOR:
For the better part of a decade,
Edison's phonograph
had lain dormant,
"comatose for the time being,"
he'd told reporters
when queried about it.
But by the late 1880s,
his old rival,
Alexander Graham Bell,
and his cousin Chichester,
a chemist,
had picked up
where Edison left off.
ROSENBERG:
Alexander Graham Bell's cousin
comes to him and says,
"Tom, isn't this cool?
"Look what I did.
I've done a mod
to your phonograph."
And he had taken the phonograph
and put a sort of
wax surface on it
instead of tin foil,
and Edison's basic response was,
"Uh-uh, not while
I'm around, fella."
STROSS:
Edison did not have
a generous nature,
and he was most unwilling
to say to a rival, "Well done."
GITELMAN:
I think he, you know,
got kind of anxious.
"I have this little bit
of intellectual property here,
"I'm known for this,
and now other people
"are sort of inventing
around my invention.
I better get back to it."
NARRATOR:
Denouncing the Bell associates
as "pirates,"
Edison had vowed to best
their machine
and immediately set to work
on what he called
"the perfected phonograph."
To assist in the effort,
he'd made his friend
Ezra Gilliland
an official partner,
giving him charge of the
marketing and manufacturing
of the improved device.
But when Gilliland
expressed concerns
over design flaws
in one prototype
and offered Edison his own ideas
for potential improvements,
he was coldly rebuffed.
It was impossible,
Edison told him,
for a man to do business
and invent simultaneously.
I think Gilliland did feel
that he was more of an equal
partner in this operation
than Edison perceived him
as being.
The problem is that for Edison,
nobody is quite his equal.
ROSENBERG:
If you had your own ideas
and you really wanted to go off,
you were kind of
in the wrong place
because it was really
Edison's party.
NARRATOR:
Then, in the spring of 1888,
Gilliland was approached
by an entrepreneur,
who offered to buy
the marketing rights
to Edison's new phonograph.
Edison stood to make $500,000
from the sale.
Gilliland,
in a secret side deal,
negotiated a payout for himself
of $250,000.
ISRAEL:
Basically, Gilliland
put a lot of pressure on him
that this was probably the best
deal he was going to get.
So Edison gave in
to the pressure.
NARRATOR:
It was several months
before Edison became aware
of the sum paid to Gilliland,
and then he was enraged.
"I just learn you have made
a certain trade
of a nature unknown to me,"
he cabled Gilliland,
then in Europe.
"I have this day abrogated
your contract."
ROSENBERG:
Edison felt it was
an utter betrayal,
and I think that
stung him deeply
in a way that he hadn't
been hurt before.
STROSS:
Edison, from the moment
he became famous,
felt that people
wanted things from him,
and Gilliland was someone
he knew from way back,
so he trusted him.
Edison would not allow himself
to be in a vulnerable
position again.
NARRATOR:
In Fort Myers,
on the land the longtime friends
had planned to share,
two newly constructed houses
stood side by side.
Edison now instructed
the caretaker to "cut the pipes"
that supplied Gilliland's house
with water.
BALDWIN:
Thomas Edison had a highly
cultivated sense of betrayal,
and either you were with him
or you weren't.
It was quite black and white
in that regard.
NARRATOR:
By 1888, the electrification
of the United States
was well under way.
In the six years since Edison
had thrown the switch
on the first electrical
power grid at Pearl Street,
his empire had grown
to include 121 central stations
in cities and towns
across the country,
from Birmingham, Alabama,
to Grand Rapids, Michigan,
as well as numerous others
in Europe and Latin America.
But already,
the industry he'd founded
was bristling
with competition.
In 1884, Pittsburgh entrepreneur
George Westinghouse
had gotten into the game,
buying up patents
from electrical inventors
in America and abroad
and quickly developing
his own rival system.
More recently,
the Thomson-Houston Company,
a longtime supplier
of arc light,
had begun installing
its own central stations,
using technology licensed
from Westinghouse.
Now the race was on
to light the dark corners
of the world.
