# Thomas Edison: The IDIOT Who Changed The World

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** MagnatesMedia
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

When Thomas Edison was young, he was described as an idiot. And yet, he would go on to become one of the most legendary inventors ever, completely changing the world and building a business empire. There's a common saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So, it's no wonder people called Thomas Edison a wizard. Edison played an instrumental role in the advancement of the telegraph, radio, camera, telephone, and most famously the incandescent light. Many would say he's one of the most influential people ever. And there's no doubt seeing him start from nothing and defy all the odds is extremely inspiring. However, whilst Edison is one of the most famous inventors, some argue that he wasn't really the genius he's touted as and that instead he just stole others work and took the credit for himself. And this led to dramatic battles like where Edison fought Nicola Tesla for the glory of illuminating the world. Fortunes were made and destroyed in seconds. And this is where Thomas Edison's dark side emerged. So Edison's legacy is not black and white, but since this is such a fascinating story, for this video only, I decided to hire a professional voiceover artist and a 3D animation studio to help bring this story to life. So, let's travel back in time together to the 1800s. Welcome to the true story of Thomas Edison, the man who conquered darkness. Thomas Edison was born in 1847, but he was described as defective as he had an abnormally large head and was frequently ill. Thomas's infancy was difficult and lonely. However, it was never boring as Thomas's curiosity was insatiable. He wanted to know what everything was and why things worked the way they did. Thomas's father found his neverending questions exhausting. But Thomas's mother was happy to nurture his curiosity. One day, Thomas saw one of the neighbors geese sitting on its eggs, and he questioned his mother about it for hours. Later that night, Thomas took the bird's eggs, snuck into his neighbor's barn to build a nest for them, and tried to hatch them himself. But whilst his childish adventures were cute, Thomas's curiosity could also be dangerous. Another time, he started a small fire in his father's barn just to see what it would do. And since the fire was so huge, if the wind had been blowing in another direction, it could have burned the whole town to the ground. After this, his father was convinced that Thomas was an idiot, so he whipped him in front of the entire town. Things got even worse when Thomas got a bad case of scarlet fever. Money was so tight that his father had to pull him out of grammar school in order to buy medicine. When Thomas finally re-entered school the next year, he was way behind the other kids. And if his father treating him like an idiot wasn't embarrassing enough, his teachers were also doing it. One day at school, Thomas overheard two teachers making fun of him, so he ran home and told his mother that he never wanted to go back. Thomas's mother refused to believe that her son was an idiot. But clearly, traditional schooling wasn't working for him, so she decided to educate him herself. Thanks to his mother, Thomas learned basic reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as any other kid. And once those fundamentals were covered, she didn't force subjects onto him like his school teachers did. Instead, she let him pursue his own interests. One day, Thomas read a book that described scientific experiments he could do at home. After performing every one of them, he asked for another book, worked on that, and then kept asking for more. But as Thomas's love for science grew, so did his ability to get into trouble. One time, when Thomas was trying to figure out how balloons worked, he fed a boy some chemical powder, hoping he'd float away. But

