Introduction

Several years ago, Apple ran a full-page magazine advertisement that pictured a man dressed in a three-piece suit and a white shirt with an upturned collar and crossed bowtie. He is leaning against what appears to be a wooden worktable and is holding an odd shaped light bulb as if it has something to do with whatever it is he is working on. He has no expression on his face and is staring straight at you. From the Victorian style of his attire, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess the picture is probably from the early1900’s.

In the upper right corner, there is the familiar Apple logo. A caption beneath the logo simply says: “Think Different.” The man in the picture is not identified as if to mean if you don’t know who he is, you should know. But I knew: Thomas Alva Edison.

        The idea of the advertisement was to celebrate those people in history who had the courage, as it is popular to say, to think outside the box. Oddly enough, the universal symbol for that kind of revolutionary thinking is what Edison is holding and made a reality: the light bulb.

But just how important was the invention of the electric light? In short, successfully inventing the electric light meant establishing principles of electric power distribution not previously understood. Those principles were so important they altered civilization itself. The author and noted physicists, Michio Kaku, said in his book, Hyperspace, that without the understanding of how to harness the electromagnetic force of the universe, namely electricity, “civilization would have stagnated,” stuck in an age without the modern conveniences the utilization of electric power has enabled. To get a sense of its importance, just think of the last time a storm knocked out electric power or view the near-primitive living conditions of people in countries where electricity is the privilege of the wealthy, or even worse, nonexistent. Societies with abundant electric power prosper; those without it languish.

While we take for granted having electric power at our fingertips, astonishingly, when Edison announced he intended to invent the electric light to replace gaslights for indoor lighting, scientists severely criticized him and suggested he was dreaming. The scientists believed an electric light where each lamp could be controlled individually as could be done with gas jets was impossible, contrary to the then known laws of electricity. But Edison, who was a self-taught electrical genius, believed otherwise.

Then in what raised the animosity of the scientists even more towards the brash young inventor with no formal scientific training, Edison managed to raise the capital to fund his research from  a circle of prominent of Wall Street bankers, that included J. Pierpont Morgan,  who provided him with the equivalent of $100 million today. Such a thing was unheard of at the time since prudent businessmen didn’t invest in a new invention until it had proven itself. Edison didn’t even have a prototype, just his assurances he could do it. But he did have an astonishing track record of commercially successful inventions and had just recently stunned the world by recording sound. The press called him “the Wizard” as if there wasn’t anything he couldn’t invent if he wanted too. So regardless of what the scientists said, he was not an inventor to be ignored, and no one wanted to bet against him.

A year later, he showcased his lamp with a filament made from a six-inch piece of sewing thread. With that lamp, and the supporting electric power system he designed, Edison turned the scientific community on its head by establishing new principles for the production and distribution of electric power that took civilization from the Stone Age to the modern age of technology.

But then another inventor stepped forward and claimed he had invented the electric light before Edison and had a patent to prove it. That set off a legal dispute that would last for years before the courts decided the issue in Edison’s favor. By that time, however, control of the electric power industry his invention had begun would slip through his fingers when a crafty shoe salesman turned electrical equipment manufacturer manages to orchestrate a merger that pushes Edison aside and forms one of the largest corporations in the world at the time, and still is today – General Electric.

This book is intended as an account of what is one of the most important, if not the greatest, invention in history, the incandescent electric light,  and how the money merchants, as they always do, in the end, came to be the lord and masters of it all. It is also, however, intended to tell the story of how one bold, young inventor, who, in the face of blistering criticism from scientists and working in nothing more than an oversized barn in the woods of rural New Jersey, had the courage to “Think Different” and thereby make a discovery that changed the world forever.

Part I – The Inventor

One – The Wizard Speaks

On a September day in 1878, several reporters gathered at the laboratory of Thomas A. Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, for a press conference. Though only 31, he was wealthy, a celebrity, and, because of his impressive record of inventions, the envy of every other inventor in the world. He was at the top of his game, and stories about this young and charismatic inventor, particularly after he had recently stunned the world by recording sound with his phonograph, sold newspapers, lots of newspapers. So when he said he had something to announce, the reporters willingly made the journey from New York City hoping to get the scoop on his next blockbuster invention.

He doesn’t disappoint them.

With pencils and notepads at the ready, the reporters could not believe their ears as he boldly told them he would do what most scientists believed impossible: invent an electric lamp.  He explained his lamp would produce light by heating a thin strand of metal to incandescence and would replace the soot and fume-producing gas jet used for indoor lighting in major cities around the globe.

