Ewan Morris (2:51)

is born in 1847. It's kind of interesting. Family, they had been loyalists during the Revolutionary War, fled to Canada and then managed to get involved in an insurrection in Canada in the late 1830s. So fled down south again, settled in town of Milan in Ohio, later moving to Port Hurong. Edison was born in 1847. This is a time of huge technological change across the Western world. Certainly two key new technologies, the railways and the electromagnetic telegraph, both of which technologies, of course, are going to play a huge role in Edison's own life and Edison's career. Railway networks are spreading out across Europe, across North America. Once the telegraph is invented in 1837, then slowly but surely telegraph networks kind of spread out across Europe, across the eastern seaboard of the United States and inland, typically following the railways, for all kinds of reasons. This is an age that has, so to speak, discovered progress. The idea of technology as a progressive force that's going to transform society, that's going to transform history, and everybody's expecting a new kind of future that's going to be different. And that's the world that Edison is born into in 1847. By the time he's a young man in 1866, the first transatlantic telegraph cable has been laid between Britain and North America. Telegraphy is really getting to be big business by this stage. I mean the capacity to transmit and communicate information very, very quickly over huge distances is transforming the way that states are governed and it's transforming the way commerce works, it's transforming the way that business is done. So bright young men, as Thomas Edison turned out to be, are very aware of the possibilities that this new technological age offers.

Eleanor Evans (4:58)

An age of huge opportunity then. And as these tracks and these cables are being laid, he is literally there ready to take advantage. How obvious is it from a young age that Edison might be someone who might take up this opportunity? What are his sort of influences and background that enables him to do this?

Ewan Morris (5:15)

As always with these kinds of individuals and the kinds of stories told about them, it's quite difficult to disentangle truth from fiction. Men like Edison rapidly acquire mythologies around themselves. And certainly someone like Edison wasn't averse to promoting mythologies around himself. And he was very aware of the need to promote himself and establish himself. He's a particular kind of self made, rugged, individualist inventor. I mean, that's the Edisonian model, so to speak. If accounts of his early life, both from him and others, are to be believed. Yeah, he was clearly quite a precocious child, curious, interested in tinkering about and messing about with things. One story about him and a friend setting up a kind of little baby telegraph line between their respective houses and sending messages to each other. He gets a job on the railways, and there are stories about him carrying out chemical experiments. I mean, indulging in his curiosity, finding out about the world, tinkering around with things. So he was clearly interested from a pretty early age in the practicalities of technology, certainly in the practicalities of this new amazing electrical technology that he was working on the railways, soon to be working as a telegraph boy. He was very, very aware of this kind of apparatus, aware of its possibilities, and probably like a lot of bright young men, scratching his head and wondering, can I make a far spark here? And of course, unlike most of them, it turned out that Edison could make a far spark here.

Eleanor Evans (6:57)

So sorting that sort of mythology of the self made man from the more realistic prospect of. He obviously had these proclivities of testing and experimenting. But is it fair to say that he did sort of follow the apprenticeship path and the working path over a more education route?

Ewan Morris (7:13)

Yes, absolutely. Edison received very little if any formal education in anything that we might think of as science, certainly no formal education in electricity. But as he was a young man working on the telegraph lines, he had all sorts of opportunities to tinker, to play with this equipment. He was part of a culture of experimentation. Speed was the challenge in lots of ways. Telegraphists like him would literally compete with each other who could send messages down the line fastest. They would find tricks, they would develop shortcuts as ways of making sure that they won that particular game. So he was in an ideal position to know intimately how, in practical terms, these kinds of technologies worked. And coming out of that position, he turned out to be quite successful in. I think tinkering probably is the right word. He started to come up with little improvements, little changes, ideas for different ways of using existing technologies, and then starts trying to sell, then starts trying to patent those kinds of ideas, so that by the early 1870s, really he's making a name for himself as a kind of inventor, entrepreneur. He's clearly very good at coming up with those little changes to apparatus. Something that will make something work a little bit more efficiently, something that will make it work a little bit more quickly. He invents new kind of telegraph that allows four simultaneous messages to be sent back and forth down a telegraph wire simultaneously. And that's really the kind of thing that people are interested in during this Period. There are huge volumes of traffic. More and more people, more and more companies, more and more government agencies are using the telegraph for all kinds of purposes. The more information you can jam through those lines as quickly and efficiently as possible, then obviously the more money the telegraph companies make. So a telegraphic device that lets you send more messages down the line at the same time, that's a big thing.

