computer history museum in mount view, california. >> thomas edison was an american original holding patents in his lifetime from botany to the phonograph. no other american inventer has more. collected papers at rutgers

university number 5 million pages, and scholars worked on them since 1978. his final laboratory in west orange, new jersey, occupied 21 acres, and it is now a national park. on exhibit there, among other things, is his personal desk with a pigeon hole labeled "new things," crammed of papers and notes of ideas he never got to. we know at least what one idea might have been because near the end of the life, he would put his money on sun and solar energy, what a source of power. i hope we don't have to wait out until oil and coal run out to tackle that. i wish i had more years left. perhaps he contributed to us the next best thing. it's in the electric light and invenges of modern america. while the light is not a natural subject to the computer history museum, i invited professor

freeberg to have the conversation because of the profound observation about the natures of invention and inventers. the lessons he draws out speak across a decade to a time and place here and now in silicon valley and the approaches are familiar, and in both cases, the world has changed forever because of it. ernest is a distinguish the of the university of tennessee, author of two books, and winner of numerous prizes heard on public radio and lectures for the organization of american historians. join me in welcoming ernest freeberg. [applause] >> welcome. >> thank you. welcome to the museum. >> thanks, great to be here. >> thrilled to have you here. let's talk about what the book is not. what the book is not is, first of all, a biography of edison.

>> right. >> it's not a discussion of the invention of electricity. it's not a discussion of the competition between edison and tesla, a favorite subject around here -- [laughter] but we're not going into that today, but what it is, and what i love about it is it's a social and technological history of the incon descent light and the enormous impact the lighting of america had on our society and on the world. >> that's right. i think it's in many ways a foundation of the modern economy that we live in and shaped our lives in ways that are often invisible to us just because light is so am biketous. >> did you have a theory about edison going into the project? >> well, i think i began with the premise that shows up in the textbooks that edison was the inventer of the lightbulb. i was not interested in edison's

role in what happens when the light lightbulb leaves the laboratory and goes out, but looking at what edison did, i began to realize that the actual story of the invention process was a lot manufacture complicated and interesting than i expected. >> you used the phrase about past examinations of edison as often being, in your words, more hero worship than history, and while i want to get into the process of inventing in a minute because that's a very important topic for us, why is, as a historian, do you see this necessary to make that distinction? >> well, i think partly, we need to understand how important it is for inventers themselves to turn themselves into heros, that participant of what they are doing when they sell a product is sell their own identity, and edison was a master at this. people, you know, gave him this phrase, the wizard of the park, and he cultivated that

conscientiously, and it was a powerful tool for him in order to develop funding and to get the world to trust him that it would be a good idea to put this powerful deadly force of electricity into their houses. >> and it did turn out to be a pretty deadly force in the beginning. we'll talk about that. back to the hero thing, too, for a minute. so there are parallels to the way that you talk about the evolution of edison perfecting the light, and the way that we often talk about the evolution of computing as well, and you've actually spelled some of these out, and i just want to get you to talk about those for a minute. first of all, you talked about and debunced is stems alone from the great inventer in the lab, there's a eurorei cay -- eureka moment, and all three of

those things you take on early in the book saying that's not what happened. it was not true in edison's time. can you talk about that and what you learned? >> well, partly, i think people long for that story, that great eureka moment story. that's exciting and accessible to people. it's complicated to understand the idea and battles over the marketplace. it's much easier to think of these great ideas as passed down to us by a sort of mt. rushmore creativity. >> in the case of edison and the light bulb, how did it happen? >> first of all, he entered late into the search for a working bulb. there were five or six other inventers who held patents ahead of him, a crucial one. they all recognized the key elements of a bulb and carbon filament, so edison was entering

into a crowded field, learned a lot from the mistakes and successes of the rivals, and many suggested he stole their ideas. there was a lot of battling over the patents. >> who else was involved at that time? in trying competitively trying to achieve the same things that edison was trying to achieve? >> another fascinating character is maxum, known for the gun, and he beat edison so crucial patents about how to treat the filament and how to work a bulb in the field before edison did. joseph swan in new castle in england was working for a year on developing a working lightbulb and put into the field, his house lit a nearby mansion, set up the first outdoor street light, and it was six months before edison did. there were many people con

verging the big test of this when was in paris at the electrical expedition, and edison wop the day when he arrived with this, but he was there with five other people who had workings with the systems as well right at the same time. >> and were they all aware as inventers are today of each others' work? >> yes. >> the progress they were making? >> yesment there were at least a dozen if you go back -- you know, the first person to identify the ability was davey in 1810, and once he demonstrated that, people were trying to do this for years, and they didn't quite have all the pieces together and converged in the 1870s, but with more than a half century, people were trying to create the light. >> what do we know or what did you discover about the way that edisonfelt -- edisonfelt about the other stages of progress that other incenters were making? >> well, i think -- i suspect like many other inventers he had

a sense of rivalry. he announced arrogantly when he entered the field he figured this out in a way that nobody else had, and first big breakthrough was to suggest they were wrong because they were creating a carbon filament bulb, and they he was going to createa titanium bulb. when he announced that, stock sk markets in gas around the globe plummeted because they were convinced if he can, than surely he can. he was wrong. six months later, he went back to carbon with the rest of the crowded field. >> as we get into the discussion of the technology, talk a little bit about a really wonderful phrase that you are early in the book which is that edison invented a new tile of invention. he almost invented the modern way of innovation happening. >> that's been said. his model at the park was to create the first research and

development laboratory, but he often of the very, very critical of college education and he was proud of the fact and new enough to hire university trained mathematicians and people who understand the latest chemistry to help. he needed technicians to realize his ideas, a glass blower, for example, somebody who was able to realize the various ideas they experimented with. >> it was the team working collaboratively, but edison was the guiding intellectual, and they knew about the specialty, but edison was the one who set the agenda, and, also, he was the one who had to negotiate with the capitalists in order to get the money to pay for what turned out to be a very, very expensive research and development process. when he lost it, he called it an

invention factory promising to have a minor invention ten days and an amazing breakthrough every six months. he didn't know what, but he just was going to create great ideas. >> announced it to the world? >> yes. >> like moore's law of invention, just roll things out. >> yes. >> he had two other things, access to capital, both from the public markets and from his own considerable wealth at this point because he was making tremendous royalties off a number of inventions, not the least of which was the phonograph. was he investing that back? >> the big chunk of money made was from the telegraph. he started that as, you know, as a lowly telegraph operator, learned the business, and figured out how to send transmissions both directions on the same wire, a valuable patent for the union. he got a payoff with that. i don't think he made as much, but they don't know what it was good for taking a long time.

people said it was the most, you know, ingenious, but useless invention. people bought tickets to see a phonograph on stage, but once you saw it, what's it good for? it took awhile for people to realize that music was the great use for it. edison being deaf didn't think about the value of music. >> had to be thrilling to watch a phonograph on stage play a cylinder. >> once. [laughter] >> the other thing that he had was a commercial sense. he wanted to invent things with commercial potential to put in the market. >> absolutely. he was not a scientist. he grew very heavily on sciences. he did the thing which many americans wsh doing at that time which was to borrow heavily from european scientists to take their ideas, and find ways to make them much cheaper and more effective and put them into the market place and sell them around the globe so that was

very, very important, and edison very often, he -- even with the electric light, he had to go out and -- it was always frustrated with the lack of capital support, so he had to very often go out and create his own electrical manufacturing companies, for example. he had to market this. he had to work out the as thetic of electric lights to convince people this was just not going to be a more efficient light, but that it could be beautiful in ways that gaslights could not be. >> let's talk about this technology itself and drill into this a bit. talk about for a minute what was available at the time? what was lighting europe, america, the average home and the problem that edison was solving for? >> right. people often side in the 19th century people were hungry for light. people were moving into cities, buildings were getting taller, coal smoke was covering windows, and there was an enormous hunger

for light. you see that in the spread of the whaling industry initially. the development of karosene and gaslights from coal, an enormously capitalized powerful business. that's what edison was taking on. everybody recognized that people wanted light, that they would pay an enormous amount for light in the case of gas they would put up with terrible inconveniences for the light. he saw a market there. >> in the city, gaslights were pervasive, weren't they? >> they were. >> throughout manhattan, pittsburgh, philadelphia, baltimore, boston -- >> right. it was a terrible technology. these -- the gas had to be kept under pressure in large tanks, often kept in poor neighborhoods, and they would explode periodically causing terrible destruction. the pipes leaked so that the

soil, urban streets, the soil became terribly poisennous, and people were affixuated because they didn't have the gas toxins adjusted right. when it worked well, it sucked oxygen out of the air, heated up rooms terribly and replaced oxygen with noxious acids that ended up damaging furniture. if you were wealthy enough for gaslights, you had to be wealthy enough to replace furniture because of the damage it did to the leather bindings and fabrics. >> there was a tremendous hunger? >> yes, yes, and everybody knew that. edison was struggling in a market everybody knew there was a of money to be made. >> did edison and other inventers come to the solution naturally?