The reporters were dumbfounded. The idea, after all, had been around for decades once scientists in the early 1800’s had demonstrated that an electric current could heat a piece of wire to incandescence. They also knew that others had attempted to invent such a light only to fail, and fail miserably. No one, it seemed, knew how to distribute electric current in sufficient quantity to sustain a large number of electric lamps the way gas was supplied to light thousands of gas jets, and with each jet capable of being controlled separately, one from another. That simply could not be done in an electric circuit, or so scientists believed.

So why, one reporter asked, leaning close to Edison as the inventor cupped his hand behind his ear (Edison was nearly deaf and could only hear when someone spoke directly into his good ear), did he think he could do it?

He nodded several times to indicate he had heard the question. “Because I have found the secret,” he responded, his face beaming with the look of satisfaction at having been asked the question, like the boy who had the key to the candy store. And the secret was so simple, he proclaimed, that when the others who have tried to invent such a light learn of it “they will wonder why they didn’t think of it.”

        The reporters were puzzled and shocked at his big, audacious claim. They grumbled amongst themselves, wondering if he could be joking, toying with them in some sort of a prank. He was, after all, known for his clever practical jokes. He continued with a brief demonstration of a lamp design using platinum as the light element. Shaking their heads in disbelief, the reporters soon began to realize he was deadly serious. And with his track record of commercially successful inventions, he was not someone to be ignored.

His spectacular track record of inventions began in 1870 with an improved design for the stock ticker. The age of rapid communication of price information on stock and gold transactions had just begun using devices called printing telegraphs and the demand for such devices was booming.

The price information was distributed over telegraph lines from a central office to brokerage offices where a ticker, which was called such because of the sound it made, printed the transaction prices on a narrow strip of paper known as “ticker tape.” The tickers, however, were unreliable, frequently getting out of sync with the central office and printed out gibberish. Technicians would then have to be dispatched to realign the machines which meant long and costly delays in restoring service.

Edison’s ticker, however, because of an ingenious electric circuitry design, could be realigned electrically from the central office, thereby eliminating the need to dispatch costly technicians to restore service. When the president of Western Union, William Orton, saw a demonstration of Edison’s Universal Stock Ticker, he was so impressed he declared that Edison was the “best electrician in the country,” and immediately offered him the huge sum of $30,000 ($60 million today, and at a time when there were no income taxes) for his patent to the Universal. He also contracted Edison to produce the machine exclusively for Western Union over five years which was worth another $500,000 in revenues ($1 billion today). Edison’s Universal Stock Ticker rendered all other stock tickers in use obsolete and would remain the standard ticker used in the financial industry well into the 20th century.

Overnight, this 23-year-old, self-educated nobody from the Midwest had established himself as one of the world’s leading experts in electrical circuitry becoming a wealthy, superstar inventor in the process. His success did not go unnoticed by other aspiring inventors who also had dreams of becoming rich and successful in the booming telegraph business.

Edison established his manufacturing business in Newark, New Jersey, to produce the Universal and other electrical devices, and within a couple of years, his business grew to become one of the largest companies of its kind in the United States. Within a year of arriving in Newark, he married and, a short time later, started a family. He was feeling as though his ambitions had come true, and, for most people, that kind of success would have been plenty enough for a lifetime.

        Edison, however, wasn’t like most people.

Ideas of new devices to sell to the telegraph industry, with which he was familiar having been a telegraph operator during the Civil War, filled his head. His inventing success had started a fire in his belly, and he craved more recognition and money.

He turned the top floor of the Newark shop into a laboratory, where along with a couple of assistants, he continued to experiments on improvements to the telegraph. He had a natural curiosity and was prodigious reader thanks to his mother who had home schooled him and instilled a love of learning. Science became his favorite subject, and from the time he was a young boy, he tinkered with mixing chemicals (chemistry was his favorite subject) and the telegraph which aroused his interest in electricity. All his life, he would have an insatiable appetite for information and kept himself current in the latest scientific theories and discoveries.

He would never claim, however, that he was a scientist; he was, in his own words, an inventor. As such, he was only interested in scientific research to develop commercially viable inventions and measured the success of his inventions by the amount of money they made, the size of the “silver dollar” as he described it. If the invention didn’t turn a profit, he considered it a failure.

It wasn’t long before he decided on his next invention. He would tackle a perplexing problem that had throttled growth in the telegraph industry – message capacity.