Eleanor Evans (9:25)

Yeah, I can see where the efficiency comes from there. And he's clearly grasping this age of opportunity with both hands and, as you say, these little incremental innovations and tweaks to other people's inventions. He's immersed in this world. One thing I hope we can touch on before we move on is that Edison also experienced some form of hearing loss. Could you explain to us a little bit more about this and how it might have affected him as a young man as well?

Ewan Morris (9:49)

As far as we can tell, at some point in his early teens, probably when he was around about 12, 13, something like that, he became ill, scarlet fever, and as a result became pretty much entirely deaf in one ear and had relatively limited hearing in the other. I can kind of sympathise. I had meningitis when I was around about his age. And, yeah, I mean, I can't hear anything terribly much with my left ear either, so I have some sense of what his encounters with the world was. His hearing was clearly a lot worse than. Than mine. I think. It would certainly have given him a different kind of perspective. He describes it in his own accounts of his deafness, his partial deafness, almost as a boon. He could withdraw from conversation, he couldn't hear, so he could be inside his own head and work out his own ideas. He didn't have any distractions, he didn't have the noise of the world to get between him and his inventions. I suspect that that's a bit of a myth that Edison told about himself, but I'm sure it would have given him an added edge. So, in terms of his own ambitions, his own hopes to do things with communication, with sending information and the like, as he was working as a very successful telegraph engineer, you detailed how he's

Eleanor Evans (11:04)

building on other people's ideas and how he's making tweaks. How is this formalised? How much of it is he able to sort of run as a business at the moment? Is he essentially like a brain for hire? How does he start to formalize this sense of inventing?

Ewan Morris (11:17)

He's an independent inventor. That's probably the best way to describe him. He's by no means the Only one. There are lots of young men like Edison across Europe, across the east of the United States during this period, doing much the same sort of things that Edison was doing, tinkering with apparatus, inventing things like new fire alarms. I mean, Edison invents a voting machine, if I remember rightly, finding out new uses for telegraph type technology. So he's making a good living as an independent entrepreneur is essentially what he's doing up until the 1870s. I mean, he's earning a living. He's increasingly in a position where he has his own workshop and can start hiring people to work with him at the business of invention. And in Edison's case, clearly one of the reasons, I think, underlying Edison's increasing success at the business of invention, the emphasis on business. I think Edison understood very, very well indeed from pretty early in his career that if you're going to be an inventor, then it had to be a business. Now, this was something that you had to work at. This wasn't something that was down to kind of serendipity or anything like that. You had to work systematically at the business of invention. You had to almost put yourself in a position where you were way or almost mass producing invention. And that's increasingly during the 1870s, what Edison tries to do.

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Eleanor Evans (15:16)

So Menlo park in New Jersey becomes this place, this testing ground for him to further formalize the sort of tinkering he's doing with an army of other brains as well. Can you take us into this culture of patents so we can better understand what he was trying to do in this age? How did it work? How did people put their name to these sorts of inventions at this stage?

Ewan Morris (15:35)

Yes. I mean, Menlo park is established towards the end of the 1870s. It really is a laboratory for invention. He hires a cadre of young people like him with those kinds of proclivities, with those kinds of talents, with those kinds of capacities for invention. And then Menlo park churns out patents, churns out improvements, churns out inventions. Essentially, if you want your invention to be commercial, if you want to make money out of your invention, then you need to acquire a patent. A patent is essentially a document that gives you exclusive rights to make, to exploit, to use that invention for a limited number of years, typically seven years. It rewards your inventive ability essentially by giving you the monopoly of that invention for a particular period of time. In order to acquire a patent in the United States, you would typically work with a patent agent. You would draw up specifications, you would draw up a description of the piece of technology that you wanted to patent. Very often you would make a model, build a model of the piece of technology that you wanted to patent that would then be submitted to the US Patent Office in Washington, dc, where it would be looked at, scrutinized. People would check to see, well, has anybody else patented anything else like this? Is this something really patentable? Is somebody just trying to claim rights for something that's already public, common knowledge? So it's an expensive business. It's a speculation, literally. I mean, you wouldn't take out a patent frivolously, you wouldn't take out a patent unless you assure that you could recoup that outlay. At the very least, this was something that really was going to make you money.

