SPECIAL: Thomas Edison (Part 1)

alright so last month sam went down to nashville for the podcast movie conference and he did a fireside chat with john lee du you might know him as the host of the entrepreneurs on fire podcast and if you like my first million you might like the entrepreneurs fire podcast it's the same it's like inspiration and strategy around your entrepreneurial journey and helps you create the life you've dreamed dev wow sound too bad does it alright well guess what it's also part of the hubspot podcast network that's who brings you our show and other great business shows so if you wanna listen learn and grow go listen to entrepreneurs on fire it's on the hubspot podcast network if you can find it at hubspot dot com slash podcast network alright we have a special episode by ben wilson this is a three part series on thomas edison we discovered this podcast about two or three months ago and freaking loved it it it had very small listeners leadership both sean and i binge listened to all of them his name's ben wilson the podcast is called how to take over the world ben has allowed us to air this episode and the next two so this is a three part series on thomas edison he's allowed us to air on our feed just because we like it so his podcast it only had a few hundred listeners at the time but we thought this was so cool sean and i and it's about a similar topic that we talk about so we have this topic called or the segment called billy of the week billionaire of the week this one is on thomas edison we loved ben's podcast podcasts so much we just said hey man let us just air this on our feed because it's so good so it's called how to take over the world this episode is on thomas edison he's got a few other episodes or a few other folks on his feed he's got thomas edison i believe he as alexander the great the roth charles family it's really really cool i'm a history buff and so i'm happy that he was cool and loves air this we're doing it none other than just we think it's good and we want you guys to check it out so here it is enjoy the episode there's part two and part three on our feed check it out and we show you oh yeah with without high power just one second look following me hunt i'd like to take this chance to apologize absolutely nobody hello and welcome to how to take over the world this is ben wilson it's good to be back today i'm going to be talking about thomas edison the world renowned inventor and businessman i'm really glad that i chose to do this episode about edison because honestly he's underrated i learned a lot while doing this one and i think you will learn a lot listening to it he was an unbelievably prolific inventor filing one thousand ninety three patents in his lifetime among those are two of the most important inventions of all time the light bulb and recorded sound and thomas edison is interesting because he is in many ways the original inventor entrepreneur celebrity there is sort of a playbook now you think about someone like bill gates or steve jobs or you elon musk and that playbook for how to be a famous inventor originated with thomas edison he's really the first one to do it in fact edison celebrity really surpassed any of those guys i mean yeah bill gates and elon musk they are famous nowadays it is very famous but edison was literally the predominant celebrity of his day the most famous man celebrity is almost kind of under selling what he was he was viewed in these almost mythic god like terms after he died in the usa there was an effort made to ex all the electric lights in the entire country for a minute as a tribute to edison he seemed to represent progress itself and the idea that man had mastered the elements and could do anything now edison was born in this era of incredible change and he wrote that to levels of celebrities previously only enjoy by kings and congress so i wanna study on this podcast is two things one edison the businessman an inventor and how he was able to achieve success in those domains to the extent that he did because it was truly remarkable and then second edison the celebrity and how was able to spin the perception of his success into nearly unparalleled fame and influence this first episode will cover edison life through the invention of recorded sound and then the second part which should be coming out in just a week or two will cover his life from the invention of the light bulb to his death so let's start at the beginning thomas a edison was born in milan ohio on february eleventh eighteen forty seven he came from a family a very contra men his grandfather had opposed the american revolution and been forced to flee to canada when the us successfully gained independence from great britain but then his father samuel made be opposite mistake and backed a failed rebellion in canada and was forced to flee back to the us thomas was the youngest of seven children born to a moderately wealthy family he was born in ohio but mostly grew up in port huron michigan frontier town right on the border with canada about fifty miles north of detroit it was a major transportation hub located right where the saint clair river meets lake huron and also along a major train line growing up he actually went by his middle name so his family called him a and his friends called him a he was of medium height he stood five nine in an adulthood and he was really sc as a child though he eventually filled to a medium build but the feature that most frequently drew people's comments and attention where his piercing gray eyes as a child thomas edison attended a few months of school but he was mostly homeschool school by his mother and you might think okay yeah frontier town eighteen fifties it was normal to be homeschool but no actually most kids went to school they went somewhat irregular things were definitely a little different back then but edison was unusual in fact that he attended very little school and was almost entirely home and that's because thomas edison was not like the other boys he didn't