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

instead, the boy just became incredibly ill. Another time, when Thomas learned that friction generates static electricity, he attached metal wires to the tails of two cats and tried to rub them together, which just got him clawed. This didn't stop Thomas, though, because when something was a mystery to him, he had to understand it. So, Thomas began collecting everything he could find in case it was useful, from feathers to metals to bones. His mother urged him to start his own home laboratory in their basement so he could practice his experiments down there. However, it was very basic and to conduct more sophisticated experiments, he needed money. When Thomas was 12, he got a job on a train selling newspapers and snacks to passengers on board. For a boy obsessed with science and machines, working on a train was paradise at first. But it didn't take long for an accident to happen. One day, when Thomas was carrying a stack of newspapers almost as big as he was, he noticed that his train was already leaving the station. He immediately ran after it and managed to reach one of the box cars just in time. But with the train already moving, Thomas lost his balance and was about to fall and get crushed by the train. Miraculously, someone managed to grab Thomas by the ears and pull him up to safety. But he felt something snap inside his head. By the time Thomas recovered from the initial pain of the accident, he could barely hear anything. Thomas was partially deaf and would never recover. In fact, his hearing would only get worse with time. After this, Thomas changed. He started spending more time alone, and he took his scientific studies even more seriously than before. But he did say that his deafness made it easier to concentrate for longer periods. Thomas even set up a mini lab in the baggage car of the train so he could still experiment while at work. Unfortunately, this caused a whole new problem. During one experiment, Thomas knocked a bottle of phosphorus off the shelf and accidentally started another fire. Thomas would soon get a chance to redeem himself, though. One day when he was 15, he saw a train arriving at the station and a few yards away, a baby crawling right in its path. Thomas sprang into action immediately, scooping up the baby just in time and saving its life. It just so happened that the baby was the son of the station master, and he'd notice Thomas constantly hovering over the station's telegraph in his spare time. That's because Thomas was fascinated by the telegraph, which was the first machine allowing people to almost instantly communicate over long distances. So, as a way to say thank you for saving his child, the station master showed Thomas everything he wanted to know and later helped Thomas get a job as a telegraph operator. He would only get paid around $20 every month, but for the first time since his accident, Thomas was genuinely excited. In the 1860s, the electric telegraph was a relatively new technology, and Thomas was always testing out little improvements for it. But this often got him into trouble. Thomas's job was to receive and relay information about trains and news about the ongoing Civil War. But most of the job was simply just waiting around all night. And Thomas didn't have the patience for that. Instead, he created a machine that would produce a signal he was supposed to send out every so often whilst he took naps. When his supervisors found out, Thomas was fired. So, Thomas got another job and was back at it again. This time he took his receiver and upgraded it into a repeater, meaning a telegrapher was no longer needed to relay an identical message from one station to the next. This invention was genuinely useful, but unfortunately Thomas's new supervisor had been working on a similar device, and when he got beat to it by a teenager, he got jealous and fired Thomas out of spite. Thomas went on like this for years, moving around frequently, taking on new jobs, and often getting fired for not doing what he was actually supposed to. He always wanted to experiment with the equipment

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

rather than follow instructions. At 20 years old, Thomas returned home feeling depressed. He was poor and increasingly deaf. However, Thomas's life was about to change forever. Thomas had made some good friends during his time on the trains and one of them wrote to him about a job opening in Boston at Western Union which was a telegraph company at the time. Thomas jumped at the opportunity and he arrived in Boston in 1868. He was so fast at tapping out Morse code that Western Union gave him the job of receiving stock market quotes from New York's fastest sender. And when that got boring, he started tinkering with the telegraph again. After a while, Thomas made some useful refinements. And when a telegraphy journal wrote a piece on him, companies began offering him money to work on inventions for them. This gave Thomas the confidence to quit his job and become a full-time freelance inventor. Around this time, he started sleeping less as that gave him more time to work on his creations. But things got off to a rocky start. Thomas's first invention was a simple vote recorder for which he registered his first ever patent. It allowed lawmakers to press a yes or no button from their seat to vote on something. That was as far as he got with it, though, because according to the legislature of Massachusetts, using it would be illegal. Thomas was nearly bankrupted from this. So, he decided that going forward, he would only work on inventions in commercial demand, meaning he could make money from them. He said, "I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent. " This way, he could continue doing what he loved and what he was good at, but he hopefully wouldn't starve along the way. Thomas's next invention was an improvement on a telegraphic stock ticker, which definitely fit the commercial demand criteria, as the company he developed it for quickly found around 30 clients for it. But Thomas got screwed over in the deal and sold his patent rights for next to nothing. Working as a freelance inventor was proving much tougher than he'd thought. And although he'd learned a lot, those lessons weren't paying the bills. So Thomas became increasingly anxious. However, there was one invention from which Thomas knew he could definitely make some serious money. The earliest versions of the telegraph used two wires between each station, one to send electrical signals and one to receive them. Then in the 1860s, inventors found a way to take turns sending and receiving signals through a single wire. And later on, they figured out how to send and receive signals simultaneously. But whilst these new features were useful, they made the telegraph slow and unreliable. So telegraph companies didn't implement them. Thomas set himself an ambitious goal to fix the bugs as he called it. Thus inventing the first truly functional duplex telegraph. Since Thomas had a reputation as an able inventor, he was able to take out a loan of $800. It was a big risk, but if he succeeded, he would effectively double the capacity of telegraph wire and cut its cost in half. Telegraph companies would pay huge amounts of money for that and the royalties could be life-changing. So, there was a huge upside if things went well. But unfortunately, they didn't. When Thomas first presented his invention to a big telegraph company, he couldn't get a response to his message. The test was at midnight on a Saturday, so Thomas didn't know if the operator on the other end of the line was asleep or if it was him who built the telegraph wrong. But either way, the result was the same. Nobody was buying his invention. Considering that the $800 he borrowed would be worth over $18,000 today, Thomas was now in some serious financial trouble, and there was no way anyone in Boston would finance his inventions. anymore. So, he spent the last of his money on a train ticket to New York. When Thomas arrived, he didn't have a penny to his name, and he hadn't eaten in days. So, in order to get food, he had to trick a store owner into giving him a free sample of tea bags, which he then traded for some 5-cent dumplings a

