sunshine in a bottle, music in a box. Sounds crazy, but I did it. In fact, I thought I could do anything.
From the time I was born, incidentally, my birthday is February 11th. Anyway, from the time I was just
a kid, I had a notion that nothing was impossible. It was just that no one had ever thought of it before.
So I spent my life doing things that no one else had ever done before.
When you were seven and moved here from Michigan, from Ohio, you figured out that birds could fly because
they ate worms. And if people ate them, then they could fly, too. But you also figured out that eating
worms wasn't such a super idea. So since I was younger than you, you told me that if I ate them, then
I could fly, too. Yeah. Yeah, well, I was wrong. You got sick.
and nobody flew. It wasn't the last time I was wrong, and it didn't keep me from doing the impossible.
I've been a teacher in this school for 20 years, but I've never seen anything like that Edison boy.
He's driving me crazy with his impossible questions. When I tell him I don't know, he wants to know
why I don't know. It's a waste of time to keep him in school. I'm going to recommend that they keep
him home and let his mother try to cope with him.
So for the next several years, I taught Tom at home. Okay, Tom, enough for today. Take your questions
and your experiment down to the basement and you can work on the impossible down there. I lived next
door to Tommy for a long time and me and him built some pretty neat stuff in that basement. We used
to kind of borrow things from the neighbors once we made a telegraph.
dope pipe wire and strung it on trees between our houses. We used rags and bottles for insulation and
brass for rings, and it worked, too. We sent Morse code just like real operators. Somewhere along about
that time, I got my first job. I was a candy butcher. Yeah, Tom went to work on my train selling candy
newspapers on the Detroit roads.
I think he was about 12 then. When Tom wasn't selling, he was reading, but reading wasn't enough. He
had to prove everything he read. So I let him set up a lab in one of the box cars. One of his experiments
caught the car on fire. I guess I should have fired him, but instead I moved him to another job. Between
his practical jokes and experiments, Tom moved a lot.
I finally ended up in Boston working as a telegraph operator for Western Union. I was 21 and starting
to go deaf in one ear and still experimenting. In fact, I finished my first invention that year and
made my first visit to the patent office.
It was a lot faster than those days. I was so proud of myself, I took that machine right over to Congress.
I thought my fortune was made, but the Don thing didn't work. As a veteran congressman said, I can tell
you what your problem was. Your machine worked. It just worked too good. It counted votes so fast,
It left no time for opposition to feel faster, so of course Congress wouldn't buy it. I decided right
then that if there was no market for an invention, it didn't work. So much for Boston. I decided to
move to New York. I got a job there working for the Golden Stock telegraph company. I had several more
unprofitable inventions, but finally I had a winner. So I am back to see the patent clerk.
Edison, Edison Universal Printer. Nice to see you again, Mr. Edison. As Vice President of the Golden
Stock Telegraph Company, I can tell you, Edison, we are very impressed. Yes, sir. This new and gold
stock ticker is a real breakthrough. We're prepared to offer you $40,000. Satisfactory. Satisfactory?
Little did he know I was hoping for five and would have gladly accepted three.
I spent my unexpected fortune setting up a workshop across the Hudson in New Jersey. I hired John, Will,
Batch, and Charlie, and some other top notch mechanics. I became a businessman. Well, actually, I hired
a bookkeeper to keep up with the business. And I went back to work, which, of course, brought me back
to the patent department. Thomas Edison, quadruplex
We're sending four messages simultaneously. You're getting to be a familiar face, Tom. I really enjoyed
that invention. You see, I got fired once for interrupting his supervisor while he was sending me a
telegraph message. With my telegraph, four people could send messages without interrupting each other.
Well, anyway, with the money from the quadruplex, we moved to Meadow Park and set up the world's first
research lab. Now, that was my greatest invention. I invented the invention.
