Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Dirt Nap City is the podcast about history's most interesting dead people. In each episode, Alex and Kelly dive into the life of a famous person that you have heard of, but probably don't know much about. Our stories are about actors, entrepreneurs, politicians, musicians, inventors, explorers and more! We also cover things that used to be popular but have fallen out of favor. Things like pet rocks, drive in theaters, Jolt Cola, and many other trends of yesterday make up our "dead ends". But whether we are talking about interesting historical figures or past trends, the show is funny, light-hearted, entertaining, informative and educational. You will definitely learn something new and probably have some laughs along the way. Everyone will eventually move to Dirt Nap City, so why not go ahead and meet the neighbors?
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Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People
Was Thomas Edison the greatest inventor of all time? Despite thousands of failures, his inventions still impact us today.
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Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs of the late 1800's and early 1900's. He was driven by a passion for discover and invention and invented many things that we still use today. But did you know that, despite inventing the phonograph, he became mostly deaf at the age of 12? And did you know that many of his over one thousand patents were never commercially successful?
In this episode of Dirt Nap City, Alex and Kelly talk about this fabled American inventor who has been called "The Wizard of Menlo Park". We cover his early life as a newspaper publisher and "traveling telegraph man" as well as many of the inventions that were less than successful.
We recognize that without Thomas Edison, we probably would not have the technology to podcast today!
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Dirt Nap City is the podcast about the most interesting dead people in history.
Subscribe and listen to learn about people you've heard of, but don't know much about.
Someday we'll all live in Dirt Nap City, so you should probably go ahead and meet the neighbors!
Hey everybody, welcome to Dirt Nap City. Well, you're not actually there, but we're talking about it. Uh, we are the podcast about interesting dead people, and I'm here today with my buddy Alex.
SPEAKER_00Hey man, how's it going?
SPEAKER_01It's going great, and uh by here today I mean he's at home, I'm at home in separate cities, but we're both in Texas, and we're both excited to be recording two episodes today, the first of which I will be leading. And if you don't know the rules, what are the rules, Alex?
SPEAKER_00The uh person has to be dead, and they have to have been interesting when they were alive. I wonder if somebody gets more interesting after they die, though. A lot of times we we've talked about people who nobody knew them when they were alive, and then um in uh as they passed, they got more and more popular.
SPEAKER_01Well, that kind of breaks the rule you just said, because you just said they had to be interesting when they were alive.
SPEAKER_00But nobody knew they were interesting until after they died. There's probably lots of people right now that are doing interesting stuff that we won't know about for hundreds of years. And we've also had people that weren't interesting at all, that got mythologized uh or canonized and became more interesting after they died.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Man, there's so many variations on this, and that's why this theme works so well. So thank you for joining today. Now, of course, the audience knows who we're talking about because they clicked on the button in their podcast app. They also hit the um subscribe or download or follow or whatever the button's called in their app because they wanted every episode. We got a back catalog now. We've got what, like 14 episodes we've done, I think, at this point. Yeah. So if you want to know about Evil Kinevil, Colonel Sanders, Andre the Giant, Mr. Rogers, uh Eleanor Roosevelt, all the Roosevelts, really, we kind of cover them. You can go back to our back catalog and uh strongly encourage you to go deep because this is educational, entertaining, and a lot of fun. So for today, we're gonna start with somebody that Alex is gonna guess because he doesn't know who it is. And this person is an American, uh, born to actually originally from Canada parents. His parents were originally Canadian but moved to the U.S. His family was Canadian, uh, but moved to the U.S. But he was born in Ohio in 1847, and he died in New Jersey in 1931.
SPEAKER_00Wait, what year was he born?
SPEAKER_01Uh 1847 and died in 1931. Okay. So uh he was the seventh, seventh child, uh born into the family, and he was a pretty smart guy, but of course, what do we find with smart people? They don't do very well in school. And he followed that. Isn't that funny?
SPEAKER_00I uh I think smart people do well in school, but also people that aren't smart don't do well in school. Wait. We said that you said that people who aren't smart no are smart don't do well in school.
SPEAKER_01That that's what we found. I mean, that was the case with Einstein, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but I think we've also found that people who aren't smart don't do well in school. It yeah, cuts both ways. Couldn't lick the algebra.
SPEAKER_01That's true, that's true. Well these clues aren't helping me. Uh yeah, I'm making so I'm going from hardest clue or at least but Vegas to most more specific. That his parents were Canadian? That that he that his family was from Canada originally.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I uh I was stumped on that. That I should have gotten it on that one.
SPEAKER_01They were actually his family, it was actually part of um they were British um loyalists, and they fled to Canada originally because of their British loyalism, but ended up in Ohio. But yeah, that's all irrelevant. See, the way I'm doing it is like a funnel. I'm starting with the biggest, broadest, and going down because this next one's gonna be a big clue. Okay. Ready? Yeah, he lost his hearing at age 12 and was mostly deaf for the rest of his life. No? Uh all right, and then on top of that, um, this one's a an even bigger clue. I would say during his lifetime, he was considered the face of technology and progress in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm sorry, the 19th and 20th centuries, the 1800s and the 1900s, early 1900s.
SPEAKER_00Face of technology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Kind of the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of his time without the drama.
SPEAKER_00Was it Thomas Edison? Yes. Really? I gave some good clues. Good for me. Oh man, yesterday, yeah, it I yesterday was the uh I don't know when you're listening to this, but yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first cell phone call. Oh, wow. And I was thinking about how we don't even know the names of people anymore that like were big technologists for the most part. But it said that he made the call 50 years ago and he he was he worked for Motorola and he called a guy from ATT and he's 94, and the guy from ATT didn't remember the call.