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

few blocks away. And to make matters worse, the one friend Thomas had in New York was out of town. So he spent the entire first night wandering the streets, cold and lonely. But he was still determined to succeed. The next morning, Thomas made friends with a fellow telegrapher who loaned him $1. It may not sound like a lot, but it was life-saving. Thomas realized if he lived off 5-cent dumplings, he could eat for 20 days. Still, as Thomas roamed the streets, it was hard to imagine he'd soon become one of the most influential people in the world. If you run your own business, YouTube channel, or any kind of team, you'll know how chaotic things can get if you're managing lots of files. But that's where today's sponsor, Dropbox, is an absolute gamecher. We're probably all familiar with Dropbox for storing files, but until recently, I hadn't realized how many incredible features Dropbox has to make your life easier and streamline your workflow. For example, with Dropbox Transfer, you can share large files up to 250 GB with a single link, and anyone can download the files, even if they don't have Dropbox. And don't worry if someone makes a mistake as you can easily recover deleted files or revert the file to an older version before certain changes were made. But my favorite feature is the fact that you can sync your content across all your devices so easily. So if I switch from my PC to my laptop, I can just instantly access all my files without having to do anything. I'm also really excited about their new AI powered tools like Dropbox Dash, which lets you quickly find whatever you're looking for. For example, if you're not sure what a file is called, you could just search images from Spring Campaign and it'll surface what you need, which is a huge timesaver. So, try Dropbox today and help your team create faster. Just click the link in the description below to get started now. Thomas went to see a well-known inventor called Franklin Pope and offered to be his assistant in exchange for a place to sleep. Pope offered Thomas the dingy cellar in the laboratory's battery room. It wasn't much, but at least it was better than the street. Pope was the inventor of an important device at the time. In post civil war America, the price of everything from silver to cotton, railroad securities, and government bonds was heavily influenced by the value of gold. So getting its price quickly and reliably was crucial to the financial markets. Pope had invented an indicator that displayed the current price of gold via telegraph, and virtually half of Wall Street relied on it. The problem was that all the individual indicators got their information from a single telegraph. And one day, as Thomas was admiring the central device during trading hours, it broke down without warning. Suddenly, half of Wall Street couldn't access the data it needed. Pope's firm was facing immediate collapse as he couldn't figure out how to fix it. However, when Thomas took a look at the indicator, he immediately saw the problem. One tiny spring inside had gotten loose and was wedged between two gears, meaning the machine was just stuck. Thanks to Thomas, the business was saved. And the next morning, Pope's business partner gave him the job of improving the gold indicator further. This led to Thomas getting promoted again, and his salary was raised to $300 per month, which was leagues above anything he'd ever earned. Before long, Thomas had perfected the gold indicator, and this success meant Western Union personally hired Thomas back to improve upon a stock printing system, which occasionally printed random numbers at different endpoints. When that happened, Western Union had to find which endpoints had failed and dispatch employees to reset them, which required a lot of resources. For his solution, Thomas devised a way to reset all of the endpoints simultaneously from the central telegraph without the need for anyone to do anything on the endpoints. This single-handedly saved Western Union so much money that they offered Thomas $40,000 for the patent rights to the invention, which is just over $1 million today. This was truly life-changing money. Through his inventions, he had gone from starving on the streets with nothing to now feeling rich. However, the only thing crazier than Thomas getting a payment equivalent

