The content explores the complex legacy of Thomas Edison, highlighting his remarkable inventive drive and business acumen, while also touching upon controversies surrounding his methods and his intense rivalry with Nikola Tesla.
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When Thomas Edison was young, he was
described as an idiot. And yet, he would
go on to become one of the most
legendary inventors ever, completely
changing the world and building a
business empire. There's a common saying
that any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from
magic. So, it's no wonder people called
Thomas Edison a wizard. Edison played an
instrumental role in the advancement of
the telegraph, radio, camera, telephone,
and most famously the incandescent
light. Many would say he's one of the
most influential people ever. And
there's no doubt seeing him start from
nothing and defy all the odds is
extremely inspiring.
However, whilst Edison is one of the
most famous inventors, some argue that
he wasn't really the genius he's touted
as and that instead he just stole others
work and took the credit for himself.
And this led to dramatic battles like
where Edison fought Nicola Tesla for the
glory of illuminating the world.
Fortunes were made and destroyed in
seconds. And this is where Thomas
Edison's dark side emerged.
So Edison's legacy is not black and
white, but since this is such a
fascinating story, for this video only,
I decided to hire a professional
voiceover artist and a 3D animation
studio to help bring this story to life.
So, let's travel back in time together
to the 1800s.
Welcome to the true story of Thomas
Thomas Edison was born in 1847, but he
was described as defective as he had an
abnormally large head and was frequently
ill. Thomas's infancy was difficult and
lonely. However, it was never boring as
Thomas's curiosity was insatiable. He
wanted to know what everything was and
why things worked the way they did.
Thomas's father found his neverending
questions exhausting. But Thomas's
mother was happy to nurture his curiosity.
curiosity.
One day, Thomas saw one of the neighbors
geese sitting on its eggs, and he
questioned his mother about it for
hours. Later that night, Thomas took the
bird's eggs, snuck into his neighbor's
barn to build a nest for them, and tried
to hatch them himself.
But whilst his childish adventures were
cute, Thomas's curiosity could also be dangerous.
dangerous.
Another time, he started a small fire in
his father's barn just to see what it
would do. And since the fire was so
huge, if the wind had been blowing in
another direction, it could have burned
the whole town to the ground. [Music]
After this, his father was convinced
that Thomas was an idiot, so he whipped
him in front of the entire town.
Things got even worse when Thomas got a
bad case of scarlet fever. Money was so
tight that his father had to pull him
out of grammar school in order to buy
medicine. When Thomas finally re-entered
school the next year, he was way behind
the other kids. And if his father
treating him like an idiot wasn't
embarrassing enough, his teachers were
also doing it. One day at school, Thomas
overheard two teachers making fun of
him, so he ran home and told his mother
that he never wanted to go back.
Thomas's mother refused to believe that
her son was an idiot. But clearly,
traditional schooling wasn't working for
him, so she decided to educate him herself.
herself.
Thanks to his mother, Thomas learned
basic reading, writing, and arithmetic
as well as any other kid. And once those
fundamentals were covered, she didn't
force subjects onto him like his school
teachers did. Instead, she let him
pursue his own interests.
One day, Thomas read a book that
described scientific experiments he
could do at home. After performing every
one of them, he asked for another book,
worked on that, and then kept asking for
more. But as Thomas's love for science
grew, so did his ability to get into
trouble. One time, when Thomas was
trying to figure out how balloons
worked, he fed a boy some chemical
powder, hoping he'd float away. But
instead, the boy just became incredibly
ill. Another time, when Thomas learned
that friction generates static
electricity, he attached metal wires to
the tails of two cats and tried to rub
them together, which just got him
clawed. This didn't stop Thomas, though,
because when something was a mystery to
him, he had to understand it. So, Thomas
began collecting everything he could
find in case it was useful, from
feathers to metals to bones. His mother
urged him to start his own home
laboratory in their basement so he could
practice his experiments down there.
However, it was very basic and to
conduct more sophisticated experiments,
[Music]
When Thomas was 12, he got a job on a
train selling newspapers and snacks to
passengers on board. For a boy obsessed
with science and machines, working on a
train was paradise at first. But it
didn't take long for an accident to
happen. One day, when Thomas was
carrying a stack of newspapers almost as
big as he was, he noticed that his train
was already leaving the station.
He immediately ran after it and managed
to reach one of the box cars just in
time. But with the train already moving,
Thomas lost his balance and was about to
fall and get crushed by the train.