fit in naturally he was he was kind of odd a school mate wrote years later quote i often run across him in town with just as dirty nose and faces as the other boys but he seemed to be thinking of something all the time and not playing much another wrote that he was quote a child that was always doing funny things different from other children loved to be by himself and this el was taken for stupidity actually his father later said was he a remarkably smart boy why no some folks thought he was a little at adult i believe teacher told us to keep him in the streets because he would never make a scholar all he ate went to support his brain and he was pun he was forever asking me questions and when i would tell him i don't know he would say why don't you know and it's difficult to know how much of this a and this kinda of weirdness was due to his hearing edison had progressive deafness that got worse throughout his life and we don't have good records of when this first started because edison didn't really like to talk about it all we have is a single statement when he said i haven't heard a bird sing since i was twelve years old so it's clear that he had already started to go deaf as a child but that doesn't seem to explain all of his social loop he was also just different he thought different he acted different from other boys age he had a very analytical mind but as a consequence he looked at the world kind of like an alien away some really smart people do at one point in his childhood he burned down his father's barn and when his furious father asked him why he said i just wanted to see what it would do so his deafness combined with his kind of agnes set him apart and isolated him the thing that saved him in the midst of this isolation was his mother missus edison was a very strong and literary woman she saw the intelligence in her son nurtured it believed in him and hold himself she homeschool school them by buying textbooks and reading through them with young a edison would later write quote i used never to be able to get along at school i don't know now what it was but i was always at the foot of the class my father thought i was stupid and at last i almost decided i must really be a dun my mother was the making of me she was so true so sure of me and i felt that i had someone to live for someone i must not disappoint but his mother's education could only take him so far and at age twelve young edison became an independent man and his young adulthood from twelve up through his teenage years is the most frontier america mark twain sounding store you have ever heard in your entire life in fact if mark twain had written it you might say yeah it's good but it's a little much tone it down a little bit it starts like i said when thomas is twelve years old and the family falls on hard times due to a big economic recession so edison takes a job as a news boy eventually selling papers on the train to and from detroit he had an entrepreneurial streak from a young age and was soon selling other things on the train as well from candies to fruit and other produce as he's doing that he realizes that the produce is cheaper in the big city of detroit than it was in his small town so he starts buying produce in detroit and taking it home when selling it at a profit on the street support huron and pretty soon he's growing this little business setting up a couple fruit stands and hiring out other little boys to man and so it is that at age thirteen edison was running a thriving business with multiple under underage employees he even bribes the train conductors because technically he's transporting goods on the train without paying and he bribes them in the best possible way he goes to their wives and offers them berries and butter at wholesale prices so now even the wives of the train conductors are caught up in this vast net underage deception they're invested in thomas edison succeeding and so of course the conductors allow him to continue to transport his goods for free one of my favorite stories from the stage of edison childhood is how he reacts to news about the battle of shiloh this is all happening during the american civil war and for those of you who don't know the battle of shiloh was one of the biggest battles of the war edison is in detroit when new starts to come in about the battle and he can see that it's a huge sensation people are following it like it's the super bowl so he formulate a plan he walks into the detroit free press and buys a thousand copies of their paper he doesn't actually have the money to do that so he buys the paper on credit with no collateral essentially they do it because they're charmed by this pre coach young kid manning to buy a thousand papers and he then bribes the telegraph operators to send word to all the towns between detroit and his home of port huron that the battle of shiloh had commenced was underway and there was more news to follow in today's edition of the detroit free press which by the way will be coming on the evening train well of course edison takes his normal evening train home and he gets the first stop and there is a mob of people at the train station waiting to buy papers he had to raise the price from five cents of paper to twenty five cents a paper just to keep from running out right away and he ends up making a huge profit on selling all a thousand papers at a markup of twenty five cents five times as normal price and edison gets up to all sorts of plots and schemes as a young teenager at fifteen he decides that rather than sell someone else's paper he's going to start his own he calls it the weekly herald he brings a printing press onto the train and starts printing in this office that he's made for himself in a little spare room and creates the first ever newspaper printed on a moving train the paper does decently well actually it gets a maximum circulation of four hundred copies a week at his height but even this enterprise is not enough for curious young edison he's has been experimenting with chemistry