STAUDENMAIER:
If you are the town council
in a town of 5,000 people
in Ohio someplace
and you're debating,
"Do we want to electrify?"
you know that
there's Westinghouse,
there's Thomson-Houston,
and there's Edison.
All of them claim to be able
to deliver a whole package
to you.
NARRATOR:
Both Westinghouse
and Thomson-Houston
were peddling
a new delivery system,
developed in Europe
and known as
alternating current, or AC,
which employed
high-voltage wires
to transmit electricity
over long distances--
as much as several hundred miles
from the generating station.
By contrast,
Edison's low-voltage
direct current system, or DC,
with its maximum delivery range
of only a mile or two,
seemed downright antiquated.
You can imagine how much more
attractive it was to a city
if you came as a Westinghouse
salesman and said,
"We don't have to build
power houses every one mile.
"We'll put something
on the outskirts of town,
and as your town grows,"
and remember,
this is 19th-century America,
it's growing very, very rapidly,
"We can just expand and provide
more and more electricity
from this one power station."
NARRATOR:
With his competitors
undercutting him on cost,
Edison was feeling the squeeze.
To his 121 domestic stations,
Westinghouse already had 68
after just one year in business.
As AC begins to become
a real serious competitor
and as the Westinghouse system
begins to spread,
increasingly,
Edison's closest associates
are begging him to turn to AC.
There are lots of advantages
to AC,
and Edison refuses to go along
with them.
ROSENBERG:
Alternating current
is very complicated
compared to direct current.
To understand it,
to make it work
requires a level of mathematics
he just didn't have.
He just didn't have
the background.
NARRATOR:
With his own dominance
in the industry at stake,
Edison's competitive streak
short-circuited.
This time, instead of
out-inventing his rivals,
he would conduct a ruthless
campaign to discredit them.
Capitalizing on a recent spate
of grisly accidents
involving high-voltage wires,
Edison now sought to convince
the public that AC was unsafe.
"It's a matter of fact,"
he warned
in a widely-circulated pamphlet,
"that any system employing
high voltage jeopardizes life."
ISRAEL:
The safety issue
was an important one.
But it's also the case
that there were ways to solve
that, and they were solved.
And so I think he had
real concerns about danger,
but this was his system.
NARRATOR:
From West Orange
now came accounts
of gruesome experiments designed
to prove AC's deadly power:
the electrocutions of dogs,
calves, horses,
all by means
of alternating current.
Edison also offered
his expertise to New York State
in its effort to introduce
a "humane" method of execution,
testifying that electricity
would indeed be more humane
than the gallows.
JONNES:
All of a sudden Edison,
who had always been
against capital punishment,
suddenly is completely
behind the electric chair,
and he feels that
the best way to do this
is to use, guess what,
Westinghouse
alternating current generators,
and it is fully his intention
to associate everything to do
with Westinghouse
and his electricity with death.
BALDWIN:
He had a very adversarial view
toward other people's technology
and he fought to preserve
his own technology,
and that might've been
his downfall.
NARRATOR:
In the end,
Edison's grisly campaign
made not a dent
in his competitor's sales.
And by 1890,
it was clear to J.P. Morgan
and the other partners
in Edison General Electric
that the future lay
with alternating current,
and their future profits
in a merger
with Westinghouse's principal
rival, Thomson-Houston.
"If you make the coalition,
my usefulness as an inventor
is gone," Edison warned.
"I can only invent
under powerful incentive.
No competition
means no invention."
It was a price the money men
were willing to pay.
STAUDENMAIER:
Basically, the Edison people
said, "We're going AC."
So he was forced
out of that game
is really what happened.
There's no question about that.
NARRATOR:
Edison had little to do
with the merger,
and in the course
of negotiations,
his name was dropped.
From then on,
the company would be known
simply as General Electric.
STROSS:
He had backed
the wrong technology,
and the end was
he lost control.
NARRATOR:
Edison departed with stock in
the newly consolidated venture
and a seat
on its board of directors.
But he was eager to move on.
