Thomas Edison
Inventor

OK. Select all of the inventions issued to Thomas Alva Edison.

A. An improved typewriter

B. An improved stencil pen

C. An improved method for preserving fruit

D. An improved method for making blank phonograph records

E. An improved automobile

F. An improved electrical automobile

G. An improved flying machine

H. Improved bullets

I. An improved method for playing music in tune

J. An improved method for breaking rocks

K. An improved method for making bricks

L. An improved electric light bulb

M. An improved method for making motion pictures

N. An improved method of shafting

Of course, first we have to ask:

 

When is an Invention an Invention?

Every now and then you'll read headlines like:

Thomas Edison Did Not
Invent the Light Bulb!

Or even more emphatically:

Edison Stole the Idea
of the Light Bulb!

Then the author will smugly inform you that it was actually Englishman Joseph Swan who invented the light bulb. Yes, and Tom stole the idea. The reason we think Edison invented the light bulb is because he was a shameless self-promoter. What a schmuck!

Of course, someone else will tell you the real inventor was not even Joseph Swan.

It was an American named Moses Farmer.

No, say others. The real inventor of the light bulb was John Wellington Starr.

Or maybe it was Frederick De Moleyns.

Or two fellows named William Sawyer and Albon Man.

Or perhaps Heinrich Göbel.

Or Alexander Lobygin.

Or was it ....?

Or maybe ...?

By now you know there's something strange going on. It's almost as if no one was the real inventor of the light bulb.

But then everyone knew that.

Or at least everyone knew that in Tom's time.

So we'll take a little excursion into the past.

And we mean the past.

I Think, Therefore I File

Thork the Caveman suddenly had a great idea. He realized that by carving a disk out of a chunk of rock and standing it on its edge it would roll along the ground. So he carved a disk out of stone and showed how it worked to his friendly neighborhood cave dwelling patent examiner. He called his new invention the wheel.

The patent examiner looks at Thork's application. He sees that yes, the wheel is new and novel, but he asks if it is useful. That is, what good is the wheel?

Well, Thork says, if you roll it along the ground it is amusing. So it has utility as an entertainment device. OK, says the examiner, the wheel is new, novel, and useful. So he grants the patent.

Now when making his working model, Thork carved the wheel out of stone. But in his patent he didn't say that. He simply said the wheel was a disk set up on its side. Most importantly at the end of the patent, where he specifies his claims, he mentioned no material of construction.

So along comes Oog, another Caveman. He realizes he can make a wheel by cutting down a tree and chopping off the end of the trunk. This also makes a disk that can roll along the ground. He points out that the wooden wheel is lighter and easier to make than Thork's stone wheel. So he files a patent for an improvement over Thork's invention.

But Thork objects. Using wood is simply an obvious extension of his patent. Anyone skilled in the art would realize you could make a wheel out of wood as Oog claims. The examiner agrees and Oog does not get his patent.

Oog, though, appeals his ruling. But the patent judges agree with the examiner. No patent for Oog's wooden wheel.

So what does Thork do? Well, he can start making wheels as well - and out of anything, wood or stone. No one else can do so. Naturally Oog is irritated and goes around saying that Thork "stole" his idea of the wooden wheel.

But then along comes Doog. He realizes you can carve pie-slices out of the wheel leaving spokes. So he files a patent for the new improvement. The advantage, he points out, is the new wheel is lighter and the spokes add flexibility. So the wheel doesn't break as often. The patent examiner agrees the modification is new, novel, and useful. So Doog gets his patent.

However, when Doog starts to manufacture his wheel, Thork files an injunction. The spoked wheel, Thork said, is still a wheel as he described in his original patent. It's still a disk that rolls on its side.

But Doog argues his wheel is not a disk. A disk must be solid. But the examiner and the judges disagree. The spoked wheel is indeed a disk. So Doog must either license Thork's original patent - or wait until Thork's patent expires.

Then suddenly along comes Dorg. He is a caveman science writer. He writes an article and points out that before Thork filed his patent some unknown caveman had carved a picture of a wheel on the side of a cave - but he didn't patent it. That is, the concept of the wheel had been previously disclosed and was public knowledge before Thork had filed his patent. So no one can patent the basic idea of the wheel, and the basic patent of Thork is invalid.

So it seems that anyone can make and sell a wheel: Thork, Doog, or anyone. So Doog can now practice his new invention, the spoked wheel after all. Although Thork tries to stop Doog, the judges rule, yes, Thork's original patent is invalid.

Doog now has an advantage. Because Thork's patent was invalid, that doesn't mean Doog's patent is. His patent on the improvement - that is the spoked wheel - is still valid. Other people can sell a solid wheel, yes, but no one else can market a spoked wheel - or anything else with spokes. The spoked wheel sells like wildfire.

So with the money from the spoked wheel, Dork sets up a research and development department. His caveman scientists and engineers begin to find even more uses for the wheel - not just the spoked wheel but the wheel in general. They find they can put two wheels together on a pole and have a wheel and axel. You can put buckets on the edge of a wheel and put it in a stream of water. This creates power that can be used to turn the wheel and axel and do things like grind grain. You can even stick wheels on the sides of large boxes and make a means of transportation called a cart.

Doog makes sure that these new use patents are broad enough to include all wheels: solid, spoked, stone, wood, anything. So in later years, Doog becomes rich and famous as the inventor of the wheel.

Of course, in Doog's time, everyone knew he didn't actually invent the wheel. Instead a lot of people had been working to make a practical and useful wheel for years. It just happened that Doog that had been one who had made a wheel that worked.

And in Tom's time, everyone knew he didn't invent the light bulb. Light bulbs had been around for decades. But Tom had created a practical working electrical light that people would actually buy. So we'll go back to Tom's time.

Back in Tom's Time

Tom was born on February 11, 1847. This was a time when technology was wreaking its havoc on life and society as much as the computer and Internet revolution wreaked on late the 20th century.

In 1800, people communicated and traveled the same ways they had for the last 5000 years. They walked, rode animals or in carriages, and sailed in boats. Taking a trip or sending a message took months, if not years. But by 1850 and using high powered technology, trips of thousands of miles had been cut to days and communication to seconds. Of course, then high technology was steam and electricity.

But first a bit about Tom and his family.

Edison, the Traitor

Of course, we don't mean Tom. We mean his dad and granddad. They had a knack for being on the wrong side.

Tom's granddad, Samuel, had been a Tory during the American Revolution. So after someone named George and his buddies won, Sam up and moved to Canada. His own son, also named Samuel, was born there in 1802.

Samuel, Jr., ran an inn but also had a taste for politics. Then - bad luck, Samuel - he supported an insurrection against the Canadian government. Unlike the American "insurrection" Samuel and his buddies lost. So he slipped south across the border, and he and his family settled in Milan, Ohio. Tom was born there, and seven years later, the family moved to Port Huron in Michigan.

First let's get this straight. Tom's was not a rags-to-riches story nor was he uneducated. Tom actually came from a reasonably middle class background and had a good education - at least for 1850's America.

Much has been made about Tom having only three months schooling. At school we learn Tom had been inattentive, easily distracted, and hard to handle. This may very well be true, but would also be expected in a hyperactive kid with increasing deafness.

The source of Tom's deafness is open to debate. Tom himself changed the story over time. The most famous version was that he was once was running to catch a train and the conductor grabbed him by his ears and yanked him on board. Another story - pictured in a movie starring Mickey Rooney - was he once got his ears boxed by an irate train conductor. Or possibly Tom had suffered from a childhood illness, possibly scarlet fever.

However, the cause of Tom's handicap - actually it was severely impaired hearing, not complete deafness - may simply have been heredity. Tom's son, Charles, also became hard of hearing, as had Tom's father, Samuel.

But as far as being uneducated, this was a time where education was how much you knew, not how long you went to school. Many people of influence and power had little or no formal schooling. And Tom had the advantage that his mom had been a school teacher and took charge of his education.

Tom always credited his mom with his ability to read rapidly and with high comprehension. But we have to admit that Tom was just plain smart. Modern psychologists have estimated his IQ at 145. This is genius level (albeit low genius level) and Tom continued to read books the way people today watch television. But he read not just any books, but books on science and technology.

Tom Edison, Businessman

Some people shake their head and bemoan that Tom had to start work at age 12. Actually it was his idea. He told his mom and dad he wanted to discontinue his studies and set up a business. They said OK.