sets in his basement and that was becoming his true passion in fact he's so passionate about learning science and chemistry and conducting experiments that he sets up a chemistry lab on the train unfortunately this leads to his ic moment when he goes too far reaches too high and the lab catches fire which not only puts an end to his chemistry experiments but actually gets him kicked off the train with his chemistry set his printing press and everything else he's he's done on the train between port huron in and detroit as his career as a budding merchant is put to an end edison picks up a new interest he becomes a telegraph operator what they call at the time a station agent and edison jumps in and immediately becomes obsessed he spends eighteen hours a day learning morse code learning how to send and receive the dots and dashes that make up telegraph messaging in short order he becomes a pretty good station agent he apparently became a very good receiver which is of course when you listened to the morse code and transcribe transcribed the messages but he was always a relatively self self sender which is funny because you know he was mostly deaf you'd think that he would had trouble hearing and transcribing the messages but no that was what he was a good at in fact eventually after a few years he becomes the best in the country he could receive and transcribe even the fastest messages with few to no heirs but yeah never was a great sender and this is enough to really make a name for himself in the community of telegraph operators around the country in eighteen sixty three he leaves michigan and becomes what was called a traveling trump operator because this area was more or less frontier country in america the american midwest michigan ohio indiana illinois missouri although those states were very much still developing and settling so new towns and cities were popping up all the time and many were growing rapidly so it was a very fluid and changing scene and the areas where station agents were needed was changing all the time so station agents were hopping from city a city as needs cropped up often sharing room and board with each other as well as tips for where to find good whiskey and pretty girls as they moved from city to city hence they were called trump operators they actually didn't call themselves that they called themselves spark or lightning sling which are both very steampunk punk and it's funny to me because it seems exactly what kids of that age would still call themselves if they were around today they were a tight knit group of intelligent and technically skilled twenty somethings who were well educated in a very frontier sort of way not a lot of theory and formal university training but a lot of experimentation and practical knowledge they were also dealing on a daily basis with some of the most advanced and sophisticated technology in the world at the time and this created a perfect storm for experimentation for learning for innovation and also for hi i've talked before about the tribe of man x phenomenon and it was in full effect here in fact this is sort of a textbook example and it's crazy how much it resembles silicon valley and its heyday both are on the frontiers of america born a generation or two after it was settled and during a time of really rapid population growth both had access to the most advanced technology at the time silicon chips in the case of california telegraph in the case of edison in his conte both scenes were started and run by men in their twenties who were obsessed with tinkering and both scenes were dominated by playful applications the new technology especially for the use of practical jokes and in the same way that steve jobs was kind of the king practical joker in his circle thomas edison was the king practical joker in his that's another funny little coincidence that we for whatever reason great innovators are also very often great practical joker most of the practical jokes that edison and his buddies were doing focused on one thing physically shocking on inspecting bystanders remember this is a world where electricity is essentially a brand new technology there was no power grid electricity was only used to send telegraph messages and your average person had no experience with it whatsoever so when people get shocked they have no idea what is happening to them and so the telegraph operators who did understand it had endless fun with this there is a story of edison putting a wire in some shallow water and flipping the current whenever people walk through it and their arms would fly up over their heads and then he turned it off after a couple seconds and these people's arms would fall back down to their sides and they look around completely be will at what had just happened to them while edison and his traveling tram operator buddies are cracking up looking down from a nearby window but edison wasn't just innovating with his practical jokes he's also starting to invent the first thing he comes up with is a clever device that records incoming transmissions so that they can be played back slower and soon inventing becomes an obsession like a real obsession like a borderline unhealthy obsession in fact edison starts to take on an appearance of a junkie basically he sounds remarkably like a drug addict he's well paid but he's always broke because he's spending all his money on spare parts and extra batteries he barely sleeps he was notorious his whole career for pulling all night and only sleeping when he absolutely had to he would sit at his work bench and invent and tinker and were work until he just you know passed out or he lay down and sleep for an hour too and they get it right back at it he always looked the she and dirty because whenever he did sleep it was usually him falling asleep in his clothes at the bench and so he also rarely changes and almost never buys new clothes he also takes on a really gone appearance because he's barely ever eating and if you listen to this podcast you know this is one