"I'm going to do something now
so different and so much bigger
than anything I've ever done
before," he told his secretary,
"that people will forget
my name was ever connected
with anything electrical."
JONNES:
Edison, who always wanted
to look like the champion,
said, "Oh, you know,
electricity is an old thing.
"I'm really done with that.
"So, you know,
I've created this world."
Sort of "Lesser beings
will move it forward."
But the truth is
he was heartbroken.
NARRATOR:
Ogdensburg, New Jersey--
a desolate region
30 miles from West Orange,
strewn with quarries
and scarred by mines,
perpetually covered in dust.
It was to this place that Edison
retreated in the early 1890s,
convinced that
its stony landscape
would yield to him
the next big thing.
The United States was then in
the throes of a building frenzy,
two decades and counting
of railroads and bridges
being banged together,
cities stretching outward
and up.
All of it hinged on steel,
and thus on iron ore,
and the rich veins in the East
were by now running dry.
Edison intended to keep
the nation's steel mills humming
with an ingenious new process
for extracting iron
from low-grade ore.
[loud whistling]
[explosion]
BALDWIN:
He invented the process
that began with dynamiting
these mountains,
breaking them
into giant boulders,
pulverizing the boulders
in these giant
interlocking drums
that break them further down,
then break those down
into pebble size,
pulverize that down
through a screening system
so you ended up with this
like very fine sediment,
and that's when the iron
was pulled out.
GITELMAN:
Fantastic idea to get iron ore,
to grind it up, right,
and then drop it
and have it drop past
Just let it drop past
some magnets, right?
And so the actual iron would be
pulled out by the magnets
and the worthless ore
would fall to the ground.
Genius idea.
NARRATOR:
It was not enough
that the effort
required Edison
to design and build
a whole series
of gargantuan new machines;
he also intended to automate
the entire plant
so that the ore processed there
would never once be touched
by human hands.
For the first time
in many years,
the inventor could once again
immerse himself in inventing.
LEONARD DEGRAAF:
Fundamentally, Edison is
a technical problem-solver.
It's basically
what he wants to do,
and that is, he wants to bring
a bunch of his mates together
and solve fun
technical problems.
And at Ogdensburg, he's doing it
on a massive scale.
That is fun.
That's like a big sandbox.
NARRATOR:
From 1890 on,
as the plant took shape
and the technical staff grew
to more than 200,
the Ogden works consumed more
and more of Edison's time.
Finally, in 1894, he moved up
to the mine entirely,
promising Mina to return home
to West Orange on Sundays.
BALDWIN:
But he ended up building himself
a little cabin up there.
It was called "The White House,"
but it was really kind of grimy
and dusty and horrible,
and he wrote some letters
to his wife.
It was like he was high
off of how grimy it was
and disgusting it was.
And in terms of his
hands-on approach, you know,
describing crawling
underneath these machines
and fixing them himself
because "There's nobody else
who can do it,"
you know, it's like a CEO
that can't let go.
You still have to get down
to the nitty-gritty,
you can't help yourself.
NARRATOR:
At times, even to Edison,
the enterprise seemed cursed.
Machinery malfunctioned.
Buildings collapsed.
More than once,
the plant had to be shut down
for lack of cash.
Having steered clear
of partners,
Edison had to shore up
the venture
with his personal fortune
again and again,
eventually selling even
his shares in General Electric
to keep it afloat.
None of it seemed to faze him.
As he put it in one letter
to Mina,
"Your lover is
as bright and cheerful
as a bumblebee in flower time."
STROSS:
He liked the idea
of not being too old
to handle rough conditions,
throwing out all of the comforts
of modern life
and living as a roughneck.
Maybe it was a reaction
to his having to keep
Wall Street happy.
There were no investors
anywhere near that mine.
DEGRAAF:
He's away from the pressures
of being Thomas Edison,
the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
And so in Ogdensburg,
he can be himself.
NARRATOR:
No matter the difficulty,
Edison kept at it
year after year,
so seemingly unconcerned
with the bottom line
that many took to calling
the Ogden "Edison's Folly."
