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Thomas Alva Edison has always been portrayed as the greatest, most prolific by far American inventor. The man obtained over a thousand patents in his lifetime and is credited with inventing or improving upon devices that changed our world, our lives forever: the lightbulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, telegraphs, telephones, x-rays, and batteries. The list goes on. His contemporaries were blown away. Many viewed him as like a magician. That’s how far beyond the realm of reality, the realm of what they understood, his inventions were. But in recent decades, many have come to doubt Edison’s genius. No one is a real magician after all. They’re just tricks, sleight of hand. More recent Edison critics take a look at his impressive body of work with scrutiny. He didn’t really invent all those things, they say. His employees invented it and he just took the credit. A bunch of other guys invented it and he just put the cherry on top and took the credit. He flat out stole that idea from someone else and took the credit. Modern minds are split on Thomas Edison. He’s either a great American hero, inventor of our modern world, or an idea stealing fraud who ripped off other great minds and claimed the credit. But who was he really? Was Thomas Edison the real deal or do we need to rewrite the history books, giving back credit where credit is due? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Way back in episode 9 I covered Nikola Tesla. Incredibly interesting fellow. I highly suggest giving that episode a listen if you missed it. But the thing with researching Tesla is, when you research Tesla, you will come upon a lot of anti-Edison perspectives. Tesla and Edison were rivals, sort of, during the war of currents. Tesla invented the AC induction motor for harnessing, using alternating currents as a form of electricity. Edison, at that time, was already using DC, direct currents. And while AC was better, Edison didn’t want to redo his whole thing and figure out a whole new system. That was a nightmare. So he pushed for DC over AC. And really, it wasn’t even Edison vs. Tesla on this. It was Edison vs. George Westinghouse who bought Tesla’s patent and employed him. But all that to say, Edison gets a bad rap in anything about Tesla, my episode included. And I’m not saying it isn’t at least a little bit warranted but if you’re researching Tesla, you’re only getting a small, not very positive, peek at Edison. But there’s a whole, whole lot more to him. So it is time, finally, over a year and a half after releasing the Tesla episode, to give you the other half of Edison’s story. And to hopefully get to the bottom of the question on everybody’s minds: does Thomas Edison deserve the credit that he got for all those inventions?
But first, as promised, I released a mini fix episode over on the Patreon on Wednesday about Sophia Dorothea of Celle who was the wife of King George I that he had imprisoned for three decades. It’s a wild story. There is drama, there is scandal, there are multiple extra marital affairs and illegitimate children, there is murder. The whole thing’s whack. You can listen to the first 5 minutes of that for free on patreon.com/historyfixpodcast or subscribe to listen to the whole thing or just buy the one episode for a few bucks without having to subscribe. But I also wanted to remind you guys now that I’m picking up some sponsors, there are no ads on patreon and there never will be. So if that’s something that bothers you, might be worth subscribing.
I also need to apologize for something I said in last week’s episode. It was when I was talking about Hitler and instead of going into detail about the holocaust, I referred to what he did as “super whack stuff” which didn’t sit right with at least one Jewish listener who reached out to me on Instagram. And I genuinely appreciate that she let me know. It helped me see how my wording was unintentionally trivializing the holocaust which I would never ever want to do. So if that gave you the ick last week too, I’m truly sorry and I will do better. One of the biggest themes of this episode is growth mindset, right, making mistakes and learning and growing from them. So, I appreciate the opportunity to grow and I apologize for coming across as insensitive.