of my hobby horses that all these great men were light eaters cesar napoleon putin's tea jobs all of them that we have covered so far at least and i tried to let this rest i decided that when i started doing this episode that i wasn't going to bring it up anymore even if it did turn out edison was a light eater because i'm starting to sound like a freak who's weirdly obsessed with this one little thing which is kind of true but then i started reading the edmund morris biography and this is the second paragraph of the entire book okay he said quote from earliest youth he had half starved himself even in early middle age while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fat on haute cuisine he would eat no more than six ounces of meal generally only four and drink nothing except milk and flavored water a man can't think clearly when he's tanking up he would say okay so rant over but i do wanna make the point that edison it was commented by a ton of people by his friends and associates this was something really remarkable about him that he ate hardly anything and so with all these things put together he's becoming sort of an invention junkie he's obsessed with it barely eating barely sleeping he loves it he can't get enough of it and then he has like an episode he has a moment that almost yearly parallels an incident from julia caesar's life he's studying michael far book experimental researchers to try and figure out a solution for one of his telegraph inventions and fir was a very famous english scientist one day edison comes home at four am and rather than go to bed he starts studying fair until he bursts out to his roommate quote i am now twenty one i may live to be fifty can i get as much done as heated i have got so much to do and life is so short i am going to hustle and if you remember caesar had an incident where he sees a statue alexander the great and burst into tears because alexander had already accomplished so much by his age so like caesar edison decides he has to hustle the next year in eighteen sixty eight he moves out to boston where he drops out from being a station agent and starts a business where he can focus more fully on inventing his first invention is an electric boat counter which totally flops but then he starts to develop advanced telegraph technology for the financial sector you'll remember from the roth child episode that getting information faster than your peers creates enormous financial opportunities so he's helping these bankers in boston and new york by creating the first electric stock ticker machine but more than anything by creating various techniques for sending more messages faster he's getting them prices of commodities like gold and also prices of stocks before anyone else so that they can profit off that information and so as great as boston was if you're going to be working with bankers and financier sears you gotta be a new york city so he moves down from boston to newark new jersey which is just across the river from new york and moves his business down there as well in eighteen seventy four tom invent his first mass market product the ind which is essentially a machine that shocks you this being the eighteen seventies people are like oh awesome just what i need and it actually sells pretty well it was marketed as something that should be in every family as a specific cure for rh and as an fountain of amusement like i know some people tend to glam the good old days i can be guilty of this but i for i'm grateful to live in an age where people are not so bored that they will sit around an induction coil and shock themselves for hours on end just for entertainment his other consumer facing invention was the electric pen the best way to think about an electric pen is it was like a tattoo pen except instead of skin it made perforation in a stencil you could then roll ink over the stencil to make hundreds of copies of a handwritten note it was actually exactly like a tattoo pen the first tattoo pens even modern tattoo pens were basically made by simply adapting the edison electric pen to be used on skin but the success of these inventions are modest compared to his invention of the quad which is a system for sending up to four signals across the same telegraph line which is a big deal because it increases the bandwidth of communication a lot right four is it the quadruple is really successful both financially and in terms of raising thomas edison profile amongst fellow scientists and fellow and inventors he gets married in eighteen seventy one to a sixteen year old by the name of mary s which was not as weird back then being the work addict he is he works until well after midnight on the day of his wedding but regardless of his work addiction these are good years he's married and in love the business is doing well he's got over seventy employees and he's having a great time thinking of new inventions all day the quadruple sells so well that he's got some more money and decides he wants to move out to the country where he can have a little more room to experiment a little little more elbow room so he moves his laboratory to men park new jersey and men park was essentially the middle of nowhere the average podcast listener has six shows in their rotation so you're most likely not just listening to my first million if so i wanna make another suggestion i wanna share a podcast podcasts that i've been listening to the show is called the jordan harbinger show so jordan is my homie he's a great friend of mine one of the guys who helped encourage us to launch his podcast he's given us a ton of feedback on how to grow how to make the content amazing and his show is awesome i became friends with them because i started listening to show and it reached out and it's very fascinating he dives into the minds some very very interesting people so authors scientist ceos mobs he's got a gift kinda like sean does to be honest of getting guests to share never heard before stories very cool very fascinating a few of my favorite