Immediately Tom began to show a real entrepreneurial talent. He set up newspaper and fruit stands and even hired some of his friends to manage them. He himself would hop the train from Port Huron to Detroit and go up and down the aisle selling papers. If the papers were selling well, he would up the price as the trip progressed. He did pretty well for a twelve-year-old businessman.

After a while Tom found that he could make even more money printing his own newspaper. He bought some type-setting equipment and a printing press and would print a one page paper as the train made its run. These sheets also sold well and Tom even ran ads.

Of course, when the train got to Detroit Tom would load up on produce for his fruit stands since the costs were cheaper than in Port Huron. To avoid paying shipping costs, he sold fruits and vegetables at cost to the wives of the railroad employees. Tom's ability to schmooze the right people would be one of his keys to success.

Tom would probably have continued as a local Michigan businessman and no doubt successfully. But then at age 15, there was an incident which made a big difference in Tom's life.

The station master of Port Huron was James MacKenzie and he lived with his family at the station. Now you'll read different versions of the story. In one account there was a runaway train heading toward James's 3-year old son, Jimmie, who was playing on the tracks. Or it may have just been a train pulling into the station. Or maybe it was just an uncoupled car that began rolling toward Jimmie. But whatever it was, Tom ran to young Jimmie and pulled him off the tracks. In gratitude the elder MacKenzie offered to teach Tom telegraphy. So Tom got into a new career.

Because this story has variant details and puts the teller in a heroic light, it has all the appearance of a story invented by a shameless self-promoter who wouldn't hesitate to steal other peoples inventions and claim they were his own. And even more suspiciously, there is no direct documentation of the story - such as newspaper accounts or letters or diaries telling how Thomas Edison saved the life of Jimmie MacKenzie. However, most biographers accept the story.

Why so? Well, there is what historians call "corroborating" evidence. This is, we have extra information that may not directly confirm the story, but nevertheless fits in with it.

Fifteen years later, in 1877, when Tom was pretty rich and fairly famous, he got a letter from the elder MacKenzie. James - addressing Tom by his boyhood name "Al" - was asking if he could be a representative for selling Tom's new telephones at "a better income than I am now making" (yes, Tom was then making telephones).

Asking Tom not to throw the letter in the wastebasket but send him a prompt reply, James then mentions that Jimmie was now almost as big as he was and was working as a lineman on the railroad. Tom, by now a very busy man, immediately wrote a warm letter that he would put in a good word for James with his manager who was looking for agents to sell the phones outright rather than renting them as that knave and varlet Alexander Graham Bell was doing. In closing Tom mentioned that the last time he saw young Jimmie the young boy was only 2½ feet tall. Tom's handwriting, by the way, is much easier to read than James's, and James did get the job.

So why do we say a couple of chatty letters corroborate the story?

Look at it this way. Even after fifteen years, James felt he had a good chance to wrangle a job out of Tom. He even admonished Tom - jocularly, no doubt - not to toss the letter out but to send a prompt reply. So it's almost like James felt Tom owed him a favor for something, possibly getting Tom started in the field that led to his fame and fortune.

And then at the close of the letter James specifically mentioned his son's progress in life as something he figured Tom would be interested in. Then Tom's own reply also commented on the young man he had last seen as a toddler.

Proof? No. Corroboration? Yes. So the best guess is the story is true.

High-Tech Tramp

In any case, James, Sr., taught Tom telegraphy. Really high tech stuff.

There was, though, a war on - the Civil War - and news flew back and forth from the armies to the commanders so fast that one modern writer called it T-mail. So telegraph operators were in demand, and at age 16 (too young - legally - for military service), Tom was able to find jobs easily enough.

He did, though, have problems keeping them. From 1863 to 1869 Tom became an itinerant or - less courteously - a "tramp" telegrapher. He bounced around the country, mostly in the Midwest but also moseyd up into Canada and down to New Orleans.

The reasons for Tom's unsteady employment are not hard to find out. When he made mistakes, they could be whoppers. In Canada he once accidentally let a train slip through a signal and a collision was avoided only by the watchfulness of the two engineers. Tom's boss threatened him with criminal prosecution and at an opportune moment, Tom slipped across the border back to the US.

Tom's penchant for experimenting also caused problems. He preferred the night shift where all he had to do was send a message to the next station that the scheduled train had just passed. To while away the time between trains, he would set up a chemical bench where he would run experiments.

In one town he had set up his bench in a room above his boss's office. All was well until one of Tom's co-workers came by casually swinging a hammer. The hammer cracked a bottle of sulfuric acid and the spill dripped down to the boss's desk. When Tom got to work, he was informed he was welcome to pick up his pay and get out.

Between jobs Tom would drop back at Port Huron to visit with his folks. Then in 1868, Tom, now 21 years old, got home after a stint in Louisville. There he found times had gotten hard chez les Edisons. His dad, who had been a successful farmer, was out of work, ironically because railroads had made produce from other areas of the country so cheap that local crops couldn't compete. Tom's mom was also failing mentally, and to help his folks out, Tom decided to find steadier employment. So he headed to Boston and Western Union, then the biggest telegraph company in the country.

Troubleshooting Tom

OK. Just how did Tom go from being a tramp telegrapher in 1868 who couldn't hold a job to one of the most famous men in the world?

With his fondness for experimenting, it's natural that Tom would start tinkering with the telegraphic equipment. In the train stations there were lots of spare parts laying around - no two-day shipping at the time - so Tom started making inventions to fix specific problems. And a specific problem is what led to Tom's first invention.

Now the heaviest users of the telegraph were the newspapers. During the day the news stories came in so fast and furious that the sender would sometimes "break" the telegraph operator receiving the message. So you easily ended up with garbled stories.

Originally Samuel Morse had felt that telegraphs should make a permanent record of the messages. So he had invented what is called a Morse Register. This was a device which would receive the dots and dashes of the Morse code and record them onto a strip of moving paper.

But early on the telegraph operators - including Samuel's friend and partner, Alfred Vail - found they could simply listen to the clicks and write the letters down by hand. Contrary to intuition, this method was quicker and cheaper than having a machine record the message.

Although by Tom's day Morse Registers were rarely used, there were usually a few laying around. To solve the problem of the rapid-fire news stories, Tom' took a second Register and hooked it up to the first. But he then adjusted the second Register to write down the message at a slower speed. So the telegrapher could then transcribe the tape at a more leisurely pace. This was in 1867, and Tom said this was his first invention.

But note what Tom did. He took an earlier invention and used it to make a new one. Using old ideas in new ways is a perfectly legitimate and quite common way to make a new invention.

Unfortunately an invention that's good for the employees isn't necessarily good for the business. The newspapers began to complain that the news reports were coming in too slowly. A quick investigation led to Tom and his new invention as a culprits. Tom was out of yet another job.

There is another - quote - "first invention" - unquote - which some sources say predates the delaying relay. The story is from 1863 when Tom was only 16.

Telegraph lines did not require a large amount of electricity and the current was supplied by batteries in the office. This was both an advantage - the lines were not particularly dangerous - and a problem - the signals weren't that strong.

If you study electricity you see that current and voltage are related with resistance. Since all wires have some resistance, the current decreases as you send your message further and further. If your power is from low voltage batteries, you run out of electricity if you try to send the message too far.

So messages had to be sent by relay. That is, they would be sent by one station to another which would then resend the message on down the line with the signal being rejuvenated by the batteries in the second office. Tom's other "first invention" was an automatic relay that sent the message on directly without a human operator.

The trouble with the story is automatic relays had been known since the beginning of commercial telegraphy. So rather than inventing the automatic relay, Tom probably redesigned relays that just weren't working very well. In any case, Tom got his first start as an inventor by fixing problems, and he soon became a good problem fixer.

And there were plenty of problems in telegraphy. Loose lines, corroded wires, bad contacts, and such stuff could cause current and voltage fluctuations. Since the telegraph messages depended on closing a switch to tap out the code, variable current could result in gaps and garbled messages. On one of his jobs Tom was able to reconfigure a series of switches and improve the quality of messages that came into the station. Such successes got the station masters encouraging his work. He and one of his bosses even tried to invent a new type of relay that would correct itself for current fluctuations "which would have been very valuable," Tom said, "if we could have got it."

With his preference for the night shift, Tom continued spending a lot of his time thinking about and creating new inventions. Like virtually all inventions, his were improvements or modifications on existing technology. We must repeat. An improvement of an earlier invention is indeed a bonafide invention. Even if the earlier invention was one you didn't invent.