Ok, let’s take a look at Edison’s early life which is honestly kind of remarkable. But you find that with this sort of person usually. These super inventive genius people did not have typical childhoods. They were not typical children. An average normal child who soars through public education is not going to turn into an Edison or an Einstein or a Tesla or a Wright or a Christie or a Shelley. They were all a bunch of weirdos and none of them were cut out for institutions designed for normal people. I’m seeing that more and more as I dig into these scientific and literary geniuses. Geniuses are weirdos, in a good way. And Edison is no exception. We’ll get into his atypical childhood in a second but first let’s go back even farther. Because I think it’s so ironic that he’s known as the greatest American inventor but, he’s actually like barely American. So his great grandfather lived in New Jersey at the time the Revolutionary War broke out. But he was a loyalist. So he was on the side of Great Britain. He was loyal to the crown. Which was a hard thing to be at that time. So he fled the fledgling United States in 1784 just after the war ended and he went to Canada where the family lived for the next several generations. Edison’s grandfather, a Canadian militiaman, actually fought against the United States in the War of 1812. Edison’s mother was originally from New York but her family moved to Canada which is where she met his father. But then Edison’s father got involved in an uprising in Canada in 1837 and fled to the US, settling in Ohio. And I think if multiple of your ancestors, your great grandfather and your father, are having to flee from their countries, I don’t know, I think that might say a lot about your family. I can’t figure out what it says exactly, they’re brave, obviously, determined, maybe a little hardheaded, stubborn, they stick to their principles, they aren’t easily swayed. They don’t just assimilate with the masses and do what’s easy like everyone else. They think for themselves.
Once in Ohio, Edison’s parents had 7 children but only 4 of them would survive to adulthood. Edison was the youngest of the 7 born in 1847. When he was around 7 years old, the family moved to Michigan so that his father could work in the lumber industry there. Edison was sent to school but it didn’t go well. He was not a good student. And like I said, this is typical of his kind. They don’t fit the mold of traditional public schooling. When the schoolmaster called him quote “addled” his mother put her foot down. A former teacher herself, she pulled him out of school and began educating him herself. Edison said years later quote “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint,” end quote. So his mother was tutoring him in reading, writing, arithmetic, but he was really a very self-taught, self-led learner, as we see with this genius type. He learned most things by reading on his own and experimenting endlessly with all things science and engineering. He loved to experiment, try something and see what happens. And then tweak it and try it again and tweak it and try again until he achieved the desired result. He loved it. And this would continue throughout his life, this belief in self-improvement through experimentation. Edison was not easily frustrated by failure. He was not afraid to fail. And we see this from even a very young age. Most kids don’t have that kind of patience.
When he was 12 years old, he developed hearing problems. He was actually completely deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other ear, which I had no idea. This was probably from having had scarlet fever as a child but he apparently liked to come up with wild, elaborate stories about why he couldn’t hear. Later in life, he theorized that his hearing loss allowed him to avoid distraction and concentrate more easily on his work. Which has me wanting to get some of those little earplug things they market to overstimulated moms that like mute the sound so your nervous system can chill out, not a sponsor. At the age of 13 he went to work selling newspapers, candy, and vegetables on the trains that ran from Port Huron which is where he lived in Michigan to Detroit. He made around $50 a week which is, I’m fairly certain already adjusted for inflation because that would be a crazy amount for a 13 year old if it wasn’t. So he made the equivalent of $50 a week peddling newspapers and what not on trains. And almost all of that money went to purchase equipment for electrical and chemical experiments. He actually set up a mini laboratory in the baggage car of one of the trains. I don’t know who let him do this, maybe it was like a covert operation, I don’t know. He also set up a printing press and started printing his own newspaper and he started distributing it along with the other real newspapers he sold to passengers. I mean, this is an impressive kid right here. Now eventually, his little science lab in the baggage car led to a fire and he had to stop doing that but, he was able to pivot in a very unexpected twist of fate way.
In 1862, when he was 15 years old, he saved the life of a 3 year old boy named Jimmie MacKenzie. Jimmie was crawling around on the railroad tracks, clearly being air quotes supervised by his dad. Edison noticed a boxcar had come loose and was hurtling down the tracks right towards Jimmie. So he grabbed him and pulled him off the tracks, saving him. Jimmie’s father worked at the train station and he was so grateful to Edison for saving his son from being struck by this train that he decided to repay him by training him as a telegraph operator. I guess this was something the guy knew how to do, he figured if he taught it to Edison, he could get a job operating telegraphs which was, you know, better than peddling newspapers and candy. Which he does, Edison starts working for a train station in Ontario as a telegraph operator. But, like before, he’s also studying qualitative analysis and conducting chemistry experiments and also still publishing his own newspaper on the side. And he ends up getting blamed for the near collision of two trains and quits that job before they can fire him.