episodes are episode one seventeen with robert greene i've talked about robert greene books all the time of this podcast is one of my favorites and then episode four ninety eight with rob du who's coming on our podcast actually a month so you can't go wrong with adding jordan harbinger showed your rotation check it out search for the jordan harbinger show that's h a r b i n g e r on apple podcasts spotify wherever you get it check it out he's awesome i love him it's just twenty miles from manhattan but it was a part of new jersey that had been completely undeveloped up to that time so that was what he liked about it it was close to his clients in new york but at the same time kind of out in the country so edison moves his operations down men park and it's like disneyland but for inventors and electrician but this paradise is broken in eighteen seventy six when edison hears rumors about an invention that threatens to undo all of his hard won success that he got with the quad alexander graham bell has invented the telephone now the times of homes being wired up with telephone wires was still long in the future neither edison nor really envision this quite yet they saw the telephone as the evolutionary next step of the telegraph and in their minds what the telephone did promise to do was make edison quadruple obsolete even if you're able to send four morse code messages at the same time it's still not as efficient as just being able to pick up a phone and simply tell someone a message luckily for edison why bell telephone was technically capable of carrying sound it wasn't yet a very practical invention it couldn't carry messages very far or very clearly the sound was really garbled and it got even more to distorted the further of the signal had to carry so the race was on to create a functional telephone something that could actually be used in telegraph stations edison is has ever completely obsessed with the problem and with ind inventing he's working day and night every day to build a new transmitter and his approach is to just try every material possible until something works there are essentially two parts to the transmitter a hard casing and a diaphragm for the casing he tries graphite carbon dust lead anything else that seems like it might do the trick and the diaphragm got even weirder he's testing rubber leather cloth silk ivory pig's bladder fish guts i mean he's just trying any substance he can think of to see if it will work for this diaphragm to help carry sound better on this new transmitter but it works i mean eventually he finds a a couple substances that work and edison carbon transmitter vastly improve the telephone whereas bell original telephone barely allowed you to make out the outlines of what the person was saying on the other end edison transmitter are more or less sounded like a telephone that were used to so it was an enormous improvement the question was would it improve the telephone as much as whatever improvement alexander graham bell had been working on since he invented the telephone he had also been trying to improve it and make it so that know you could you could hear it and it could sound better bell had not been idle a western union which was the telegraph company that had a near monopoly on all the wires in the united states decided to stage a competition between edison transmitter and alexander grand bell new transmit or new telephone and when they put them head to head it turned out to be a blow out edison phone could pick up a whisper from three feet away and transmit at seventy miles whereas bells telephone couldn't even carry a shouted call from new york to newark work so with that essentially edison had won the first round of the telephone battles and i think there's a really important lesson to be drawn from this victory one of edison greatest weaknesses turned out to be one of his greatest advantages in this instance and that weakness was that he was not a particularly good theoretical scientist he didn't really know the underlying physics and chemistry all that well i'm not trying to say he wasn't like ignorant of the science i he did he he knew the basic principles of science but he was self taught right he didn't know the theory nearly as well as his peers who were harvard educated or who had gone to universities in london or paris you know he was by comparison a tinker he compensated for that by acting like a tinker he experimented like crazy with a telephone later with the electric light bulb he didn't really try to reason it out he didn't start with first principles and and think his way to his inventions he just dove in and started trying stuff and he was just unbelievably persistent he tried and he tried until he brute force his way into a solution into an answer listen to how he described his own process and the way he viewed gene yes edison said quote everything on earth depends on will i never had an idea in my life i've got no imagination i never dream my so called inventions already existed in the environment i took them out i've created nothing nobody does there's no such thing as an idea being brain born everything comes from the outside the ind one coax it from the environment the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game the genius hangs around his laboratory day night if anything he's there to catch it if he wasn't it might happen just the same only it would never be his it reminds me of experiment frequently cited and discussed where different groups of people are put in teams and ask to make a tower as tall as they can out of marshmallows scotch tape and some spaghetti sticks and they have eighteen minutes to make this tower and i did this when i was in a consulting firm and the famous result from the study is that kindergarten actually regularly outperformed business school students among others also lawyers and ceos and actually when i did this experiment with with my consulting firm our tower was shorter than the average tower created by a team of kindergarten so why would that