was that the first at ternty felt to be workable and marketable? >> sir humphries davies in 1810 had two different lights in his period. he was interested in electrochemistry. it was exceptive to generate the electricity that it didn't seem viable until the dynamo came along later. davey demonstrated that and the ark light, a powerful, bright light rather than using a filament, it uses two carbon rods, kept just close enough so the current, powerful current jumps across the gap, and it creates a light that many because of times brighter. >> why did edison choose one and not the other to pursue as a way of perfecting this? >> well, somebody beat him to the arc light. you know, the person who really lit downtown streets in america

was charles rust, who was a similar -- had a similar trajectory in life, growing outside on a farm outside of cleveland. like many young men, he was self-educated, access to scientific american and popular science monthly and was hungry for the information. he, following the magazine, figured out how to make his own lights. europeans were experimenting with this in paris particularly, and he figured out how to make one that was cheaper, more efficient than anybody else did before. charles rush, who we think about the great white way, the broad lighting up of broadway and these public streets, that was all done by ark lights, and chaferls rush had not just the american market, but the global market covered very quickly. >> the way the lights were deployed is amazing. you got pictures in the book of the massive towers built in the hearts of cities and just bathed

everything from a single tower almost like a lighthouse. >> yeah. one of the exciting things about the invention is good ideas that go bad, you know, and this is clearly one of those. san jose being a famous location for one of these towers, and those lights were expensive, and because they were so brilliant, the idea was you could just create one single artificial moon above the town and that would -- rather than putting a lot of lamps down low, and, often, when you erect the one moon, it casts terrible shadows over large swaths of town where it didn't reach so you had to do another tower and another. you know, detroit was the sort of market society with 70 separate towers to try to get every spot in town, and it worked so badly that pretty soon the towers fell down in the high winds, and they let them go.

>> so the individual solution was the solution being sought after with this refinement that edison and his own competitors wanted. >> that's right. what they called to make the lights visible. it was one thing to make one massive light of many thousands of power, but it was another to break the light up into usable pieces to bring indoors. when they brought the ark light indoors, which they tried to do often in fancy balls and those things, the light made everybody look so karosene -- karosene daffous, and people attending an event said i'm not going to electric light again. [laughter] >> i'm thinking of mainframes versus pcs here. that's us in a computer history museum, i guess. talk about the actual technology that enabled this to happen because the key development of the liability bulb itself was

the filament. it was the lighting agent. can you talk about the attempts tried and what edison's science was in the breakthrough on this? >> yeah. it's a complicated system, and the filament was one of the missing pieces. everybody recognized that carbon was the right element to use, that it would have high temperatures, but you also needed to have a bulb, and people tried to do this, and it was really late development in the improvement of creating a vacuum that allowed a lot of these people to all immigrate to at the same time. you needed to have a steady current of electricity at a republican cost. when edison developed the filament, he was working on the entire system, part of what ahead his system so successful was that he was thinking that not just of the missing piece, but the entire integrated system that went into the marketplace. >> he envingsed it from end to

end? >> yes, even the meter; right? he had to charge customers, make sure they got a good deal so he invented the meter to put on people's houses so they knew they got -- >> they thought in sis stemmatic terms about the big problems, not simply in the breakthrough that would enable something to happen in one point of the system. >> that seems to be the thing that meant that he emerged from the contest as the person we remember as the inventer of the electric light with many, many rivals. what he did was figure out how to create the systems how to put into the field and have a chance of teaking on the gas companies for that market. >> let's talk about once he -- and, oh, by the way, before we go there, i want to talk about his idea he called it simply light. his notion was that this bulb had to be extrord -- extraordinary simple and had to

be something that any average person could understand how to use and could use very less r -- very easily and that the light itself would be so pure and clean. >> yes. engineering, this was, in many ways, the most complicated technical system that existed in the 1880s, but for the consumer, it was the on-off switch; right? involving no matches, no cleaning of lamps, and, in fact, you didn't change the lightbulbs. you contract with the company and sent one to change around the bulbs periodically. edison recognized the fact the systems work best in the market place. if you asked the consumer to not understand it, to do as little as pock -- possible -- [laughter] >> yes, that's bril lament. there's local and modern examples of that all over the place. >> certainly. [laughter] >> there's doubters at the exhibition in 1881 that you

talked about. it roughly brought the bulb to life in 1879, is that about right? >> new year's eve 1879 with the demonstration. he still had not perfected the system, but convinced a lot of people he had because those bulbs looked great, but a few weeks later, they burned out. he had not figured out yet -- by the exhibition in 1880, in the fall, he had something that could last much longer. >> and, by the way, what was that that he figured out about the filament that wouldn't burn out so quickly? >> well, he knew it was carbon. he had very much a dn an approach to try everything. he's famous for saying, well, i failed a million times, anne that's fine because i learned something each time. he tried beard hair and fishing line and, you know, cork, whatever he -- whatever carbon element he could find and stuffed the laboratory full of

every possible element, not knowing what might work. he finally locked in on loops of bamboo filament, and when he decided that bamboo was going to be the key to this initial success, he hired -- with great fanfare -- three explorers, sent them around the globe to go find the best form of bamboo filament. the great form of pub publicityr him, especially when the explorer who went to latin america never came back. [laughter] disappeared. the one who went to japan found a species of bamboo that made the most consistent fiber so those early breakthrough bulbs were of bamboo fiber. >> i just love that storiment i mean, it just shows the extent to which he was determined to spare no expense and also to get the perfect solution, and tame, made it a public relations coo.

>> yes. >> so speaking of that, let's talk about what he did in paris. i -- i just want to read what you write in the book about how he set up his demonstration at the exposition, and as you said, there were a will -- there were a lot of people in paris showing off their approach to electric lights. he built a 220-ton generating machine. >> right, the dynamo. >> the dynamo, shipping it from america to paris. he designed a display in the grand hall -- i love this -- with two massive electrified " "e's," standing for edison, obviously, and a lek try fayeed portrait of himself. he won the gold medal of honor for electric lighting. this was a marketing and public

relations master stroke. >> yes. , now, in fairness, he had the better system in the sense he brought a much more complex system, the dynamo he brought, the 220-ton jumbo dynamo was more efficient than anybody thought possible at the time. >> why was that? >> he just -- he had insights into the construction of the dynamo, took it apart, and reconstructed it, and he had a breakthrough with the filament that he recognized the fact that it needed to be high resistant filament, counterintuitive for reasons i don't understand, but counterintuitive to electrical experts at the time, and that proved to be the stroke that made his much more efficient than others. so partly he won fair and square, but had a sense it was about showmanship and winning

the gold would ultimately win the patent war that was coming, and that if people were going to invest in this new technology, they wanted to put their money on the man with the spinning e revolving picture of himself. [laughter] ..

>> he had control of this technology. in that time of 1880, there were six or seven companies in the business that edison arrived with. he had the advantage because he had more capital and lots of things. people were hungry for information on light. so there was a chaotic time. >> what is the next step? how did this play out in his own vision?

>> he always said that i want to go back to the laboratory and be an inventor. but he felt as though he never got to support to run his invention. so you have to create a series of manufacturing companies to create the product. he worked with lighting designers, for uses in the theater. across the board he believed that electric light would be better than gas. >> he had to look contract with local companies. as it turned out, he made a lot of money. but the people found it much harder to make a living. partly because there were a lot of other competitors. >> did he have a breakthrough that really was instrumental

when you could say whole sections of the city would be lit. for example, without one really show them how to have electrified the of the world? >> at 12th street station in manhattan, his wall street actors taking this and so forth, this was a highly publicized place. but still, this system was decentralized. we think in terms of the electrical grid now, that edison was taking in terms of a small bread. a system that he could light up outside city blocks with. then he would have to have another system. the city would have to have a power station about every five blocks. that was his model. >> let's talk about the

implications with electricity being rolled out and others being proven. you then talk about the specific changes that it begins to bring to modern life. life is suddenly erupting on the scene. what are were the first major things that begin to happen, especially in an urban setting where life becomes lit up in the average home. >> well, it didn't happen except for the homes of the wealthy right away. it's a common model where the industry invests first until the price comes down. it took decades for the average person to afford it. there was a lot of investment these new machines and the possibility of keeping these running 24 hours a day was very enticing. there is a real battle, and

along comes a tool that seems to raise what they thought was the distinction between the period of rest and work. often laborers were paid more. there was a real struggle over child labor. that was one of the things that the progressive reformers managed to battle first. eliminating it in the middle of the night. >> houses push back?