At 19 years old, he began working for Western Union, using his telegraph operator skills. He requested to work the night shift so that he could continue, of course, reading and experimenting. But, once again this little side hustle cost him his job. According to Wikipedia quote “One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilt sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below. The next morning Edison was fired,” end quote. Moral of the story, don’t set up a science lab above your boss’s office if you want to keep your experiments a secret. So he’s lost another job, but through all this, he’s met another telegrapher (telographer? I don’t know) named Franklin Leonard Pope who also happened to be an inventor. And Pope allowed Edison to live in a room at Samuel Law’s Gold Indicator Company where he worked in New York City. And soon these two Pope and Edison along with another guy named James Ashley, founded their own electrical engineering and inventing company in October of 1869 that was called Pope, Edison, and co. Sorry Ashley, you’re part of the co I guess. Edison actually received his first patent just before that in June of 1869 which was for an electric vote recorder, like to count votes during elections. But, politicians wouldn’t go for it. They didn’t want votes to be counted electronically. I suppose they trusted humans over machines. And so this first invention was a bit of a flop at the time. Next, he turned his attention to improving telegraphs, something he already knew a bit about. This led to the development of the quadruplex telegraph which could send two messages simultaneously in both directions. So two messages coming in and two messages going out at the same time. He also developed an electric pen.
So the inventions and patents are rolling now and Edison sells some of these patents, he sells the quadruplex telegraph patent and he starts actually making money as an inventor. In 1871 he gets married to a former employee named Mary Stilwell and they go on to have three children together. But Edison is a bit of an absent father. He was known to get so wrapped up in his work that he would basically forget about his family altogether. He often slept at the lab and spent most of his time with his male colleagues. But Mary just kind of let it slide. She just sort of let him do his thing. She was in bad health though, this poor woman. She eventually died of what they think was a brain tumor but for years she just suffered, like basically as a single mother raising these children while her health failed and her husband forgot about her.
In 1876, Edison used the money he got from selling the quadruplex telegraph patent and opened a new upgraded laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey that would later become known as the “invention factory.” The Menlo Park lab was unique at the time because it was the first institution set up with the sole purpose of experimenting and inventing. No one else was doing this. Edison hired a bunch of guys and put them in this lab and together, they just tinkered and experimented, and figured stuff out, and they invented all kinds of stuff. It was all about new innovations and making improvements to existing technology. And here’s where we run into a little bit of trouble with the issue of giving credit where credit is due. Edison is credited with most of what was invented or improved upon at his Menlo Park lab. But, most of the actual research and development was carried out by his employees, under his direction. Right, so who should get the credit? Does Edison get the credit as the boss man or does this guy he hired who actually made the breakthrough discovery get the credit? I think that’s where the question lies most of the time with Edison.
The other issue lies with the fact that he’s mostly improving upon things that were already invented by other people. He’s making them more practical and more marketable. And, in a lot of cases, he gets credit for them. There’s actually only one invention that he totally came up with on his own and didn’t borrow the idea from other inventors. Out of 1,093 patents, the only truly original invention was the phonograph. He had already been working to improve telegraphs. He had also been working to improve telephones which were developed by Alexander Graham Bell and some other guys. He found a way to transmit voices at a much louder volume so you could actually hear them. So he’s already working on transmission, right, getting information from one place to another. Right, we can hear someone talking through this telephone device, but what if we had a device that could record someone talking so that we could listen to it again later? And this led to the development of the phonograph in 1877. That’s what a phonograph does, it records sound. His first idea was to record sound as indentations on a rapidly moving piece of paper. And then he, and his employees, let’s not forget them, came up with a machine with a tin-foil coated cylinder with a diaphragm and a needle. And the cylinder turns around, like a record player or a music box, right, and then the needle… you know what, I don’t know, I’m not even going to try to explain how it works because I’m going to butcher it. But what I do know is, that, according to the Library of Congress quote “When Edison spoke the words "Mary had a little lamb" into the mouthpiece, to his amazement the machine played the phrase back to him,” end quote. And if he was amazed at his own invention, yeah, I’m not even going to pretend to know how a phonograph works. But this was possibly the only true, unique, original invention that Edison came up with. Everything else was an improvement upon someone else’s idea. Not that that isn’t valuable. That’s all the Wright Brothers did with their 1903 flyer. They took the work of other, failed aviators, and they made it better and they made it better again and they figured out a way to make it practical and marketable and we don’t call them frauds and we don’t accuse them of stealing the idea. This is what Edison was doing too.