To meet the growing demand for telegraph services, the telegraph companies installed more lines. But by the mid-1870’s, in major cities, such as New York, the ability to add more lines had reached its limits. In business districts, it was common to have telegraph poles that reached nearly 50 feet into the air with dozens of crossbars supporting hundreds of wires. The tangle of wires could be so thick that passersby could not see the sky if they looked up. City dwellers were outraged by the unsightly mess and politicians were demanding something be done. Fearing the threat of government regulation if they attempted to install more lines, the telegraph industry was desperate for an alternative solution on how to increase message capacity.

There were, however, only two possible options: Either send messages more rapidly or increase the number of messages that could be transmitted over the same telegraph line.

The first option made sense. Electricity travels at nearly the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), but an expert telegraph operator could, at best, only tap out 50 to 60 words per minute. Attempts had been made by inventors, including Edison, to design equipment that could automatically transmit messages at the higher speed of a couple of hundred words per minute, but none of these devices had proved useful.

That left the second option of sending multiple messages over the same wire. But inventors had had limited success in designing equipment that could do that because of the complex electric circuitry it required. That problem, however, fit right into Edison’s wheelhouse. He could smell the money.

He would later say that it was the most difficult electric circuitry design he ever undertook, including the electric light. After months of experimenting at his own expense, he developed an apparatus with a complex and brilliant circuitry arrangement that enabled the sending of four telegraph messages – two in each opposite direction – simultaneously over the same line. It was known as the Quadruplex, and for the telegraph company that owned the patent, its messaging capacity would be quadrupled without the need to install any additional lines. The savings in capital expenditures would be enormous. He sold the patent for $30,000 ($60 million today), and he became the go-to inventor as his reputation as an electrical genius, to the consternation of rival inventors, grew even more.

        But his invention talents were not yet known outside of the telegraph industry. That was about to change.

        By 1876, after several years as an electrical manufacturer, Edison had grown tired of the drudgery of managing a business. In what many considered an unusual move, he decided to sell his successful electrical business and build a laboratory in the wilds of the New Jersey woods about 15 miles south of Newark. He announced that henceforth he would earn his living from inventing. Scientists, who heard of his intentions, believed he had lost his mind. No one, they said, could earn a living by inventing because inventions were serendipitous and could not be developed from scientific research as Edison said he would do. Most scientists predicted he would fail.

        He doesn’t fail.

        Instead, he opened his laboratory and turned his attention to Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention of the telephone. Bell had offered his telephone to Western Union for $100,000, but William Orton, Western Union’s president in what has to be one of biggest misjudgments in corporate history, believed the telephone had no future. But when investors began to show an interested in Bell’s invention, Orton had second thoughts.

Orton asked Edison to review the potential for the telephone. Western Union owned the rights to another version of the “speaking telegraph,” as the telephone was first known, invented by Elisha Gray. In a controversy some still believe was the result of political influence, Bell supposedly beat Gray to the patent office by no more than minutes in filing for his patent on the telephone. Orton was hoping Edison could design a telephone that did not infringe on Bell’s patent so Western Union could compete with Bell if his invention turned into a success.

        Bell’s telephone operated by creating variations in the electric current as a person spoke into a mouthpiece that had a diaphragm made of thin metal mounted to it. The change in pressure from the speaker’s voice on the diaphragm varied the current in the line similar to a telegraph operator tapping out the Morse code. At the receiving end, the current would stimulate another metal diaphragm to vibrate accordingly thereby reproducing the sound.

Bell’s invention, however, had two major shortcomings: the transmission of the sound quality was poor and limited to a short distance. From his mastery of electrical circuitry, Edison designed a revolutionary device to improve the sound transmission – the microphone. His carbon-button transmitter, as his microphone was called because of a small, button-shaped cake of carbon that was the key component, not only improved the sound quality, but also the transmission distance. It was so sensitive that a whisper could be heard over a hundred miles away. His transmitter made the telephone a viable commercial product and would be used in the telephone into the 20th century. He eventually sold the United States and British patent rights to his transmitter for $250,000 ($500 million today).

        But then, as if the microphone wasn’t remarkable enough, he did something even more so. During his work on the telephone, he and his assistants had conducted hundreds of experiments on sound waves, which were made even more difficult because of Edison’s deafness. Astonishingly, however, because of those experiments, and because he was the kind of person to not let disabilities get in his way, he conceived of a machine to record sound – the phonograph.