SPEAKER_01Well, well, kind of kind of ironic, um, actually, because one of the things we're going to talk about is the 50-year anniversary of the light bulb, which which was a big celebration in 1929. But okay, yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Thomas Edison was known to be an inventor of groundbreaking technology. Um, he was known to invent the light bulb, although he actually didn't. He he kind of perfected it. He did invent the phonograph, uh, the electric pen. We'll talk about that a little later, and of course, motion pictures, the original version of Motion Pictures, which um was called a kinotograph, kinotograph.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I hope you're gonna get into some of those inventions that didn't work out. That's what's always fun to hear about. Yeah, the things that didn't quite pan out.
SPEAKER_01Um, as a matter of fact, do you want to take a guess how many patents he had over the course of his lifetime? Oh my gosh. I mean I mean, ten would be a lot for a person, right? To have ten patents, you could be proud of that.
SPEAKER_00But he probably did like uh a hundred a year. Um, yeah. I mean, he he probably had a thousand.
SPEAKER_01A very good guess, actually. He had 1,073 patents at the end of his life.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. His middle name was Alva. So Thomas Alva Edison, and he was known when he was young to be Al. They actually called him Al, you know, like that song. Or like you. Some people might call you Al. Some people might if if you'll be my bodyguard. And he was born in Milan, not Milam, but Milan, Ohio, in 1847, born on February 11th. Um, his mother, Nancy Elliott, was originally from New York, and then her family moved to Canada where she met his father, Sam Edison Jr. They were married. Well, Sam was a descendant of British Loyalists who fled to Canada at the end of the American Revolution, but they were eventually back in the U.S. when Thomas was born. They made their home in Ohio, as I said, but they ended up moving in 1854 to Port Huron, Michigan. Port Huron, H U R O N Huron. And uh Port Huron. That is where his father worked in the lumber business making shingles. I mean, that's a that's a that's a job you don't hear much about anymore, is shingles.
SPEAKER_00Making, right? Making shingles, yeah. I don't think they do it by uh one by one anymore.
SPEAKER_01I don't think they make it out of lumber either. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So anyway, Al, as he was known, uh Young Thomas, was the youngest of seven children. Umly four of those children survived to adulthood, by the way. Big, you know, lots of people died at a younger age back then. He did have sort of poor health in his very young years and was considered a poor student. As a matter of fact, a schoolmaster uh referred to him as addled and slow at school, and that kind of ticked his mother off. And so Nancy took him out of school and taught him at home. And later in life, he said about his mother quote, My mother was the making of me. She was so true and so sure of me that I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint. I love that. Yeah. And so, you know, he had a propensity for uh fixing things, mechanical things. He liked chemistry, he was into all this kind of stuff that was um probably not typical for boys of the time, but you know, it was kind of the dawning age of those things. And so as he got to be 12 years old in 1859, he actually took a job selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railroad in Detroit. Now, he originally just was selling those things, but he eventually managed to convince the conductor to give him some space in a baggage car. And you know what he set up in the baggage car? Hmm a laboratory. Oh wow. He had chemical uh chemicals that he kept in there, beakers, vials, and he did experiments in this uh baggage car, but he also set up a printing press, and in the on the printing press, he printed what was called the one-page weekly Herald or the Grand Trunk Herald, and it was basically a newspaper about the two stops, you know, Detroit, things going on in that region of of uh Michigan, I suppose.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a fellow Michigander.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, and the Grand Funk Railroad. That's great.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, oh, I guess maybe that's where that comes from. Did you know that? No, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Grand Trunk, yeah, Grand Trunk Railroad. I wish that you told me it was the Grand Funk Railroad.
SPEAKER_01Then unfortunately, there was kind of a small tragedy. His chemistry set caught fire. Um and the on the train. Yeah, on the train. The conductor was not happy, didn't kill anybody, but the conductor basically said, get off, and reportedly boxed him on the ear so hard that it ruined his um hearing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that used to be a thing that people would do to you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It boxed him on the ears and caused him um to lose his hearing. Now, there are several accounts. Um, actually, uh some people say he had he did have scarlet fever when he was younger, and some people say that's why he lost his hearing. Because Edison doesn't think it was the boxing that did it.
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm guessing the conductor said it was the scarlet fever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, probably so when asked. Uh, and then also apparently there was a time when he was trying to catch the train as the train was moving, and he was lifted onto the train via his ears, and he said that might have also been the reason. So he had kind of a rough his his ears had kind of a rough childhood. By the same guy? I didn't say that. It just said he he was uh trying to get on the train, uh was lifted up by his ears, and there were lots of abuses to his ears, and so he lost his hearing. But actually, in some ways, he found it to be a uh respite. He actually said, uh, quote, deafness drove me to reading, and my refuge was the Detroit Public Library. I didn't read a few books, I read the library.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I've been to that library. That's a great library, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to go to that library as a kid all the time. It was it common knowledge that Thomas Edison uh lost his hearing. I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_01I don't think it was any sort of secret. I don't think it's something that they put out there up front when they're talking about him. You know, you don't think of him as deaf first and vendor second, but um, but yeah, pretty much every every source I looked at talked about it.
SPEAKER_00But you had said it as a clue, and I feel like I was supposed to know that, but I didn't know that until today. I was today years old when I knew that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, no, that's all right. That's all right. That's the whole point of the show, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, uh, in his in his days on the railroad track, or towards the end of it, Thomas rescued a three-year-old that was about to be hit by a train, a boxcar that was about to roll into him. And the the three-year-old's father was so grateful that he actually taught uh Thomas Edison telegraphy. So, like the art of telegraphs, how to do, you know, dashes and dots.