Even before the plant
was fully operational,
the price for its product
plummeted,
its value diminished
by the discovery
of a vast new source
of high-grade ore
in the Midwest.
Edison finally admitted defeat
in 1898.
By then, he'd sunk
nearly ten years
and some $2 million of his
own money into the venture.
ISRAEL:
Why did Edison stick with that
for so long?
It was a technical challenge
that Edison really enjoyed
taking on.
In fact, he later says,
you know,
he's talking to his assistant
in the ore milling venture
at the end of it,
and they're looking at where
they'd dug out all this ore,
a big hole in the ground,
and this guy says,
"Well, you sure wasted
a lot of money on that,"
and Edison says, "Yeah,
but we sure had fun doing it."
He had such a great time, right,
that it didn't matter
that he spent that much money
on this hole in the ground,
so to speak.
NARRATOR:
In the quest
for commercial iron ore,
the inventor had instead
found fresh inspiration.
KOEHN:
There's something
very interesting
about how he literally lets go
of what most of the people
around him would call failure
and then moves forward
without a huge amount
of reflection, soul searching.
He's thinking, he's seeing,
he's observing, he's filing,
but he's moving.
This was a man who really
didn't spend a lot of time
looking backward.
NARRATOR:
They called it the "Black Maria"
for its resemblance
to a police wagon.
Built in the winter of 1893
just outside the main laboratory
at West Orange,
the tar-papered structure
had been positioned
atop an enormous lazy susan
so that it could be rotated
to follow the sun
and outfitted
with a retractable roof
to maximize available light.
It was from this curious
building on November 1, 1894
[gunfire]
that the shots
suddenly rang out.
Inside, America's beloved
sharpshooter Annie Oakley,
Little Sureshot,
was performing her act,
firing away at tiny glass balls
as Edison's latest invention
captured the action
in real time.
The device,
an electrically powered camera
capable of recording motion,
was the first of its kind
in the United States
and a mechanical monument
to Edison's unparalleled gift
for synthesis.
The idea had come to him
nearly six years before,
sparked by a conversation
he'd had
with British photographer
Eadward Muybridge.
ISRAEL:
Eadward Muybridge,
who was very well known
for these animal motion studies,
had developed this device.
It was a revolving disk
with these images on it,
and as it revolved
with a light shining through it,
it looked like motion pictures.
And he gave a lecture
in West Orange,
which Edison attended,
and afterwards,
they were talking.
And Edison said, "You know,
we ought to combine
"my phonograph
with your machine
and we can produce
talking pictures."
And then Edison got to thinking
a little bit more about that,
and he said,
"You know what?
I can do that myself."
NARRATOR:
Within months, Edison had
drawn up a patent application
for an optical recording device
called a "kinetograph,"
from the ancient Greek
meaning "writer of motion."
The kinetograph, he promised,
would "do for the eye
what the phonograph does
for the ear."
BALDWIN:
It makes the transition
sound so effortless
and truly brilliant.
There's something god-like
about it.
"I have solved the problem
of the ear and that sensory,
and now I will move to the other
way that we perceive the world."
NARRATOR:
Further inspiration
had been found
during a visit to Paris in 1889,
where Edison had met French
scientist Etienne-Jules Marey,
whose "chronophotography"
captured 12 consecutive images
per second
on a long,
continuous piece of film.
ISRAEL:
Marey had been filming birds
by converting a gun
into a camera
so that as you pulled
the trigger,
he was actually taking
rapid pictures of them
with strip film.
And this influenced Edison
to go back and experiment
with roll film.
ROSENBERG:
Motion picture technology
is difficult.
You have to have film
that stops, gets the image,
advances, stops,
gets the next image.
And it has to do that
20, 30 times a second.
So you need film
that can take the beating.
You need film that's
sensitive enough to do it.
Edison worked
with George Eastman
to develop the film
with the sprocket holes,
figuring out
how the machinery's
going to advance the film,
stop it,
advance the film,
stop it.
And he developed
a really terrific camera,
and that was his contribution.