be well usually adults spend the first five to ten minutes discussing how they're going to build and putting together a plan and debating ideas for the best way to build a structure out of these weird substances and kindergarten know do that they just start sticking spaghetti into marshmallows and taping it up and and building and then you know when their tower collapses and it usually does it's only been a couple minutes so they just fix it and adapt on the fly or they try something differently they try new way of building the tower and so they spend less time planning than adults do and more time just trial and error and they trial an error their way to taller towers when we did this experiment at the consulting firm many of us had you know these very nice looking towers that were either pyramids or kinda square looking structures that you probably imagine and the team that actually won that they got the highest tower didn't look anything like that it looked like this total freak show of a structure that they had just kinda they started experimenting from the very beginning and it was kinda leaning and weird but it you know it worked it was the tallest by far so anyway obviously there's a takeaway from all this i would say that it is plan less do more you have to try and fail and try and fail until you find something that works whether that's in business art sports writing whatever it may be that was the approach that worked for edison and i think it's the approach that works for most people most people spend more time planning and thinking they need to and less time just getting in reps trying experimenting and failing and figuring out things that that do work the hard way but okay back to the start back to the life of edison so edison sold the rights to his new transmitter to western union for a hundred thousand dollars which seemed like a ton of money but alas it was kinda shorts sighted for edison telephones obviously became one of the most important technologies in the years to follow and his receiver was actually widely used for the next one hundred years if you went and picked up a phone in the nineteen sixties it would have a carbon based transmitter based on edison patent so he lost out on millions and millions of dollars by selling that patent to western union unfortunately this was kinda typical for edison he was a really great inventor obviously but he was not a great businessman he was he was okay i mean he wasn't like a does but he wasn't he wasn't in the type of businessman man that he wasn't an inventor it was in the midst of working on this transmitter that edison made his first truly great world changing discovery and it happened really late at night edison would have these great midnight work parties generally speaking the environment at men park was very professional very buttoned up and work like but being the insane insomnia act that he was he would often make his men work very with him and when he did he would have the night watchmen bring up a midnight dinner the men could relax and converse it was the one time that they could kinda let their guard down and joke around have a good time while they were at work and then after they did this after this midnight meal the hours after midnight were often their most creative and led to some of their most productive experiments and and big breakthroughs and one night shortly after their midnight dinner edison was testing out different materials for the diaphragm of the transmitter and since he was hard of hearing edison had to hold his finger to the diaphragm to feel how much it was vibrating to see how well it was transmitting sound because again you know he couldn't really hear how well was transmitting sound as edison was doing this it kinda don on him like oh wait this is making unique vibrations for each sound he makes so he turns to his assistant bachelor and says batch if we had a point on this we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point and it would give us the speech back so that's the way that recording works right and he he needs to just kind of intuit this that if my voice is making these vibrations well then if i could make these vibrations kinda solid then in whenever way i record them i could just reverse the process and make the sound again and it's kinda like a big realization to have all at once right but he does so he he calls his master mach the german man by the name of k and by the way this guy and bachelor were geniuses especially k he was an absolute event at taking edison ideas and turning them into machines and so edison tells this mach that they're going to try to do this making an ind dent on some wax paper then pull it back through to see if the noise will reproduce k said this is absurd but hey you know i'll try it there's no way this is gonna work but sure whatever you say mister edison it's a real statement to their adaptability and ability to move quickly that they haven't an experiment rigged up and ready to try in just an hour or so bachelor pulled the wax paper along the wheel and edison spoke loudly into a telephone mouthpiece with a point attached to the back and he's the stock phrase that they used for experiments such this he said mary had a little lamb they pulled out the wax paper and examined it saw the marks of the vibrations and then put it back under the needle at the beginning and they pulled it along roughly the same speed and as they did they heard edison voice saying mary had a little lamb back to them k cried out my gut in hem or english my god in heaven i he is like his mind is blown right master would later say it was not fine talking but the shape of it was there there were cheers and congratulations all the way around people can't believe it they have imagined for the first time in history heard recorded human speech and it can be difficult to understand just how monumental this was when edison told his attorney benjamin invention butler about the invention the ladder response was my dear edison tell me something