So let’s talk about lightbulbs. Because this is where it gets really murky. If I asked you, if I asked any educated person “who invented the lightbulb?” They’d probably answer “Thomas Edison.” Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb. That’s the answer to the trivia question. But, there’s a whole lot more to it than that, and a whole lot more people were involved. So, what role did Edison actually play in the development of the lightbulb? Let’s shine a light on that shall we? After initially wowing the world with his phonograph, the novelty sort of wore off. It was cool but people weren’t exactly sure what to do with it. It was a bit ahead of its time to be honest. So Edison set it aside and started to try to tackle another area that needed work: electric lighting. At this point, 1878, the world was still being lit by candles and gas lights. Can you imagine? But there is electricity. They know about it. They’re working on it. They know it can be used for lighting and all sorts of things. It’s still pretty dangerous right now. But it’s there. It has potential. The problem is. They cannot figure out how to make a lightbulb that doesn’t just immediately burn out. Tons of guys have been working on this. Over 20 people dedicated their lives to inventing a functional lightbulb before Edison came on the scene. But they were all flawed. They burned out too quickly or they required way too much electricity to operate, or they were way too expensive to market. In 1840, a British scientist named Warren de la Rue had invented a functional lightbulb that used a coiled platinum filament. But platinum was way too expensive. They couldn’t sell platinum lightbulbs to the masses. No one could afford them.
So, not unlike the Wright brothers, Edison takes in all of these flawed designs. What did la Rue do? What did Volta do? What did Woodward and Evans do? And he’s trying to improve upon their designs, to fix the problems that they were having with their lightbulbs. And he does this the same way he’d always done it, even as a kid. He runs experiment after experiment after experiment and every time it fails, he learns something. Every failure leads to improvement. And slowly, gradually failure after failure, improvement after improvement, he finds a design that works. This is where we get Edison quotes like quote "I never quit until I get what I'm after. Negative results are just what I'm after. They are just as valuable to me as positive results." and “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” and “when you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven’t.” The guy is a master of growth mindset. It’s hard to fail. It’s frustrating. Our brains hate failure. We want to give up because the feeling is that uncomfortable to us. But he’s able to shift the way he sees failure. He hasn’t failed. He’s eliminated a possibility on a list of possible solutions. And all he has to do is eliminate all but one possibility. Each time an idea fails, he successfully eliminates a possibility. It’s not a failure. It’s another step in the right direction. And this is what he does with the lightbulb. And I say he but remember, this is really like a team of people that he has working for him. He has a whole team working on this, the Edison team. So whether or not he can take sole credit for any breakthrough, eh, it’s an interesting ethical question.
And he does finally make a breakthrough with the lightbulb after testing all kinds of different materials to use as filaments - cardboard, grass, hemp, palmetto - he finally settles on bamboo, carbonized bamboo. And part of what made this discovery possible was the work environment. This laboratory he created was just jam packed with every material and supply imaginable. They had everything at their fingertips, everything they could ever possibly need or want to experiment with. Edison said he wanted the lab to have quote “a stock of almost every conceivable material.” A newspaper article published in 1887 claimed the lab had quote “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels ... silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell ... cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores…” and the list goes on and on. Edison once said quote “to invent, you need a good imagination, and a pile of junk,” end quote. And in that pile of junk was bamboo. And that’s what ended up working as a lightbulb filament that could burn for 1,200 hours making it practical for use in electric lighting.
