Edison vs. Tesla | The Business of Discovery | 4
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Hello, American History Teller listeners. I have an exciting announcement. I'm going on tour and coming to a theater near you. This live show is a thrilling evening of history, storytelling, and music, with a full band accompanying me as we look back to explore the days that made America. And they aren't the days that you might think. Sure, everyone knows July 4th, 1776. We'll be hearing a lot about that date this year. But there are many other days that are maybe even more influential. So come out to see me live. More shows to be announced soon. So for information on tickets and upcoming dates, go to AmericanHistoryLive.com. That's AmericanHistoryLive.com. Come see my Days That Made America tour live on stage.
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Few figures in American history reshape daily life as much as Thomas Edison. The world he was born into in 1847 was lit by candles and oil lamps for most Americans, and gas lit for the wealthy few. But by the time he died in 1931, electricity flowed through homes and businesses across the country. Edison and the research teams he organized played a major role in that transformation. Over the course of his life, he was granted more than a thousand U.S. patents. But his legacy extends beyond invention. Edison helped pioneer the very idea of organized innovation, building some of the first modern research and development laboratories in Menlo Park and later West Orange, New Jersey. In the process, he established a model for how the modern world would go about the business of discovery.
To help us understand the man behind the myth, I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, and author of several books about Edison, including Edison, A Life of Invention. Our conversation is next.
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Paul Israel, thanks for joining me today on American History Tellers. My pleasure. So Thomas Edison was a tinkerer from a young age, but where did his curiosity come from?
Well, I think that kids tend to be naturally curious, and some retain that, and others become less curious over time. So Edison retained his curiosity. I think part of that was, in fact, his education and the environment that he was in. So in the 19th century, it was easy to be not just curious about technology, but to learn it pretty easily since most kids technology was mechanical. You could literally see how a piece of machinery worked. And then Edison's own education was pretty informal. He was first in a private school when he was about seven or eight. And then for a variety of reasons, including possibly the family not being able to pay for this private school in Port Huron, where he grew up, he was born in Milan, Ohio.
And And so his mother began to teach him by focusing on reading and reading a lot of the books in his father's library. That's one of the reasons why Edison was sort of imbued with the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers, especially Thomas Paine. And his father was an entrepreneur. So one of the things he began to understand was how entrepreneurship worked. And so between his parents, he developed a love of learning through reading and learning sort of understanding how one could move from one project to another, not being worried about setbacks, figuring out how to move forward.
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