SPECIAL: Thomas Edison (Part 3)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, so last month, Sam went down to Nashville for the Podcast Movement Conference, and he did a fireside chat with John Lee Dumas. You might know him as the host of the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast.
And if you like My First Million, you might like the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast. It's the same, it's like inspiration and strategy around your entrepreneurial journey, and helps you create the life you've always dreamed of. Wow, that doesn't sound too bad, does it? All right, well guess what? It's also part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. That's who brings you our show and other great business shows. So if you want to listen, learn and grow, go listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire. It's on the HubSpot Podcast Network.
You can find it at hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
All right, we have a special episode by Ben Wilson. This is a three-part series on Thomas Edison. We discovered this podcast about two or three months ago and freaking loved it. It had very small listenership. Both Shaan and I binged, listened to all of them. His name is Ben Wilson. The podcast is called How to Take Over the World.
Ben has allowed us to air this episode and the next two. So this is a three-part series on Thomas Edison. He's allowed us to air it on our feed just because we like it. So his podcast, it only had a few hundred listeners at the time, but we thought this was so cool, Shaan and I, and it's about a similar topic that we talk about. So we have this topic called, or the segment called Billionaire of the Week. This one is on Thomas Edison. We loved Ben's podcast so much, we just said, hey man, let us just air this on our feed because it's so good. So it's called How to Take Over the World. This episode is on Thomas Edison. He's got a few other episodes or a few other folks on his feed. He's got Thomas Edison, I believe he has Alexander the Great, the Rothschild's family.
Really, really cool. I'm a history buff, and so I'm happy that he was cool and let us air this. We're doing it none other than just we think it's good, and we want you guys to check it out. So here it is. Enjoy the episode.
There's part 2 and part 3 on our feed.
Check it out.

**Ben Wilson** (2:22)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. Before we get into the episode today, I do want to say a big thank you to everyone who has left reviews on Apple Podcasts. We just got over 100 reviews, and those do a ton to surface the podcast and help other people find it. So thank you, I really appreciate the support. Also, all of you who've been sending me emails of support and letting me know how much the podcast means to you, it means a ton to me to hear from you when you send me those emails and those messages. So thank you, I appreciate it. And it really does help fuel me and keep this going.
This is a new kind of episode. It's going to be a little bit more free flowing, a little more relaxed, a little more loose. Where this came from was I was looking at all of my notes that I had written for the Thomas Edison episodes. And I realized that I had about 60 pages of notes and I had used about 30 of them for the two episodes, which meant I had nearly half of my work go unused. So I thought to myself, why not use that in some form or fashion? So these are notes, this is stuff about Edison that didn't really neatly fit into the narrative, but I still thought was interesting. So it's going to not have the same structural flow, it's not necessarily gonna follow his life in chronological order. It's literally just kind of a stream of consciousness of some things that I thought as I was studying the life of Thomas Edison.
So I wanted to start off talking about what is by far one of Edison's most underrated inventions. And that is the word hello.
If you think I'm joking, I'm not. I double and triple checked this just because it seemed so unbelievable to me. But it's true, Thomas Edison invented what is now one of the most fundamental words in the English language.
Before Thomas Edison, when people saw each other, they would say greetings, good day, salutations. I don't know, they said other things. They generally did not say hello. It did exist as a word. It was pronounced differently. It was pronounced usually, halloo. And it was usually used as an expression of surprise. So you can hear that still sometimes that someone, I don't know, for whatever reason, I think of it in a British accent, someone saying, hello. You know, like they get surprised by something. And that was the way that this word halloo was used as an expression of surprise. But then in the old, old days of telephones, when they were essentially still used as a tool for telegraph operators, they needed a way to get each other's attention because they didn't have ringers yet. So really they just had open lines between telegraph stations. So if you needed to get in contact with someone, you just shouted. And so they needed something to shout. Alexander Graham Bell suggested the word ahoy. And it's, I would love to live in the alternate universe where that becomes the standard greeting between people. But Edison suggested that they use this word halloo, but that was, you know, the vowels are kind of soft. It didn't carry that well. So he changed the vowels to hello, because you can shout that really easily and be heard really easily. So telegraph operators start using this when they want to be heard from station to station. So, hey, I've got a message for someone.