Also like most inventions, Tom's didn't work the first time, if at all. He would tinker, get stuck, and then set the idea aside. One of his ongoing projects was how to send multiple messages back and forth along a single wire. There were already "duplex" senders which could send two messages and Tom began working on a system that would handle even more. He worked off and on, but at first he never really got anywhere.

Tom the Inventor

Tom began to work in Boston in March, 1868. He was no longer a gangly often bedraggled adolescent. He was a 21 year old bright young man with ideas and strong mechanical and electrical skills. He started to work for Western Union.

This was the time of the small scale businessman/inventor. And Boston was a center of innovation where a number of businessmen operated electrical and mechanical shops. They made and repaired equipment but also created their own devices which they patented.

The American patent system was established with the individual inventor in mind. The filing fees were much less than in Europe and despite common belief, you did not need a working model. You could supply the patent office simply with a diagram and if the examiners were convinced the application described something that was - quote - "new, novel, and useful" - unquote - and that it would work, they would grant the patent.

But even if an examiner says no, all is not lost. The inventor - or his filing agent - can go back and modify the claims, usually making them more specific so as not to conflict with earlier patents (the prior art). If the examiner still says no, you can appeal his ruling. This process can go back and forth for quite a while, and yes, to do so costs money.

Which leads us to another characteristic about Tom's era. The nineteenth and early twentieth century were times of accessibility. You could get in to see the high and mighty if you knocked on their office doors and were willing to wait. You could even - literally - walk into the White House and ask to see the President. As a teenager, Albert Michelson, the first American to win a scientific Nobel Prize, actually went to the White House and asked President Grant if he could get into the Naval Academy. He did.

Within a couple of months of hitting Boston, Tom began writing articles for the technical magazine, The Telegrapher. So Tom's name was known to many of the local businessmen before he even met them personally.

Make no doubt about it. Tom was also a great salesman and a fervent (some say shameless) self-promoter. He was soon able to convince a local businessman, Baker Welch, to finance some of his ideas. With Baker he filed a notification for a patent - called a caveat - for a fire alarm that would send a telegraphic signal to the fire station telling them which alarm had been set off. By the start of 1869, he had agreements with a number of other businessmen, and he had sold the rights of a printing telegraph, that is, a telegraph that automatically typed out the message in English.

Banned from Boston

Tom's financiers were not limited to established businessmen. He got some of his money from friends.

In fact Tom's first patented invention was funded by a fellow telegrapher, Dewitt Roberts. This was for an automatic vote recorder for legislatures. Rather than having a clerk record the "Ayes" and "Nays" manually one by one, why not have the legislators push a button at their desk and have the votes tallied automatically? As a testimony to Tom's salesmanship, Dewitt chipped in $100 to fund the idea. In 1869, $100 was big money - about a quarter of what a family could live on for a year.

With patents filed and the invention ready, alas, no legislature was interested. That's because the politicians liked standing up and calling out their votes. The opposition in particularly wanted to stand up resolutely (or fatuously), and shout their opposition with a resounding "NAY!".

Tom then realized that having a good idea was not enough. There had to be a need for the idea. Or at least, it had to be something that people would like to have. But you had to know beforehand what would sell and what wouldn't.

And it didn't help that some of Tom's inventions just didn't work. He had continued thinking about multiplex telegraphy, that is, sending multiple messages along a single line. Although he hadn't come up with a way to send a lot of messages, he did come up with what he thought was a better way for sending two messages. But the actual demonstration - sending the messages from Boston to New York - fell flat.

Now one thing all fledgling inventors should know. Very few financiers will just dole out coin and say, well, if it doesn't work out, Tom, that's all right. In the real world of technological financing, the money is not, we repeat, is not a gift.

Instead, what you get from the Money Men are loans. And Tom's invention - to use today's business patois - "did not meet projected expectations". And now the backers were expecting repayment. So what to do?

Yes. You skip town. In mid-April Tom landed in New York dead broke.

Tom in the Big Apple

After finding a friend who loaned him a dollar, Tom went to the NYC Western Union offices but found there were no jobs. He was, though, put on the waiting list.

We don't know exactly how - probably through friends at Western Union - but Tom got permission to stay in a back room of a company called the Gold Indicator Company. In fact, he was sleeping in the room where they kept the batteries for the telegraph.

Telegraph? Well, the Gold Indicator Company built and sold earlier versions of the stock ticker. This stock ticker, reasonably called the Gold Indicator, was specifically for printing out current gold prices. Gold was a big commodity since the big time swindlers - sorry, that's businessmen - like Jay Gould were buying up so much gold that the price was going through the roof.

Gold speculation had even gotten so crazy that an official Gold Exchange was established on Wall Street to keep tabs on the wildly changing prices. The individual brokers sent and received the prices by telegraph, and the messages were recorded as numbers printed onto a moving strip of paper.

The head of the firm and inventor of the Gold Indicator was the Reverend Samuel S. Laws (called "Doctor" Laws). He was also the president of the Gold Exchange and so naturally he kept a Gold Indicator in his company's office.

Prices literally changed by the minute. So when the telegraph in the Gold Indicator Company broke down there was panic in the office. Samuel came running into the ticker room where Tom had been hanging around. Tom said he thought he knew what the problem was, and Samuel shouted "Fix it! Fix it!". Tom saw that a spring used to hold the electrical contacts in place had broken and jammed the gears. He replaced the spring and reset the instrument.

Samuel then summoned Tom to his office. He would, he said, hire Tom as the supervisor of his company. The wages were $300 a month - a huge salary of the time.

Despite the excellent pay, Tom wanted to branch out on his own. So after replenishing his personal funds, he left the Gold Indicator Company and by the first of October, 1869, he had formed an engineering firm in Newark, New Jersey with a young man named Franklin Poole - who in fact had been the previous manager at Gold Indicator. Although Franklin and Tom did some inventing, most of their income was from making telegraphs and running lines to the various brokerage firms.

Like many successful companies they found themselves swallowed up by a larger firm - the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company - and this was then gobbled up by Western Union itself. So Tom - once a lowly telegraph operator on stand-by for Western Union - found himself working for the company in a managerial capacity.

By now, though, Tom had bigger plans than to be an employee of someone else's company. So he left Western Union and set up what we would call a "consulting firm". And the trick of all (successful) consultants is to make sure you have a client from the start - and a good way to ensure you have a client is to have your first client be your former boss.

Actually Tom had two former bosses that were good contacts. One of course was Samuel, that is, Doctor Laws, and the other, the head of Western Union, Marshall Lefferts, known as "General" from his Civil War rank.

Tom sat down with the General. They agreed Tom would work on a number of inventions, and the General would put up the money. If the inventions looked good, then Western Union would pay Tom a fee for the rights.

By now Tom had a number of patents issued for telegraphy. The patents were specific and related to - and dependent on - other patents by other inventors. Also due to the questions of how much an inventor should be compensated, Western Union decided the best thing to do was simply pay Tom a lump sum for the rights.

So Marshall asked Tom what he wanted for his patents. Tom later said he figured $3,000 would have been, OK but thought $5,000 would be fairer. But instead of naming a figure, he asked Marshall to make him an offer.

"How would $40,000 strike you?" Marshall asked.

Needless to say, $40,000 struck Tom very well indeed.

Well, with real capital now in hand, Tom could start a real business - and devoted solely to inventing.

Consulting Tom

Tom kept up his work for the General. But as an independent consultant he was also free to work with other businessmen. His usual modus was to receive payment to do some work and then sell the patent rights for a successful invention. And of course, he could work on his own inventions as well.

By the end of 1871, Tom had invented better stock tickers, automatic telegraphic printers, electromagnets for telegraphs, and other devices. He had also bought a house in Newark and on Christmas Day married Mary Stillwell, then 16 years old. Mary's age and the spousal chronological difference - Tom was nearly 25 - were not that unusual for the time.

For the next five years, Tom's own firm - which changed name from time to time - continued to work with various companies to invent and market devices for telegraphy. But he also began to branch out. In 1876, Tom and another partner, Edward Johnson, established the American Novelty Company. The products were intended for the household and small businesses and included inks for making simultaneous copies of documents and small electric motors. Companies would also call on Tom for his electrical expertise, and in 1875 Tom was hired by the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad to inspect the line from New York to Boston. Tom was certainly doing all right, but of course he preferred inventing.

In 1876, Tom relocated his business from Newark. This was to his famous Menlo Park laboratory about 15 miles south-southwest of Newark

And also in 1876 along came a gentleman named Alexander Graham Bell.

