#3 The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Edison Invented The Modern the Modern World

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time-only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high. So I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today. And I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. Having one's own shop, working on projects of one's own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow. These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee. Edison's need for autonomy was primal and unvarying. It would determine the course of his career from the beginning to the end.
That was an excerpt from the book that we're gonna be talking about today. The title is The Wizard of Menlo Park, How Thomas Alva Edison Invented The Modern World. And the author is Randall Stross. It's the main source material for today's discussion as we look into the life of one of the most famous people of the 19th century.
Let's go ahead and start with the, apart from the introduction of the book.
Thomas Alva Edison is the patron saint of the electric light, electric power, and music on demand. The grandfather of the wired world, the great grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person who flipped the switch. Before Edison, there was darkness. After Edison, media saturated modernity. Edison is famously associated with the beginnings of movies, which is where the modern business of celebrity begins. But he deserves to be credited with another, no less important discovery related to celebrity that he made early on in his own public life and by accident. The application of celebrity to business. The celebrity is distinguished from the merely well-known by the public's bottomless desire for closeness, for learning anything and everything about the person.
The first celebrities in American history were political and military figures, the founders, and Lincoln. Treating them as objects of fascination, the public experienced a feeling of personal and wholly spurious closeness.
In the 1870s, Edison joined the ranks of larger-than-life demagogues, making way for the civilian celebrity.
Other 19th century figures, like Mark Twain and PT. Barnum, also gained fame on a scale impossible to imagine in an earlier time for those who worked outside of politics. But Edison's celebrity exceeded everyone else's. He achieved it well before he and others had created the technology to mass produce visual intimacy on a larger-than-life scale. When Edison initially became famous, the public could see him only with the images conjured up by newspaper texts, supplemented with the occasional line drawing. There's a funny anecdote that we're going to touch on later dealing with newspaper texts and trying to recoup some costs from the newspapers themselves. Back to the book. During his lifetime, however, the technology for depicting images advanced rapidly. His face became so well known that an envelope mailed on a lark from North Carolina with nothing but his picture on it to serve as both name and address, arrived in his hands in New Jersey a few weeks later.
No one at the time would have predicted that it would be an inventor of all occupations who would become the senor sir of the age. In retrospect, fame may appear to be a justly earned reward for the inventor of practical electric light, yet Edison's fame came before light. It was conferred for an earlier invention, the phonograph. Who would have guessed that the announcement of the phonograph's invention would be sufficient to propel him in a matter of a few days from obscurity into the firmament above? Any one of dozens of technical breakthroughs that had come before had much greater impact on the US economy. Their creators were more likely candidates for the top rank of fame. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Robert Fulton's steamboat, John Jethro Wood's iron tip plow, Cyrus McCormick's reaper, Charles Goodyear's rubber manufacturing process, Samuel Morse's telegraph, Alicia Graves' Otis elevator, Lucian Smith's barbed wire, and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. These were prior inventions that fundamentally changed the US economy. Why would the phonograph, of all things, have made its inventor famous beyond imagining? More mysterious is that it was not just the phonograph itself. It would take two decades before the machine was ready to be actually commercialized on a mass scale. But the mere idea of the phonograph that instantly seized the imagination of everyone who heard it, inspiring essayists to expect machines capable of thinking as well as speaking. That's actually an interesting thought. 150 years later, we're still expecting machines to be capable of thinking. That's exactly what machine learning and artificial intelligence is all about. And this seems to be a desire that you see throughout human history, something that we're still experiencing today. Back to the book. Edison's admirers endowed him with fantastical powers that would permit him to invent anything he wished. One humorist suggested that he invent a pocketbook that will always contain a dollar or two. Edison did not himself lack for self-confidence and held fast to the conviction that he could remove any technical obstacle that impeded his progress, no matter what field of invention he explored. This conviction would lead him into blind alleys, but it also led him to astonishing success, planned and unplanned. More than anything else, the utterly fearless range of his experimental activities draws our attention today.