mr. freberg spoke at the computer history museum in mountain view, california, in >> he held 1093 patents in his lifetime. no other american inventor has more. at rutgersed papers university number five million pages. scholars have been working on them since 1978. his final laboratory in west orange, new jersey occupies 21 acres and is now a national park. on exhibit their is his personal desk. it includes a pigeonhole labeled crammedgs, which is full of papers and notes on ideas he never got to. we can know the police one of those ideas might have been because near the end of his life he said, i want to put -- i put my money on the sun and solar

energy. i hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out until we tackle that. i wish i had more years left. perhaps edison contributed to us the next best thing. it is described by historian ernest freebug in his book. while the electric light is not a natural subject for the computer history museum, i have invited professor freeberg because of his profound observations about the nature of invention and inventors. the lessons that he draws out speak across the decades to a time and place, here and now in silicon valley where edison's approach and the success it produces are quite familiar. in both cases, the world has changed forever because of it. distinguished officer of humanities at the university of tennessee, the author of other two books and the winner of numerous prizes.

his documentaries are heard on public radio and he lectures frequently for the society of american historians. please welcome me and welcoming -- join me in welcoming ernest freeberg. [applause] welcome to the museum. >> thanks. >> let's talk about what the book is not. the book is not a biography of edison. >> right. >> it is not a discussion of the invention of electricity. it is not a discussion of the competition between edison and tesla, which is a favorite subject around here. what it is and what i love about it is it is a technological history of the incandescent impactnd the enormous the lighting of america had on our society and on the world. >> that's right. it many ways it is a foundation

of the modern economy we live in and shaped our lives in ways that are invisible to us because light is so ubiquitous. >> did you have a theory about edison going into this project? >> i think i began with the edison was the inventor of the light bulb. i was not so much interested in edison's role as i was in what happens when the light his .aboratory and goes out looking at what edison actually did, i began to realize the actual story of his invention process was more complicated and interesting than i expected. you use the phrase about past examinations of edison as often being more hero worship in history. while i went to get into the process of inventing in a minute , why as a historian do you see

it necessary to make that distinction? partly we need to understand how important it is for inventors themselves to turn themselves into heroes, part of what they are doing when they are selling a product is selling their own identity. edison was really a master at this. people gave him this phrase, the wizard of menlo park. it was a very 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 will talk about that. back to this hero thing for a minute. there are parallels to the way the evolution of edison finally perfecting the incandescent light. the way we often talk about the evolution of computing as well.

you have spelled some of these out. i want to get you to talk about these for a minute. you debunk the notion that most great progress stems from the single brilliant inventor alone in the lab, that there is a eureka moment, this flash of brilliance and at -- and that the innovation happens in that isolation and not so much in an ecosystem. all three of those things you take on early in the book and you say, that's not really what happened. i do talk about that and what you learned? >> -- can you talk about that and what you learned? story is exciting and accessible to people. it's a lot more exciting to complicated to understand the battles over the marketplace. it's much easier to think of these great ideas is being

passed down to us by a mount rushmore of technological creativity. in the case of edison and the lightbulb, how did it happen? >> edison entered late into the game for an incandescent light bulb. rivalwere five or six inventors who held crucial patents ahead of him. all of them recognize the key elements of a vacuum bulb and carpet filaments. edison was entering into a crowded field. he learned a lot from the mistakes and successes of his rivals, and many suggested he stole a lot of their ideas. there was a lot of battling over the patents. >> who else was involved at the time in competitively trying to achieve the same things edison was trying to achieve? >> another fascinating character is hiram maxim, known for the ma xim gun. he beat edison to crucial patents and had a working

incandescent lightbulb in the field before edison did. englandnewcastle and also was working for years on developing a working lightbulb, and put one into the field. nearbyse, lit a mentioned, set up the first outdoor street lights in front of his shop in newcastle, and had a patent six months before edison did. there were many people converging. the big test of this was in paris at the electrical exposition. edson won the day when he arrived with this, but he was there with five other people who had worked in and candace and writing systems at the same time incandescent writing systems at the same time. the first person to identify the possibility of incandescent light was sir humphrey davy in 1810. once he demonstrated that, people were trying to do this for years.

they did not quite have all the pieces together. theeally converged in 1870's. for more than happy century, people were trying to create the incandescent lightbulb. >> what did you discover about the way edison felt about these other incremental stages of progress that other inventors for making? i suspect, like many other inventors, he had a real sense of rivalry. his first big breakthrough was to suggest that they were all wrong because they were trying to create a carbon filament bulb and he was going to create a titanium bulb. this, stockunced markets plummeted because people were so convinced that if edison said he can do this, he can. it turns out he was wrong and six months later he had to say,