Alex vs. Tom

Today you'll read that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea of the telephone from a poor Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci. This story has even been touted on the British comedy panel quiz show, QI, which also told us how the mother of actor Michael Nesmith invented Post-It^® Notes. Of course, Mike's mom actually invented Mistake Out, the first typewriter correction fluid.

You'll also read on the Fount that the string or "tin-can" telephone had been known for - quote - "centuries" - unquote. Actually the first documented example of this was from a man named Amos Dolbear in 1854. Amos, by the way, was an inventor in his own right with a Ph. D. in mining engineering from the University of Michigan.

The trouble was the string on the string telephone couldn't touch anything between the tin cans. So lots of people began wondering if electricity could be used to send voice messages. Claims of making "speaking telegraphs" - as early telephones were called - went back to the mid-1800's although clear demonstrations and documentation is lacking. So once more we see that since the idea of the telephone had been floating around, the patents had to be for improvements in the "speaking telegraph".

On February 14, 1876, a professor from Oberlin college filed a patent caveat for an improvement on the speaking telegraph. And on that day Alex filed a patent for the telephone. Officially Alex filed first - although some people think there was finagling in the back rooms of the patent office - and so Alex was given priority.

And Tom ...?

Actually in 1875 - a year before Alex's or Elisha's patent filings - Tom had begun working on his own telephone ideas. But we see that Alex got there first.

There is yet another little known aspect of inventing. Just because someone beats you to a patent, that doesn't mean you have to say "Aw, sh[ucks]!" and give up. You look at the other fellow's patent. Depending on what the earlier inventor actually claimed, you might be able - as they say in the industry - "get around" the earlier patent.

Of course, Alex tried to make his claims "broad" - that is, so vague that other inventors couldn't get around his patent. But he also said that his invention was as "substantially described" in the body of the patent.

What Tom had noticed in Alex's patent that "as substantially described" included using "mercury or some other liquid" in the transmitter and receiver. So what would happen, Tom wondered, if you made a receiver and transmitter out of a solid? Perhaps something like carbon? You might be able to - quote "get around" - unquote - Alex's patent.

Sure enough, Tom created the carbon button transmitter. This was made by wrapping an insulated wire around a small carbon button. The vibrations of carbon would alter the voltage in the wire. The current would be sent over a wire to a receiver where the change in voltage could then be changed back to vibrations in the receiver.

Tom's original transmitter made of "plumbago" - the old word for graphite - was prepared in a very strange way. He had a shed back of his laboratory with a bunch of kerosene lamps. The lamps produced soot, of course, and at a certain time a night watchman would come by, collect the soot, and roll it into a roll. Then he'd cut the roll into small buttons. He had to come by at the right time or the soot wouldn't be of the right consistency.

And no, Tom was not the sole inventor of the carbon microphone. The basic idea of using carbon to alter the voltage of a line had been around for a number of years but had never been patented. So it was not possible to get the patent on a carbon transmitter itself.

Tom's most serious competitor regarding who invented the practical carbon microphone was a German immigrant named Emile Berliner. Ultimately Emile lost the patent battle to Tom who had sold his patent to the owner of Western Union, now a gentleman named William Orton. But don't feel too sorry for Emile. He did all right as we'll see.

Tom's Sound Idea

If you go take a look at Tom's patents - which cover his "improvements" - it's often hard to see exactly what he is inventing compared to the other guys. That is, it's not clear how what Tom did that was different from the "prior art".

So we ask. Is there something new that Tom did invent that we can understand?

Yes, indeed. And it was his favorite invention.

That you could record sounds as a pattern of vibrations on a surface was well known. The best way was to have a pig's hair attached to a diaphragm that caught the vibrations. The hair would trace lines on a piece of moving paper covered with soot. Then in 1877 French writer and inventor, Charles Cros, had actually documented an idea for registering vibrations as grooves on a metal surface with a needle attached to a diaphragm. He did not build a model, though and no one really knew about the idea.

Simultaneous inventions are by no means unusual. In the same year Tom himself had made a sketch of a machine. You turned a cylinder covered with tinfoil with a hand crank. A needle was mounted on a diaphragm and this would then scratch a record of the vibrations on the foil.

The difference? Tom actually built the machine.

Or rather, Tom went to his chief mechanic, John Kruesi. The usual story is that Tom simply handed John a sketch with the note, "Kreusi - Make this". The story may be true but in any case John did make the device.

And here's the big difference. Tom had also reasoned that after you recorded the vibrations, you could then move the needle back to the beginning. Start the cylinder rotating again and the bouncing of the needle would make the diaphragm vibrate and actually play back the sound. This was a new idea.

And the darn thing had actually worked. Everyone in the lab heard Tom's voice repeat "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Tom said he was as surprised as anyone.

Tom soon demonstrated the phonograph to the staff of Scientific American. They, like everyone else, were flabbergasted and gave Tom a nice write up.

But no one was more surprised than Alexander Graham Bell. How the heck, he wrote his father-in-law, could he have missed out on this invention?

Strangely Tom had trouble seeing how you could actually use the machine. That's because the invention as it stood had virtually no commercial potential. The tinfoil recordings were fragile. So it only played the recording back a few times. It was also cranked by hand and required practice to both make the recording and make the playback intelligible. Perhaps, Tom thought, you could use it as a dictating machine.

But Alex thought that if Tom could jump in on the telephone, maybe he, Alex, could repay the compliment. Soon Alex recognized how to make a patentable - and marketable - improvement to Tom's original idea.

Alex's improvement - actually it was from his employee, Charles Tainter - was that you could coat a cardboard cylinder with hard wax. The needle could cut into the wax to record the sound. But the wax gave more playbacks - maybe a hundred or more - than tinfoil.

It is true that Tom held the basic patents of the idea of reproducing sound. But patents do expire and in the mid-1880's the field of making a marketable record player became very crowded.

There were lots of problems. How to improve the sound and how to make the cylinder turn at a constant speed were the two big questions.

Turning the cylinder was pretty straight forward. You added a spring powered regulator that would rotate an axle. Such mechanisms were known.

The problems in improving the sound were complex and really wouldn't be fixed until the 1920's. But one issue was with the records themselves. Even wax was still a temporary and fragile medium. The cylinders might get 100 playbacks. That was better than tinfoil, but not great. And also the problem was with how to mass produce the cylinders.

The earliest recordings required the artist or speaker to perform before a set up of multiple record players. Then to make more copies you'd have to repeat the performance until there were enough records to send out to the retailers. Certainly, an inefficient and expensive way to do business.

It was clear you had to find a way to make a mold of the original that could cast copies. Tom worked literally for years on the problem.

Tom's (successful) method was to deposit a thin layer of gold dust - yes, gold - onto the wax surface. The dust sifted into and filled the grooves. You then electroplated the gold dusted cylinder using copper. The plating solidified the dust and built up a thicker metal cylinder around the wax record.

You then melted the wax away and you ended up with a cylinder with a negative of the grooves on the inside of the cylinder. You pressed warm wax on the inside to make a positive impression on the wax. Then after cooling, the wax contracted and could be freed from the metal mold.

But try as he might, Tom never found a wax that was durable enough to last. The recordings still wore down too fast.

The solution? One word: Plastics.

The plastic record was an invention of Thomas, yes, but a young inventor named Thomas Lambert. The process was the same for making wax cylinders, except you pressed melted celluloid into the inside of the mold. Then you had a much more durable record.

Competing with the cylinder recordings was an alternative that everyone knew about - the disc. Emile Berliner - the same inventor who had also invented an alternative carbon microphone - had borrowed an idea from metal engravers. You coated a zinc disk with wax and recorded the vibrations by scratching the wax with a needle down to the metal. Since the needle couldn't cut into the metal, the recording required a side-to-side vibration of the needle to create distinguishable grooves.

You then etched the exposed metal with acid. This created the same grooves as on the wax but into the metal. The metal disc would replay the sound, yes. But the purpose was really to serve as a durable master to create molds by electroplating. By pressing a softer material that would harden onto the mold, you produced a copy of the original metal disc, grooves and all. Because the mold was made from a flat disk it could be separated from the master far more easily than a cylinder.

Emile tried making his records out of celluloid but the platters were too brittle. Instead, he turned to hard rubber which when warmed could be pressed into the metal mold to make the record. When cooled the disk was hard but not brittle and far more durable than celluloid. You could also put another recording on the other side of the disk, getting two for one.