Eleanor Evans (17:25)

So you're betting on this outcome to say, yes, I know I have the capability or my team has the capability to make this. It sounds like it's a stage that's ripe for competition, ripe for, dare I say, exploitation. How does Edison specifically go about using this system? What's his approach to it?

Ewan Morris (17:40)

The answer to that is Menlo Park. It's a patent factory. He's churning out patents at regular intervals. They all have Thomas Alva Edison's name on them. But clearly, most of the work of invention is taking place, so to speak, under Edison. He's not the one doing all that invention. He's not the one coming up with all of those. Tinkered around, played around. It's a collective process. And again, I think that one of the things that Edison realized and this made him successful, which others like him often didn't realise, was that this kind of innovation works best as a collective process, where it's not just you who's going, ah, yes, bright spark after bright spark after bright spark. But you've got a team, you've got a group of people working together collectively, putting these sorts of things together. Which is ironic, of course, because the myth with which Edison surrounds himself and which his promoters and puffers in the press created for him, is of this kind of rugged individualist, the man of invention. He's the one who's doing all this. The reality behind that is very different. Yes, Edison's running the show, but a lot of the work, the absolutely essential work of invention, of innovation, is a collective activity.

Eleanor Evans (19:00)

It sounds like he's got real skill, then, in bringing together people into these systems, into these team environments that will result in that innovation. But I'm sure listeners coming to this and knowing Edison's name already will have known at least one thing about him, and it's that he invented the light bulb. I'm putting that in quotes here. Can you take us into the reality of this sort of, this idea and what's important to understand about this particular invention that's such a milestone in Edison's legacy?

Ewan Morris (19:26)

1879, the invention. I'm happy that I'll go back and deconstruct the word in a minute. I'm happy to call it the invention of the light bulb in all sorts of ways. What Edison did with the light bulb, did in order to succeed with the light bulb epitomizes everything that I've been saying about the collective work of successful invention. So, yes, Edison invented the light bulb, and no, he didn't. People had been trying to make an incandescent electric light for a good 40 or 50 years before Edison patented his incandescent light bulb in 1879. The Welsh Natural philosopher, experimenter, inventor of the gas battery, William Robert Grove in the early 1840s, for example, describes an incandescent light that he'd invented. He says he could read newspaper by. It seemed perfectly viable. The slight drawback was that the filament, the bit that actually does the glowing, was made out of platinum wire, and platinum wire was not cheap. So this was never really going to be a viable commercial technology. Other experimenters over succeeding decades come up with similar things. Typically, they're either too expensive to be commercially viable, the light doesn't last long enough. I mean, there are other forms of electric lights. Electric arc lights, for example, where you have glowing sparks coming out between carbon rods. Those are increasingly common. By the 1860s, 1870s, theaters might be illuminated by them. There are proposals to use arc lights in lighthouses and things like that. You wouldn't really use something like that in a domestic setting. But towards the end of the 1870s, Edison decides he's going to perfect an incandescent electric light. And he does it systematically by exploiting this workforce, this experimental workforce that he's acquired. The trick is getting the right filament. You want to get a filament that's cheap, that glows sufficiently brightly and that lasts long enough. And he just experiments. Well, he and his fellow experiments just keep on experimenting, experimenting, trying sample after sample after sample, and they ultimately decide that carbon coated filaments of bamboo are what's going to work best for them. And then they have their light bulb. But of course, light bulbs on their own aren't really of much use to anybody. I mean, what do you do with a light bulb? You need to hook it up to a supply of electrical power so that it lights up. What Edison realized was that you had to, so to speak, market and commercialize these two things at the same time. In order to sell his light bulbs, he needed to create a market. To create the market, he needed to set up networks of electrical distribution so that people could hook themselves up to the network, slot their light bulbs in and light up their houses. But of course, nobody was going to want to hook themselves up to the network unless they had a use for electricity. Well, they did. They had the light bulb. So both of these things had to emerge together. And that was the trick, really, that Edison mastered and mastered extremely well, extremely successfully around. By the same time, Joseph Swan in Britain also developed an incandescent light bulb just as successful as Edison's. I mean, I'm not really interested in here and which one came first? That's not an interesting question. The interesting question was how did they go about it? How did they succeed? And in Edison and Swan's case, they succeeded by joining forces in Britain at any rate, because Edison had a system that worked and that was what really mattered. And he then proceeded to expand the system, expand his networks across North America and into Europe as well.