SPEAKER_00Not telepathy, telegraphy.
SPEAKER_01So he decided to take a job as a telegraph operator in Port Huron, and he continued his scientific experiments where he could, but he didn't have the great setup that he had before. Um, and between 1863 and 1867, he basically was a wandering telegraph operator, taking telegraph jobs all around the country, going to different places. And you know, I guess that was kind of a skill set. It would it would be like being a traveling nurse, you know, going to different hospitals and helping out for a while. He was a traveling telegraph guy.
SPEAKER_00Now, you know, if you're a faithful listener to the show, you should know that I'm fascinated with telegraphs.
SPEAKER_01Oh, well, all right. Well you remember that? So what I do, yes, I do. Um, well, a couple of things along those lines. Um he actually ended up moving to Boston in 1868 and worked at Western Union for a while, but uh his first invention was kind of a flop. He invented an automatic or I'm sorry, an electric vote recorder in 1869. And he took it to uh Washington, D.C. in hopes of getting the government to adapt it because he figured that he could actually save the country lost productivity by voting by counting votes electrically instead of manually. So basically he was thinking the cumulative time that they spend counting votes could be saved. They would want it. Well, it turns out that the politicians wanted nothing to do with it because there's a lot of vote trading and and shenanigans that go on during that process, and they didn't really want it to be electronic. They wanted to be able to kind of mold the clay, so to speak. Some things never changed, Kelly. So he was disappointed but undaunted. He realized that what he did have an invention, he needed it to be something that there would be a big audience for. Because that was kind of a niche thing, right? The vote vote counting thing. So he moved to New York City in 1869 and ended up sleeping in a room at the Samuel Law's Gold Indicator Company, and he ended up fixing some machines there. He wasn't an employee or anything, but they were so impressed with how quickly he fixed the machines that they hired him. And so he ended up working on projects for them for a while and ended up forming his own company with a guy named Franklin Pope. They formed Pope, Edison, and Company, and from that, they were able to actually develop the first multiplex telegraphic system. And what that meant was that you could send and receive two messages simultaneously in both directions. That was something that hadn't been done before.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. And and this is with no formal education, just his mom homeschooling him.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. He essentially just was a bookworm, loved scientific books, loved, and he experimented a lot. I think you'll find the theme of this. He was very much a try it, fake it till you make it, and try it till you get it right kind of guy. Like he loved to make mistakes because he said every time he made a mistake, that was one less thing that could be the answer.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, that's an engineer's brain, right? Yeah, an engineer and with no formal training. That's really cool.
SPEAKER_01So he ended up inventing the stock ticker from all of this um tele telegraph work, and Western Union ended up paying him forty thousand dollars for it, and that that kind of ceded his ability to open his own thing, you know, that that money, that forty thousand dollars, you know, in the 1800s was a lot of money.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01He also, um, you know, you asked about um inventions that didn't quite work so well. Uh, one of them was a thing called the electric pen in 1875. And there's a thing that is more modern but outdated today, like by 2023 standards. This is a very outdated technology, but it's a technology that was actually popular in our lifespan that was actually developed from the electric pen eventually. Do you remember that smell in school when you'd go by the um the office? The ditto machine? Uh, what was that also called? Do you remember? Mimeograph? Mimeograph, yes.
SPEAKER_00The electric pen purple was the electric pen was actually the forerunner to the mimeograph. Oh, dude. And it would be wet when they'd give it to you, and some kids would take it and put it on their face because it would be warm and wet. Do you remember that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, and also I think people thought you'd get a contact high from the smell.
SPEAKER_00And it had purple ink.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the electric pen was actually a small um needle that went up and down, kind of like almost like a tattoo pen. Like almost like a tattoo pen. But what it would do is as you wrote with it, it would put holes in specially treated paper, and then the person um, in order to make copies, they used a roller to press ink through the holes that would make copies. So basically it was it was like creating a stencil on this specially treated paper, put the ink on top of that onto another piece of paper, and that's how it would make the the duplicate.
SPEAKER_00So that was like when we were using it, that was like hundred-year-old technology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, that was uh 1875 when it was yeah, so 1975. Yep, yep, absolutely. Did y'all call it a ditto machine or did you call it a mimeograph? No, I heard I heard both. I heard both. Mimeograph was the official term, but yeah, they called it a ditto machine. That's actually I'd forgotten that term. That's pretty good. Hashtag ditto machine. All of that said, uh, that was one of those inventions that actually the electric pen, I guess it had life on its own, but it never made him a lot of money or made him famous or anything. It turned out, though, remember all those nice things he said about his mother? She was sort of the one he lived for and couldn't disappoint. Well, she died in 1871. Uh but that same year he actually got married on Christmas Day to a former employee named Mary Stilwell, and he loved her, but they had a kind of difficult relationship because he was very dedicated to his work. He slept at his office, he spent more time with his colleagues than he did with uh his wife, and you know, was a little bit absent in their early part of their um uh marriage. But despite all of that, he had three children. He had Marion, his daughter, who was born first, Thomas Jr., his son, who was born second, and his third child was named William Leslie, who was born in 1878. So 1873, 1876, and 1878, his three children were born, and his first two children had nicknames. They were relevant to his greatest invention up to that point. You want to guess what they were?
SPEAKER_00I mean, his greatest invention to the point where the electric was the electric pen, right?
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, no. It was the uh it was the uh stock ticker. Oh, the stock ticker. Oh, um the the the super duper telegraph. Like he he he invented a better version of the telegraph. Dot and dash. Oh Marion's Marion's nickname is his uh oldest daughter, his oldest child who was his daughter was named uh nicknamed Dot and uh Thomas Jr. was nicknamed Dash. But wait, they weren't twins. But they were born within two years of each other, and he said, we'll call this one dot. And then when they had he knew he was gonna have another child, I suppose.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say, so he just had dot for a while. Yeah, he just had dot. We have another have to have another kid.