NARRATOR:
Throughout, Edison had worked
closely with his assistant
in the mining operation,
a sometime-photographer
named William Dickson,
who was largely responsible
for the optics of the device.
Now, Dickson had begun
to produce the first films
in what eventually would be
the Edison Company's
extensive catalogue,
a collection of short features
meant to be shown
one at a time
on a coin-operated,
peephole viewing cabinet
called a kinetoscope.
STROSS:
The first motion picture
entertainment device
was an ingenious contraption
that allowed you to see
a loop of film,
a very short loop.
NARRATOR:
The inaugural batch
of kinetoscopes
shipped from West Orange
in April 1894:
five to Atlantic City,
ten to Chicago,
and ten to a small storefront
in Manhattan,
a former shoe shop
near Herald Square
soon to become the world's first
commercial "kinetoscope parlor."
STROSS:
They were setting up
the machines,
getting ready to open,
and curiosity seekers
had gathered
and they decided to let them in,
to give the machines a try,
and it turned out
to overwhelm them.
The public poured in.
The novelty of the thing
was incredibly attractive.
ISRAEL:
The kinetoscope,
it's a lot like the original
tin foil phonograph.
It's an astounding invention.
People are enthralled by it,
they want to see it,
they want to experience it,
but pretty soon,
it doesn't go anywhere, right?
These short films,
you pay a nickel,
you see something,
and all of a sudden,
there's nothing magic about it.
NARRATOR:
Convinced that
the constant interruption
of having to move
from one machine to another
detracted from the viewing
experience,
Dickson and others
on Edison's team
urged him to develop
a projection device.
But the inventor was reluctant.
"If projectors replace
kinetoscopes," he argued,
"there will be a use
for maybe ten of them
"in the whole United States.
Let's not kill the goose
that lays the golden egg."
In the end, others would
beat him to the punch.
In early 1895, French inventors
Auguste and Louis Lumière
introduced their projection
system to wild acclaim in Paris.
Later that year, yet another
system, called the phantascope,
was unveiled at the
Cotton States Exposition
in Atlanta, Georgia.
ISRAEL:
All of a sudden,
larger-than-life figures
appeared on a screen.
And that was the future
of motion pictures.
Very rapidly, projection becomes
something that people expect.
NARRATOR:
With no projector of their own
to market, Edison's sales agents
approached the phantoscope's
inventor, Thomas Armat,
and convinced him to sell
the patent rights in his device
to Edison.
"The great majority
of the parties
"who desire to invest
in such a machine
have been waiting for the Edison
machine," Armat was told,
"and they would never be
satisfied with anything else."
ISRAEL:
They essentially say,
"You know that everybody's
waiting for Edison,
"so why don't you just sell out
to him?
You'll do much better than
trying to compete with him."
I think in Edison's own mind,
he could just slap his name
on what became known as
the Edison Vitascope
because by that time,
Edison is both the individual
and he's the corporate Edison.
He could be one or the other,
depending on the circumstance.
And in this case,
it was the corporate Edison
that was the Vitascope.
NARRATOR:
Billed by the press
as "the ingenious inventor's
latest toy,"
the Vitascope made its public
debut on April 23, 1896
at New York City's
Koster and Bials' Music Hall,
throwing hand-tinted images
across a 20 by 13 foot screen
and effectively launching the
American motion picture industry
in Edison's name.
[piano music playing]
KOEHN:
The more you peel back
the layers of Edison's work,
the more you realize
that part of his genius
was about seeing how
other people's achievements,
thoughts, failures,
small successes
could be connected
to push forward
what he was working on
in a big way.
For Edison, it was about
taking all these ideas,
all those different
river streams
which were initiated or fed
by all kinds of other people,
and then building the aqueduct
to channel the river.
NARRATOR:
On a Saturday afternoon
in January 1903,
55-year-old Thomas Edison
welcomed a new man
to the chemical research
department at West Orange
with a few choice words
of advice:
"Nothing that's any good
works by itself," he said.
"You've got to make
the damn thing work."