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

to a million at 24 years old is the fact that it took him less than 30 days to spend nearly all of it. Thomas spending all the money he'd made sounds irresponsible, but it was actually quite the opposite. After all this time, Thomas had some hard one business experience, and he was now keen to expand his business further. You see, Western Union only bought the patent rights to the stock ticker invention, but Thomas kept the manufacturing rights to himself. As part of the deal, Western Union gave Thomas an order for 1,200 stock tickers, which over the next few years would make him almost $500,000. That's the equivalent of around $13 million in today's money. So, Thomas spent his initial $40,000 building a manufacturing plant, a laboratory, and hiring other capable inventors to work as his assistants. This way he could create more inventions, sell them for a big lump sum, and then manufacture them for even more money. He considered it an idea factory where he and his assistants would carry out all kinds of experiments to test out his many ideas. Since Thomas was never sure what they'd need, he filled the lab with a wide variety of chemicals and every kind of metal possible. He also collected whatever random materials he could, such as peacock tails, bullhorns, and porcupine quills just in case. Who knew what they might need? However, it's fair to say that Thomas had a unique style of invention. Ever since he was a kid, Thomas despised math. There was no way for him to understand how numbers related to anything going on in the real world. So when it came to using tools like calculus, trigonometry, and physics formulas, Thomas was useless. Instead, when he was working on a new machine, he would visualize it. Down to the smallest gear and even the flow of electricity, Thomas could see how all the moving parts of his inventions fit together, how they could be repurposed, combined, or improved in some way. And even though his methods were unusual, unscientific even, they were undeniably effective. Between 1872 and 1873, Thomas filed 53 separate patents, including improvements on the stock ticker and the telegraph. However, this has led to some controversy around Edison in the present day. Some feel he gets too much credit for other people's inventions. For example, Thomas didn't invent the typewriter, but he did improve on it. Another argument is that he was more of a businessman than an inventor, as his company took credit for the inventions of the many assistants he hired. The truth is more nuanced. Thomas Edison was both an inventor and a shrewd businessman, which is what separated him from most other inventors. He was always focused on the commercial side of invention and kept reinvesting profits to expand his business. Either way, producing so many patents didn't come easy. Frequently, Thomas gathered some of his assistants and formed what he called an insomnia squad who would stay awake for up to 3 days working on an invention until it was absolutely perfect. He famously said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. " Thomas pushed his employees hard, but he was right there with them, and he worked harder and longer than any of them. The laboratory was home for Thomas. In fact, his obsession with working there soon became problematic. Thomas had gotten married and had children with a woman named Mary, who did most of the parenting while Thomas worked in his lab. But Mary grew increasingly lonely and isolated and felt neglected by Thomas, who often slept in his lab instead of coming home. Mary soon developed health problems and died at only 29 years old. This meant Thomas suddenly had three kids to take care of by himself. So shortly after this, he married another woman named Mina, had more children with her, and resumed his focus on his lab. However, in 1873, Thomas had a whole new problem.