They set up electric lamps in the lab and people journeyed to Menlo Park to see them. It was a spectacle. It was like magic. He moved to New York City and drummed up huge investors - J.P. Morgan, Spencer Trask, and members of the Vanderbilt family. The first commercial electric light system was installed on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan in 1882 and by 1883, a year later, they had 513 customers using 10,300 lamps. It spreads to Europe. It really takes off. Now here is where the drama with the ACDC war of the currents goes down. Long story short, Westinghouse thinks AC is better. Edison thinks DC is better. Tesla invents the AC induction motor which actually makes AC better. Edison tries to cling to DC even though it’s becoming more and more obvious that AC is better. Eventually his main investor JP Morgan merges Edison’s company, Edison General Electric with another company called Thomas-Houston and renames it General Electric. Edison serves on the board for a few years and then bows out of the lighting industry altogether and moves on to other things but not before electrocuting a bunch of animals and helping to invent the electric chair to try to prove that AC currents were dangerous. Insert upside down smiley face emoji here.
His long forgotten wife dies around this time and he remarries a woman named Mina Miller. He has three more children with her, doesn’t see much of his original three children with Mary. He just sort of moves on and starts a new family. In 1887 he builds a new, upgraded lab in West Orange, New Jersey. It was like Menlo Park on steroids. And he turns his attention back to his only true invention, the phonograph.
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But he only does this because, when he set it down years ago, others picked it up. Two other guys, Chichester Bell (who was Alexander Graham Bell’s cousin by the way) and Charles Sumner Tainter had started working on Edison’s phonograph idea when he abandoned it. They upgraded his idea to a wax cylinder and a floating stylus and they started calling it a graphophone. But they weren’t stealing the idea. They actually wanted to collaborate with him on it. They go to Edison and they’re like “check this out. Look what we did with your phonograph idea. Do you want in?” And he’s like “um, no, back off.” And he refuses to collaborate with them. He feels the phonograph is his and his alone and no one else gets to be part of it. And so this possible competition stirs him to action and he starts working on the phonograph again. According to the Library of Congress quote “Edison eventually adopted methods similar to Bell and Tainter's in his own phonograph,” end quote. So it’s like, they stole his idea and made it better and then he stole it back from them. There’s a fine line between collaboration and theft here.
He initially marketed this new and improved phonograph as a business dictation machine but that was a flop. Then he started marketing it for home entertainment and switched from cylinders to disks. Yes, this is essentially an early record player. And that was slightly more successful but, according to the Library of Congress it was quote “always hampered by the company's reputation of choosing lower-quality recording acts. In the 1920s, competition from radio caused business to sour, and the Edison disc business ceased production in 1929,” end quote.
But, no matter, Edison has all kinds of other things to do. He’s messing around with ore-milling for a while, which is like methods of extracting metal from ore. He gets involved in cement. He starts pushing people to make things out of cement, like not just sidewalks and buildings, he proposes building furniture, refrigerators, and pianos out of cement. And for all these interests, all of these avenues he pursues, he starts companies, he gets investors, he gets patents. It’s a huge undertaking. Each thing - phonographs, lightbulbs, ore milling, cement, they all have like multiple companies and corporations and employees and all of it to go along with them. I don’t know how this guy had the time to oversee all this. And then he has multiple labs and all these people and investors. It makes my head spin. But it’s also more evidence that like, yeah, Edison is not doing this all on his own. No one could do all of this. He has teams of people, cogs that turn all this heavy machinery.