i think i'm going to go back to carbon with the rest of the crowded field. >> as we get into the discussion of the technology, let's talk about a really wonderful phrase that you have early in the book, which is that edison invented a whole new style of invention. but he almost invented the modern way we think of innovation happening. >> that has often been said. his model and menlo park was to create the first research and development laboratory. he often was very critical of college education and was sort of proud of the fact that he was largely self-taught. he knew enough to go out and hire university trained mathematicians and people who understood the latest chemistry to help him in his project. he also had to hire technicians who could realize his ideas, a glassblower, for example. toded somebody was able realize the various ideas they wanted to experiment with. the entire team

working collaboratively, intensively, but addison-wesley was the-- edison guiding intellect. many of them knew much more about their particular specialty, but edison set the agenda and also was the one who had to negotiate with the toitalists to get the money pay for what turned out to be a very expensive research and development assess. -- process. called this an invention factory and he promised he was going to come up with a minor invention every 10 days and an amazing breakthrough every six months. he was not sure what things those were or what field it was. he was going to create great ideas. >> he announced this to the world, the moore's law of invention. >> yes. access to capital, both from the public markets and his own considerable wealth at that point. he was making tremendous royalties off a number of other inventions, not least of which was the phonograph. the big chunk of money he

made was from the telegraph. he started as a lowly telegraph operator and learned the business and figured out how to send transmissions both directions on the same wire, forh was a valuable patent western union. i don't think he made as much with the phonograph because people were fascinated by the phonograph but they did not really know what it was good for. it took quite a long time. people said this was his most ingenious but useless invention. people bought tickets to see a phonograph onstage but once you have seen it, what's it good for . it took a while for people to -- the riskat music radius for it. edison, being deaf, did not think about the value of music. >> it must've been fascinating to sit and watch a phonograph on stage play music. he was not a scientist.

he did the thing which many american inventors were doing at that time, which was to borrow very heavily from european scientists, take their ideas, and find ways to make them much cheaper and more effective and put them into the marketplace and sell them around the globe. that was very important. edison very often, even with the electric light, he had to go out and was always frustrated with the lack of capital support. he had to very often go out and create his own electrical manufacturing companies. he had to market this. he had to work out the aesthetics of electric light to try to convince people that this was not just going to be a more efficient light, but that it could be beautiful in ways the gaslight could not be. let's talk about the technology itself and drill down

into this just a bit. talk for a minute about what was available at the time. lighting europe, america, the average home and the problem that edison was trying to solve for? the 19th said in century that people were hungry for light. people were moving into cities. buildings were getting taller. coal smoke was covering windows. the development of kerosene in the 1850's, and gaslight from coal, which was an enormous and very heavily capitalized, powerful business. that is what edison was really taking on. everybody recognize that people wanted light, they would pay an enormous amount for light, in the case of gas that they would put up with terrible inconveniences to have the benefits of light. edison knew there was a market there. in the major cities, gas

lights were pervasive, weren't they? >> they were. >> throughout manhattan, pittsburgh, pennsylvania. it was a terrible technology. the gas had to be kept under tanks, oftenarge kept in poor neighborhoods, and they would explode periodically and cause terrible disruption. the pipes leaked. in urban streets, the soil became terribly poisonous. people were very often they did notf adjust the gas just right. even when it worked well, it sucked oxygen out of the air. it heated up rooms terribly, and replace the oxygen with noxious acids that ended up damaging furniture. if you were wealthy enough to afford gaslight, you also had to be wealthy enough to replace your furniture every couple of years because of the damage the lights were going to do to your

leather bindings and fabrics and so forth. >> there was this tremendous hunger for an alternative. >> yes. everybody knew that. struggling in a market everybody knew there was a lot of money to be made. >> did edison and the other inventors come to the incandescent solution naturally? was that the first alternative they felt really would be workable unmarketable? >> sir humphrey davy set the stage in 1810. he demonstrated two kinds of light in his experiments. he was interested in electrochemistry. he was not interested in these as a commercial project. it was so expensive to generate enough electricity that it did not seem viable until the dynamo came along later. demonstrated incandescence, but he also demonstrated the arc lights, which was a much more powerful, bright light. rather than using a filament, it

uses two carbon rods kept this close enough so that the powerful current jumps across and creates a light that is many thousands of times brighter than an incandescent bulb. >> why did edison choose one and not the other to pursue as a way of perfecting this? >> somebody beat him to the arc light. the person who really lit downtown streets in america was had a similar who trajectory in his life. he grew up in a form outside of cleveland. men, he wasung largely self educated. he had access to scientific american and popular -- american , a science monthly. following the magazines, he figured out how to make his own arc light. europeans were experimenting with this, in paris particularly, and he figured out how to make one that was cheaper, more efficient than anybody else had done before.