It was more or less
the Edison creed.
As one acquaintance put it,
"Edison pronounces the words
'work' and 'working'
as some do 'prayer'
or 'religion.'"
Already, fewer than five years
after he'd abandoned
the Ogden mine,
the inventor had a half-dozen
new projects on the wire
and was routinely putting in
80-hour weeks at the lab.
From the wreckage of Ogden,
using much of the same machinery
and techniques,
he'd spun a manufactory
for cement
which one day would be used in
the building of Yankee Stadium
and give rise to a grand plan
to build low-cost housing
with poured concrete.
He'd immersed himself
in the development
of a storage battery,
believing that the future
of transportation
lay in automobiles
powered by electricity,
and had once again
revived the phonograph,
this time
for home entertainment.
Gradually, the West Orange
complex expanded
to include a city block's worth
of new buildings,
where a thousand men and women
were put to work
making recordings and
manufacturing cylinder records.
Also vying
for the inventor's attention
was motion picture production,
now expanding
into longer, narrative films;
the manufacture of bulbs,
fan motors, medical equipment
and other assorted devices;
and the myriad details of
overseeing the business empire
that by 1911 operated
under the umbrella
of "Thomas A. Edison,
Incorporated,"
now a worldwide brand.
STROSS:
In their advertising,
the Edison Companies would make
much of the Edison name,
as if the inventor stood
literally over the loading dock
and gave his blessing
to every box
that went out of the factory.
GITELMAN:
His face was all over
these products,
his name was all over them,
his signature was all over them.
This is really the beginning
of American trademark
consciousness.
NARRATOR:
So valuable did
the Edison name become
that the inventor
increasingly would find himself
fending off
its unauthorized use.
And when his son, Tom,
sold his famous surname
to a fraudulent
homeopathic medicine company,
Edison offered to pay him
a regular allowance
if he would change it.
For $25 a week, the inventor's
namesake, "Thomas Edison, Jr."
thus became known professionally
as "Burton Willard."
GITELMAN:
The weird thing is that
he went after his son,
whose name was "Edison"
because he was Edison.
So I'm certain he was very aware
of himself as a brand
in really almost a modern sense.
NARRATOR:
It proved a savvy strategy.
As technology wove itself
ever more tightly
into the fabric
of American life,
with more and more households
boasting a telephone
in the hallway
and all manner of gadgets
in the kitchen
and an automobile parked outside
in the drive,
Edison continued to loom large
in the public mind
as the nation's
foremost inventor.
DEGRAAF:
Technology was spectacle.
All these things
were being developed
that were just literally
transforming people's lives.
And the public
really identified Edison
with this new modern
electrical age,
so it translates also
over into Edison
sometimes getting credit for
things that he didn't invent.
MYHRVOLD:
If I'm at a cocktail party
and I tell someone
that I'm an inventor,
there's exactly two people
they think of.
They think of Thomas Edison
and the crazy guy in the
Back to the Futuremovies,
which is kind of
an Edison lampoon.
Edison single-handedly created
the image of an inventor.
NARRATOR:
"Please accept the thanks,
Mr. Edison,
of one truly
appreciative woman,"
a Kansas housewife wrote him,
after extolling the virtues
of her pressure cooker
and her washing machine
and her Victrola.
"We women of the small town
are indebted to you
for our pleasures
as well as our utmost needs."
[alarm ringing]
[men shouting]
NARRATOR:
It began in the early evening
of December 9, 1914.
Sparked by an explosion
in the film-finishing building,
the massive fire leapt
from structure to structure
at West Orange,
gathering force and momentum
from the chemicals used
in the manufacture
of phonograph recordings,
as well as the records
themselves.
The flames could be seen
from Newark, seven miles away.
Throughout the evening,
Edison stood watching
as a constellation
of local fire companies
struggled to douse the blaze,
which soon engulfed
four city blocks.
By 10:00 p.m., he'd already
begun making a list
of what would need to be done
to recover.