He drew a sketch of the machine he wanted made and gave the diagram to his chief machinist, John Kruesi, to construct. Its main feature was a six-inch drum mounted so that it could be turned with a hand crank. Edison plan was to wrap the drum with a piece of tin foil and position a diaphragm with a needle attached to its back so that the needle lightly touched the foil’s surface. When someone spoke into the diaphragm while rotating the drum, the sound waves would cause the diaphragm to vibrate which in turn would cause the needle to etch hair-like grooves into the foil’s surface. Retracing the grooves as the drum was rotated again would cause the diaphragm to vibrate and reproduce the recorded sound. But would it work?

When Kruesi brought the finished machine to Edison, he asked what it would do. Edison told him it would talk. Incredulous, Kruesi and the other assistants gathered around and watched as Edison spoke the words to the nursery rhythm, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into the mouthpiece as he rotated the foil wrapped drum. To everyone’s astonishment, including Edison’s, when the grooves were retraced, the machine reproduced Edison’s words and in his voice. News of the phonograph caused a sensation. Suddenly, his name was known around the globe. He was now a celebrity.

From that point on, people clamored to know more about this mysterious inventor and his enormous laboratory located in the tiny hamlet of Menlo Park somewhere in the woods of New Jersey. The press was more than happy to oblige and dubbed him “the Wizard of Menlo Park” as if there were nothing he couldn’t invent once he put his mind to it. Creative reporters began chronicling his life depicting him as a man driven by his work, the eccentric scientist, who spent endless hours in his laboratory surrounded by bubbling flasks of chemicals as he barked orders to his assistants who were tinkering with machines that sent electrical sparks flying into the air until, presto, another invention was born. It was the stuff of science fiction.

To add to the allure, there was his careless appearance which probably was best described as disheveled. Edison was never one for formalities. His preferred attire was loose fitting clothes, often wearing the same clothes for days at a time, which were usually spotted with grease and chemical stains. He frequently wore a pillbox hat and a bandana around his neck, was often in need of a haircut and shave, and had either a cigar or a plug of tobacco constantly in his mouth. Workdays were often long, and when he grew tired, he would curl up on a workbench using anything he could find for a pillow and take a nap. The press, of course, found these mannerisms charismatic and depicted him as the country bumpkin who came to the big city from the Midwest and, in spite of his rustic nature, made good. It was the all-American story of how the future held great promise to those who applied themselves.

Edison, too, was an excellent raconteur and enjoyed regaling the reporters, or anyone else who would listen, with comical stories, of which he kept a notebook full. And when he spoke about his inventions, he was captivating, mesmerizing listeners with promises of marvelous new devices that would change the world. This time was no different as he continued to outline his plans for his electric light system.

The promises grew even more astonishing as the reporters listened to what he had in mind. Not only would he bring electric current into every home and office for lighting, but he would also use electricity to provide heat, for cooking, and most of all, to run machines, such as sewing machines or to pump water. And he would produce the power at a central location, enough to supply 10,000 lamps, and distribute it in cables buried below ground just as gas was supplied to customers for gas jets through buried gas mains. By the time he was done, he predicted, he would render gas lighting obsolete and make electric power so cheap that “only the rich will be able to afford to burn candles.” He had a few “bugs” to work out, he said, but promised he would be able to demonstrate his new lamp in about “six weeks or so.”

The reporters knew they had the sensational story they had hoped for. What they didn’t know was that Edison was counting on them to make his plans front page news. Inventing, after all, was expensive, and he had calculated that the expense of the research and development to invent an electric light would be high. The hope was that the announcement of his intentions would stir up interest among the capitalists of Wall Street who might want to get in on the action, or, in modern terms, the IPO. The reporters also didn’t know that he already had the backing of someone who had access to the kind of capital he would need. The reaction, however, was beyond anything that either Edison or his backer had ever anticipated.

By this point, his reputation as a genius inventor was so well known that when the news about his intentions hit the papers, it shocked the financial markets in both New York and London. A panic ensued at his prediction of making gas lighting obsolete, and investors in gaslight companies stampeded to sell sending the prices of those securities into a tailspin. The stakes were high since the annual revenues from gas lighting in the United States alone were $150 million ($300 billion today). The British Parliament became so alarmed at the magnitude of the potential losses that it commissioned a panel of scientists to determine if the young inventor could do what he said he could. (Later, the panel returned with a report that said what Edison was attempting was impossible. Those scientists would live to eat their words.)

        The Wizard had spoken, and no one, it seemed, wanted to bet against him.

Next Chapter: New Chapter