>> it especially was important for the transportation industry. it did create a 24 hour per day transportation delivery system. the scene was very crowded at this time. there were many things moving faster and colliding into each other. electric light mainstreet travel more safe. so it may possibly delivery system. >> many love the electrical light. it was dangerous to workers in terms of opening up the

possibility of the workday that would never end. office workers, people working in any kind of field operations, they were so happy not to be working under gaslight that they welcomed the electric light. >> you talk about safety in the book. just making cities safer. making neighborhoods safer. that light could be brought, not like an arc light like the moon, but to the street-level. >> yes, that's right. this was a way to open up space so that working people, when they got off work at night, and opened up the city and made it available in a way that was inconceivable up to that point in time. >> okay. let's talk about the kinds of professions that had to be

invented. it is very easy to forget today, as you point out in the book, but there were no electricians. there were no standards. electrical engineering was an entirely new idea. there were no electrical engineers. this all started to come about. building buildings with the electricity. there was a whole generation of jobs that open up this phenomenon move forward. >> that's right. one of the other things that edison had to do is create a school. and there was increasing pressure on universities to develop the first electrical engineering programs. many cities had electrical clubs, where young men who wanted to get into this field would pay a small membership fee and get to hear lectures.

they could try experiments in the laboratory not sort of things >> they were learning the hard way. >> they really were. >> the electrical connection of the mines that were being strung through the cities were not up upon tall powerlines what we are accustomed to today. >> there were no regulations for how to do desperate. >> yes, kids love this.

but once these are quite companies are unregulated and the wires were there, was very dangerous. there were five or six in a given city looking for a market. it did not cost that much money to buy a dynamo. >> a lot of the research was done with the newspapers of the era. >> one of the other things you

discover, not the danger, necessarily, but just the wonder of light coming to america. can you talk about that? >> i think my favorite part of the research was going back and finding -- it was really at one point in every city, town, hamlet across the country -- it was the night that the light came on. people would show up by the hundreds in downtown streets and wait for the flip of the ceremonial switch. there would be cannon blasts and in cheyenne, wyoming, the whole town roped into song to serenade the electricians for bringing light to their town. so there were they were such celebration when the light came on. >> yes. >> even if it wasn't in their homes. for many decades, electric lights were something you could maybe see at work or at downtown

in the amusement parks. it would be in the city square. you would go back to hrc nor gaslamp. >> what is the difference with homes attention right away and those that came too much later? >> there is a great convention. it wasn't just something that the rich one of the courts themselves, but rather the value was only that more and more people could be brought into it. even though it was something that was much more expensive than gas in the 1920s. at the same time, it did sharpen the line between the have and

have-nots. electrically speaking. especially urban and rural america. americans drew from thinking of themselves as jeffersonian farmer's to thinking of themselves as part of an urban nation. the electric light really created a sharp five between the old world and the new one that was emerging. you can see time and again, especially farmers magazines and journals that they are very aware of the fact that someone out there, people are going to baseball games and coney island and there's a whole world that they are missing out on. that distinction was there from the start. >> what is happening to edison at this point? is he being hailed as the genius of the age to an even greater level than he had been at that

point? now the democratization of light was making his own image that much greater? >> is an interesting story. he was so committed to the dc power system. it was replaced by the ac power system. the westinghouse takeover. so he loses control of the electric company and it becomes general electric. >> ironically. >> right. he is out of it within a decade. and as he is leaving the business, he gets a very nice payoff to do this. he says i'm going to go back to inventing and come up with something that nobody will ever remember that i was associated with electric lights. [laughter] which did not happen. >> the score and entrepreneur kicked out of some company. >> yes, yes. he continues to be remembered as

the great expert on electricity. he spent the rest of his life with scientific hunger. everyone wanted to know what he thought about the new technologies that came along. he was happy to play that role. >> how vigorous was his fight on this alternating currents? this battle? >> he is most famously known -- you have to use westinghouse that was used. to demonstrate this, he would have to round up stray dogs and he would electric you done to demonstrate this. >> we are really not familiar

with the sight of him. >> there were people being electrocuted in the streets. >> he had a personal best of interest in dc power. which really crowded his judgment. he basically took off and paint on these wires hoping that that would work as insulation. so edison felt like, you know, many people were very disturbed by what was happening in the city streets. ultimately the public would finally reach a point where it was was not willing to go forward with electricity. >> european engineers came to america and saw the chaos of the

wires. they saw these people in the streets. they said, how can you put up with this? and they said that they had a a lot more light than you do. [laughter] but we have more light in the united states and all the rest of europe combined. >> looking at the questions that have been passed in from the audience, there are some really great questions. now, i'm going to ask a couple questions about the technology. the filament in and the lightbulb. was that standardize quickly once the technology had been decided upon? >> it was an evolutionary process.

he had to go into a partnership with his rival to figure out how to use a ghastly treatment, which was very necessary to make it last longer. he made a much more consistent element than the bamboo fiber. that ultimately replaced this process. it got better and better until finally it culminated into the metallic filament that was developed in germany initially and then pioneered in this country by general electric. which totally changed everything in a way. they were so much more efficient than the old carbon filaments. that was really the breakthrough that allow the electric light to

really compete against other things. general electric said this is edison's dream realized. and this is decades after, promising that this would be an abundant form of light that everyone would enjoy. it wasn't until later that it started to enter the marketplace. and there was a similar entry price. the electric company would provide carbon bulbs for free trade but if you wanted to buy the other bulbs come you had to pay your own. so slowing things down, so much more efficient that ultimately in a decade or so, everyone switched over to metallic filaments. >> that is so interesting. there are modern parallels there. as transformational as it can

be, you can take a long time for it to be penetrated probably. made available, made expensive enough for it to be accessible to many people. >> so the estimate in 1930 was 70% of urban homes were wired for electricity. so it took 50 years just to get this into people's houses. and that was created by the building boom in the 1920s. many were reluctant to tear up the walls and install this. new housing, by the 1920s, electricity was considered to be the standard. >> you touched on the next question that i was going ask, which is isn't it true that people were afraid of wiring homes? did have something to do with

the danger that it represented? >> people talked about it being safer and cleaner. but there was resistance to putting this deadly force into your house. especially the most famous story about that is one edison installed his first system, one of the early adopters was one of the vanderbilt women's football bets. rather than ripping up the balls, they would run the wires up. and basically he set the room of one of his major backers on fire. [laughter] so he ordered a specially designed desk lamp and it had

burned down to senders. >> even after that, you have to ask about if it is the kind of investor that you want. [laughter] >> his management style, i would like to touch on not for a moment, to the extent that you helped with your research, he had a factory that employed thousands of people. as laboratories are popular, as you said, with many researchers and brilliant individuals working under him. how did he manage that? do we know how he took that task on? >> that memo was a fairly small

group of about 20 people working with him. so he had a very personal and intense relationship with him. working essentially 24 hours a day. he was a famous napper. he would sleep on ours. his entire team is expected to be working with them at all times. there was a spirit of teamwork that most of them remembered for the rest of their lives. >> one of the questions here that i was going ask you is from the audience. this mystical idea that this was fire, could you run across that

at all? there were also people who were intrigued by that or who are afraid of that? i think i have heard that story told. did you run across that? i do not. what i was struck by was time and again journalists tried to explain to their leaders when an incandescent bulb was like. he always found it to be incredibly beautiful. it looked like a droplet of fire or an italian sunset order with the flower order this or that. you know, they were drawn to its beauty. above all else. and they loved to look at it. but the problem came when you weren't supposed to look at the metallic filament. once the metallic filament came in, it was so bright that the lighting performers had to teach

people to use lampshades. people said why should i be paying money and the top honor. and they had to say it's not register a polite, of course it is uncomfortable if you look right out of it. it is not meant to do that. and put the light here and cast onto your book here, this is how you do it. so there was a real concern that the world had become so bright that people's eyes were going to be damaged. >> what is most surprising to me you didn't expect to uncover? >> the development in this later period. people decided there was too much light and the focus had

been on maximizing the amount of light and suddenly people realized what this would feel like. you know, so this is one window designers figured out how to use light to create effects that had not been possible before.