more about your wonderful invention in recording the human voice it is so remarkable that i do not understand it at all his confusion is pretty understandable given that edison himself struggled to find the words to describe what he had invented he wrote quote you probably remember our experimentation about printing the human voice i have not done that but i have produced in recording the voice on a paper from which i can reproduce the same voice at any future time as you can listen and recognize the voice of the original speaker in speaking to the philadelphia record newspaper edison colleague edward johnson described it similarly he said that edison had invented an instrument quote by which a speech can be recorded while it is being delivered on prepared paper and that it could be quote red delivered at any time i mean even by today's standards that kind of sounds like magic i can record a voice on paper and then make the paper repeat back the same voice and to people at the time it was like now it was a complete sensation it's difficult to put ourselves in their shoes because now we are so used to seeing and experiencing new technologies that were sort of jade to it i mean what could be invented now that would truly blow your mind what was the last invention that you saw it and we're just like whoa mouth escape you couldn't believe what you were seeing or hearing it's really rare these days right i don't even know what could do that now to us maybe like a a teleportation device or something like that that's kinda like what this was the people at the time it really it it melted their brains there are stories that they test the device with random strangers they play it for people and they ask them what do you hear and the people respond i have no idea what this is i i don't know what i hear and you know the audio was not as high quality as recorded audio not as high quality as the audio that you're hearing right now for me but it was auto right but these people could not decipher the words and then the person who was playing the audio for them would say this is a recorded human voice that you're about to hear and they would play it again and the person could tell them every word that the person had spoken is when they heard it the first time their brain could not compute that they were hearing human speech from a machine edison said quote they do not expect or imagine that i'm sheen can talk and hence cannot understand its words it's just it's really crazy it is it is it is crazy how much this invention blew their mind how incomprehensible it was to them in fact after it was announced one professor wrote to edison asking to rep imp what obviously must be a hoax he said quote the idea of a talking machine is ridiculous but the article is so ingenious constructed that some persons are so ignorant of the first principles of science that they are apt to believe it true unless you deny it in other words the this scientist is asking edison to rep reports of this talking machine because obviously that's ridiculous that could never happen despite these reactions edison doesn't immediately recognize how this might be commercialized notice that in his letter to his lawyer he starts by saying you remember our experimentation about printing the human voice i have not done that what edison was trying to do was print human speech in order to make telegram easier to send telephones had been invented obviously as we've discussed but these were still being used as more reliable ways to send telegram rather than having to tap out messages and morse code you could call up the station agent and he would just write down the message as you said it and it would later be delivered to the intended recipient in writing right he was trying to invent a way so that you could speak and the words would simply type themselves out automated voice transcription essentially something that is still not told reliable in two thousand twenty if you ever use voice transcription on your phone or something like that you know it makes lots of mistakes so he felt like he had only solved half the problem he had invented a way to record sound but you could only play it back with sound you couldn't automatically convert to writing which is what he was trying to do edison and his colleagues failed to anticipate the mass market appeal of their achievement they would really gain that perspective accidentally an article in the scientific american reported breath on the work of some french researchers who were attempting to record human speech but they were attempting to do so by measuring the movement of the lips tongue mouth larynx and so on of of the speaker right so they're trying to to measure the way of that your mouth and your throat is moving as you speak and then they were going to try and use that to create a robot that would do basically the same motions you know like artificial lips and stuff with an artificial throat that was like a pipe organ and they would recreate the sounds somewhere else so you could speak they would measure it then they would send that information across telegram and essentially a robot would recreate your speech on the other end we know that this was not a reliable way to record and reproduce human speech but at the time it seemed rather promising and impressive the reporters of the scientific american so they write an article about it saying that it's these needs these french researchers are really on the verge of remarkable breakthrough and soon they will be to record and reproduce sound how exciting is that well edward johnson who was kinda like edison chief marketing officer sees this and it really grinds his gears right it really makes him mad that these guys are getting all this press for claiming to be on the verge or something edison had actually already accomplished so with edison permission he writes a letter to scientific american and basically says hey we already recorded a human speech and we can reproduce it at any time and he sends a diagram of their as