- How did Edison go from poverty
to creating an electric empire
as well as the first research institute?
Well, I'll tell you,
and along the way,
I'll talk about a relentless drive,
telegraph humor,
a strange philosophy on sleep,
lighting beards on fire,
the invention of the phonograph,
and long-legged generators.
Ready?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
- Thomas Alva Edison, out of friends and family
was born in 1847 in Ohio.
Although he grew up in Michigan to lower class family.
He only went to school for three months
and was mostly self-taught.
When he was just 12 years old,
Edison got a job selling fruit and newspapers
on the train as a news butch.
He worked 14 hours a day
and soon realized that the real money
was in making the newspapers.
So he collected enough off items
to create his own newspaper,
"The Grand Truck Harold,"
which he shield on the train with other publications.
At its pinnacle,
he sold about 200 newspapers a day
and had four assistants.
By 1862, the telegraph had arrived in Michigan
and Edison was in trance.
Edison quit his job,
sold his newspaper,
and spent all his time
loitering around the telegraph office.
In fact, according to Edison
he saved the telegraph operators three-year-old son
from being hit by a train.
With that, operators help,
Edison learned how to operate a telegraph
and got a job as a night shift operator.
He loved working at night
as he could experiment
and read during the day
and work at night.
His big drawback to this plan
was that there was no time for sleep.
So instead,
he took naps at all times of day and night.
A practice he continued for the rest of his life.
In fact, he later said that quote,
"Sleep is an absurdity. A bad habit."
That he felt would be defeated with time and technology.
Unfortunately, for Edison,
the sleep habits made him miss an important signal
in a train crash was narrowly a verdict.
Edison went from job to job.
Meanwhile, he read everything he could get his hands on
and experimented above the salon where he lived
or wherever he could find space.
By the time he turned 22,
he filed for his first patent,
for an electric vote counter.
Unfortunately for Edison, this was not a success
as it worked well, but nobody wanted it.
Legislators needed time to filibuster if they wish.
After this, Edison like to say quote,
"Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent."
Despite the setback,
Edison quit his job at Western Union
to bring out his invention.
By the very next year,
he had the backing to create his own company
with over 50 workers.
When Edison was 24, he married Mary Stilwell
a 16 year old girl that he had employed
three months earlier at one of his shops.
She had three children in the next six years.
The oldest two, he nicknamed Dot and Dash,
in a bit of telegraph humor.
Edison however mostly ignored his family
and focused exclusively on his work.
Patenting invention after invention.
It was about this time that he patented
the invention of the phonograph or the early record player.
Based on an item called a phoneautograph.
The phoneautograph was an item used to study sounds.
It would take a person's speech
and make a needle scratch on the roll of coated glass.
Edison's idea was to have
the needle scratch on something softer than glass.
So it would make imprints on the material.
He started with soft paper, but tinfoil worked better.
He would then speak into the machine
and have it imprint on the tinfoil
and then rotated again where the bumps
in the tinfoil would cause the needle to vibrate
which would cause the cone to vibrate
and recreate the sound.
Edison recorded "Mary Had A Little Lamb"
and became instantly famous.
♪ Mary had a little lamb ♪
♪ A little lamb ♪
(static music)
- Edison was now famous enough to get some major backers
for his new offices in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
This was not an ordinary office,
but an invention factory.
Turning out a promised minor invention every 10 days
and major invention every six months or so.
He was a relentless boss
which took a toll on everyone, including himself.
He said "The stress had turned his hair damn near white."
A man told me yesterday, I was a walking churchyard.
Edison decided to focus that relentless energy
on creating commercial light.
Luckily for him, over 70 years earlier
an English chemist named Humphry Davy,
had discovered two ways to create light with electricity.
Davy found that if you put a large voltage
between two carbon rods,
it would make a bright light,
an object he called an arc lamp.
Edison played around with Davy's arc lamp
but felt that it was a dead end.
Too bright and harsh for indoors with a short lifespan.