SPEAKER_01And and and apparently he traveled quite a bit um with his daughter when she was young and called her everybody knew her as Dot, so she was kind of a celebrity. Um, but his wife actually died in 1884, so that would be six years after their um third child was born. She died, and they say it was cancer or perhaps uh an overdose of morphine that was used to give her pain relief from the cancer. Nobody's sure. Um, but there wasn't a scandal or anything, it was just one of those questions that was up in the air. Um, he did end up marrying again uh two years later. His second wife's name was uh Mina Miller. She was the daughter of Lewis Miller, who founded the Chautauqua Foundation. He was an inventor, um, Mina Miller's father was, and they kind of met through that circle, um, and then he was introduced to his daughter. Of course, um Edison was about double her age, you know, she was twenty something, and he was almost 40. But they fell in love, they got married, and they ended up having three children, and they moved to Menlo Park. But this was kind of cool. Uh, on the second marriage, uh, Nina Miller, he actually taught her Morse code, and they would tap each other's hands to communicate sometimes, like if they didn't want to share what they were saying to other people, almost like speaking another language. And he had a quote that said, My later courtship was carried on by telegraph. I taught the lady of my heart Morse code, and we got along much better than we could have with spoken words by tapping our remarks onto one another's hands. Presently I asked her thus if she would marry me. The word yes is an easy one to send by telegraphic signals, and she sent it.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. Hmm. It's nice. So did did he speak um uh I mean is that was that his primary form of communication?
SPEAKER_01No, no, he he could speak. He had had his full hearing until he was twelve, so he had learned how to speak, and he wasn't a hundred percent deaf. He could still hear to some degree. Uh you know, I mean he ended up inventing the phone. Phonograph, right? So he had to be able to hear. I think he did the Morse code with his second wife as more of a little kind of inside thing. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. Good way to get to hold hands. I'm gonna teach you Morse code. Now you've heard of the wizard of Menlo Park, right? No.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01Is that that's Edison, right? That's Edison, yeah. That was sort of the nickname he was given.
SPEAKER_00Isn't Menlo Park now isn't that called Edison, New Jersey?
SPEAKER_01Oh, I don't know. No, I think it's I think there's still a Menlo Park.
SPEAKER_00I think I think I don't know. I don't know. If you're if you live in Menlo Park, hit us up. Let us know. I know there's an Edison, New Jersey, and I thought Menlo Park was a place in Edison, New Jersey.
SPEAKER_01Hmm. Yeah, I'm looking. I just clicked on a link to Menlo Park, but I don't see anything about the name being changed. But that could be. Um that was where he moved his invention factory, is kind of what he called it. And you know, you might think of it as like a technology incubator or a um creative creator space, but his intent was not to mass produce anything, but it was at that facility, it was literally just to invent things. You know, that was what he wanted to do. And he worked long hours, he expected the same from his employees, and he even said, 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 then he also said about this um invention factory that he started, he said, I'll produce a minor invention every month and a major one every six months. And he was right. You know, he was right. If you got a thousand patents, he had to be kind of on a pace like that. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_00Did he have a staff of people that were helping him with this?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's always been that's always been one of the biggest criticisms about uh Edison is that he actually didn't always invent these things. His team sometimes invented them, but he was giving the credit because he was paying them to do it. So basically they were invented by his company, and so he would get the credit, but he would have ideas that he would give to his staff that they would they would iterate, or they might come up with ideas that would turn into an invention, but their names weren't always the primary one. It was Edison's name, and then they might be cited as a as a co-inventor or something like that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I had mentioned earlier how we don't know the names of inventors pretty much anymore, and that's why, because they all work for companies and the companies get the credit.
SPEAKER_01So speaking of uh kind of giving credit where credit might not have been due, um, you know, a lot of people think that Edison actually invented the light bulb, but the light bulb had been experimented with for almost 70 years before he actually um came up with something. And what he actually did, he didn't invent the light bulb in 1879, he came up with a practical version of it, something that would last more than a few seconds. And you know how long his first successful light bulb, in his opinion, was how long it lasted, burned.
SPEAKER_00Well, in order to be successful, it would have to be longer than a candle, right? Yeah, I bet it wasn't. I bet it was, yeah, like maybe a minute.
SPEAKER_01No, no, actually, uh quite quite longer than that. I think that probably people before, during those early experiments, were getting a minute, you know, two minutes, whatever. But you know, this was something I should say, not just successful, but not just practical, but also marketable, right? You wouldn't buy a light bulb that only lasted a minute. Right, right, right. No, no, no marketable. It was 40 hours. Wow. So it was a carbon filament that he came up with, and he tried all kinds of different filaments. He tried hair, he tried horse hair, he tried beeswax, he tried, you know, grass, he tried thread, he tried all these different things, and finally he came up with a filament that was strong enough to burn for 40 hours. And of course, you know what the big difference is why it burns that long with electricity is because it's in a vacuum.
SPEAKER_00Got it, yeah, yeah. And you probably when light bulbs first came out, you probably only used them at night. And because people weren't used to staying up late, they'd probably go to bed early anyway. So you're probably using it for an hour or two at night. So that's like a month, you know?
SPEAKER_01Forty, 40 nights, yeah, a month, month and a half, something like that.
SPEAKER_00And if you can sell that in a 12-pack, you've got a year's supply of light bulbs. Um, guess how long a light bulb would last in the 1920s? Wait, it was 40 hours when? 40 hours in 1879. And then by the 1920s, they must have improved on that by a lot. So a light bulb probably could last a year. Well, how many hours?