"Am pretty well burned out,"
he told a reporter on the scene,
"but tomorrow, there will be
some rapid mobilizing
when I find out where I'm at."
Although the main laboratory
was untouched,
by morning, most of the rest
of the West Orange complex
was molten rubble.
Edison was undaunted.
When informed that the damages
were estimated
at between $3 million and
$5 million, he just laughed.
"Although I am over
67 years old," he said,
"I'll start all over again
tomorrow."
NARRATOR:
The years to come
would see Edison winding down,
spending less and less of his
time at his West Orange complex,
which eventually was rebuilt,
and more occupying a new role
as a full-fledged celebrity.
Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
[audience laughs, applauds]
NARRATOR:
He was often seen now
gallivanting about the country
with fellow American hero
Henry Ford,
who as a young man
had worked briefly
for the Edison Illuminating
Company in Detroit
and had idolized
the great inventor ever since.
ISRAEL:
As Ford tells it,
he talked to Edison about
his ideas for the automobile.
After Edison took a look
at his plans,
he said, "Go for it.
I think you've got
the answer here."
Ford clearly saw Edison as
somebody to model himself after,
and they began
to become friends.
NARRATOR:
Calling themselves
"the vagabonds,"
the two men hit the road
each summer,
together with naturalist
John Burroughs
and tire magnate
Harvey Firestone,
Edison usually in the lead
of a caravan
that included a field kitchen,
dining tent, laundry service
and a contingent of cameramen
from Ford's publicity
department.
By the second annual sortie,
which also included wives,
the press was bringing up
the rear.
STAUDENMAIER:
They were media extravaganzas
of the first order.
But it was nostalgia for them:
four guys out there
in the woods,
cooking and making their coffee,
and it was nostalgia
for the people
that loved to see those stories.
"The old guys still got it,
look at that."
NARRATOR:
Fueled by extensive publicity,
the details
of the Vagabonds' adventures
circulated through
the national conversation:
the rib-eye steaks
that were served for dinner;
the campfire debates
about Mozart and Shakespeare;
the fact that one year,
the Firestones
even brought along their butler.
ROSENBERG:
There is a story,
they were out
and the car was having trouble.
They pull in to a small town
and the guy says,
"Oh, well, it looks like
the electrical system."
And Edison says,
"No, I'm Thomas Edison,
"I looked at the electrical
system.
The electrical system's fine."
The guy looks at him
and looks at the car
a little more and says,
"Oh, I see,
it's in the fuel here."
And Ford says,
"No," he says, "I'm Henry Ford.
"I went through the fuel system.
There's nothing wrong
with the fuel system."
And the fellow looks
at John Burroughs,
who had a beard this long,
and says, "And you," he says,
"you're Santa Claus, right?"
[playing march tune]
NARRATOR:
Almost mythic in stature now,
Edison could barely turn around
without being honored.
One poll named him
"The Greatest Living American."
In another, he beat out
Theodore Roosevelt
and William Shakespeare as
the "Greatest Man in History."
There was a Congressional Medal,
a commemorative stamp,
even a song entitled "Thomas
Edison: the Miracle Man."
KOEHN:
Journalists, politicians,
individuals, other inventors,
pour their ideas about
what constitutes invention
into a file folder called
"Thomas Alva Edison."
And that's not his doing.
A lot of it is just
where he was at the time
and the kind of impact he had
that doesn't ever get balanced
against the failures
or the people that fed the river
of those inventions.
He gets to end up
holding it, right,
and stands atop the mountaintop
as this great, great inventor.
ROSENBERG:
Now he is the sage.
When you want a great quote,
you ask him,
even if there's absolutely
no reason
why he should know anything
about it.
BALDWIN:
In his last years, he actually
looks halfway relaxed
if you can imagine Edison
being relaxed.
And so people
would come to his house
and they would have
these interviews
where they would ask him
his views
on everything and anything
you can think of.
What do you think of
the Einstein theory?
I don't think anything
of Einstein's theory
because I can't understand it.