[inaudible] so we sort of move in and out of the vocabulary of light that was carefully worked out by these rumination engineers. they talked about things like what should a church look like. and catholics had different ideas, mormons about what light onto it like to be sacred. and whether or not it was an intrusion on their sacred space. there are things we take for granted. they make us feel a particular way. >> this is a great question. one that i am glad that someone sent out. the friendship that developed between edison and henry ford, you talked about that in the book a of it. can we go into that? is fascinating to think of

edison and ford bringing so much change to society. >> yes, he mentored ford at a crucial time and encouraged him and ford was always grateful for that afterwards. he created his museum in dearborn, michigan. he gathered up everything he could find and even dug up the topsoil. towards the end of their life, they would go on long camping trips. they both denounced the modern world that they did so much to create. and we are just going to go fishing. and of course, he had a huge

entourage, a lot of specially designed individuals and electric lights to go into this. they couldn't quite let go. >> right. >> did you track that? was as part of the social history that you're trying to tell? >> it was more just thinking about a wide movement that ford and edison participated in. suggesting it may be the that country had gone too far in creating these systems. that was the part that interested me the most. everything we could do to cement miss this great hero. >> we are coming to that point where, as you said, edison

starts to reflect back. there is a great quote in the book when you talk about him going on these vacations. he says i don't want to be near lake yesterday. if you french novels and a fishing rod is what he wants. it wasn't as if he seemed too long for that. he wanted to get away from the more complex and just be himself and. >> yes. >> many people were grappling with this. as much as people were hungry for it, created these spaces and made work safer and more effective. many people were disillusioned. they thought this was a terrible trade, we have a much more beautiful nighttime, but we have made it an uglier daytime. we have poles and wires and ugly signs. why would we trade day for night we met many people were concerned about this.

they were also concerned about the psychological effects that people were staying up too late. things we know now about this disruption of the circadian rhythms and sleep. i think many people started to be romantic about candles and the colonial revival movement and an attempt to convince people to turn off the light and live with candlelight so they can get in touch with something that has been lost in the modern world. a psychologist had an argument that if god had designed twilight is a way to cultivate spiritual creative side, people dream and contemplated in human beings are going to cut themselves off as soon as they

flip on the light, and it is a piece of the human experience. if you like children that lived under too much artificial light became irritable and the lack a spiritual dimension. >> did you find any indication that edison was reflecting back on his life? >> he was a great defender of artificial light. he said that put someone under it, they say that this'll make you a better person. more energetic, he was never clear on how, but he was convinced that it would. so right to the bitter end. >> okay. so he has been called the greatest of his age. would you agree with that?

>> he certainly deserves enormous credit. but really the book is designed to suggest that the age itself is more interesting. it is the age that invented edison rather than him shaping the age. it is honestly an important figure. it is important because it was an enthusiasm that human beings had entered a new stage for invention is not just something that comes along once in a while, but you can actually turn out new ideas all the time. it is important that way, but not unique. >> one final point is he created what you call an expectation of perpetual innovation. the sum total of this is that we

would be moving into an era when innovation would just be something we would live with day after day of the rest of our lives. >> americans particularly embraced this. we're also very proud of the growing reputation and consider this to be an expression of democratic values. if you educate people probably, if you encourage innovation and remove barriers between workers and thinkers, this was america's gift to history. material objects whole world wants to have. >> we did interests of that.

thank you so much for being with us, ernest freeberg. what a great book. [applause] >> in a moment, we will continue booktv. in his book "the tinkerers", alec foege looks at american innovation. and the man who defeated the nazi u-boats after that. on the next "washington journal", the two-day marriage case that the u.s. congress taking up this week. a reporter for the "los angeles times" joins us. we will also talk to the professor. later, wall street journal reporters getting ready on job losses and the economy. "washington journal" each

morning. >> next on booktv, alec foege talks about contributions from modern-day ben franklin's and thomas edison's. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. [applause] >> i hope i can live up to the introduction. first, i would like to say that it is a real privilege to give a talk on my book at the westport library. because it has been an innovator it was just a coincidence that brought us together. so thank you to bill for helping make this happen.

you know, my book is partially about what is going on right now. it also touches on history. more specifically, it talks about what the idea is and what is the mindset of a tinkerer and how does a tinkerer differ from a inventor or hacker. a lot of innovators that we know in american society have a part of this. typically this has negative connotation. you think of the crackpot puttering around and not knowing what they were making. which is sort having fun with spare parts. but in fact, that is kind of the

heart of what it is about. so we tend to think of it as trained engineers were specialists. but they were really not specialists. they were journalists. typically tinkering is what they do in their spare time when not at work. so i have met a lot of these people, talking to other groups about this book. it is looking at the things around us. it is about keeping one's eyes and ears open to the possibilities. often times they end up pursuing

their personal passion initially. it may turn into something like this one day. but that is not typically have a gun into it. you know, we talk about education these days and whether we are teaching our kids the right things. people wonder how we can get the spirit back into the schools. but i would argue it's that it's not about that. i think most kids know how to tinker. they typically play around and try to figure out how it works and see what they can make out of it. you know, i think that we have become a culture in a lot of ways and we sometimes forget. they are under pressure to have higher scores for the districts. i don't think we need to teach

them to do that. we just need to make sure that we don't squash the spirit too early. my book begins with my own experience, if you will. that is when i sat on my blackberry. [laughter] i was getting into the car and realized that i had damaged the screen. i also realize that the phone was still working, but i can realize anything on the screen. so i took it to a local phone store and i thought that they could fix it or that i would turn it in for another one relatively cheaply. the salesperson said, i used to do it and it was my job and he said he could film a new one. and i said, that is one of $50. not so good.

and so i found a group of videos on youtube that made me think, maybe this will work. okay, we are having a technical difficulty here. one moment. in any case, i will explain it to you. it was a video of that told me how to take apart my blackberry and remove the screen and put in a new screen. so i went online and got a special set of screwdrivers for

about $20. and i follow the video. when i opened it up, there were about five pizzas including a circuit board and a keyboard and took the old one out and it worked like new. that was my realization that we live in a culture where we have these high-tech devices that we have and feel like we have this. so frankly i figured if i was going to throw this out anyway, i might as well give it a shot. so theoretically, it shouldn't be that difficult. >> the idea for this book came a

time after the big economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. there are a lot of white collar workers losing their jobs and worrying about what they actually did. realizing that we could become a huge service economy. but the united states is to be a country that could make things. i learned my research the fact that the united states is a huge manufacturer. most of the things that we make our high end electronics items. these days, we just don't need as many people to meet all of those things. but we certainly are manufacturing and there has been a trend with a lot of companies trying to manufacture some of their devices. that turned out to be a

misnomer. and i try to boil down what it meant in terms of putting the book together. thinking about how we have lost the spirit. whether it was something that just needed to be refreshed. there seems to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge and you just pick up enough knowledge of textiles and metals in programming and figuring out how to do what you want to do. and then you try to come up with something new. certainly skills are important.

but they are a means to an end. mastery is not the point. it is coming up with something new. before i delve back into history to talk about this in this country, i just would like to point out a few things in the culture that show that there is a renaissance going on right now. there were some affairs arranged and they were very wonderful festivals and all sorts of electronics and art and music. another thing going on these days are tinkering workspaces. you can go in and there is all sorts of high-tech equipment that you can play around with.