SPEAKER_01Oh. Because that's how it's usually written on the side of the box, you know. Oh, I've never even seen that on the side of you've seen that now? Yeah, yeah. So it was 2,000 hours. Okay. Um no, actually it was 2,500 hours. 2,500 hours. That was the expectation of a light bulb. Well, have you you you uh you understand or have heard of planned obsolescence, right? Right, right, right, right. Well, have you heard of the light bulb conspiracy?
SPEAKER_00Well, just for people that don't know, you're inventing something for and not hoping that it's gonna last forever, so people keep buying them.
SPEAKER_01Correct.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like razor blades. Right. You could probably invent one that would last forever, but that would be a bad invention.
SPEAKER_01Or even last longer, right? Last twice as long or three times as long. Well, have you heard of the light bulb conspiracy? No, sir. So in 1925, on January 15th, in Geneva, Switzerland, there was actually a an oligop an oligopoly. No, what is it? Oligopoly? Oligopoly. There was an oligopoly called the the Phoebus Cartel that started to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. This was a group of people, companies, including Osram, General Electric, Associated Electric Industries, and Phillips. I mean, you've heard of Phillips, right? In the 1920s, they got together and intended to basically lower the operating um expectancy or lifetime expectancy of a light bulb to 1,000 hours down from 2,500 hours to make more money. Yeah, greedy. They did this in secret, and they were planning to have this thing. I don't know why it said they had intended for the uh cartel to last for 30 years from 1925 to 1955. That was what all the original agreements were. I guess they wrote up papers on how they would share the extra wealth. And if you think about it, you're cutting the expectancy of a light bulb from more than in half, you're gonna double your revenues, right? You're gonna sell twice as many light bulbs. Well, ultimately the thing that ruined it for them was World War II. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So so that so a hundred years later now, how long do the light bulbs last?
SPEAKER_01Well, so an incandescent light bulb, about two thousand hours. Like if you if you have an old school incandescent light bulb and you have the box, it'll say two thousand hours on the side of the box.
SPEAKER_00So that's that's max. They maxed it out a hundred years ago.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um that you have to strike a balance between cost and performance, right? You could probably make one that would last 10,000 hours, uh a traditional incandescent, but it would cost too much, right? It's made of gold or something. So, but of course, LEDs uh rather than 2,000 hours, they last like 20,000 hours. So like the equivalent of 10 light bulbs over the span. So if you know if a 2,000-hour light bulb lasts you for a year or two years, we're talking 10 to 20 years now that a LED will light last you. The other big thing that Edison started working on and actually did invent was the phonograph. You know that uh Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the invention of the telephone. And uh Edison was big on the telegraph, being a traveling telegraph operator, and he invented the phonograph, which is a combination of the words phone and telephone and telegraph, right? Um this was something that had never really been seen before. There was a French guy that had invented something that in theory could actually record and play back sound, but he never actually built a working one. He had he had written down the way he would do it, which was somewhat correct, but he had never built one. Edison was able to build one, and initially the way he did it was by using paper that had indentations made on it with a needle. Kind of like the telegraph, you know, it was something popping up and down, but those um indentations were made based on the vibration of your voice, right? The sound of your voice created those um those movements, and that movement is what became the recording. Now, originally he did it on paper, he switched to foil and on a rolled diaphragm, and that proved to work and kind of blew a lot of people's minds early on, but it created uh a groove that when played back, when the needle went in that groove, you could amplify it using like one of those big you know earhorn things, and it would uh you could actually hear it. The very first uh recording that Edison made was his own voice. So getting back to him being deaf, he could he could talk into it, recorded his own voice, and he could hear his own voice. So he wasn't completely deaf. Um, probably what we would call hard of hearing these days. But do you know what it was? Uh was it Mary Had a Little Lamb? It was, it was.
SPEAKER_00I think I heard that before.
SPEAKER_01He he recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb, and he patented the phonograph in 1878, and it was an original um invention, it was very, very um well received as a novelty, it was something that people um were clamoring to hear about. It was like magic, you know, they had people hadn't seen this before.
SPEAKER_00So I have a few questions. Sure. First, how do you know how long between when the telephone was invented and the phonograph? How many years are we talking?
SPEAKER_01Uh well, let's see. The phonograph patent was issued in 1878. Let's just I'll I'll have to look and see. Uh uh, what year was the telephone invented 1876. So two years later.
SPEAKER_00The all the kind of early adopters had telephones and phonographs at that time. I mean, that's that's that's really cool. I was wondering too, do you think that uh his hearing impairment uh actually helped him figure out like he was keenly aware of vibrations in sound because of his hearing impairment that might have spurned him on to think of sound as a series of vibrations. I mean, obviously scientists knew that, but to think about that as being a practical matter that could be used for phonographs, um, maybe it took somebody with hearing impairment to actually kind of harness that, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, that's a brilliant theory. I I like that theory, and I think it could absolutely be true because you can you can hold your throat and or hold someone, you know, put your finger on someone else's throat as they talk and and have your ears plugged and kind of feel the vibrations of it, you know. Um, but I will say that he did credit part of his ability to concentrate for long long periods of time on being deaf and saying that basically it blocked out distractions.
SPEAKER_00That's that's really interesting. Kelly, do you remember the bone phone?
SPEAKER_01Uh was this a number that a 900 number?