Miraculously, someone managed to grab
Thomas by the ears and pull him up to
safety. But he felt something snap
inside his head. By the time Thomas
recovered from the initial pain of the
accident, he could barely hear anything.
Thomas was partially deaf and would
never recover. In fact, his hearing
would only get worse with time. After
this, Thomas changed. He started
spending more time alone, and he took
his scientific studies even more
seriously than before. But he did say
that his deafness made it easier to
concentrate for longer periods. Thomas
even set up a mini lab in the baggage
car of the train so he could still
experiment while at work. Unfortunately,
this caused a whole new problem. During
one experiment, Thomas knocked a bottle
of phosphorus off the shelf and
accidentally started another fire.
Thomas would soon get a chance to redeem
himself, though. One day when he was 15,
he saw a train arriving at the station
and a few yards away, a baby crawling
right in its path. Thomas sprang into
action immediately, scooping up the baby
just in time and saving its life. It
just so happened that the baby was the
son of the station master, and he'd
notice Thomas constantly hovering over
the station's telegraph in his spare
time. That's because Thomas was
fascinated by the telegraph, which was
the first machine allowing people to
almost instantly communicate over long
distances. So, as a way to say thank you
for saving his child, the station master
showed Thomas everything he wanted to
know and later helped Thomas get a job
as a telegraph operator. He would only
get paid around $20 every month, but for
the first time since his accident,
Thomas was genuinely excited.
In the 1860s, the electric telegraph was
a relatively new technology, and Thomas
was always testing out little
improvements for it. But this often got
him into trouble. Thomas's job was to
receive and relay information about
trains and news about the ongoing Civil
War. But most of the job was simply just
waiting around all night. And Thomas
didn't have the patience for that.
Instead, he created a machine that would
produce a signal he was supposed to send
out every so often whilst he took naps.
When his supervisors found out, Thomas
was fired. So, Thomas got another job
and was back at it again. This time he
took his receiver and upgraded it into a
repeater, meaning a telegrapher was no
longer needed to relay an identical
message from one station to the next.
This invention was genuinely useful, but
unfortunately Thomas's new supervisor
had been working on a similar device,
and when he got beat to it by a
teenager, he got jealous and fired
Thomas out of spite. Thomas went on like
this for years, moving around
frequently, taking on new jobs, and
often getting fired for not doing what
he was actually supposed to. He always
wanted to experiment with the equipment
rather than follow instructions. At 20
years old, Thomas returned home feeling
depressed. He was poor and increasingly
deaf. However, Thomas's life was about
[Music]
Thomas had made some good friends during
his time on the trains and one of them
wrote to him about a job opening in
Boston at Western Union which was a
telegraph company at the time. Thomas
jumped at the opportunity and he arrived
in Boston in 1868.
He was so fast at tapping out Morse code
that Western Union gave him the job of
receiving stock market quotes from New
York's fastest sender. And when that got
boring, he started tinkering with the
telegraph again. After a while, Thomas
made some useful refinements. And when a
telegraphy journal wrote a piece on him,
companies began offering him money to
work on inventions for them. This gave
Thomas the confidence to quit his job
and become a full-time freelance
inventor. Around this time, he started
sleeping less as that gave him more time
to work on his creations. But things got
off to a rocky start. Thomas's first
invention was a simple vote recorder for
which he registered his first ever
patent. It allowed lawmakers to press a
yes or no button from their seat to vote
on something.
That was as far as he got with it,
though, because according to the
legislature of Massachusetts, using it
Thomas was nearly bankrupted from this.
So, he decided that going forward, he
would only work on inventions in
commercial demand, meaning he could make
money from them. He said, "I find out
what the world needs, then I proceed to
invent." This way, he could continue
doing what he loved and what he was good
at, but he hopefully wouldn't starve
along the way. Thomas's next invention
was an improvement on a telegraphic
stock ticker, which definitely fit the
commercial demand criteria, as the
company he developed it for quickly
found around 30 clients for it. But
Thomas got screwed over in the deal and
sold his patent rights for next to
nothing. Working as a freelance inventor
was proving much tougher than he'd
thought. And although he'd learned a
lot, those lessons weren't paying the
bills. So Thomas became increasingly anxious.
anxious.