Emile formed his own company, the American Gramophone Company and it took off. Yes, the gramophone in the modern sense was from Emile and developed into the record players that lasted until the advent of CD's in the 1980's.

And Tom? Well, he had been working on something else.

A Really Bright Idea

Tom always said he was suspicious of inventions that worked the first time. Well, if so, there was one invention he wasn't suspicious of. That was the electric light.

We now must reemphasize a point we made before. In Tom's time everyone knew he was not the inventor of the first electric light. He was one of many working on the problem. It was a well-publicized race to a technological finish line which everyone knew would change the world.

As far as we know, the principle of electrically induced lighting by incandescence was first demonstrated by Sir Humphrey Davy. Sir Humphrey - the "Sir" is from a baronetcy, not a granted knighthood - was primarily a chemist. But he had been studying how certain chemical reactions of metals could be converted to electricity. In 1800, Alexander Volta had found that by sandwiching slabs of paper soaked in salt water between different metals, you could generate an electric current. But Sir Humphrey found you could take this voltaic pile and send a current through a strip of platinum and the platinum heated up. When it got hot enough, it began to glow. This was the first demonstration of an incandescent light. This was in 1802.

By the mid-1870's, there had been attempts to create commercial lights using arcs. But arc lights - used up to the middle 20th century for search and spotlights - were too bright and loud and too expensive and totally impractical for home use.

And yes, to be honest we need to mention Joseph Swan. Sherlock Holmes fans will remember when Sir Henry Baskerville and Dr. Watson arrived at Baskerville Hall. It was a dark and sombre night and Sir Henry commented on the gloomy drive path leading to the hall door.

"I'll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months," Sir Henry said, "and you won't know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and Edison right here in front of the hall door."

Sir Henry was referring to electric lights marketed by the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company, Ltd. Called in the English vernacular Ediswan, the company not only sold you the light bulbs, but also the power plant. After all, to have electric lights you need electricity.

Of course, at Bakserville Hall the power plant was just an electrical generator. At that time these were steam engines - usually coal burning - that would turn the wheel of the coil of wire rotating inside a magnet. Although you'll read that such generators were loud, people are confusing 19th century generators with our own gasoline driven noise makers. Steam engines are actually very quiet and Sir Henry would have built a small shed to house the set-up. Not a cheap arrangement, but Sir Henry was rich.

We can see, then, that there is a big difference in an electric light and electric lighting. The electric light - that is the light bulb - is only one small part of electric lighting. For electric lighting you need not just the bulb but the source of electricity and a means of delivering it to the bulb.

We won't go into the development of the electric light as there are books on the subject. But ultimately the questions boiled down to what was the best material to make the filament and how to get the air out.

Strangely you don't necessarily want a good conductor for the filament. If so the current zips through the filament and uses a lot of electricity. This is not desirable whether you're using a battery - it quickly drains the electricity - or a generator - which would require too much power to keep the generator running.

And you want a white light. That means you need a temperature of 5000 degree F.

For such a temperature, you want a filament where the electrons have trouble moving around. That is, a filament that carries current but that also has a high resistance. High resistance cuts down the amount of electricity needed and makes a brighter light.

Now you can use a metal wire - but you have to make it thin and long. But another way is to use something which can conduct electricity but not too well - like carbon. Carbon conducts electricity, yes, but with about 1000 times the resistance of metals.

That is, some kinds of carbon conduct electricity. Graphite - the black slippery form of carbon that is cheap - does. Graphite has electrons that flow around but not too much. So you get a filament with high resistance and which heats up and glows. But don't try making an electric light filament out of diamond.

So almost from the beginning, knowledgeable inventors knew that carbon was a leading contender for an incandescent filament. But that's not the only thing everyone knew. They also knew you had to get the oxygen out of the bulb.

With air around at at a high temperature, the carbon would burn up. Gentlemen like Moses Farmer, Frederick De Moleyns, John Wellington Starr, Heinrich Göbel, Alexander Lobygin, William Sawyer, Albon Man, and Joseph Swan all had inventions using carbon in evacuated glass bulbs. And there were other inventors who could - and later did - claim they - quote - "invented" - the electric light.

But the consumer who was using gas lighting or oil lamps didn't care who invented the electric light. They wanted a practical electric light.

So in 1875, Tom announced just that. In six months, he told the press, he'd have a practical working electric light. And when T. A. Edison talked, people listened - including financier J. P. Morgan.

Tom started out doing what any inventor does. He did a literature review. This way he could find out what other inventors had done before. But of course he didn't do the search himself. He had one of his employees do it. And Tom had picked the right employee.

The Civil War had marked a turning point in American History, including its educational system. Formal education was becoming more widespread and colleges were beginning to turn out scientists and engineers of high calibre.

One recent graduate of Princeton was Francis Upton who had also just finished a year of post-graduate work with the great German electrical scientist, Herman von Helmholz. Edison, like all intelligent bosses, was aware of his own limitations and didn't mind having employees who knew more than he did. And despite the idea that the Edisonian method is simply trying everything, Tom knew that being guided by earlier work and theory could be an advantage.

So Francis began working for Tom not only for a decent salary (Tom wasn't always cheap), but a promise of 5% of profits of the electric light. This was a good deal particularly since the stock in Tom's company - the Edison Electric Light Company - rose from $100 a share to $3500.

At first Tom stuck with the idea that metal would be best for a filament, and he thought platinum would work. But he found it still had too many problems - it heated up too much, melted, and the atoms sputtered from the filament and darkened the inside of the bulb.

So Tom returned to testing carbon. He made his filaments by heating cellulose thread. And yes, he used the famous bamboo filaments, too. But his lights still burned out too quickly.

The problem was not so much the filament than its surroundings. Today's now vanishing incandescent light bulbs are filled with a mix of nitrogen and argon but at a reduced pressure (so the heated gases don't break the glass when you turn on the light). Both gases are available in large quantities from the fractional distillation of liquid air.

But in Tom's time these gases were hard to get. For nitrogen you burned something in a variable volume container (like a glass syringe). After the oxygen was converted to carbon dioxide, you then pushed the air through a solution of calcium hydroxide. This precipitated the carbon dioxide as calcium carbonate and then you pushed the remaining gas through a tube of solid calcium oxide to remove the water vapor. What you had was about 99% nitrogen and 1 % argon.

So using nitrogen in an electric light was not cost effective, and in fact, there are problems using only nitrogen. You need more argon than in the natural air composition, and argon wasn't actually isolated until 1895 by heating the nitrogen/argon mixture from air over magnesium to produce magnesium nitride. Do this enough - but not at home, kids - and you're left with fairly high purity argon.

In Tom's day, then, the best way to get oxygen out of a bulb was to pump it out. So the big problem of light bulb longevity was actually making a better vacuum.

Mechanical vacuum pumps simply push the air out. A good pump in Tom's day left about 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 air molecules in a bulb.

But Tom knew of another type of pump. This is where you let a stream of mercury fall through a chamber with a side arm connected to the light bulb. In simplistic terms, the mercury pushes the air out of the tube. The air in the bulb then moves into the chamber and also gets shoved on down.

The mercury pump only leaves only about 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 air molecules in the bulb which was a big improvement. So eventually - we won't say "soon" - Tom had a bulb that would burn for a couple of hundred hours.

Tom had the bulb but now he needed the lighting.

With backing of his wealthy friends, Tom had wrangled a deal that he would put electrical lights in downtown Manhattan. True, in the late 19th century electrical power was already known and becoming more widespread. But it was far from routinely available. So Tom - and his employees - knew they had to find electrical generators suited for powering his lamps.

Of course, he also had to install the cables, wires, and the power plant. To this end he incorporated a company, the Edison Illuminating Company, and it is at this point we can say Tom finished the transition from Tom the Inventor to Tom the Inventor/International Businessman.

There was one problem. Tom's generators made a type of electricity that had to be produced within a mile of the lights. Although Tom saw no problems with this, the businessmen who put up the money certainly did.

Tom Gets Westinghoused

Let's face it. Building power plants is expensive. And there were better systems around than Tom's.

Now when people start learning about electricity, they wonder why the heck do we use alternating current. That is current that flips rapidly back and forth in the wires so fast that what you really have is the electrons vibrating rather than flowing.

Well, the main reason is that electric generators are either magnets rotating inside a coil or a coil rotating inside a magnet. But whatever rotates, the magnetic field pulls electrons one way for half the rotation and then the other way on the second half. So alternating current is what you naturally get out of electric generators.