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

The US faced one of its worst financial crisis, and suddenly companies weren't coming to Thomas for specific improvements to their machines anymore. Thomas didn't panic, though. He figured if he could invent something useful enough, people would buy it. regardless of the economy. He knew that even in the midst of an economic depression, America and Europe were so reliant on the telegraph. So if Thomas managed to improve it substantially, he could surely get the telegraph companies to start paying him again. A few years back, Thomas had already tried making a duplex telegraph, which was supposed to send and receive electrical signals quickly and reliably over the same wire. That had been a huge failure which had left him penniless. But this time, Thomas was more confident and experienced. And so he set himself an even more ambitious goal. He was going to skip the duplex and aim right for the quadruplex. This meant that Thomas's new telegraph needed to simultaneously send out and receive two different electric signals over the same wire, technically quadrupling its capacity. It was his toughest invention yet. But after 2 years with many sleepless nights and relentless trial and error, Thomas had a perfectly functional quadriplex. This was an extraordinary achievement and yet it would lead Thomas to something even bigger. Thomas set up a new industrial research laboratory in a remote part of New Jersey called Menllo Park. The multiplex telegraph had turned him into one of the most renowned people in America. So, young aspiring inventors moved to the countryside to work for Thomas for free and all sorts of businesses were coming to him for help on their devices. Now Thomas said he wanted to produce a minor invention every 10 days and a big thing every 6 months. And at the time the biggest thing of all was the speaking telegraph or as it would come to be known the telephone. You see whilst Thomas had been busy with the quadruplex another inventor called Alexander Graham Bell had been hard at work adapting the telegraph so that it could transmit sound. And in 1876, he filed a historic patent for the telephone. To Western Union, this spelled doom. Bell's patent gave him the exclusive right to use the telephone commercially. So he had a monopoly that could potentially make Western Union's telegraph business obsolete. So if Western Union wanted to compete with Bell, they had to get around his patents, which meant they'd need to improve upon the telephone in a substantial way. And who better to do all that hard work for them than Thomas Edison? Thomas was very nearly deaf, so he personally had an extra layer of obstacles to overcome with this particular challenge. But it was actually because of his hearing impairment that he ultimately improved the telephone's clarity and volume way beyond what Belle had. But this gave Thomas another idea. See, the telephone was meant to transmit sound, but there wasn't a device that could record and reproduce it. And that led Thomas to invent the phonograph in 1877. This device recorded sound by capturing sound waves as vibrations onto tinfoil cylinders with a needle. It could then also play back the recorded sounds. Again, Thomas's deafness was an obstacle to overcome, but he found that by biting into the phonograph, the sound vibrations would travel through his skull and he could hear it that way. For everyone else whose ears work just fine, hearing recorded sound for the first time was a magical experience. So, the press nicknamed Thomas the Wizard of Menllo Park. Thomas assumed the phonograph would be used in business as a device for dictation, but in reality, his invention had laid the foundation for record players and would play a key role in popularizing recorded music. This invention brought Thomas a lot of fame, but his most famous invention ever was still to come.

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

For over 70 years, electric lighting was one of the most stagnant areas of scientific research. When the sun went down, people still relied on candles, gas lights, and kerosene lamps. These all had issues. Candles could cause fires. And the gas used in lamps had a bad smell and built up dangerous fumes. So in 1878, Thomas became determined to change that. And to make things even harder, he wanted to focus on incandescent light, which shined by heating a thin filament through an electric current. These were introduced all the way back in 1808, but nobody had found a way to make them burn for more than a few moments. The light needed to be small, tolerably bright, use little current, last for a long time, individually switch on and off, be cost effective, and that's just the beginning. Many inventors before Thomas had tried and failed, and everyone believed it was basically impossible to make a working incandescent light. But Thomas publicly declared he would perfect incandescent lighting. So, even though the press, his investors, and even his own assistants thought he'd gone insane, Thomas got to work with his usual enthusiasm. The main reason incandescent lights could only burn for a minute or two up until now was because of the wirelike structure inside of it, known as a filament. In order for the light to glow, the filament had to be heated to extremely high temperatures without melting or burning out. But that was a problem because in order to increase the levels of electric resistance the filament could tolerate, it had to be as thin as physically possible. About 1 of the thickness of a human hair. So the main challenge in inventing a useful incandescent light was finding the right material to make the filament from. Thomas spent his first few months experimenting with string, cotton, and other organic filaments. It didn't work, so he moved on to metals. He went through a nickel phase, and when that didn't work, he spent months testing out platinum, which he got burning for up to 2 hours. This was promising, but then months went by without any more progress, and he started from scratch again. Thomas altered the filament in every way he could. He prepared them differently, twisted them, made them longer, shorter, thinner, thicker, you name it. He also changed everything about the rest of the light. He used different bulb shapes, different circuits, varying amounts of electric resistance, voltage, and amperage. After testing 1,600 different materials, Thomas had learned a lot. But he still hadn't made that one discovery that was going to change everything. He was looking for a needle in a planet-sized hay stack, literally. Because Thomas sent agents to find new materials as far as the Rocky Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, and Japan. He even tried different varieties of human hair. After a year and a half, and countless thousands of dollars, Thomas's assistants and his investors had lost all hope. But Thomas kept working enthusiastically and finally he cracked it. After subjecting a cotton thread filament to a process called carbonization, Thomas and his assistants spent 40 hours excitedly staring into a lamp, knowing they had made a pivotal discovery. Carbonized paper was even better. It burned for 170 hours. And now it was only a matter of making little tweaks to bring that up as high as possible. On New Year's Eve, Thomas outfitted Menllo Park with 800 lights and gave a crowd of 3,000 onlookers their first glimpse into the future. The commercial value of the incandescent light was now clearly proven, so Thomas's investors happily gave him checks for further research. Although in reality, the quest for the perfect filament had only just begun. Carbonized paper burned for a few hundred hours, which was a huge step forward, but not nearly enough to change the world. Thomas still needed years to perfect the filament. But after countless discoveries on nearly 10,000 different materials, he now knew which path to follow, so he could delegate the task to his assistants while he focused on a more pressing issue. You see, the incandescent light wasn't even half the battle when it came to electric lighting. After all, the lamps needed electricity. And if Thomas was planning to illuminate the world, there needed to be a way to get it to them. So, Thomas's