SPEAKER_00No, no, you don't remember bone phones? It was a thing back in the 80s that you would wear when you're running, right? It was like uh alternative to headphones. You would wear it and it would come around like a shawl. You would wear it and it wouldn't touch your ears, but it would be like resting on your just below your um like your collarbone, and you would run with it. And the idea was that the music would play, resonate through your bones, and that you would be hearing the music. Did you ever did you ever try this? Uh I've tried it like in sharper image store, you know, where you'd see it, you'd see an advertised, but I never bought a I think they were like $800. They were very expensive, obviously not, or we'd all be using bone phones these days.
SPEAKER_01Well, I will I will say though, that I think that's sort of how a lot of these smaller um like airpods and uh bows that you can not only listen to but speak into. I think they pick up vibrations in like your jawbone and the side of your um the side of your head, right?
SPEAKER_00It gives it that fuller sound for sure.
SPEAKER_01There's a lot, there's a lot to that. It's almost yeah, it's almost like the the side of your head or your jawbone, your jawbone. And I think of Jabra, right? Jawra is a a company that makes those sort of things. I think of your side of your head as almost like a as a large um conductive mechanism, you know, that that helps with it. But regardless, um, as I said earlier, after his his um failure with the electric voting machine, he was very big on putting out use cases for stuff. And so he knew that the phonograph was a novelty, but he also wanted there to be some practical um applications for it. So he made a list, and this is actually his list of potential uses of the phonograph. Number one, letter writing and dictating without the aid of a stenographer. Okay, that makes sense. Number two, and and and actually, these are all kinds of has all have all kind of come true. Not with the phonograph, but they've all been invented. They were all things that people actually at the time didn't know they needed, but apparently we did. Uh, phonographic books, which would allow blind people to read without an effort.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I don't think that ever really took off. I mean, obviously today, obviously, of course, today. Yeah, I'm saying I don't think people bought vinyl records for that.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, I had the story of Star Wars. Um, it was like a narrated version of Star Wars, and it had little clips from the movie, like little audio clips and sound effects, but there was a narrator telling the story. Um, and and I remember listening to that all the time. And then, of course, those kids' records that had a book that accompanied them, and you would listen to it and you would read. So, yeah, I mean, of course, audiobooks are what they became. Um, the third thing was the teaching of elocution. Yeah, that's that's good. Yeah, I didn't know what elocution meant when when I saw that.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Art of speaking. Yeah, yeah, that was that was uh interesting. That you know, using this device you could teach to how to speak properly. Um, reproduction of music was actually number four on the list. Number four. That's so funny. After all those other things.
SPEAKER_00Wonder if you ever anticipated the double album.
SPEAKER_01By you know, like where 80% of the songs are crap. You know, there's one good one good song on each record.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, cheap trick live at Boudicon.
SPEAKER_01Wonder if you ever Exit Stage Left by Rush. Yeah, there you go. Reproduction of music was number four. Number five was called a family record, a registry of sayings, reminiscence, etc., by family members in their own voices and the last word of dying family members.
SPEAKER_00Wow, so but this this supposes that we all have ability to press our own vinyl. True, true. Well, it wasn't even vinyl at the time. At the time, it was wax. But were people able to do that?
SPEAKER_01No, no, not right out of the gate. You know, they had to have a special device to do to record them. Um, music boxes and toys was another thing. Clocks that announce the time in articulate speech and announce the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
SPEAKER_00It's so funny because, like you said, we have all this now.
SPEAKER_01Preservation of language by exact reproduction of the manner of pronunciation, uh, preserving explanations made by a teacher for reference during study. Um, and then finally, connection with the telephone so that telephone calls can be recorded.
SPEAKER_00It wasn't until the cassette tape was invented that a lot of this stuff happened, and then some of it took digital means everybody could record at home at that point.
SPEAKER_01But no, it's pretty interesting that so many of the things here are things that we have today that he he had the vision for.
SPEAKER_00150 years ago. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_01He actually um stopped working on the phonograph after a while. Um, the the novelty worn off, and he kind of switched over to concentrate on the light bulb. The light bulb was going crazy and making money, so he just wanted to keep perfecting that. So he stopped working on it for a while. Um, and a couple of other guys, uh, including Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin uh Chichester Bell, and a guy named Charles Sumner Tainter, they all um kind of formed a competing phonograph company, but they use slightly different technology. So they're the ones that actually came up with the flat record. The Edison Phonograph Company was still making these on wax cylinders, but um, these competitors, which they called the new phonograph, came up with the disc that we know today.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting when you read that list.
SPEAKER_01That have you heard this theory that everything we need has already been invented, and now we're just uh coming up with uh ideas and making people think that they need these things when they're actually not needs, they're just you know well, I mean you could actually say that at any time in human history because as long as humans were propagating and the species was continuing, then obviously everything existed. They needed to survive to propagate, right? I mean, even the cavemen, if they had fire and didn't freeze to death, that's pretty and food.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but there's a difference between the invention of penicillin and the invention of TikTok, right?
SPEAKER_01Is there?
SPEAKER_00Is there, Alex? You're down on both, huh?
SPEAKER_01Um, so so actually, funny thing, I'm allergic to penicillin, and I'm also allergic to TikTok.
SPEAKER_00So I'm I'm barking up the wrong tree here.