yet unnamed contraption which would come to be known as the pho photograph this creates an international sensation and people's first reaction is essentially wait you're telling us that we can hear the voices of dead people and that is kind of the first application that people make in their minds is that if we can record people's speech then we will be able to hear them continue to talk after they are dead which tells you something about human nature right and that doesn't seem so remarkable to us now right we're used to hearing the voices of past statesman you've heard the voice of john f kennedy and richard nixon if you're in american you've heard all these actors and actresses from old time movies who are are now dead and that doesn't seem weird to us but this was really remarkable and i think one of the reasons why is that for thousands of years across many different places and and cultures soot say and magicians fortune tellers had claimed to be able to speak for the dead via magical or divine powers we have for whatever reason this internal natural urge to connect with our loved ones who have died and so that was like kind of a staple of magic and now along comes this man who had made that promise real we're going to be able to hear the voices of dead people from beyond the grave if they record something before they die no wonder he was soon given the nickname the wizard of men low park a few short weeks later on december seventh eighteen seventy seven edison and his colleagues walked into the offices of the scientific american to display a working model of the pho photograph here's what scientific american wrote about what happened next quote mister thomas a edison recently came into this office placed a little machine on our desk turned to crank and the machine inquired as to our health asked how we like the pho photograph informed us that it was very well and bid us a cordial good night these remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves but to a dozen or more persons gathered around and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little con explained and illustrated below the photograph was obviously then diagram below the article it was huge news all over the world and though he didn't realize it at the time this marked the beginning of the end of thomas edison life as a private person he would be a celebrity for the rest of his life letters from the ado public constantly streamed in and eventually so interested on who crammed into public viewing areas in the men park lab to catch a glimpse of the legend at work edison soon discovered that he was a natural show he was sort of steve jobs like in his ability to get the press to report breath on any new invention that he had made or even claimed to have made in fact edison served as a direct inspiration for few jobs in nineteen eighty four when jobs was pulled the bag off the first macintosh its first words mimic those of the pho photograph hello i am macintosh it sure is great to get out of that bag so anyway all this leads to a huge international profile and a big platform but not huge profits edison would struggle to find a profitable use for the pho photograph for quite a while and everybody would it would be decades before recorded audio found a use that many people would use in their homes and and was widely available part of this was edison fault he was an tinker he just couldn't stop trying to perfect the machine and and just kinda get something done and ready for a lease but part of it was also just the technical difficulties inherent in creating a useful product edward johnson wrote quote the pho photograph is creating an immense stir but i think it impress people more as a toy than as a practical machine which was definitely true around this time the new york sun released an article titled a marvelous discovery a man of thirty one revolution the whole world and it was really a h it was the first of many articles that would portray edison in an almost legendary light it issued closely to an old american stereotype of this wild frontier inventor this was first established by benjamin franklin about a hundred years earlier edison was portrayed as a plain spoken approachable normal singing man who nevertheless possessed and almost god like ability to create technology that revolutionized human in life out of the air he was usually portrayed as dirty and grinding with grease chewing tobacco and speaking plain unaffected language and though edison was definitely trying to portray a certain image you know he liked playing up this folks c inventor the appearance that was in these reports was for all intents and purposes correct he did kinda look like that he did love to chew tobacco or chomp on a cigar he did in fact do a lot of the work himself at this time and could often be found at the work bench with dirty shirt greasy hands and he's often found in un uncomfortable conditions because he had once again slept at the office so he is kind of playing up his celebrity but you know it's based on on a truth about who he really was but this article spur even more people to come and see him men park started to turn into a zoo where he's the main attraction and at the same time pressure is mounting from creditors and business associates to find more profitable uses for the pho photograph so edison decides that he just needs get away for a while and takes a trip to the western united states he starts in wyoming where he goes to observe a solar eclipse and he then proceeds to go even further west to california before returning home making a stop at s saint louis on the way when he gets back he tells reporters that the trip was a lot of fun but he hadn't come back with any ideas for new inventions but less than twenty four hours after returning he made three sketches in his notebook and at the top of the page he titled them electric light on the next episode we'll dive into edison invention of the incandescent light bulb as well as the rest of his life until then thanks for listening