Eleanor Evans (23:30)

So it's clearly such a pivotal moment in his career and in all of our own histories. Is it fair to say that at this point he's made his name, he's got his name on the map both sides of the Atlantic. How well known is he by this stage?

Ewan Morris (23:41)

He's very well known. He'd made himself famous a couple of years earlier in 1877 with the invention of the phonograph. This is a machine that can record and reproduce sound. This is amazing. How do you sell it? You sell it through sheer showmanship. He went down to the offices of Scientific American and literally showed them the machine, turned it on, let them hear this disembodied voice all over the newspapers the next day. And that made Edison a public figure so that in 1879, the Daily Graphic has newspaper features about it. The wizard of Menlo Park. This amazing cartoon of Edison, like a wizard hat in his head cape with his inventions embroidered all over it, holding out a light. The wizard search for the successful electric light bulb. So, yeah, he's famous and he becomes increasingly the embodiment of invention. To give an example, if we jump ahead a couple of decades following H.G. wells War of the World in 1898, various kind of pulp sequels follow ups published by various authors now forgotten. One of them is called Edison Conquers Mars. And in this Hulp follow up to the War of the World, basically humans decide to Go to Mars to teach those Martians a good lesson. And how do they do it? They get Edison to build a fleet of coarse electrically powered spaceships, they travel to Mars and yes, give those Martians a good lesson. I mean, that's an example of the kind of figure Edison was by the end of the 19th century. I mean, he's Mr. Invention. He's the person who embodies what it is to be an inventor. Again, that rugged, self made, pragmatic, not actually terribly interested in theory. That's the inventor. And that's what Edison embodies.

Eleanor Evans (25:43)

Absolutely. You've given us such a sense there of a man who is undoubtedly clever, undoubtedly has smarts, but it sounds like as much as his sort of technological and inventing prowess, it's his systems, it's his eye for a savvy deal and a pattern. And this eye for spectacle as well, this self promotion, it's all a very heady mix. And we're beginning to see why he's got such an important legacy to return to, something you mentioned just now about the invention of the light bulb and the need for an electricity supply to support that. I wonder if we might turn to another significant stage in his career that are frequently known as the current wars. Can you tell us what Edison came up with and what his rivals were working on and how these two forces met?

Ewan Morris (26:24)

Edison's networks worked by direct current electricity. The kind of system that Edison envisaged was sort of relatively small scale power stations that would power large city blocks, small cities, I mean, that kind of thing. Direct current works well at relatively short distances, but over longer distances, the process of transmission starts seriously losing energy. So it becomes less and less economically viable. But it's in many ways the obvious choice because for example, most electric motors worked off direct current. So if as well as selling electric lights, you want to sell electric powers to factories and the like, then DC is the way to go. But there was another way of doing it. You can also transmit electricity as alternating current. To do that successfully, you need to do that at far higher voltages. But if you do do it successfully, then you can send electricity over far, far, far greater distances. So if, for example, you want to electrify a country as opposed to a city block, then AC looks like a rather more promising way to do it. But by the time, certainly in the United States, AC entrepreneurs, one particular, George Westinghouse came along. Edison was already very well entrenched in the marketplace. He'd already started building these highly lucrative DC networks of electrical distribution in the uk, for example, things slightly different. Sebastian Di Ferenti, by the end of the 1880s was building Deptford Power Station, which was going to be a huge power station, power most of London and that was going to be AC. In the United States, Edison was there. So AC was slower in making headway. George Westinghouse had work to do to persuade other investors that yes, AC was worth the money.

Eleanor Evans (28:16)

How did they go about promoting their various ways of this and what does that battle look like?