Next comes motion pictures because he clearly doesn’t have enough on his plate. In 1888, Edison met a guy named Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge had a curious new invention he called a zoopraxiscope. It had a circular disk with photographs on it right a bunch of little photographs going around the disk, and when you spun the disk and it flipped from photograph to photograph it looked like motion, a horse running. Maybe you’ve seen that first video ever made of a horse running. That was Muybridge. It’s like a flip book right, a bunch of pictures flipping by quickly and it looks like motion. It’s an early video camera, a motion picture camera. So Muybridge is like “check this out, what do you think? Think we can make something useful out of this?” Because what you have to understand is, there are a bunch of great inventors out there. They all have great ideas and they’re making really cool stuff but very few of them have the business skills that Edison has, the ability to take an idea, an invention, and turn it into something practical and get patents and set up companies to develop it and manufacture it and sell it to the world. He is particularly skilled at this, clearly. And so Muybridge goes to him. Because if anyone could turn his invention into something sellable, it’s Edison. But Edison, is like “nah.” And then, kind of what he did with his phonograph competitors who wanted to be collaborators, he just took the idea, and he started to develop his own motion picture camera. Who needs Muybridge?
Edison starts working on his own camera design back at his laboratory. Except he kind of doesn’t cause dude’s kind of busy and this isn’t really his area of expertise. Instead, he gets one of his employees, William K. L. Dickson, to work on it for him and Dickson basically did the whole thing. This is a tad over the line of like an employee or a team being supervised and directed by Edison. Dickson did the dang thing. He deserves the credit. Maybe? Then there is this conspiracy theory regarding the invention of the motion picture camera involving a French inventor named Louis Le Prince. And this is kind of a wild story, may have to revisit in a mini fix some day. But basically, Le Prince had apparently developed a motion picture camera himself that used a strip of paper film to record images that could be played back, like very similar to more modern video cameras and way more advanced than what anyone else was doing at the time, including Edison AKA Dickson. But, before he could show his invention to the world, Louis disappeared mysteriously from a train in France, never to be seen again. And there are all sorts of theories as to what happened to him but one of them involves Thomas Edison. Some people, including Le Prince’s family, theorize that Edison had something to do with his disappearance. That he somehow orchestrated his death in order to get rid of competition and also that he stole the design for his motion picture camera. Because Edison applied for a patent for his camera in 1891, just a few months after Le Prince disappeared. So yeah, that’s fishy, but it’s not like the man disappeared in West Orange, New Jersey. He was in France. And then as soon as I say that, I’m remember a tidbit from the Library of Congress page on Edison that says quote “In October of 1889, Dickson greeted Edison's return from Paris with a new device that projected pictures and contained sound,” end quote. Paris? So Edison was going to France but that was like a whole year before Le Prince disappeared. And now I feel myself getting sucked down a rabbit hole I do not have time for right now. File this one away to revisit later. I’d have to do so much more digging before I could form any sort of intelligent opinion on this theory. File it.
Anyway, one way or another, through Dickson or possibly murdering this French guy, Edison gets his hands on a working motion picture camera and he calls it a kinetograph. But to actually see the film, he doesn’t use a projector, he uses this little peep hole that people have to look through called a kinetoscope. And kinetoscope parlors start opening in New York and other major cities in the 1890s where people come look through these peepholes and watch little movies. And it had to have been mindblowing to them at the time. Like truly magic. Now eventually Dickson gets fired for helping some of Edison’s competitors develop projectors to show the motion pictures so you don’t have to look through a tiny peep hole which is obviously way better but Edison was sold on the peepholes. So Dickson helps the competition and he gets fired. And then Edison, realizing that a projector is better than a peep hole, takes a projector developed by some other guys, renames it and markets it under his name. So, yeah I guess he steals it. There are a lot of legal battles. There’s a lot of suing going on and eventually Edison bows out of the motion picture game in 1918.