trying to address the problem that some people have mentioned. which is in the old days when it wasn't so high-tech, most people have a workshop and they would do pretty much anything. they a lot of people can afford can't afford it, so there are lots of high-tech things that might be needed to do different kinds of tinkering. but you can certainly visit one of the shops for a day or however long you need and try out some of that equipment. >> hackers are obviously something that have come up in contemporary culture. one that i focus on in my book is a young guy who famously broke into an iphone and a few years later a sony playstation and was able to be hired by them. they try to sue them, but then

they hired him. [applause] so hackers can be tinkerers two. so they are more thieves then tinkerers but they certainly have a certain level to them. the main thing that is most important about this is there is a certain amount of humor to it. i cannot vouch for whether or not it was hurt, but there's a spirit of fun. they will all tell you that they did what they did. because they enjoy doing what they were doing. that is sort of a key element

that was kind of important. now, i'm going to go back a little bit. i tried to get through the beginnings of this. we talk about how it differs from others around the world. there is something about this country and the founding fathers with the original history. obviously ben franklin i3 obviously ben franklin is one of the great americans. in school we learned this and all sorts of other things. he was considered a huge source of wisdom which was great. a very interesting figure. the only thing is that he raised the bar kind of high and kind of

early. he made it seem like a daunting thing. and another thing interesting was, this was a way to open things up into how i look at them in the book a little bit. in the sense that i understand it it is as much a mindset. i argue in the book that the u.s. postal service was part of this. had such an impact on american society is. it was something that he had to work out over a long time before it ever became a reality. we see how those kinds of virtual things can be as valuable as a physical thing as well. the other thing that is interesting is that franklin

wasn't the only founding father. if you look at a lot of them, many of the original founding fathers of this country were sort of tinkerers. george washington probably being the biggest of all. he wanted to find the best fertilizer, the best way to prevent plant diseases, the best message for cultivation. and this was a need for it. the other progress was at the potomac and now, and he was obsessed with this for the rest of his life. he and he actually died with the hotel not being finished. he wanted to hire engineers and

there actually were no trained engineers to consult them. and in fact, the techniques that he used to develop it ended up being kind of wrong and it was built with a totally different technique. it was something that he pursued just because that was what he was interested in. thomas jefferson invented the swivel chair, macaroni machine. james madison invented a walking stick with a microscope and it to observe organisms on the ground. i think it did not catch on because he was about 5-foot 2 inches. and alexander hamilton founded the federal reserve. clearly these were men of wealth

and leisure. but they were founding a country and have a lot of things to do. but at that time, they pursued it as figuring out solutions throughout their lives. and he was not the only one at a time. to jump to contemporary, i think i identify him as being the contemporary tinkerer. it's a serial inventor. he made his original fortune with a series of infusion pumps including insulin pumps that allowed patients to receive medication around the clock

without having a nurse present. but he also invented the wheelchair, which never really caught on. but his idea was he built this technology into it. the idea was that you might need this to climb upstairs. and it didn't really catch on. he's probably best known for the segway. the segway eventually became part of this. it would change the way we live.

unfortunately, a lot of big cities banned the use on sidewalks and, i know in warehouses they use them and their a lot of tours around the country. if you are in the city, you can take a segway. the technology is around. and he obviously became wealthy off of his inventions. but if you look at how they track it over time, you could not necessarily put them together. they had these light shows and eventually he was able to install that technology.

so tinkerers don't necessarily know where they are going. but they can still end up doing great things. i also talk about thomas edison in the book. of course, the inventor of the century. he was hailed as a wizard and munro park. probably the same issue with ben franklin is that he raised the bar so high that he almost seemed otherworldly. but i talk about the device in this photo and it was actually a photograph. he came up with the first photograph that was workable and

relatively easy to produce. but edison hated music. he could not fathom why anyone would want to listen to this and spend their leisure time listening to music. it didn't make any sense to him. he pursued the market for this device which was in office dictation machine. and it didn't work out that well for him. he honestly had other successes. but he never made much money off of it. you know, it's interesting also to think about at the time, people did not understand how it worked. but he did represent this and

the contemporary version of it. because he was a great man. he had his great ideas that came out of his head. trying to figure out how to make them work. and that became the new archetype for how to innovate. you could argue that his lab was the first research and development operation in the modern sense. but again, he just couldn't understand why people would want to listen to a photograph. the irony is that the company to commercialize this was called the american graphics on included alexander graham bell

as a partner. which was particularly upsetting to him. and my point in all of that is saying that if he didn't always get it right, he was always muddling through everything. surely that is okay for all of us as well. so if you read the accounts of how his most famous inventions were realized, and there was a lot of frustrated assistance and midnight dinners and it wasn't particularly easy. but back to the idea of tinkering is something

conceptual. starting in the world war ii era, i sort of became intrigued with a guy named thomas mcdonald who was by most people's understanding, a career bureaucrat. he grew up in the midwest and iowa in a farming community. he watched throughout his childhood as farmers struggle to transport their crops on dirt roads so money but sometimes they would just stay home. so the roads were dry up until after going to agricultural college, he came under the spell of a dean at iowa state agricultural college who is a proponent of the good roads movement. it was intended to promote the

use of bicycles. .. ..

>> it was really the idea that he came up with that made the interstate highway system happen, and he liked to say that the only other two great programs of road building in history were that of the roman empire under caesar and that of that pallian's friend, and the u.s. one was the only one built under democracy, so -- but there's something about the idea of, you know, bringing working like a series of highways that intrigues me. you know, it made me realize that a lot of debate is tinkering innovation in the latter part of the 20th century going into today's seat sort of started with tinkering with

ideas, and then hopefully those would sometimes spin out into actual physical things that would change our lives. i talk about the rand corporation, which was, of course, the originator of game theory. rand was an organization that was founded during the cold war, and the idea was to protect national security, but they came up with all these intriguing ideas about how to kind of tinker with ideas that would somehow protect us better than the ideas we already had so the theory was trying to apply a mathematical approach to probability and human behavior. later on in the 70s, late 60s and early 70s, xerox created the

palo alto research center known as park in palo alto, california, known as being one of the great research and development experiences -- experiments, sorry. the idea was they were going to fund research without any products in mind. they were just going to see what came out of it, and that was inheard of at the time. why would you spend, you know, corporate money on something that, you know, what would happen with it, but, in fact, it was a very fruitful experiment, and they hired mostly former academics, not many who lived in corporation, and one of my favorite stories about park was their version of beat the

dealer, which was an old winning strait diswri for the game of 21, but they used it in terms of tossing ideas, and they would sort of sit in these apparently mustard colored bean bags -- it was the 70s -- and somebody presented an idea, and they tried to beat the idea or explain why it was wrong, and that was sort of, you know, real -- this was a big departure from what edison did in his lab where edison would just have the idea and say, you know, well, you guys do it. this was keen tinkering, and some great things came from it. the most famous one was probably the -- one of the first personal computers called the alto. you know, in a lot of ways, it's similar to what we think of now as a computer. it had a mouse and windows.

windows-like software elements, and this came out of all these tinkering sections in the park, but when showed to the people back in stanford, it didn't make sense. they didn't see an application for business, and at the time, you know, most computers typically were an operator and you submit requests, and the operator of the computer would execute it for you. they didn't see a point for it. steve jobs famously went in and wheeled his way into the labs. he heard about this, wanted a look at it, and, in fact, he traded shares in his young company, apple, to have a look

at what they were doing, a enas soon as he saw it, he said, i know what we can do with that. they, xerox never made much off of the alto, but, obviously, steve jobs did. the point there is not in a corporateceps, it's not -- corporate sense, it's not just enough to have an idea. there has to be a climate in which those ideas can become realized and become commercialized to make it happen. there's some ser renne dipty to it, even if you really try to plan it, and i think that's probably worth acknowledging. another tinker that i spoke to for the book was this guy, nathan. he was microsoft's first technology officer.

he left i think in the early 2000s, obviously, and did interesting things after that. people know him from the modernest food cookbook he put together developing a whole school of scientific cooking, so he applied science to, and in the book, i think it's like a $450 book or something, but you can, you know, it's a whole new way of cooking, but the other thing that he founded was a company called intellectual venture, which i thought was very interesting because he was kind of trying to address the issues that at park was such a problem in the 70s, dhfs how do you commercialize these great ideas that you could come up

with without either having them go elsewhere to develop them or not have an intellectual firm, but a capital firm, and the idea he gets innovators, inventers from all fields together in a room and brainstorm and come up with solutions to the world's big problems. my favorite one is a laser bug sapper they developed to help fight malaria, and, in fact, the bill and melinda gates' foundation not involved in and helped fund it because apparently it's effective, but they came up with really novel solutions for addressing climate

change and all different kinds of power solutions so it -- it's an interesting model. it's still early to see whether it really grows into something big, but it's interesting. i mentioned alexander hamilton's original financial tinkerer. people don't think of what happened a couple years back as tinkering, if you think about it in a positive sense, you know, there are obviously a lot of horrible things that came out of the tinkering of some people on wall street, but the point i make in the book about this kind of tinkering is that thing like credit default swaps and debt obligations, they were initially, actually, invented to solve problems, not to create one, and in the case of the debt