Ewan Morris (28:21)

It was a battle. Westinghouse gained a big advantage in 1888 when Nikola Tesla invented his polyphase motor. The polyphase motor was a motor that worked directly from AC currents. So Westinghouse now had something that he could take to investors, take to potential buyers and say, look, you don't need to mess around with complicated ways of turning DC into AC or AC into dc. This is a motor that works directly off ac. And once you had something like that in place, then the case for AC starts looking a lot better. Edison goes low, shall we say. There are debates around the end of the 1880s in the United States around, for example, using electricity as a means of execution. Edison had previously announced himself thoroughly opposed to death by electricity. He suddenly changed his mind. So long as the electricity being used was alternating current. He's trying to portray AC as the current that kills something that's dangerous. It's high voltage, ladies and gentlemen. You really don't want something like this in your home. And just to show you how dangerous it is, I'm going to electrocute this elephant for you, for example. So pushing for electrical execution, suggesting that, oh, what shall we call this new system of execution? Oh, yes, we'll Westinghouse them. So this kind of dirty fighting and then New York State make their means of execution. The first execution takes place. William Kemmler completely botched, which doesn't stop subsequent electrocutions taking place. By that stage, really it was a mark of Edison's desperation that he was going low. The economic case for AC transmission, I mean, particularly if you wanted to really expand systems of electrical distribution, if you wanted to send electricity over big distances, a case for AC was unanswerable. DC just simply wasn't as good a system for economic transmission over those sorts of distances. In the early 1890s, a big project was mooted to use Niagara Falls as a huge source of water powered electricity. You could produce huge quantities of electricity from Niagara Falls. How do you get that electricity to where you need that electricity to be? The answer to that was always going to be ac. So in all sorts of ways, Edison was faced by forces that ultimately not even he could overcome. And in practical terms, by the early 1890s, Edison's own companies were switching to AC Systems as well.

Eleanor Evans (31:12)

So he loses out to this other product, this other method. But clearly it's not the end of Edison. I should just pause here to say that if any listeners want to hear the Other side, you joined us last year. You went to talk about Nikola Tesla and his impact in this world. So if you'd like to know about more from the other side of things, please do go and listen to that. It's available on the History Extra podcast feed. But back to Edison. You've already alluded to how in the 1890s, his profile is still as high as ever. He's being referenced in literature of the day and the culture of the day. What happens to his reputation as he enters the 20th century? What's going on in his life and business?

Ewan Morris (31:48)

He carries on being a highly successful inventor, a pragmatic inventor. The adoption of ac, once you realize that there was no choice, so speak. I mean, he didn't allow that to hold him back in any way. He gets involved in early cinema. He carries on inventing his reputation later ON in the 20th century, I mean, after his death and moving on into our century is, I think, really fascinating and telling. Particularly the way in which Edison and Tesla continuously played out against each other. I mean, if any of your listeners, like me, are Fans of the U.S. tV sitcom the Big Bang Theory, periodically our protagonists will compare themselves favorably to Tesla, unfavorably to Edison. Tesla was the guy who's doing it all for his own sake. Edison is their corporate guy who was just in it for the money and essentially wanted to steal everybody else's ideas. Neither of which characterization is true, so to speak, historically. But that the characterization exists now, I think is really fascinating. It's really telling. It tells, I think, of a kind of discomfort in modern culture about sort of the money side, for lack of a better term, of technological innovation, that some or other. This should be free, this should be for its own sake. But no, it's been made grubby. It's been made a batter of commerce and sort of people just in it for the money. And Edison representing that grubby side of innovation that we wish didn't really exist. And Tesla representing the. Oh, yes, wouldn't be all nice if it was just kind of people sitting around and inventing for the sheer sake of it and making energy free for all. So it's an interesting contrast. I mean, how Edison and Tesla have come to stand for contrary attitudes towards technology and how technology might do things and how technology might move forward into the future.

Eleanor Evans (33:52)

So interesting there how Edison has come to represent that sort of commercially minded, as you say, maybe a bit more unsavoury to some people aspect of innovation and moving forwards. He maintains this place in the sort of popular consciousness, the American social consciousness, as an inventor to the end.

Ewan Morris (34:09)

Yes. I mean, he's Mr. Edison, he's the man who electrified America. He's the man who made America as Americans saw themselves by the 1930s. I mean, he's one of that kind of almost pantheon of great industrial barons coming out to the late 19th century who kind of dominate early 20th century American culture.

Eleanor Evans (34:33)

That was Ewan Morris speaking to Eleanor Evans. Ewan is professor of History at Aberystwyth University and author of how the Victorians Took Us to the Moon, the story of the 19th century innovators who Forged Our Future, which includes more about Thomas Edison and the world of 19th century science and spectacle.

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