But he still has plenty to do, don’t worry. He works on rechargeable batteries for a while. He tries to find an alternative to rubber as the automobile industry takes off. Because rubber had to be imported. The US didn’t have a native supply of rubber, they relied on foreign imports which could be expensive. So Henry Ford and Harvey S. Firestone of Ford cars and Firestone tires funded the Edison Botanical Research Corporation where they worked on finding a rubber substitute which ended up coming from the goldenrod plant. He messed with x-rays for a minute but that didn’t go well. X-rays were discovered by a German physicist in 1895 and, soon after, Edison started experimenting with how they could be used. But he and his assistant, Clarence Dally, didn’t understand, no one really did, that x-rays could be dangerous and they used themselves as human guinea pigs, unknowingly exposing themselves to radiation. When Clarence Dally became sick with a rare form of cancer and Edison almost went blind, they decided to stop messing around with x-rays. Edison felt terrible about Dally though. He clearly felt responsible because even when Dally became too sick to work. Edison kept him on the payroll and paid for all of his expenses until his death. Alex Knapp says in a Forbes article quote “In the early 20th Century, let me assure you that keeping employees on the payroll who couldn't work was not a common practice. Had he worked for most of the tycoons of the time, Dally would have probably ended his days a beggar in the streets,” end quote. He did eventually die of that cancer 8 years later, the first x-ray related death. About x-rays, Edison said quote “I did not want to know anything more about X-rays. In the hands of experienced operators they are a valuable adjunct to surgery, locating as they do objects concealed from view, and making, for instance, the operation for appendicitis almost sure. But they are dangerous, deadly, in the hands of inexperienced, or even in the hands of a man who is using them continuously for experiment,” end quote. And so he stopped experimenting with x-rays out of fear. But the work that he and Dally did was pretty huge. They developed the fluoroscope which allows for the real-time viewing of x-ray images. This technology is still used in doctors offices today. If you’ve ever needed an x-ray, you have Edison in part to thank for that. Dally gave his life for that. And it’s saved countless lives ever since.
During World War I, Edison served as the head of the Naval Consulting Board. This was an attempt by the navy to use science to improve warfare and they set up a laboratory and everything where Edison mostly worked on technology for submarine detection. But he reportedly felt that the navy was not receptive to many of his ideas. By the 1920s, Edison’s health started to fail him. He had diabetes and he was getting old. In 1929, his buddy Henry Ford threw a huge celebratory dinner in honor of the 50th anniversary of Edison’s electric light that was attended by President Hoover, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Marie Curie, and even Orville Wright but Edison’s health was so bad by that point that he had to leave halfway throught he dinner. In 1931 at the age of 84, he fell into a coma and died of complications from diabetes.
So, holy moly, is your head spinning? How many things did this guy do? It’s really remarkable. And when we come to the question of giving credit, can we give credit to Edison for all of these things? Surely one man cannot do all of these things. He didn’t do them alone. He had teams of people, laboratories, businesses, investors, employees, all of it. It seems like Edison has gotten the credit for things that a large group of people were doing, right, a large group of scientific and business collaborators. But then again, Edison was the leader of that group. He organized it, he oversaw it, people came to him, they brought their inventions to him to market. No one else could do what he did. If they could, they would have. And so I think, yeah, Edison does deserve a lot of that credit. He was a wildly successful person. And he manifested that success, he made it happen. He brought the people together and he gave them the tools and the ideas to work with. And without him, I don’t think a lot of it would have happened. He was the facilitator. And at times, yes, he was ruthless. He’d take your idea and make it better in a heartbeat. He’d manufacture and market something you had no hope of selling yourself.
And when we really look at what kind of person Edison was, all the way back to his childhood, all the way back to his roots, it makes sense. It makes sense why this guy could do things, could figure things out, could make things happen that no one else could do. Because he was determined. He persevered through outrageous failure. Most people would not. You fail at something enough times and you eventually give up and move on. Not Edison. Because Edison didn’t view failure as failure and that’s what made him different. We don’t always like things that are different and we don’t always like when someone is more successful than us. He’s easy to dislike. He’s an easy target. And I think that’s why we see so much Edison hate going around in recent decades. Did he steal some of his ideas? I mean kind of. Did he get undue credit? Kind of. Is he the only one to operate this way? Absolutely not. Edison just knew how to play the game and he knew how to get stuff done. And without him, without that final piece to the puzzle that brings it all together, that brings together all the work that all these other people have done, the whole team, and turns it into something, without Thomas Edison, we’d live in a different world entirely.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from The Library of Congress, The National Park Service, Forbes, Wikipedia, Ranker, and US News. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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