SPEAKER_01You know, speaking of and uh trying to force something into um an invention that we didn't really need, in 1890, a year after the phonograph, um Edison the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company started putting these wax cylinders in dolls, and it was called Edison's phonograph doll. And it was a a doll that could actually sing a song, and it played a little nursery rhyme, and it was um a big failure. Nobody liked it. As a matter of fact, I bet it was creepy as hell. Well, that's what I was about to say. There were a lot of issues with it, they broke easily. The wax in the um the wax on the cylinder ran out pretty quickly and would crack and warp, so the thing would start to sound very strange, and many people, including adults, found them uh frightening. So they uh they stopped with that, and then the Edison Phonograph Works Company also produced some uh coin slot phonographs, which were the early predecessors to jukeboxes. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah, however, part of the uh issue that they had was the amount of time that you could actually record on a cylinder was pretty short. I think it was like two minutes. And, you know, again, they were pretty fragile. They had to iterate and come up with different types of wax, etc. But his competitors, you know, as I said earlier, including Alexander Graham Bell and his company, they and uh that guy Taint, um, which I think is a funny name. Uh Tainter. Tainter, yeah. Yeah, Tainter and Bell. Um, they had they had come up with better, better tech. But again, the biggest problem was that standard size cylinders were played at 120 RPM. I mean, that's really fast. Um, and they couldn't hold very much information. Now, do you know the the sort of two main speeds of modern records? And I say modern records like 60s, 70s, 80s.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 33 and a third. Yep. And um 45.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's what that's what the you know, that's why they're called 45s, the little record.
SPEAKER_00And I I even remember some 78s.
SPEAKER_01Yep, yep. 78s were like when you when you got into your grandparents' collection of um, you know, some of the some of the classics, the Lawrence Welks and stuff, might be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and those did move fast. Yeah, I can't imagine what 120 would be like. It's it was it was tough. It was a little frightening to kind of put the needle on it when it was a 70. Right, right.
SPEAKER_01You could you could uh it could go skidding off and put your eye out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think about it, it probably had to do with the fidelity of the recording. And so at a higher fidelity, it was sort of a lower speed was required. It was kind of like the difference between EP and SP and LP on your on your VHS. You know, the the the SP was a high quality, but you only got an hour or two hours, whereas with the EP, you could you know get six hours, but it looked like crap. Ah boy, I love records. Well, um, of course, like I said, the old cylinders had a lot of problems, and the um they were eventually stopped production in 1912, and they kind of fell off of that um because of the fact that the phonograph, the traditional record player, the discs were they won out. They were like VHS and beta. They were the VHS side. They might not have been better, but they were more popular, they were more convenient. They actually also didn't have the issue with melting and cracking like the wax cylinders did. So the record players write one out. But one of the things that um came out of all this in the 1920s that I thought was really interesting is uh the term groovy. You've heard the doom term groovy. You know where that comes from.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it must come from the record grooves.
SPEAKER_01Yep, yep. It was a jazz, it was a jazz term uh to describe the uh sort of rhythm and feel of music and the way people responded to it, but it actually was referring to the groove that the needle went in. I thought that was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_00You were talking about VHS and beta. Do you know why VHS went up?
SPEAKER_01I thought it was a political thing or a or a money thing.
SPEAKER_00It was actually beta was technologically superior, it was better format, it had more money being like Sony invented it. Yeah, no, um, it the porn industry chose VHS. No, seriously, and that's what pretty much drove um those sales back um well, probably uh from the beginning to the end. Wow. Um, so that what killed porn killed beta for sure. Wow. Uh it's interesting to me that um you've got Bell and Edison that were like tech rivals back then. It sounds to me like they were rivals. It doesn't sound like to me, collaborated. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Actually, actually, I was gonna talk about this at the end, but I'll bring it up. Have you ever heard of the last last days of night? No. So that's a book. Um, it's written in 2010, I think, and it's uh historical fiction. So it's fiction written from the point of view of a lawyer named Paul uh Kravath, who was hired by um George Westinghouse to represent him in a legal fight against Edison and Tesla. Yeah, there was a lot of drama. There were arsons that were set, and that was actually true. So basically, the way the book works, The Last Days of Night, it was written from this lawyer's perspective. He's a fictional character, but all the things that happen are based on history and what really happened. So basically, after the after the phonograph and the light bulb, you know, the next big famous thing he got into was, you know what?
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_01Moving pictures.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Greatest rush album ever. Uh and also what what Edison got into. In 1888, he saw a device called a Zupraxoscope. Z-O-O-P-R-A-X-I-S-C-O-P-E. Zoopraxoscope. And you probably don't know the name, but you've probably seen this before. It's one of these things that is a round cylinder. It almost looks like a uh a pot, you know, that you would put water in or a or a cake, a cake container, but it has little slats in it, and then it has pictures on the other side, and it spins on a device, and when you peek through the little slats, the little the little cutouts, the the pictures appear to move.
SPEAKER_00Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah. They used to, and you'd pay like a penny in Atlantic City, and yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then and that's actually the the porn industry actually decided to adopt that instead of I bet you're right though.
SPEAKER_00I bet I guarantee that was the first porn.
SPEAKER_01So you think if we Google uh pornographic uh zoo zoo praxiscope, we might find one.
SPEAKER_00I I wouldn't, but sure. It was kind of like an animated GIF.