Fiction factor.
to call him Edison Effect. He got so carried away that he let a guy named Bill beat him to the packin'
on the telephone. And Edison Effect didn't amount to anything until a guy named Marconi took it and
developed the radio. But we did come up with one good thing out of telephone research. Yeah, while the
boss was working on the carbon microphone, he got a wild notion. He said he was going to build a machine
that would
possible before, boss, but I'll bet you lots of guys this one won't work again. You build a machine
like I told you, and we'll see. So I did. Strange contraption with a cylinder, a needle, a tube,
and a crank. When the machine was finished, the boss turned the crank and shot it into the tube. Mary
had a little lamb. Then he stuck the needle back on the head of the cylinder and shot it into the tube.
Turn the crank again.
And the machine said Mary had little lamb. It nearly scared us all to death. Have a cigar, John, and
pass them around. You see, I told you nothing's impossible.
a machine that worked right the first time. Then you sure messed the chest in the next division, because
it didn't work right the first, second, or the third. Yeah, we did work on that thing a long time,
didn't we? In the beginning, it seemed simple enough. Simple? And the boss felt electricity fell on
the wrong track with the arc light, so we was just going to improve it a little. The truth is, someone
told the boss it was impossible to subdivide electric current.
So of course he had to prove. Nobody knew how to do it. Nobody knew how to do it. Right. Remember when
we started out looking for filaments? We couldn't find anything that would blow without burning to ashes.
We tried hundreds of things. Then we figured out that the filaments would burn better in a vacuum. So
I put them in a bulb and pumped the air out. Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah, that was wonderful.
We had to go back and test all those inventions over again. As your banker, Mr. Edison, I must tell
you that your electric light experiment is taking too long and having no results. Our patience and our
money are coming to an end. He was right. We didn't seem to be making any progress. But I figured if
I worried about him, I wouldn't make any progress. So I went back to work. Charlie, let's try that black
carbon. We already did. It burned too fast.
But that was because of the oxygen in the air. There's no oxygen in a vacuum. Let's try it again. Here,
Batch, you carbonize this carbon thread. It took us hours to get the carbon thread into the bulb without
breaking it. But we finally did it. Then we pumped the air out and turned on the current. So we sat
down and watched and watched and watched. We stayed all night. And when our shift ended, the day shift
came in and they sat down and watched. We sat there watching that bulb
In two days, it lasted 45 hours.
Yeah, you guessed it. I went straight to the patent office. Congratulations, Tom. I thought that talking
machine, that photograph, was a great invention. But this, well, I don't know what to say. Most people
didn't know what to say when they read about the new electric light. So the boss figured they needed
to see it for themselves. So he invited anyone who was interested to come to Menlo Park on New
electric light works. We welcomed in 1880 the electric lights but it wasn't as convincing as we wanted
it to be. No we worked another year and did a lot more experimenting before we convinced anyone that
electricity is here to stay. We went back to working on filaments. We tried snake
And bamboo. Bamboo! That's it! That's it! It works fine! Now let's see which one works the best! Oh,
no! So we tested bamboo. Six thousand samples. But we found the right one. In 1881, we had a New Year's
Eve party like no one had ever had before. But that wasn't all. The boss's dream was to get electric
lights in ordinary homes.
To do this, he had to convince investors that electric lights are more practical and less expensive
than gas lights, so the bus came up with an impossible scheme. The bus said we would light up the square
mile of New York City. Every house, every street would glow with our new electric suction bulbs.
James Hennessy and I built when we were kids. We had to invent or adapt everything we used. I was in
seventh grade. Sockets, switches, dynamos, meters, fuses, cutouts, fixtures, generators, wires. Wires,
voltage, we laid wires. I wondered if I were an electrician or a ditch digger. We laid 18 miles of wires
underground. Mr. Edison working right along with us in the trenches checking every
board and every connection made. But it was worth it because it worked. It all worked. Every bulb and
every street and every house came out when I pulled the master switch. What a show. We got our backing
and started the Edison Illuminating Company and the Electronic Age. It was a dream come true. Yeah,
not just the electric lights, but what I can
could afford because of it, new labs in a new location in West Orange, New Jersey. All new equipment
and supplies, everything and anything an inventor could ask for.