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

next challenge was to design an entire industry to deliver electricity on a massive scale, which clearly wasn't going to be easy. Thankfully, though, being the world's most famous inventor had its advantages. Thomas frequently attracted world-class geniuses to come work with him, and there was no better man for this job than a young Serbian immigrant by the name of Nicola Tesla. Unfortunately, he would end up becoming Edison's greatest rival. On the 10th of July in 1856, as the clock struck midnight in the Austrian Empire, Nicola Tesla was born. The midwife pointed to the violent lightning storm outside and felt it was a bad omen, predicting that he would be a child of darkness, but Tesla's mother said, "No, he will be a child of light. " And well, she was right. Tesla grew up to be a remarkable genius. He could speak eight languages, mentally perform multivariable integral calculus, and he used his photographic memory to organize his mind like a library where he could access books from cover to cover at will. But for all his genius, Tesla had some strange quirks. He was paralyzed with fear at the sight of pearls. He had a bit of a gambling addiction. and he would freak out if the number of stairs he climbed, which he always counted, wasn't perfectly divisible by three. This strange yet brilliant child of light, found work in Paris as a technician at the Continental Edison Company, and it didn't take long for him to stand out. Tesla's supervisor sent him to America to work alongside Edison himself with a short letter that read, "My dear Edison, I know two great men, and you were one of them. The other is this young man, Nicola Tesla. " When Tesla arrived in 1884, a mugger stole everything he had except for 4 cents in his pocket. But of course, he still had his undeniable brilliance and work ethic, and that was all he needed to earn Thomas Edison's respect. After meeting him, Thomas immediately asked Tesla to come work directly with him. Now, in the 4 years since Thomas had proven the commercial viability of incandescent lighting, a lot had happened. His assistants had made massive strides using bamboo filaments. But at the end of the day, merely inventing a light bulb wasn't enough. So Thomas had been busy creating an industry to deliver electricity on a massive scale. This meant designing an entire suite of infrastructure, starting with a central power station to generate electricity and then everything that went in between that and a light switch. But before starting, Thomas had to choose which of the two primary methods of electrical transmission he was going to base all his inventions on. Direct current known as DC or alternating current known as AC. Their main difference is that DC maintains a constant voltage, meaning it moves electricity continuously in one direction, whilst AC's voltage alternates between positive and negative and thus periodically changes the direction electricity is traveling in. When Thomas started building his system, scientists knew much more about DC than they knew about AC. In fact, most scientists thought that harnessing AC at scale was physically impossible, and therefore DC was considered much simpler to operate. So, Thomas did the logical thing and placed all his bets on DC to build his system. But as time went on, Thomas came across some tough obstacles. For starters, DCbased power stations were expensive, and worse, they could only power the area within a 2m radius. DC could only travel short distances, requiring power stations every few blocks. As a consequence, Thomas's business had found success illuminating individual factories, department stores, and hotels. But he had only built 12 central power stations in major cities. So, illuminating the whole world was still a far away dream. But Thomas did what he always did and began optimistically chipping away at his obstacles. One of those was an inefficient DC motor and he assigned the hardworking young genius he just hired to improve it, Nicola Tesla. However, Tesla had other ideas. Tesla