Direct current has to be produced using a generator where the coil is hooked to a special ring called a commutator that switches direction of the current. This flips the direction of the current for half the rotation of the generator and so produces direct current.

The advantage of direct current is it's better for running high power industrial motors. But for reasons we won't go into, it isn't easy to send it long distances.

But with alternating current you can send it further by increasing the voltage with a corresponding decrease in current. You do this simply by having two coils of the insulated wire next to each other wrapped around the rungs of an iron square. The coil with more turns is the one with higher voltage and using these transformers, a low voltage AC current can induce a higher voltage to be sent further along. When you get the electricity where you want, you then lower the voltage to safer levels by sending the current through a coil next to one with fewer turns.

Nowadays you'll hear about the the AC/DC current was an Edison vs. Tesla duel. Actually it started out as Edison vs. George Westinghouse, but it ended up being Edison vs. Edison. To explain what we mean, we'll talk a little about Nikola Tesla.

The $50,000 Question

By 1884, Tom was one of the most famous men in the world, and in that year, a young Serbian immigrant showed up with a letter of introduction from Charlie Batchelor, Tom's Menlo Park manager. Charlie had been in Europe and Nikola had been working at one of Tom's European offices.

As Nikola himself wrote:

The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much.

This passage was written forty years after Nikola worked for Tom. So it's ridiculous to believe that Nikola didn't respect Tom. Certainly Nikola had some criticism of Tom's modus inventiendus, but overall he never lost his basic admiration for the man.

Still we do read that there were reasons for Nikola being far from satisfied with working for Tom.

It's worth remembering that the best way to learn about history is not to limit your reading to web chatrooms, advertisements for DVD's, or comic books. Instead you might want to try those non-electronic devices with white flappy things in the middle called books. That way you can read what Nikola and Tom actually said.

Now you will read on the Fount of All Knowledge that Nikola designed generators for Tom and was promised a hefty $50,000 bonus. But when Nikola asked for his money, Tom said he had been joking. Or as you'll read on the Fount, Tom replied:"When you become a full-fledged American [Tom said], you will appreciate an American joke."

This story has been accepted by virtually everyone and has become part of the Nikola vs. Tom Gospel. And it has been told even by serious and learnéd authors. In a book - yes, a white flappy thing, etc. etc. - written in the 1980's we even read added details and you would almost think they had a video camera in the room.

Edison swept his high back shoes from his desk and fell forward open-mouthed. "Tesla," he exclaimed, "you don't understand our American humor".

Not only do we know that Tom said he was joking, we know what kind of shoes he was wearing.

There's just one minor question.

Did all this actually happen?

Remember, if something really happened, you have to have a source that can be traced directly to someone who was there. So either Tom told the story or Nikola did.

Now we have to admit biographies vary in quality. A good biography will have references where you can check for yourself what really happened. They relate the events and give the quotes as stated in the primary sources.

However, it's common for writers of - quote - "popular" histories - unquote - to indulge in - quote - "reconstruction". Sometimes the books even create events, dialog, and scenes. For instance, here's an excerpt from a biography of Tom:

When Tom first woke up he knew it must be fairly early in the morning. He could just see the light coming in at the top of each windowpane. The rest of the glass was frosted with a thin coat of ice. He put his head under the heavy comforts again for one last little snooze before he had to jump out of bed.

Needless to say, the actual source for this passage has never been found.

So it's instructive that Nikola's most recent biography - published by a major university press - doesn't give any quote about Tom telling Nikola he was joking. It merely gives us a summary, and even then the author seems a bit dubious about the story. Instead he says that Nikola "thought" he had been promised the 50 grand.

In fact, the original source of Tom telling Nikola to quit his kidding is quite well known to true Nikola scholars even if they don't cite it. It's from Tesla: Prodigal Genius published in 1944, the year after Nikola died. The book was written by John O'Neill, who actually who had good credentials (including a shared Pulitzer Prize). John specialized in popular books about science.

Now it's possible that John got the story from Nikola himself. But in any case what John wrote was:

Tesla designed 24 types of dynamos, eliminating the long core field magnets then in use and substituting the more efficient short cores and provided some automatic controls on which patents were taken out. Month later when the task was finished and some of the new machines built and tested and found measuring up to his promises, Tesla asked to be paid the $50,000. Edison replied, "Telsa, you don't understand our American humor."

Tesla was shocked to discover that what he thought was a specific promise was being tossed aside as merely a standard practical joke of the day. He received not a penny of compensation for the new designs and inventions for the tremendous amounts of overtime beyond the none too generous weekly pay. He resigned his job immediately.

OK. We know what three authors and many internet websites say. Tom offered Nikola $50,000 and then said he was joking.

But remember, at some point, the story has be traceable to Tom or Nikola. We know Tom didn't tell the story. So what did Nikola say?

Nikola told the story, yes, - but with bit of a twist. In his 1919 book My Inventions, Nikola wrote:

During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.

The Manager? This must be Tom, right?

Weeeeellllllllll, not quite. In fact, the "Manager" - a title which Nikola capitalized - was not what Nikola called Tom. Instead, the "Manager" was Nikola's moniker for Charlie Batchelor, who was indeed - as Nikola put it - the "Manager of the works". That is the supervisor of the Menlo Park lab. So Nikola never said Tom promised him anything extra.

Now if you want to stick with the Tom-was-joking scenario, you can argue that maybe Nikola was switching Tom for Charlie in the story. After all in 1919, Charlie had been dead for nine years while Tom was still going strong. Switching the quote from Tom to Charlie would have prevented unpleasantness.

Of course recasting the story to make Tom the bad guy also makes good copy for people who want to say Tom was a knave and a varlet. You can even read the "Tom-said-it" quote on a US government website who wants you to buy their DVD about Nikola. But then, this is the same US government agency that once broadcast a story about how a clumsily modified and electronically fabricated voice was the first purported contact from the dead - and thereby laying the groundwork for supposedly educational television channels telling us about ancient aliens, Bigfoot, and completely bogus documentaries where hired actors play the parts of scientific talking heads.

Now as easy as it is to find actual sources these days - often by properly using the Fount - it's a surprise that the older story is still told as it is. Surely historians should at least mention that Nikola said the 50,000 smackers was offered by the "Manager" Charlie and not Tom.

Not surprisingly Tom's biggest fans even question if the $50,000 incident even happened. First, they say Tom was too damn stingy to make such an offer. And secondly it's easy enough to find that Nikola himself wasn't above stretching the blanket for a good story. The famous photograph of him sitting calmly with the huge lightning bolts flashing around his head was actually a double exposure where Nikola later added his picture. We know that because in his notebooks Nikola 'fessed up.

Sometimes Nikola crossed the boundary of accuracy even further and definitely claimed he did something when he didn't even come close. In 1931, he mentioned how he had developed a process for using atmospheric nitrogen to make useful chemicals like fertilizer. The Germans, he said, "perfected" his method in World War I because of the "stresses" caused by the war.

Now the method of nitrogen fixation from World War I was, of course, the famous Haber Process developed by the German Jewish scientist Fritz Haber. It was needed because the disruption of trade caused by the war had eliminated importation of nitrogen chemicals. But Fritz's process has absolutely nothing to do with what Nikola was talking about.

In 1900, Nikola gave an interview how his gigantic spark generator - the Tesla coil - could combine nitrogen and oxygen and was a method that could "fix" nitrogen to make useful chemicals. The only problem is this process wasn't new. Joseph Priestly had actually done the same thing in 1775 - over 80 years before Nikola was born. Ten years later Henry Cavendish had proven conclusively that the nitric acid formed was from the atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen. An actual patent for an process was filed in 1859 when Nikola was three years old.

To be fair, Nikola's interview of 1900 predated the actual scale up of a commercial process by six years when Norwegians Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde actually brought the process that bears their name on stream. Kristian and Sam did not, though, use a Tesla coil and nothing Nikola did or said had any bearing on their work.

But Nikola's claim that his - quote - "process" - unquote - was "perfected" by Germain chemists in World War I pushes his statement into being an outright fabrication. The only process this could be is the Haber Process not the Birkeland-Eyde Process. The chemistries of the two reactions are totally unrelated and in fact, Fritz had made any zapping technology obsolete.