obligations, for example, there were two people with applied masters at jpmorgan looking for new ways to offset risk for some of their clients, and so, you know, that is what they were trying to do when they pulled together mortgages and sliced them up and sold them as securities. in theory, it made sense. unfortunately, the -- you know, there can be a tashing side to tinkering -- a dark side to tinkering, obviously. in fact, probably the darkest part of that financial tinkering was that most people other than the people who came up with it in the first place didn't understand it, and so that's something that i think we deal with a lot in contemporary society is that when you tinker at a high level whether there's financial tinkering or tinkering with technology, when there's that gap between understanding

what is being done and what the average person can comprehend, it creates problems, but, obvious, remember back to edison, people thought electricity was magic, so, you know, there's a learning curve, but it's not to say people can't catch up. this was another guy that i interviewed for the book, really interesting young tinkerer, professional inventor who was trained at mitt, originally from australia, but he lived in this country for a long time, and he has -- he's found a lot of companies, invented a lot of interesting things including some interesting wind turbines and actually float in the air opposed to being on long posts which provide -- allows them to get into much stronger currents and therefore be more efficient,

and he also thought a lot about how to make tinkering more fun again. he's come up with interesting websites and things. one i of my favorites is instructibles.com, where actually the mouse is a mouse experiment came from, but it's actually a really -- a lot of these sites are really interesting because they -- there's projects on there to download and do, and some of them are very basic, and some of them are very high-tech, but there's instructions there, and so you can pretty much make intent with them. i mentioned before about the idea of american tinkering versus tinkering around the world, and one of the things i want to look at a little bit in the book as well was whether things going on in tinkering outside the united states that we could learn from, and one of the people that i talked to who

was not american was brandonberg, and the name probably doesn't ring a bell, but he's the file of the mp3 file, the file technology that created revolution and uphennedded the recording industry, and he, what's interesting about how he developed the technology for the mp3 file stood in stark contrast to how we do things in this country. he's worked for a long time at the frown hopper institute in germany which is a series of institutes all over the country that there's sort of interesting public-private hybrids. they have public -- they get some public money, but they have to earn their keep as well. he's a professor, but he also was working on projects with

money making potential, and what's interesting, mp3 technology, the original goal was to find a way to transmit high fidelity music over a phone line. i'm not sure why, but that's what developed into -- mp3 # is a compression technology so you can get, you know, high fidelity music into a much smaller file, and therefore transmit it much more easily. the after effects of that -- here we go -- was napster and all sorts of other things that created a lot of confusion and unhappiness in the music world,

in the united states in particular. in fact, a lot of the large recording companies tried to shut napster down, but many other services popped up. they tried to ban mp3 files that never happened, and, in fact, mp3 # technology is still the most common form of music sharing technology. my point in looking at something like that is that i think that in our country, traditionally, there was a lot of actually federal money that went towards research and development but there's less now than in other developed country. that's something that i think needs more looking into. i looked at, again, different

times of conceptual tinkering, this architect in chicago, her building called the aqua building, a residential condominium, they are irregular concrete balconies that create this effect, and the building's right on lake michigan so they are echoed in the lake, but it's a very cool building. what was interesting about how it was developedded was the way her firm works in which it's actually a very collaborative environment where the architects work in small groups, and she works in an office slightly secluded nearly them to she comes over and sees what everybody's doing. i saw a few other companies recently doing this, particularly, computer software companies, where they have two people, two engineers at a computer at the same time, and they have to both be working on the computer at the same time to get anything done, and the idea

is that, you know, you don't know what you're going to stumble upon, and you sort of -- it takes two to make sure you capture all of that tinkering goodness, i guess. i also looked at, in fact, overseas, the creator of angry birds, finnish company, a company called rovio, and what was interesting about the way angry birds was developed, again, guys trying to start their own gaming software company, but what they did was they couldn't afford to use time develop games, and they only worked on angry birds in their spare time, but rather than market researching like you do if you were a big company, they actually just kept working on it and basing it solely on what they, as programmers, thought

was fun, and it took them a long time to do it, but, obviously, angry birds was a huge success, and so, again, the idea is there's a reason why startups typically -- all right -- there's a reason why, you know, why startups typically perform a lot better than -- just go back to it. yeah. sorry. >> we had to change computers in the last minute, and in the process we took the connections to the video off, but we'll play

the video separately. >> anyway, what i was saying was that there was a reason why startups tend to come up with great innovations still these days, not large corporations, but there's a lot of thinking, obviously, with corporations about how to get that startup spirit in house. >> [inaudible] take this advice with a grain of salt. i'm david, i'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but i'm the found r founder of something called the tinkering school. it's a summer program that aims

to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. we build a lot of things, and i do put power tools into the hands of 2nd graders so if you are thinking about sending your kid to tinkering school, they do come back bruised, scraped, and bloody. the book is called "50 dangerous things," and thing number one, play with fire. learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. whether we remember it or not, it's a -- it's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. these mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. playing with fire is -- >> [inaudible] >> it's one of the great things we ever discovered. from playing with it, they learn basic principles about fire, about intake, about combustion,

about exhaust. these are the three working elements of fire that you have to have to have a good controlled fire. you can think of the open pit fire as a laboratory. you don't know what they are going to learn from playing with it. let them fool around with it on their own terms, and, trust me, they are going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer toys. [laughter] number two, own a pocket knife. pocket knives are drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which i think is a terrible thing. >> there it is. >> pretend it didn't happen. let's go forward. ♪

>> welcome to five dangerous things you should let your children do. i don't have children. i borrow my friends' children. [laughter] take all this advice with a grape of salt. i'm the -- i'm a contract computer scientist by trade, by i'm the founder of something called the tinkering school. it's a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of so we build a lot of things, and i do put power tools into the hands of 2nd graders so if you think about sending your kid to tinkering school, they do come back bruised, scraped, and bloody, so the book is called "50 dangerous things," and this is five dangerous things. thing number one, play with fire. learning to control one of the most elemental forces of nature

is a pivotal moment for children. whether we remember it or not, it's revealed only to those who get the opportunity to play with it. playing with fire, this is, like, one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. from playing with it, they learn basic principles about fire, about intake, about combustion, about exhaust into the three working elements of fire that you have to have to have a good controlled fire. you can think of the open pit fire as a laboratory. you don't know what they are going to learn from playing with it, you know, let them fool with it on their own terms, and, trust me, they are going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer toys. [laughter] number two, own a pocket knife. pocket knives are kind of

drifting out of our culture consciousness, which i think is a terrible thing. [laughter] your first pocket knife is like the first universal tool you are given. it's a spatula. it's a pry bar. it's a screwdriver, and it's a blade, yes. it's -- it's a powerful and empowering tool, and, you know, a lot of cultures give knives like as soon as they are toddlers they have knives. these are inuit children cutting whale blubber. i saw this when i was 10 #, and it left a lasting impression to see babies playing with knives showing that kids can develop an extended sense of self-through a tool at a very young age. you lay down a couple of very simple rules. cut away from your body. keep the blade sharp, never force it, and these are things kids can understand and practice with, and, yeah, they will cut

themselves. i have terrible scars on my leg where i stabbed myself, but, you know, they are young. they heal fast. [laughter] number three, throw a speer. our brains are wired for throwing things, and like muscles, there are -- if you don't use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time, but when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain too, so practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal lobes that has to do with acuity, 3-d understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visual skills and predictability. throwing is a combination of

analytical and physical skills. it's very good for like whole body training. these kinds of target based practice also helps you -- helps kids develop attention and concentration skills so those are great. number five. deconstruct appliances. there is a world of interesting things inside your diswasher. next time you're about to throw away an appliance, don't. take it apart with your kids or send them to this school and i'll take it apart with them. even if you don't know what the parts are, puzzling them out for what they are for is a good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart and no matter how complex they are, they understand parts of them. they can eventually understand all of them. it's a sense of knowability that

something is knowable. these black boxes we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. this breaks the digital copyright agent. [laughter] >> okay. so this is telling. he's a really interesting guy. he founded a summer program in san fransisco originally called the tinkering school, and at the school, kids, they go for a few

week, and they use real tools, and they do things like build suspension bridges, working roller coasters, and other cool stuff. he was well-known for this, we awe san excerpt called "five dangerous things you should let your kids do." you saw the first three of those. the last couple were break the digital millennium copyright act, fire sharing and all of that, and the last is let your kids drive a car. [laughter] he talked about little kids. but the idea is that, and now he's actually cofounded a private school calledded bright works which based on the same principles with the idea is immersive learning that, you know, while you are learning the things out of textbooks, you can