However, there was one invention from
which Thomas knew he could definitely
The earliest versions of the telegraph
used two wires between each station, one
to send electrical signals and one to
receive them. Then in the 1860s,
inventors found a way to take turns
sending and receiving signals through a
single wire. And later on, they figured
out how to send and receive signals simultaneously.
simultaneously.
But whilst these new features were
useful, they made the telegraph slow and
unreliable. So telegraph companies
didn't implement them. Thomas set
himself an ambitious goal to fix the
bugs as he called it. Thus inventing the
first truly functional duplex telegraph.
Since Thomas had a reputation as an able
inventor, he was able to take out a loan
of $800.
It was a big risk, but if he succeeded,
he would effectively double the capacity
of telegraph wire and cut its cost in
half. Telegraph companies would pay huge
amounts of money for that and the
royalties could be life-changing. So,
there was a huge upside if things went
well. But unfortunately, they didn't.
When Thomas first presented his
invention to a big telegraph company, he
couldn't get a response to his message.
The test was at midnight on a Saturday,
so Thomas didn't know if the operator on
the other end of the line was asleep or
if it was him who built the telegraph
wrong. But either way, the result was
the same. Nobody was buying his invention.
invention.
Considering that the $800 he borrowed
would be worth over $18,000 today,
Thomas was now in some serious financial
trouble, and there was no way anyone in
Boston would finance his inventions.
anymore. So, he spent the last of his
money on a train ticket to New York.
When Thomas arrived, he didn't have a
penny to his name, and he hadn't eaten
in days. So, in order to get food, he
had to trick a store owner into giving
him a free sample of tea bags, which he
then traded for some 5-cent dumplings a
few blocks away. And to make matters
worse, the one friend Thomas had in New
York was out of town. So he spent the
entire first night wandering the
streets, cold and lonely. But he was
still determined to succeed. The next
morning, Thomas made friends with a
fellow telegrapher who loaned him $1. It
may not sound like a lot, but it was
life-saving. Thomas realized if he lived
off 5-cent dumplings, he could eat for
20 days.
Still, as Thomas roamed the streets, it
was hard to imagine he'd soon become one
of the most influential people in the world.
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[Music]
Thomas went to see a well-known inventor
called Franklin Pope and offered to be
his assistant in exchange for a place to
sleep. Pope offered Thomas the dingy
cellar in the laboratory's battery room.
It wasn't much, but at least it was
better than the street. Pope was the
inventor of an important device at the
time. In post civil war America, the
price of everything from silver to
cotton, railroad securities, and
government bonds was heavily influenced
by the value of gold. So getting its
price quickly and reliably was crucial
to the financial markets. Pope had
invented an indicator that displayed the
current price of gold via telegraph, and
virtually half of Wall Street relied on
it. The problem was that all the
individual indicators got their
information from a single telegraph. And
one day, as Thomas was admiring the
central device during trading hours, it
broke down without warning. Suddenly,
half of Wall Street couldn't access the
data it needed. Pope's firm was facing
immediate collapse as he couldn't figure
out how to fix it. However, when Thomas
took a look at the indicator, he
immediately saw the problem. One tiny
spring inside had gotten loose and was
wedged between two gears, meaning the
machine was just stuck. Thanks to
Thomas, the business was saved. And the
next morning, Pope's business partner
gave him the job of improving the gold
indicator further. This led to Thomas
getting promoted again, and his salary
was raised to $300 per month, which was
leagues above anything he'd ever earned.
Before long, Thomas had perfected the
gold indicator, and this success meant
Western Union personally hired Thomas
back to improve upon a stock printing
system, which occasionally printed
random numbers at different endpoints.
When that happened, Western Union had to
find which endpoints had failed and
dispatch employees to reset them, which
required a lot of resources. For his
solution, Thomas devised a way to reset
all of the endpoints simultaneously from
the central telegraph without the need
for anyone to do anything on the
endpoints. This single-handedly saved
Western Union so much money that they
offered Thomas $40,000 for the patent
rights to the invention, which is just
over $1 million today. This was truly
life-changing money. Through his
inventions, he had gone from starving on
the streets with nothing to now feeling
rich. However, the only thing crazier
than Thomas getting a payment equivalent
to a million at 24 years old is the fact
that it took him less than 30 days to
[Music]
Thomas spending all the money he'd made
sounds irresponsible, but it was
actually quite the opposite. After all
this time, Thomas had some hard one
business experience, and he was now keen
to expand his business further. You see,
Western Union only bought the patent
rights to the stock ticker invention,
but Thomas kept the manufacturing rights
to himself.