Nikola's fame in recent years has reached the point of deification. If you go to the Fount of All Knowledge, you can learn that Nikola created everything that we use in the modern world. That includes radio, television, radar, X-rays, the FAX machine, E-mail, mobile devices, fertilizer, and the Star Trek Transporter. Today people shake their heads about his sad fate. Only in robber-baron America could a brilliant immigrant scientist be swindled out of out of his fame and fortune by charlatans and frauds like George Westinghouse, Guglielmo Marconi - and Thomas Edison.

In fairness we have to say there are other opinions . True, some of Nikola's fans may think these critics cross the bounds of courtesy:

Tesla was, without question, very skillful at generating large, noisy sparks with the aid of step-up transformers tuned to resonance (the famous Tesla coil) and he seems to have really believed that, since Marconi used sparks in his wireless work, then he too must be a wireless pioneer.

There is, however, not a shred of credible evidence that Tesla did anything more than just talk about radio (in 1901, for example, he claimed that two years before he had received radio signals from Mars), and nothing in the historical record supports his grandiose claims. It is clear, in fact, from what he did write, that Tesla actually had only the slightest (if that) understanding of electromagnetic radio physics; he claimed, for example, that "his" electric waves were both immune to the inverse-square law and that they traveled faster than light.

Tesla does appear to have sincerely believed his own outrageous statements; he lived in a delusional world of self-aggrandizement that became increasingly cut off from reality. His only human joy seems to have been feeding the pigeons of New York City, where he died in a hotel room a lonely, bitter man."

Well, if Nikola was such a hack, why is he famous?

Certainly Nikoka was not a hack, in his field of specialty, electrical engineering. What garnered Nikola's fame was that he had patented new systems for generating alternating current. He sold the patents to George Westinghouse who had been contracted to provide those new fangled electrical lights to the Columbian Exposition World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Tom had also entered a bid but because he insisted on using direct current he would have had to build a power plant close-by. But with George's preference for AC he could send high power - thousands of watts - to the World's Fair and then step them down with transformers so they could light the bulbs.

Huh! Said Tom. Well, let them try! Light all the walkways you need. But where are you going to get the bulbs?

However, Tom wasn't the only entrepreneur to have high quality engineers. George had some of the best, including Bertha Lamme Feicht, the first lady engineer to graduate from Ohio State. They quickly designed a bulb that could be adapted into the sockets and when the Columbian Exposition opened, it was lighted by George Westinghouse alternating current - and George Westinghouse light bulbs.

But even more impressive was when George put in the generators at Niagara Falls for the new hydro-electric plant. He also used Nikola's designs.

Suddenly Nikola was a true scientist celebrity the likes of a Carl Sagan or a Stephen Hawking. He was interviewed and wined and dined and honored and was more than happy to give his ideas of what the future would be like. Sometimes he wasn't too far off, sometimes way off. To date we do not have Star Trek Transporters. Nikola died in 1943.

But back to Tom and George.

AC/DC

The War of the Currents - as it's called - has been described repeatedly and so we won't go into much detail. We'll just summarize and say that Tom made quite a fool of himself trying to prove that AC current was too dangerous to use to transmit electricity.

Tom was rather devious say some, and he was a blatant hypocrite say others. It seems Tom had no hesitation in changing his stance on capital punishment if it helped business. Originally he was against it, but then he began promoting the electric chair as the method of choice since The Chair used George's AC current. Tom even suggested we should say that a criminal was "westinghoused" rather than electrocuted. To prove the dangers of AC, he recorded a film where he "westinghoused" an elephant. No, this is not Tom at his finest.

Ultimately George won and even Tom's business partners understood AC was the way to go. In 1889, many of the separate companies that Tom's big money friends had formed were merged into a one, the Edison General Electric Company.

It was then that Tom found a sad fact of life. When you get the Big Money Boys to give you Big Money, 1) the Big Money Boys want to make more Big Money and 2) they expect to call the shots.

Let's be honest. Although its fun to trash multi-billionaires, they do tend to be intelligent individuals. Greedy, yes. Ruthless, perhaps. Flaming ... Well, we'll just say they want to get even richer.

Today, of course, multi-billionaires have learned how to make even more billions by failing on a massive scale. Ruin a company, declare bankruptcy, and get a golden parachute. As for the workers who lose their jobs, well, that's just tough tiddy.

But in Tom's time, you really had to make money to get rich. And the Edison General Electric Company had some of the best technical minds in the world. They, too, knew that AC current was the only practical way to make money. Tom continued to argue, but he was now only a small voice among the many.

Eventually Tom was - ah - "encouraged" to leave the company and get back to his inventing. His name was later dropped from the banner altogether, and General Electric became one of the biggest corporations in the world and whose research center in Schenectady, New York, has employed some of the greatest minds in science and engineering (including Nobel Prize winners). GE, if you aren't aware of it, is still in business.

The Start of the Boob Tube

Probably the biggest invention of Tom's that he had almost nothing to do with was the motion picture. Tom's own contributions never went beyond novelty peep shows, and its questionable if his nine paltry patents were really Tom's ideas at all.

Anyone who saw the Death Valley Days episode "The $25,000 Wager" hosted by a future Governor of California knows that Edweard Muybridge invented the motion picture (Edweard was his real name, not a misprint). It's not a bad show even though we're not really sure there was a wager at all.

Everyone knew that if you viewed sequential pictures rapidly you could get the appearance of motion. But it wasn't until 1878 that Edweard was able to develop cameras with fast enough shutter speeds simulate motion. Now the problem was to make a - yes - practical device that people would pay to use.

The invention of the film strip was not invented by one person anymore than any other invention. Probably the first person to make a lengthy exposure of moving images was the French inventor, Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince. He used photographic paper strips and a special camera. He made what are arguably the first films as we think of them. That was 1888.

But we don't want to short-shrift Tom. He decided to see if his friend, George Eastman, could help him out. George had created a new camera where the negatives were recorded on a strip of celluloid. The Kodak made photography possible for the average consumers.

Tom figured you could make the roll move past the lens fast enough with a high speed shutter, you could have sequential images on the strip. Then by viewing the strip in the same sequence, you could playback the motion.

Here's where things get problematic. In 1888, Tom had hired a Scottish immigrant, William Kennedy Dickson, and assigned him to work on the project. Although you will read that William invented the motion picture camera, the perforated film strip, and the viewer, the only name on the nine patents, was Thomas Edison.

This brings on the question of just who is an inventor. It is possible that the true inventor can do absolutely no hands-on work at all. An assistant who is told what to build and just follows instructions has not, strictly speaking, done any inventing. So it is indeed possible that Tom's claiming to be the sole inventor is correct.

But it's not very likely. Tom's assistants were not uneducated pairs of hands. As we saw they were often graduates of the best universities. So it is more probable that Tom and William - and possibly others - should have been listed as co-inventors on the patents. Sadly, the boss claiming sole credit for what others have done is something that does happen.

Tom's - or William's - work was limited to viewing the film through a Kinetoscope - the "peep show" that we used to see in the old penny arcades that existed until the 1980's. Kinetoscopes were popular enough, but after a while the novelty began to wear off.

The truth is it was the French that were the true leaders in motion picture innovation. You can even make the history of motion pictures into an international mystery thriller where a big bad American industrialist murders a young foreign rival. We're not saying that's what happened but you could write a mystery novel about it.

What did happen is Louise Le Prince in 1888 had filed patents for motion picture projects and was taking his invention to England and the United States. Then suddenly he disappeared while on a train trip in France. Later his son, involved in patent litigation with Tom, was found dead in New York. Let us repeat we're not saying Tom was actually involved.

Tom, as did a lot of others, quickly saw a business opportunity for films. Tom, though, was still thinking in terms of the individual peep show, and in the early 1890's, Tom set up a film studio where he made the films for his Kinetoscope. Although not the first film studio it was one of the first.

Peep shows are fine. But what if you all want to go to the movies?

That's when you call in the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. It was they who produced the first practical projector. But they worked almost exclusively in Europe.

Instead in the United States the projector was the brain child of Thomas Armat. By then Tom (Edison) had realized he had invented a novelty with his peepshow, but not a massive industry. So Tom E. persuaded young Tom A. to sell the patents to him, Tom E. The projectors were renamed the Edison Vitascope and touted as Edison's Greatest Marvel. Notice he said Marvel, not Invention. In any case, when the film industry began to take off in America, Tom was there.

It was in 1903 that Tom filmed The Great Train Robbery, shot on location in the Wild Wild East - that is, New Jersey. This is one of the first real motion pictures that actually tells a tale. One thing the film has going for it is the costumes are much more authentic than in later films and television shows which has the 19th century cowboys wearing mid-20th century Stetson style hats. Tom also filmed the first version of Frankenstein in 1910. For Tom, though, films were a business, and not a new type of art. Eight years later Tom sold out.