also actually do them. if you are doing physics experiment, you can do the physics experiment and read about it, and you can do all these things simultaneously. it's an interesting approach on how to, again, not so much teach kids how to tinker, but to encourage the tinkering they already want to do. so, you know k back to the contemporary world, it's amazing. every single day now it seems like this -- there's no sorts of indications that tinkering is taking on a sort of, you know, all the earmarks of a mass phenomena, make magazines, which is also part of the o'reilly media empire that hipped -- helped start the maker fairs, is a pretty cool magazine that is filled with all sorts of experiments to do and projects

you can build. probably one of the best known phenomenas of today's tinkering world is kick starter, and those not familiar with it, it's a website where tinkers and innovators and inventors can post their projects, essentially come up with a video pitch, and people can go on and crowd fund that innovation, which has created a system that never existed before because you take out the middleman that people needed to get ideas realized in commercial projects, and so some amazing things have happened, and, in fact, just in the last week, there's -- an amazing campaign that they -- that a company -- really just two

people, i think, called wobble works, made happen. they have this 3-d printing pen. i don't know if you are familiar with 3-d printers. we'll talk about that in a few minutes, but the idea of these have -- these pens, you can actually draw 3-d objects with them, and plastic comes out of the pen. it's amazing. anyway, they had a goal of $30,000 they were trying to raise to make this product a reality. this was, we did a screen grab today, and you can see what they are up to now, and the idea is, you know, people who go on the site is pledge a certain amount of money for the project, and, typically, they get the product when it's finally made, or sometimes there are prizes that is something that, you know, it too expensive to be handing out to people, but it's an amazing phenomena, and kick starter grown into a large company over

the last couple years. there's a couple others, other sort of inin vaition websites out there, two of them are -- others ones are come by nateers and tech stars, but you're seeing more and more of these tingerring incubators going online which seems to kind of supercharge them, and i think that that's a real cutting edge trend right now. i mentioned 3-d printing, and, osks, the westport library is way ahead on this. the westport library purchased, i think, two 3-d printers, and i think there's a third or fourth in the works now, this has become the new symbol of today's tinkerers. if you haven't seen one in action before, the idea is you can design a 3-d object on your computer, and then print it out,

and a 3-d printer will make a prototype of it in plastic, and it's an amazing thing for inventers, and, you know, who can actually create a prototype very cheaply, and i know that kids enjoy them a lot too, and, in fact, we are going -- if you can see up in the top corner there, upstairs in the westport library makers' space, you have young tinkers, i think, assemblying a new 3-d printer the library just purchased, cheaper than the previous ones, but the trick is you have to put it together. [laughter] they know their audience, clearly. well, that -- i just wanted to talk for a few minutes more, but what's going on at the westport library because, as i mentioned at the start of the talk, it's -- it's by sheer coincidence, but unfortunate coincidence as i worked on this book, the westport library was

sort of delving into this tingerring phenomena and really bringing the maker movement right into the library so upstairs in the library, there's a maker space where all sorts of projects are being realized on a daily basis amist all of the books. i think those i think those three guys are in there right now, but, you know, it's been a great resource, and i know there's a lot of other big plans in the works, and the library staff's gotten involved too. these are photos from only a recent staff day at the library where the staff members learned how so soughter, which, you know, you wouldn't connect libraries and soughterring, but, in fact, i think you will in the future because, you know, this knowledge can come from all different directions, and you

always need to know how to soughter if you put something with technology together. also, i mentioned westport has hosted a minimaker fair, and i know there's another one coming up in april, just a great way to see what people from different walks of life are working on. i know that i went there with my kids, to the last one, and we saw all sorts of cool stuff. there's photos of the 3-d printers that the kids were making fun stuff with. i know one of the biggest hits was from last year's, the basketball playing robots, astonishingly accurate once they were controlled by high school students who built them with laptops, and, in fact, what's interesting was that the robots were built as part of the first robotics competition, small that

the dean founded, and so, again, there's all these -- it's not just that there's a lot of tinkering amongst adults going on, but there's a lot of really interesting efforts out there right now to get kids involved as early as they can in trying to awaken, you know, that curiosity, and that instinct for having fun that is so intrinsic to tinkering. here's just a few other things from last year's fair. the brooklyn company that they had -- they sold you the mechanism, and you could put it together yourself. i think in conclusion, i just want to say that, you know, for me, doing my book was sort of a

real -- became a much more exciting project than i thought it would be at the outset, although, obviously, i had deep interest in it from the start, but i think that there's something intrinsic to the american spirit that seems to be, you know, really worked well with tinkering, and i think, you know, the fact that we still see a lot of really bright people coming from all sorts of other countries around the world to study and to work in the united states and a lot of high-tech fields that is evidence that there's a lot of -- i don't know if you call it the "frontier spirit," or just this sort of cock eyed optimism that americans have in this tinkering, seems to go so well with, that i, you know, i tend to be an optimist about this and think that this whole new wave of tinkering is really going to bring on a new age of innovation. i think the key is from a

corporate stand point is figuring out how we cannot squash too many innovations before they become fully realized. i want to thank you all for coming tonight, and i know we're supposed to have a question and answer period if anybody has any questions. i think we have a microphone. >> [inaudible] >> that's a good question. when -- you know, i mean, patents, i actually do talk about pa tents in the book a little bit because there's things about patent law evolved in this country. one thing that i have learned in doing the research for the book

is that the idea that app invention is some brand new idea is sort of incorrect because, of course, everything comes from what came before it, and, in fact, that's, in my mind, one of the key points about tinkering is that you -- tinkering is actually taking what's around you and trying to make something new out of it. it's the -- even the laser bug accident accident -- zapper, which was built out of spare parts from consumer electronics that they bought off of ebay, so, you know, i think that was something they wanted to do in a lot of ways, so i -- you know, i understand if people come up with a great idea and afraid people are going to steal it, but the reality is that it doesn't usually work that way. people try to steal it once it's already successful, so if you

can get to that point, then you got a high class problem, so i, you know, i think it's natural for people, especially young people to think what they come up with is, you know, is never been done before, but chances are, i mean, even if you look back at the history of the airplane, before the wright brothers, i mean, people were trying to build a flying machine for hundreds and thousands of years before that. they just happened to figure out just how to do it in a way that would work. >> i just wondered, are you a tinkerer, and if so, have you invented anything? >> well, i'd like to think writing is tinkering in some regards because you certainly play around with things that already existed for a long time and hope to create something new. i do a lot of that. certainly, as a kid, i, you know, i tinkered a lot, and

built a radio, flashing light array, and i remember using those and chemistry sets and all sorts of things. have i invented anything? no, i don't think i have, but you brought up a good point in the sense that i think the message of the book, ultimately, is not that everybody is an inventer. everybody is an innovator or an entrepreneur, but, in fact, some of the ideas about tinkering and the mind set is useful to anybody, so, you know, it's the idea that coming up with something new involves a certain level of risk, and often times failure, and i think we've become a society sometimes, particularly with kids where we protect them from failure so much, but, in fact, failure is such an intrinsic part of creating something new in success that i think that that

is another reason why it's important to get kids involved in tinkering when they are young because i think that that is how the world works. yes? thank you for fixing the play, by the way. >> you're very welcome. in the search of the book, do you see markets in the country where there's more tinkering happening? for example, in the past there's innovations from the east coast, and now maybe majority of the innovations come from the silicon valley. >> right. it's interesting, in fact, i'm working on this piece called "the top 10 tinkering cities in the country," and so i may have an answer to this. i mean, you're right that obviously silicon valley has been for quite a while sort of tinkering central, but, of course; on the east coast, you have mit, the cambridge area,

and what's really interesting, i think, is over time you see these areas, you know, cities where you don't necessarily think of as being tinkering cities that because they've made an effort to attract that kind of activity have started; you know, growing into those, into tinkering hubs. one that comes to mind now is tulsa, oklahoma. i know there's a big medical technology hub there. you know, there's a lot of startup companies happening there. i think more, you know, going around the country, there's just a lot of smaller cities that are seeing, realm, this is a way to attract economic growth, so, yeah, i think there's a lot of other places happening now, and, of course, with the internet, it's becoming so much easier to share knowledge and to even, you know, whether it's through skype or some other means to

communicate in realtime so that the -- there's no longer the cultural and geographic call reasons why tinkering would happen particularly in certain areas of the country. any other questions? >> okay, john -- >> oh, yeah -- >> daniel, lou? could you turn that on? daniel, i don't know they can hear me. they turned it off completely. oh, no, here we go. >> hey, guys. >> hello? >> hey. >> can you hear me? >> yeah, i can hear you. >> i justmentsed to ask you about -- just wanted to ask you what you are working on today.