As part of the deal, Western Union gave
Thomas an order for 1,200
stock tickers, which over the next few
years would make him almost $500,000.
That's the equivalent of around $13
million in today's money. So, Thomas
spent his initial $40,000 building a
manufacturing plant, a laboratory, and
hiring other capable inventors to work
as his assistants. This way he could
create more inventions, sell them for a
big lump sum, and then manufacture them
for even more money. He considered it an
idea factory where he and his assistants
would carry out all kinds of experiments
to test out his many ideas. Since Thomas
was never sure what they'd need, he
filled the lab with a wide variety of
chemicals and every kind of metal
possible. He also collected whatever
random materials he could, such as
peacock tails, bullhorns, and porcupine
quills just in case. Who knew what they
might need? However, it's fair to say
that Thomas had a unique style of
invention. Ever since he was a kid,
Thomas despised math. There was no way
for him to understand how numbers
related to anything going on in the real
world. So when it came to using tools
like calculus, trigonometry, and physics
formulas, Thomas was useless. Instead,
when he was working on a new machine, he
would visualize it. Down to the smallest
gear and even the flow of electricity,
Thomas could see how all the moving
parts of his inventions fit together,
how they could be repurposed, combined,
or improved in some way. And even though
his methods were unusual, unscientific
even, they were undeniably effective.
Between 1872 and 1873, Thomas filed 53
separate patents, including improvements
on the stock ticker and the telegraph.
However, this has led to some
controversy around Edison in the present
day. Some feel he gets too much credit
for other people's inventions. For
example, Thomas didn't invent the
typewriter, but he did improve on it.
Another argument is that he was more of
a businessman than an inventor, as his
company took credit for the inventions
of the many assistants he hired. The
truth is more nuanced. Thomas Edison was
both an inventor and a shrewd
businessman, which is what separated him
from most other inventors. He was always
focused on the commercial side of
invention and kept reinvesting profits
to expand his business. Either way,
producing so many patents didn't come
easy. Frequently, Thomas gathered some
of his assistants and formed what he
called an insomnia squad who would stay
awake for up to 3 days working on an
invention until it was absolutely
perfect. He famously said, "Genius is 1%
inspiration and 99% perspiration."
Thomas pushed his employees hard, but he
was right there with them, and he worked
harder and longer than any of them. The
laboratory was home for Thomas. In fact,
his obsession with working there soon
became problematic.
Thomas had gotten married and had
children with a woman named Mary, who
did most of the parenting while Thomas
worked in his lab. But Mary grew
increasingly lonely and isolated and
felt neglected by Thomas, who often
slept in his lab instead of coming home.
Mary soon developed health problems and
died at only 29 years old. This meant
Thomas suddenly had three kids to take
care of by himself. So shortly after
this, he married another woman named
Mina, had more children with her, and
resumed his focus on his lab. However,
in 1873, Thomas had a whole new problem.
The US faced one of its worst financial
crisis, and suddenly companies weren't
coming to Thomas for specific
improvements to their machines anymore.
Thomas didn't panic, though. He figured
if he could invent something useful
enough, people would buy it. regardless
of the economy. He knew that even in the
midst of an economic depression, America
and Europe were so reliant on the
telegraph. So if Thomas managed to
improve it substantially, he could
surely get the telegraph companies to
start paying him again. A few years
back, Thomas had already tried making a
duplex telegraph, which was supposed to
send and receive electrical signals
quickly and reliably over the same wire.
That had been a huge failure which had
left him penniless. But this time,
Thomas was more confident and
experienced. And so he set himself an
even more ambitious goal. He was going
to skip the duplex and aim right for the
quadruplex. This meant that Thomas's new
telegraph needed to simultaneously send
out and receive two different electric
signals over the same wire, technically
quadrupling its capacity.
It was his toughest invention yet. But
after 2 years with many sleepless nights
and relentless trial and error, Thomas
had a perfectly functional quadriplex.