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

believed alternating current could work and that it wouldn't have the same limitations as direct current. According to Tesla, producing electricity with AC would be cheaper than DC, and there was no limit to how far it could be transported. Truthfully, Thomas had considered this many times himself, but he'd already designed an entire industry around DC and filed hundreds of patents for it. Starting over with AC instead would have cost him millions in royalties, years of his time, and he honestly thought using AC was impossible. So Thomas told Tesla to just work on the DC motor. And he casually mentioned that if he managed to improve it substantially, he would award Tesla $50,000, which is over $1. 6 million today. With a crazy incentive like that, Tesla forgot all about alternating currents. And a few months later, he came back to Thomas having done a fantastic job improving the motor. But when Tesla asked him about his $50,000 bonus, Thomas just laughed and told him, "Tesla, when you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke. " Basically, Thomas said he had not been serious about the bonus. Tesla didn't see any humor in this. He felt he'd just been scammed. So, Tesla quit his job right then and there. However, Tesla's life took a turn for the worse after leaving Edison's company. He even resorted to digging ditches just to survive at one point. But Tesla was more determined than ever to make AC a reality and prove Edison wrong. And so, the war of the currents had officially begun. Two of the world's greatest inventors were going to battle it out. By 1887, Thomas hadn't gotten much further with DC. But Tesla, who began 6 years after him with literally no money, had made scientific history. In just 3 years, Tesla registered hundreds of patents for a remarkably efficient electrical infrastructure powered completely by AC. And it didn't have any of DC's problems. This quite literally shocked the world. It was a clear threat to Thomas. But for an investor named George Westinghouse, it was a golden opportunity. Westinghouse knew that there were ridiculous profits to be made in electrical illumination, but he believed DC was stagnating the entire industry. So when Tesla published his AC patents, he immediately cut him an incredible deal. Adjusting for modern inflation, Westinghouse paid Tesla a flat fee of $2 million for his patents and a monthly $65,000 salary to help implement the system. On top of this, Westinghouse gave Tesla a good chunk of his company's stock, which was bound to grow explosively over the next few decades. But the craziest part is that Tesla's royalties for the main alternating current patent all by itself, were estimated at more than $und00 million at the time, $3. 3 billion today. And that is just one of hundreds of other patents registered to him. So at this point, Tesla was on track to become the richest man alive. Meanwhile, Thomas knew that he was on the losing side of the war of the currents. And this really brought out the worst in Thomas Edison and led him down a very dark path. When it came to delivering electricity on a massive scale, AC was simply the better option. But as a businessman, Thomas still had to look out for himself. His investors were now considering going with Westinghouse instead. So he launched an allout propaganda war. Thomas started by lying about the dangers of AC in the newspapers. But when that wasn't enough, he secretly funded the invention of the electric chair using AC so that people associated AC with death. When that wasn't enough, Thomas paid kids on the street to bring him stray puppies he would electrocute with AC in public. He even electrocuted an elephant with AC and made a movie about it. But despite his best efforts to scare people about the dangers of AC, ultimately many of Thomas's investors saw through his lies and went with Westinghouse instead. And while Thomas Edison was busy torturing helpless animals, Westinghouse and Tesla were busy improving their AC system. In 1892, they undercut Thomas for a