One thing we have to emphasize is that Tom in no way shape or form invented the motion picture. Nor did he do much development in it. At the same time if you buy technology you aren't stealing it, and if people think you invented what you marketed, hey, what can you do?

Coasting

In later years, Tom proved that during his life that he was a great inventor, yes, but not the best businessman. Not that you should feel sorry for him. When he got squeezed out of his companies or sold his interests, he got just compensation.

But what was there to do?

Tom had been thinking about branching out. There were other things to invent and not everything needed electricity.

For instance, how about making rugged furniture that would last longer than what you could usually buy? Alas, Tom's idea - concrete furniture - went nowhere. However, to get into the business he did buy a concrete company and made an improved type of Portland cement. It was Tom's cement that went to build Yankee Stadium.

Probably Tom's biggest failure was when he tried to find ways to get iron from the low grade ores from New Jersey. And he had an idea which really wasn't bad.

If you go to the beach and drag a magnet through the sand you'll end up with tiny black grains hanging to the magnet. This is iron oxide - magnetite - that was ground up as the sand was formed.

So Tom's idea was to just grind up low grade ore, run a magnet through it, and it'll pick out the iron bits. Use an electromagnet and you can then pick up and dump the iron ore where you want. In fact, beaches with a lot of magnetite have been mined for iron ore in this way.

Tom spent about 10 years working on the project and it never panned out. Part of the problem was technical, the rest economic. The cost of high grade ore dropped and made his process uneconomical.

In 1884, Tom's first wife, Mary, died of what was probably cancer. In 1886 he married Mina Miller. In the same year, he relocated his lab to West Orange, New Jersey. The site grew into a large manufacturing complex. All went well until 1914 - Tom was 62 years old - when a fire broke out and thirteen buildings were destroyed. But Tom immediately began to rebuild. To pack it in and retire never occurred to him.

There's one (somewhat) amusing interlude. By the turn of the century, Tom was so famous his name would sell anything. His first son (by Mary), Thomas Edison, Jr., started licensing his name to a number of products, including quack medicines. Tom, Sr., got a court order to make Tom, Jr., cut out the nonsense.

In World War I, the government brought Tom (Sr.) in as a consultant, primarily for the Navy. All in all it was not a productive time, and after the war Tom's activity began to drop off. But then in 1918 he was 71 years old.

His ideas got to be more exploratory (to use a polite phrase). One thing he worked on was to find a domestic alternative for rubber. That too never panned out.

Between 1915 and 1924, Tom, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs, all went on well-publicized driving trips across the country. Then on the 50th anniversary of opening his Menlo Park laboratory there was a big dinner. Not only was the dinner attended by President Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman, and Orville Wright, but Nobel Laureate Marie Curie took the time and trouble to come over from France. Tom, though, was not in the best of health and had to leave early.

Histories are written during the time of the historians. So they reflect the historians era as much as - if not more - than the times of who they're writing about. In the 1970's with the rising distrust of authority and lack of civility to people who hold contrary opinions, we began to learn:

Thomas Edison Did Not
Invent the Light Bulb!

 

... and ...

 

Edison Stole the Idea
of the Light Bulb!

... although by now you'll realize this really tells us that the readers - or rather television watchers - were suffering from the I-Know-Something-You-Don't-Know Syndrome. Also called the Assistant-Professor Syndrome, this malady is when you puff up your ego by believing the opposite of what qualified scholars and historians using primary source material tells us. After all, if the Arthur Küssenamarsch Well-Endowed Professor of History of the Later-Mid-19th Century at the University of Seldom-On-Tyne writes a book that tells of the importance, genius, and inventions of Thomas Edison, and yet you believe a comic book that says that Tom was a thief, a hack, and a swindler, why, doesn't that mean you know more that the Arthur Küssenamarsch Well-Endowed Professor of History of the Later-Mid-19th Century at the University of Seldom-On-Tyne?

Alas, it doesn't. We have to admit Tom was a great inventor.

Tom died on October 18, 1931 at what was then an extremely advanced age of 84. Naturally the accolades poured in. There were some voices, if not dissenting, were a bit grumbling. Nikola Tesla was asked by the New York Times what he thought of his former employer. Nikola - now that Tom was no longer around - spoke a little more boldly than he had twelve years before. He said that if Tom was looking for a needle in a haystack he would simply examine every piece of straw until he found the needle. He then concluded:

I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

Nikola, though, never quite got it. If the theory you use is wrong, you're going to be looking forever in the wrong place. Tom at least would eventually find the needle. Nikola, though, used the wrong theory and spent the last fifty years of his life finding nothing but straw.

But that, as they say, is another story.

References

Edison His Life and Inventions, 2 Volumes, Frank Dyer, Thomas Martin, Williamm Meadowcroft, Harper, New York, 1910. The classic official biography written in Tom's lifetime. This has lots of information but as in all biographies of this vintage - and when written with cooperation of the subject - it must be read with caution. But at least the authors also interviewed people who knew Tom in his younger years. This book is a good source to understand how Tom made the transition from "tramp" telegrapher to an inventor and entrepreneur in just a few years. These volumes are also available at various places online.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Tom Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, Randall Stross, Matthew Josephson, Crown, 2007.

Edison Inventing the Century, Neil Baldwin, Hyperion Books, 1995, University of Chicago Press, 2001..

Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Edison, Matthew Josephson, McGraw-hill Book Company, 1959. A pretty classic biography

The Tom Edison Papers, Rutgers University, http://edison.rutgers.edu/

Edison, Matthew Josephson, McGraw-hill Book Company, 1959. A pretty classic biography

A Streak of Luck: The Life and Legend of Tom Alva Edison, Robert Conot, Simon and Schuster, 1979.

The Story of Thomas A. Edison, Inez McFee, Barse & Hopkins, 1922. A typical early biography for kids written during Tom's lifetime. Sticks pretty well to the facts but also includes invented dialog and is told in a novelistic manner. Despite what you learn the - quote - "nonfiction novel" - has always been a popular literary genre and didn't begin with Truman Capote.

Thomas Edison: Young Inventor (Childhood of Famous Americans Series), Sue Guthridge, Aladdin, 1986. An example of a late 20th century kids biography of Tom. What makes this book particularly interesting is the illustrations are by famed comic artist Wallace Wood.

"'Claim the Earth: Protecting Edison's Inventions at Home and Abroad", Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property: Concepts, Actors and Practices from the Past to the Present, Stathis Arapostathis, Graham Dutfield, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013.

America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, Andre Millard, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Thomas Edison: Inventor of the Age of Electricity, Linda Tagliaferro, Lerner, 2003. A 21st Century Young Readers' Biography. This tells quite a different story for Tom's Ontario misadventure.

"Turning Light Into Day", Scientific American, Vol. 112, No. 25, pp. 535-536, June 5, 1915,

The Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A History, Lewis Coe, Mcfarland and Company, 1995.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, W. Bernard Carlson, Princeton University Press, 2013.

Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney, Prentice-Hall, 1981. This has the story of Tom wearing the high back shoes.

Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, John O'Neill, Ives Washburn, 1944.

The World's Greatest Fix: A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture, G. J. Leigh, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Thomas Edison Biography: Inventor (1847 - 1931), http://www.biography.com/people/thomas-edison-9284349

"Emile Berliner", American Memory, Library of Congress, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlemil.html

"The Gramophone", American Memory, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlgramo.html

"Incandescent Lamps", Edison Technical Center, http://www.edisontechcenter.org/incandescent.html

"Everybody Steals in Commerce and Industry. I've stolen a lot myself, Quote Investigator, Tom Edison, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/05/09/everybody-steals/

"Inventors and Inventions from 1851-1900", Enchanted Learning, http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/1800b.shtml

Thomas Edison National Historical Park, https://www.nps.gov/edis/index.htm

"A Penniless Thomas Edison Makes Some Money, 1869", George Bryan, Salt of America, http://saltofamerica.com/contents/displayArticle.aspx?19_161

"Thomas Edison", Museum of Information and Science, http://www.schenectadymuseum.org/edison/a_timeline/01_a02.htm

The Farmer Lamps of 1859 and 1868, http://home.frognet.net/~ejcov/farmer.html

"Mary Nesmith Graham", Famous Women Inventors, http://www.women-inventors.com/Bette-Nesmith-Graham.asp