This was an extraordinary achievement
and yet it would lead Thomas to
something even bigger. [Music]
[Music]
Thomas set up a new industrial research
laboratory in a remote part of New
Jersey called Menllo Park. The multiplex
telegraph had turned him into one of the
most renowned people in America. So,
young aspiring inventors moved to the
countryside to work for Thomas for free
and all sorts of businesses were coming
to him for help on their devices. Now
Thomas said he wanted to produce a minor
invention every 10 days and a big thing
every 6 months. And at the time the
biggest thing of all was the speaking
telegraph or as it would come to be
known the telephone. You see whilst
Thomas had been busy with the quadruplex
another inventor called Alexander Graham
Bell had been hard at work adapting the
telegraph so that it could transmit
sound. And in 1876, he filed a historic
patent for the telephone. To Western
Union, this spelled doom. Bell's patent
gave him the exclusive right to use the
telephone commercially. So he had a
monopoly that could potentially make
Western Union's telegraph business
obsolete. So if Western Union wanted to
compete with Bell, they had to get
around his patents, which meant they'd
need to improve upon the telephone in a
substantial way. And who better to do
all that hard work for them than Thomas Edison?
Edison?
Thomas was very nearly deaf, so he
personally had an extra layer of
obstacles to overcome with this
particular challenge. But it was
actually because of his hearing
impairment that he ultimately improved
the telephone's clarity and volume way
beyond what Belle had. But this gave
Thomas another idea. See, the telephone
was meant to transmit sound, but there
wasn't a device that could record and
reproduce it. And that led Thomas to
invent the phonograph in 1877.
This device recorded sound by capturing
sound waves as vibrations onto tinfoil
cylinders with a needle. It could then
also play back the recorded sounds.
Again, Thomas's deafness was an obstacle
to overcome, but he found that by biting
into the phonograph, the sound
vibrations would travel through his
skull and he could hear it that way. For
everyone else whose ears work just fine,
hearing recorded sound for the first
time was a magical experience. So, the
press nicknamed Thomas the Wizard of
Menllo Park.
Thomas assumed the phonograph would be
used in business as a device for
dictation, but in reality, his invention
had laid the foundation for record
players and would play a key role in
popularizing recorded music.
This invention brought Thomas a lot of
fame, but his most famous invention ever
[Music]
For over 70 years, electric lighting was
one of the most stagnant areas of
scientific research. When the sun went
down, people still relied on candles,
gas lights, and kerosene lamps. These
all had issues. Candles could cause
fires. And the gas used in lamps had a
bad smell and built up dangerous fumes.
So in 1878, Thomas became determined to
change that. And to make things even
harder, he wanted to focus on
incandescent light, which shined by
heating a thin filament through an
electric current. These were introduced
all the way back in 1808, but nobody had
found a way to make them burn for more
than a few moments. The light needed to
be small, tolerably bright, use little
current, last for a long time,
individually switch on and off, be cost
effective, and that's just the
beginning. Many inventors before Thomas
had tried and failed, and everyone
believed it was basically impossible to
make a working incandescent light. But
Thomas publicly declared he would
perfect incandescent lighting. So, even
though the press, his investors, and
even his own assistants thought he'd
gone insane, Thomas got to work with his
usual enthusiasm.
The main reason incandescent lights
could only burn for a minute or two up
until now was because of the wirelike
structure inside of it, known as a
filament. In order for the light to
glow, the filament had to be heated to
extremely high temperatures without
melting or burning out. But that was a
problem because in order to increase the
levels of electric resistance the
filament could tolerate, it had to be as
thin as physically possible. About 1 of
the thickness of a human hair. So the
main challenge in inventing a useful
incandescent light was finding the right
material to make the filament from.
Thomas spent his first few months
experimenting with string, cotton, and
other organic filaments. It didn't work,
so he moved on to metals. He went
through a nickel phase, and when that
didn't work, he spent months testing out
platinum, which he got burning for up to
2 hours. This was promising, but then
months went by without any more
progress, and he started from scratch
again. Thomas altered the filament in
every way he could. He prepared them
differently, twisted them, made them
longer, shorter, thinner, thicker, you
name it. He also changed everything
about the rest of the light. He used
different bulb shapes, different
circuits, varying amounts of electric
resistance, voltage, and amperage. After
testing 1,600
different materials, Thomas had learned
a lot. But he still hadn't made that one
discovery that was going to change
everything. He was looking for a needle
in a planet-sized hay stack, literally.
Because Thomas sent agents to find new
materials as far as the Rocky Mountains,
the Amazon rainforest, and Japan. He
even tried different varieties of human
hair. After a year and a half, and
countless thousands of dollars, Thomas's
assistants and his investors had lost
all hope. But Thomas kept working enthusiastically