[laughing]
NARRATOR:
In 1926, at the age of 79,
Edison officially retired from
Thomas A. Edison, Incorporated,
passing the reins on to his
and Mina's eldest son, Charles,
and taking up more or less
permanent residence
at his home in Fort Myers.
The same old place.
[louder]:
The same old place.
What?
The same old place.
NARRATOR:
Not content to rest
on the laurels
of the more than 1,000 patents
registered in his name,
he busied himself with yet
another inventive campaign:
to discover and cultivate
a domestic source of rubber.
Almost completely deaf,
suffering from kidney disease
and a persistent
digestive ailment,
Edison had, in a sort of
medical experiment,
eliminated food entirely,
limiting his diet
to several daily cigars
and a pint of milk
every three hours.
"I came in with milk," he said,
"and I guess
I'll go out with it."
Returning to West Orange
in 1931
after a winter in Florida,
he was in such
a debilitated state
that he was virtually
unable to work.
Early in September,
his kidneys began to fail;
by the end of the month,
he was confined to his bed.
STROSS:
As Edison's health failed,
reporters gathered
in West Orange.
They took over the garage
and made it a press office.
This went on for weeks.
The attention that it received,
with the most minute change
or word from a doctor
being sent out around the world
as news,
shows a kind of fame that's
hard to imagine today.
NARRATOR:
The news of Edison's passing
on October 18, 1931
brought forth an outpouring
rarely afforded mere mortals.
Condolences arrived
from all over the world
from heads of state, civic
organizations, schoolchildren.
Newspapers from coast to coast
ran special features,
recounting not only
the inventor's death,
but also the by-now-familiar
story of his life.
REPORTER:
Workers at his Orange,
New Jersey, plant
paid last respects to the man
whose inventive genius
freed the world from darkness.
NARRATOR:
For two days and nights,
Edison's body lay in state
in the library of his
West Orange laboratory,
as more than 50,000 people
passed to pay their respects.
And on the third night,
in response to a request
from President Herbert Hoover,
radio listeners
across the country
switched off their lights
in unison,
the darkness meant as a reminder
of what life would have been
like had Edison never lived.
BALDWIN:
It was almost like a Biblical,
catastrophic thing.
Like, "the inventor
of the light,
his light has gone out"
kind of thing.
Because he created
this technology
that was now part
of everybody's daily life.
MYHRVOLD:
They didn't have to have
directly owned a phonograph
to have heard it
and be influenced by it.
They didn't all have to have
electric light,
but they soon would.
Thomas Edison was born
into a world
that wasn't industrialized.
Indoor lighting was candles
or a kerosene lamp.
We couldn't record voices
or sounds or motions.
What Edison left
by the end of his life
was a world
that was well on its way
to becoming the world
we know today.
NARRATOR:
"It is impossible to measure
the importance of Edison
"by adding up
the specific inventions
with which his name
is associated,"
the journalist
Walter Lippmann wrote
in the days
after the inventor's death.
"Edison showed that
anything could be changed
and everything
could be controlled."
ISRAEL:
We think of the act of invention
as this eureka moment.
Aha! The light bulb goes off,
we have this great idea,
that's invention.
But for Edison,
that was the starting point,
because he didn't
just have ideas
and build devices that worked
in the laboratory;
he actually took them
into the marketplace
and did it over and over again.
He came up with a modern process
of innovation.
MYHRVOLD:
There was a dynamism
and an acceptance of new ideas
that made America
the world's inventor.
And within America, the guy
who really practiced invention
as a business,
as an end unto itself the most,
was Thomas Edison.
BALDWIN:
His imagination was insatiable,
had insatiable need to think
of things that were interesting.
You know, I think we're still
all about that,
being the first to do things
and being innovative.
It's ingrained
in our way of life.
Thomas Edison embodies
the entrepreneurial spirit
of this culture.
KOEHN:
We love inventiveness.
I think part of it
is that, you know,
America in many ways
has invented itself.
And so I think we love people
who can take something
out of the ether,
which is a dream or, you know,
a kind of glint in your eye.
You bring it out of the ether
into something concrete
that changes all of our lives.