SPEAKER_01You know, it's just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce or whatever.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it was it was the basically the same technology as the book, the flip books, yeah, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it it had to do with the um the way the eye perceives images and the sort of frames per second. Um I I saw a couple of examples of it online, and and actually there was a man, like a muscle man, in uh in a little uh Speedo doing like flexing his muscles, and that was kind of one of them. One of the first um uh quote unquote films was a horse running. There had been a bet between two, I forget who the two people were. Edison might have been one of them, but it was it was whether a horse actually lifted all four legs during running or if there was always one leg down and they used a rapid camera or a series of cameras to take pictures of this horse running, and then they looked at them in quick succession and they realized it created the sort of illusion of motion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I think you've told me that before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I I wish I actually wish I remember more about that. But basically, when he got into this, you know, he saw this zoopraxiscope and he was pretty he was pretty uh intrigued and decided he was going to start to try to make something that made images move. And his quote was, I'm experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. Yeah. That's cool. He also was early on, um, you know, originally there weren't talkies, right? Everything was done silent films, and maybe there'd be an orchestra there playing, or there'd be subtitles or something, but uh Edison didn't see any reason why you couldn't synchronize the video or I'm sorry, the film and the uh sound from a phonograph, like record the phonograph while you were shooting the film. And he he did a lot to try and do that, but he was sort of ahead of his time. It was harder, it was more tricky to do than he thought. So um basically in um 1889, they worked on patents for a motion picture camera called a kinetograph and a kinetoscope for viewing. So the kinetograph was for recording and the kinetoscope was for viewing. And after that became a thing, they started to open parlors in New York, just like you said, where you would go and uh watch short films, um, and that sort of birthed the motion picture industry. Probably really short though. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're talking less than a minute, right? Yeah. Ultimately, there was a lot of uh heated battles, and eventually the what won out um was the celluloid as we know it today, the film. One other quick note about Edison that uh was interesting, much like the way Einstein was um kind of instrumental in World War II, Edison was instrumental in World War I in that he was one of the first people that thought technology and invention should be brought into the military. That was sort of a foreign concept before this time, before World War I. So when World War I broke out, the government created a thing called the Naval Consulting Board in 1915, and that was their attempt to sort of create a uh science and a defense program, like DARPA, maybe at the time. He did a lot of research during that time. He spent a lot of his time trying to detect submarines. That was one of his early things, like sonar. Um, but he said that he felt like the Navy never really was receptive to his inventions or suggestions. It was kind of too far out there for them. He did also have a quote, you know, speaking of Einstein, he said, uh, what do I think of Einstein's theory? I don't think anything of it because I don't understand it. I think that was a quote from me from during the Einstein episode. Right, right. Um, yeah, you know, he he also had some idiosyncrasies, like he never slept more than four or five hours a night. He was big on taking little catnaps, and he did have um, you know, like a bed in his office that he would take catnaps on. But as he got older and older, he found that those catnaps were getting longer. But in his younger years, he said, I never found a need for more than four or five hours of sleep in in the 24. People talk of loss of sleep as a calamity. The better is to call it a loss of time and opportunity.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's that has borne out to no and born to be not true.
SPEAKER_01Well, and so he did start to have some more health issues in in the 1920s. Um, he spent more time at home, less time working. His son Charles was the president of his company and kind of running it at that time. So he was sort of in semi-ex semi-retirement. Um, and he did have that laboratory near his house that he could work at in West Orange, and he worked on later in his life um actually an alternative to rubber. Well, guess which friends of his were encouraging him to look for that? Uh Goody's? Uh close. Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford. Sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he did actually find a type of uh plant that could be used to make rubber. And so that was kind of a big deal for both Firestone and Ford, and to Edison, I suppose. But um, as I said, in 1929, that was the 50th anniversary of his first electric light that had lasted uh 40 hours. There was a big celebration. They actually called it the Golden Jubilee, and it was hosted by Ford and General Electric, took place in Dearborn. Boy, Michigan is really represented in this in this episode.
SPEAKER_00That's where my parents grew up, Dearborn.
SPEAKER_01Nice. Um, and at that dinner, uh Henry Ford was there, of course. President Hoover was there. I was hoping it would be Roosevelt so we could tie him back in, but yeah, I haven't heard from him in a while. No, uh Rockefeller was there. Uh George Eastman, the photographer, you know, or photo guy was there.
SPEAKER_00Kodak Eastman, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And and you know, back to the back to the um moving pictures, I kind of forgot to mention or didn't mention that uh Edison did credit Eastman with making motion pictures possible, which is right, you know. Um also he was partying with Orville Wright of the Wright brothers and Marie Curie. Quite a quite a gathering. Yeah, yeah, it was a golden age. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Love that 20th century, man.
SPEAKER_01Unfortunately, two years later he died in uh 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey. He had all kinds of ailments at that point, declined fast and went into a coma on October 14th, died on October 18th, and um yeah, that was kind of the end of his his uh time on Earth, his move to Dirt Knap City.
SPEAKER_00Well, this begs the question: what do you think you would think of today? I mean, think of all the things almost everything we have today can came as a direct descendant of, or he was a direct uh as a direct descendant of something that he thought of.
SPEAKER_01He he he basically made all these inventions that have been built upon and had ideas that were way ahead of their time. Um I just want to end with a few quotes that he said. That he wrote this in his journal when he was about to marry Nina. Um he was really in love, and he said, It's a good day for an angel's picnic. They can lunch on the smell of flowers and the new mown hay, they can drink the moisture in the air and dance to the hum of bun bumblebees. Underrated poet, this guy. Yeah, yeah, kind of that was kind of Disney sounding. Uh get you know, in a less in a less um uh what is it called when it's sappy? Um cheesy? Yes, less cheesy things he said. Um, many of life's failures are people who do not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. And then of course he said, Um, the reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls and looking like hard work. But perhaps his most famous uh saying, I'm sure you've heard this, is genius is one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I don't know. I don't know if his math was right on that, but uh yeah, bit of a nerd, this guy.
SPEAKER_01Bit of a nerd, but um, but certainly a nerd that we wouldn't be doing our podcast without, probably. You know, maybe somebody else would have come along and invented it, but ultimately we do have him to thank for uh all the technology that we're using at the moment.
SPEAKER_00Well, I love, as you know, I love to hear about the um the the big uh the big names of the 20th century. So thank you for uh for letting me know about uh comment Alva editing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well thank you for listening, and for everyone out there, uh as I said, please check out our earlier episodes, and we will see you again in two weeks on Dirt Nap City. Bye.