>> right now, we're working on the trinidad, jr., a $300 kit, and we have it pretty well assembled right now. this is the object it will print on, side to side, and these rails are what the extruder is mounted on, and this moves up and down and forwards and backwards. this is what we've done so far, and we're making pretty good progress. >> this is our second day working on it. of course, it's hard to get any time to build it. a lot of the times, when we got the printer initially, we built it for a few hours, and then, today, we've been working on it for almost two hours, so we've made a good amount of progress. >> when do you think you'll be done? >> i think we'll be done pretty soon. either late topt -- actually, probably next time we start

building again, we'll probably have it done in that session. >> and, do you have ideas of what you want to try doing op it first when you are done with it? >> first, we want to see what kind of resolution it has and what it's capable of doing, and then we might use it to print smaller objects and use the replicators we have for larger, more detailed objects. >> what's -- can you think of an example of, like, what kind of object? >> yeah. a lot of things like small tools, like -- we like to print whistles. those are fun to do, things like that, just small little trinkets, little toys too. >> yeah. are these things that you design or are they already designed? >> most of them are from the west lake university, a website where people upload designs and you download them for free. it's a great community, and people have cool models, and

some of the stuff we made ourselves, so a lot of times you find cool stuff to print. >> what was the thing that first got you excited about the 3-d printers? >> you hear about it on the news, in newspapers like the "new york times," pretty much everywhere now, and when i started working at the library, once i had access to a 3-d printer, it was just a whole lot of fun because i could experiment on my own with 3-d printing in general. >> yeah, well, thanks for talking about it, and good luck with the project. i can't wait to see it done. >> thank you, see you. [applause] >> i read about intel and other companies that are developing 3-d chips. is there -- are there any

particular companies that are particularly involved in 3-d chips or prominently -- >> well, i know that there's some -- i'm not sure if this is what you are referring to, but i know there's a lot of companies right now developing immersive 3-d technology so you can, for example, control your computer or television without a mouse. there's a number of -- i know that, there's a small company partnering with asis with the first laptops coming out this year, i think, and it's all going tore gesture based, and so i know there's a plug-in product to buy at best buy this month, i think, that does the same thing. i think we'll see a lot more of that. >> [inaudible]

>> yeah, i'm trying to remember. it's escaping -- if i think about it, i could probably remember. i can look it up and tell you, but, yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff like that going on. it's funny, even in the course of the past few years, we've lived in a world of the personal computer for quite awhile, but it some seems like the personal computer is going to disappear within the increase few years, and, you know, either we'll have something tablet based or what's intriguing happening right now, still in prototype is the google glasses, putting on a pair of glasses and, you know, you're in the computer, so you don't need the computer anymore, and i think we'll see a lot more stuff like that. >> [inaudible]

>> i guess you'll always need a keyboard, maybe a virtual keyboard. there's another technology that's out there already where you can -- it projects a keyboard on to the desk, and you can type on that. >> [inaudible] >> just a note the 3-d printers at the library were all donated. >> well, thanks, everybody. >> thanks very much. >> this was a lot of fun. [applause]

>> mr. secretary, we'll put them down as undecided. [laughter] [applause] mr. chairman, as i listened to those comments, it struck me what a wonderful thing free speech is. >> that was the hearing with donald rumsfeld made justifications for attacking iraq, and what you didn't hear were questions that we got a chance to ask him which is how much money is hal burrton going

to make, and how many u.s. soldiers will be killed? how many iraqi civilians will die from this? i liked those questions answered now. >> more with code pink co-founder sunday thigh at eight on c-span's " q&a." >> next, recounting the youth of scientific and mathematical research used during world war ii. his book is "blackest war." this event held in madison, connecticut is about 40 minutes. [applause] >> well, thank you. it's great to be here at rj julia, a wonderful independent bookstore, a dying, but essential breed, and i can tell you as both a writer and a reader, stores like this play a role that can't be duplicated anywhere else, so thank you.

word war ii, was, of course, the first war where science and scientists played a vital and essential role. the manhattan project, thousands of physicists and other scientists who developed the atomic bomb was the most dray mat, and well-known illustration, a close second, and today, well known were the thousands of mathematicians and other scientific workers at the park in england and in washington, d.c. who broke the german enigma and others. patrick blackett, hardly a household name, and a very small group of british and american scientists who really turned the tide in the battle against the u-boats are not so nearly well known as all, but their contribution was, i think, every bit as vital, not only in winning one of the most crucial battles of the war in nazi

germany, but, also, for the lasting consequences in revolutionizing the very way military commanders think about war. that matter revolutionized in the way quantitative analysis could be applieded to a host of particular problems in business world through the new science, patrick and his colleagues created in the war, operational research, and so it's their story that i tried to tell in my book, "blackett's war." the war of the u boats was the threat that churchill worried could bring britain to its knees even at of danger of sea board invasion faded, and the threats in the battle of britain during the summer of 1940. britain crucially depended on imports not only for oil fields, war material, but just to stay

alive. the country was the net importer of food, and by the start of 1941, the u-boats already sunk enough shipping to reduce imports below the 31 million tons a year needed to just maintain essential food supplies for the civilian population. the crunch of the whole war, churchill wrote to roosevelt at the end of 1940, rests in the atlantic. the decision for 1941, he wrote, lies upon the -- , and churchill wrote, the battle of the atlantic was the dominating factor throughout the war, and never for one moment could we forget everything happening elsewhere on land, sea, or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome. so in the spring of 1940 -- excuse me -- thanks -- so in the

spring of 1941, in the face of mounting losses, churchill issued a somewhat chiral -- churchillian demand to take control of the boat, and it was in this that blackett had to put together a small group of scientists to see if he could come up with some way of improving their here to fore adismal performance in attacking the german submarines that was threatening to cut britain's vital lifeline. he was a naval cadet, and as an 18-year-old mid shipman, saw action at aboard a battleship in world were i. after the war, the navy decided

that all of these cadets, cadets in britain at that time started at age 14 and at age 18, they graduatedded and went into the navy of mid shipmen. but this navy had had to rush the last class right into war with the start of world war i so they thought to make up for the loss in the intrups of education, they would send them to universities for six months just to round out the education. blackett was sent to cam jpmorgan bridge, and -- cambridge, and within arriving there, he wondered to a laboratory, a physics lab story, to see what a scientific laboratory was like, and very shortly after that, he told the navy i'm leaving the navy, i want to be a scientist. he never did receive a ph.d.. he quickly became one of the world's foremost for the work done in the 1930s discovering

the positive electron, antimatter, existence was confirmed, and he'd win the nobel prize for physics in 1948, he was good looking, a demanding presence, hands-on ability and theoretical imagination, and colleagues never knew anyone as equal in his ability to conceive of a problem in physics, write out a few lines of mathematics, design an apparatus, build it himself, carry out the experiment, and analyze results. he was also one of a number of scientists in britain and america who had been working hard behind the scenes in the 1930s to prepare for war and try to make sure that the army and navy made full use of science when it came. he was frustrated to no end by what he found to be the typical attitude of military commanders

which was not only that a bunch of civilian intelligent comiewls did -- intellectuals did not tell them how to run a war, but that the only role of scientists and other technical men was to produce a new weapon or gadget, hand it to the military, and then not extend themselves with anything beyond that. blackett argued that war itself was tactics, strategy, and operation was a series of actions directed at more or less definite ends, and to quote him, the use of these weapons and the organization of the men who handle them are at least as much scientific problem as is their production. what he was arguing for was what would become the genesis of operations research. today, it's a fundamental component of military thinking, something every student at west point in the naval academy studies, and, indeed, every

student in business school. then it was revolutionary. military commanders thought that tactical planning in particular was an art that learned to experience the judgments, and they bridled at the idea of civilian intellectuals, but several astonishing insights that blackett achieved early on changed their minds. the most dramatic was a simple, but a calculation the scientist made showing the tactics the navy ordered its air crews to follow in attacking u-boats, even though it seems like a perfectly sensible approach on the face, it was unlikely ever to be successful. ..