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

contract to light the Colombian Exposition, which was a world famous event. And so, Westinghouse and Tesla went allin. With 160,000 light bulbs, they gave a light show that even Thomas would have been jealous of. It was an incredible spectacle seeing the event illuminated so brightly using Tesla's lighting and it also proved AC was safe. The war of the currents came to its definitive end the next year when Tesla's lifelong dream of building a hydroelect electric power station in Niagara Falls was realized and AC was forever established as the superior way to provide electricity at enormous scale. Today, alternating current is the main way we power our cities, homes, and industries. So, you could definitely say Tesla won the war of the currents. But that's not to say that direct current isn't useful. Whenever you use a smartphone, a laptop, or basically anything with a battery, you have Thomas Edison to thank. And either way, when you turn on a light, remember it's thanks to Tesla's AC power and Edison's incandescent light bulb. After their battle over AC versus DC, Tesla and Edison would remain in an ongoing race to develop more inventions with both men having a huge impact on many industries. However, even though Tesla was on track to become the richest man in the world, his life going forward was a series of tragedies. Westinghouse wanted to expand his business to every corner of the world. And to do that, he took on a colossal amount of debt. But after a financial crisis in 1890, his business was facing bankruptcy. Because of this, Westinghouse desperately asked Tesla to reduce his royalty. And without hesitating, Tesla tore up the contract that was going to bring him a fortune. Westinghouse's company was saved, and Tesla got a massive one-time payment for his patent rights. But this meant he couldn't legally use his own inventions anymore, and building on his previous work became practically impossible. Sadly, Tesla then spent all his millions on failed experiments until eventually he lost everything. Tesla later wrote in his diary that he was in love with a pigeon. After the pigeon died, he said he felt his life's work was over. Unlike Tesla, Edison protected his patent rights very carefully. He was a businessman, always thinking about the commercial side of his inventions, and he would soon be changing the world in another unexpected way. By 1886, Thomas had reduced the cost of producing a light bulb to just 22 cents. He built over 500 isolated lighting plants and raised the number of big city central stations from just 12 up to 58. Thomas was a legendary inventor, but he was also a remarkable businessman. At 38 years old, he built an illumination and manufacturing empire that raded in millions every year and made the business of electric illumination profitable for the rest of the world. However, during the war of the currents, JP Morgan took a large interest in Thomas's companies and consolidated them into Edison General Electric. But Thomas wasn't very happy there. His business had grown to a staff of almost 3,000 employees and that meant he had a lot less time to work on inventions. Most of the time he was acting as a manager. Then in 1892, JP Morgan removed the word Edison from Edison General Electric. So soon after, Thomas sold the 10% of stock he still held and resigned from his position. Today, General Electric is worth over $und00 billion. So, selling everything was maybe not the best decision Thomas ever made, but he had enough money to become a full-time inventor again, which is what he truly loved doing. In fact, Thomas had the habit of simultaneously working on dozens of different projects in his laboratory. So, during his campaign into electric illumination, he'd been cooking up some other inventions as well. For example, back in 1887, Thomas realized that the old phonograph, which recorded and reproduced sound, was wasting its potential as a device to record business meetings. So, he reconceptualized it as

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AafeUIwSLvw&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 52:00)

an entertainment device. Thomas's deafness had only gotten stronger by now, so he never really got to enjoy this himself. But the phonograph turned music from something you could only get at an opera concert to something accessible to anyone for an affordable price. He then had another idea to combine sound using his famous phonograph with a viewing machine. Thomas took the world by storm again when he patented the first effective motion picture camera called the kinettograph. For nearly a decade, all motion pictures seen by American audiences were made by Edison's Company. Thomas even built a large studio where he produced the historic film The Great Train Robbery. However, not only did this spur the entire world to improve on his ideas and create even better cameras, but it also paved the way for thousands of artists to advance the art of film making. In fact, in the early 1890s, more competitors arrived on the motion picture scene. To try and avoid paying to use Edison's patented equipment, some early movie makers moved across the country to a tiny suburb of LA in California, hoping to move far enough away from Edison that it would be hard for him to take legal action against them. So, in a weird way, Edison led to the creation of Hollywood. on a list of most important people in film history. Edison was ranked in the top 10. He also played a large part in the invention of the projector and the radio. And in his quest to build an electric car with Henry Ford, Thomas completely revolutionized battery technology. Thomas Edison didn't waste a second. It's no wonder that for 20 years, popular newspapers and magazines consistently voted him as America's most useful citizen. Edison filed his 1,093rd patent in 1931, and he died that same year, aged 84. The US held a minute silence as a mark of respect for the man whose inventions had changed the world. However, whilst Edison's inventions certainly made him wealthy, the richest man alive at the time was John D. Rockefeller, and his rise to the top was extremely brutal. If you want to watch that story, just click the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you there in a second.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/24297*