Luckily, Davy also noticed that
if you put current through a piece of metal
it will cause the metal to glow,
an effect called incandescence
Edison focused on incandescence,
even though all previous experiments
had quickly lit on fire and burnt out.
One of the first things he did
to prevent the wire from lighting on fire
is to encase it in glass
and to remove all of the air with a vacuum pump.
These balls of glass were fitted
to screw caps from kerosene cans.
That looked a little bit like tulip bowls
and were thus called light bulb.
In September of 1878, Edison gave interview
to the New York Sun declaring total victory.
The title of the article was "Edison's Newest Marvel"
sending cheap light, heat, and power by electricity.
In truth, he was nowhere near ready,
with either the light bulb or the generator.
He was very good at generating money,
but in the laboratory,
he was only generating failure after failure.
However, by April of the following year,
he had finally manages to make a generator
that could produce plentiful DC power.
It had large electromagnets to create a large magnetic field
and a small rotating coil in the center
with complex windings to maximize current output
that was spun with a steam engine.
They called their machines "long-legged Mary-Ann,"
as the two electromagnets look like legs
to the overworked male engineers.
No women were allowed to work in the factory.
One of the biggest differences with Edison's power generator
is that the coils had very low resistance
which caused it produce a lot more current
than other generators used.
Now they have the power
but still the light bulb would burn out in under an hour.
Edison also decided that what he needed was
to put his light bulb some parallel with separate circuits
so that each one could be individually turned on and off.
For that reason, unlike other light bulbs at the time
and there were a lot of luminescent light bulbs at the time.
Edison wanted a high resistance material.
His workers started to methodically experiment
with thousands of different materials,
even the good nature to experiment
between different men's beards, which didn't work very well.
Eventually they found the cotton thread worked
up to 14 and a half hours.
This was nowhere near good enough for commercial use
but good enough to patent,
which is what he did on November 4th of that year.
Still, Edison needed something
that would last hundreds of hours, not 14.
He focused on natural materials saying,
"No, I believe somewhere in God's almighty workshop.
"There is a vegetable growth
"with geometrically parallel fibers suitable for our youth.
"Look for it."
Special envoys were set all over the world.
A particularly unfortunate man named Mr. Segredor
survived mercury poisoning in Menlo Park
only to die of yellow fever and Havana
all in Edison service.
Finally, an Edison employee found that mandate bamboo
from Japan made a pleasant glow that lasted over 1500 hours.
Finally Edison's results were rising up to his claims.
What's little remembered now is how much Edison
had to create for the single invention.
He had to make the light bulbs, of course,
but also all the light fixtures.
He had to create a power source for the electricity
as well the lines to get them to the light fixtures.
Edison was very worried about safety
and he insisted on placing the wires underground
which required him to dig up whole cities,
a method that was unfortunately dropped later on
by others to save money.
He also invented a new method to transfer electricity
that was both parallel and in series to save on wire.
A method we still use today.
He had thick feeder wires that transmitted the electricity
and then split the current
into many different parallel wires
near the bulbs themselves,
a famous Scottish scientist named Sir William Thomson,
later knighted Lord Calvin was asked
"Why no one else thought of this ingenious approach?"
He said, "No one else's Edison."
Edison said "Everything is so new
"that every step is in the dark.
"I have to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors
"and then tend to a thousand details
"the world never hears of."
No wonder he was always looking for new wealthy investors
and his factory in Menlo Park took up two whole city blocks.
He looked ready to take over the world.
Instead he got into an outright war
between two men named Westinghouse and Tesla.
The ACDC war of the currents between
Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse is next time
on The Secret History of Electricity.
♪ Electricity, electricity, ♪
♪ Electricity, electricity. ♪
- Thanks for watching my video.
Please remember to give it a nice thumbs if you like it
and forget to do anything if you don't like it.
Also, I have a nice video
about how generators work if you're interested.
And also one about Humphry Davy,
who's a really fascinating character.
Okay. Have a good day.