charles brush, when we think about the great white way, the lighting up of broadway and public streets, that was all done by arc light. really had not just the american market, but the global market covered very quickly. weree way these arc lights deployed is amazing. you have these illustrations in the book of these massive towers that were built in the hearts of cities and they just bathed everything from a single tower almost like a lighthouse. >> one of the exciting things about this invention is good ideas that go bad. this is clearly one of those. locationbeing a famous for one of these towers. because arc lights were expensive and because they were so brilliant, the idea was you could create one single artificial moon above the town and rather than putting a lot of laps down low -- often when you

erected one moon you discovered it cast terrible showers -- shadows. you had to do another tower, and another. detroit was the high water mark of this idea. they had to put up 70 separate towers to try to hit every spot in town. it worked so badly that pretty soon the towers started to fall down in the high winds and they just let them go. solution wasdual the solution being sought after, with this refinement that edison and his other competitors wanted. >> that's right. it was one thing to make one massive light of many thousands of candlepower. it was another to break that light up into usable pieces you could bring indoors. when they brought the arc light indoors, which they tried to do often in fancy balls or those sorts of things, the light made everybody look so cadaverous.

every wrinkle and gray hairs stood out. many people after attending in a fight with an arc light said i'm never going near electric -- attending an event with an arc light said, i'm never going near electric light again. about the actual technology that enabled this to happen. the key development of the lightbulb itself was a filament. was the lighting agent. can you talk about the various attempts that were tried and what edison's science was in his breakthrough on this? >> it's a complicated system. the filament was one of the missing pieces. everybody recognize that carbon was the right element to use, it would incandescent at higher temperatures. many people tried to do this. it was late developments in the improvement of creating the vacuum that allowed a lot of

these people to have a breakthrough at the same time. you also needed a dynamo to steady current of electricity at a reasonable cost. when edison developed the filament, he was also working on the entire system. he was thinking not just of the missing piece, but of an entire integrated system that could go into the marketplace. >> he envisioned the whole thing from end to end. >> yes, even the meter. he had to figure out how to charge customers, make sure they knew they were getting a good deal. he had to invent a meter to put on people's houses. >> was this part of what made him unique? he thought in systemic terms about these 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 out of this contest as the person we remember as the inventor of the electric light, even though he

had many rivals. but he really did was figure out how to create a marketable system he could put into the field and have some chance of taking on the gas companies for that market. -- it's talk about once he want to talk about his idea. he called it simply light. his notion was that this bulb had to be extraordinarily simple. it had to be something that any average person could understand how to use and could use very easily, and that the light itself would be so pure and clean. >> yes. ways,ering -- in many this was the most complicated technical system that existed in the 1880's. for the consumer, it was the on off switch. it involved no matches, no cleaning up lamps. he did not even change your own lightbulb. you would contract with the company and they would send an electrician around to change the light bulbs periodically. edison recognize the fact that

these extremely technical systems work best in the marketplace if you ask the consumer to not understand them. >> to do as little as possible. that's brilliant. there are local and modern examples of that all over the place. >> certainly. talk about this famous showdown, the paris exhibition in 1881 but you talk about. he roughly brought the incandescent bulb to life in 1879. 1879 when he eve made a demonstration at menlo park. he still had not perfected the system, but he convinced a lot of people that he had. a few weeks later, they were all burned out. by this exhibition in 1880, he had something that could last longer. >> what was that that he figured

out about the filaments that would not burn out so quickly? >> he knew it was carbon. he had an inductive approach where he would try anything. i haveamous for saying, failed a million times and that is fine because i learned something each time. he tried beard hair and fishing line and cork, whatever carbon element he could find. he stuck his laboratory full of every possible element, not knowing what might work. he finally locked in on loops of bamboo filament. was he decided that bamboo going to be the key to his initial success, he hired with great fanfare three explores and sent them around the globe to find the best form of bamboo filament. it was a great form of publicity for him, especially when the explorer who went to latin america never came back. [laughter] the one who went to japan found

a species of bamboo that seem to make the most consistent fiber. those early breakthrough bulbs were bamboo fiber. >> i love that story. it shows the extent to which he was determined to spare no expense and also to get the perfect solution, and at the same time made it a public relations coup. speaking of that, let's talk a little bit about what he did in paris. i want to read what you write in he set up his how demonstration at the exposition. as you said, there were lots of people in paris who were trying to show off their approach to electric light. 220-ton generating machine. >> the dynamo. >> he shipped it from america to paris.

he designed a giant display in the grand hall with two massive electrified eve's -- eaves -- e's, and a portrait of himself. [laughter] in a giant exhibition filled with lighting placements throughout the world, only edison won the gold medal of honor for electric lighting. this was a marketing and public relations masterstroke. >> yes. in fairness, he did have the better system in the sense that he brought their a much more complex system. was moreo he brought efficient than anybody thought possible at the time. >> why was that? he has certain insights into the construction of the dynamo, took it apart and reconstructed it. he also had a big breakthrough with the filaments.

he recognize the fact that it needed to be a high resistance filaments, which was counterintuitive for reasons i don't quite understand. it was counterintuitive to electrical experts at the time. that proved to be the stroke that made his much more efficient than others. partly he did win fair and square. he also had a great sense that this was about showmanship, and winning the gold medal was going to help him alternately win the patent more -- war that was coming and people were going to invest in this new technology, they would want to put their money on the man with the spinning, revolving picture of himself. [laughter] of course, brush -- you have this wonderful quote here. brush is crushed by this. he says, i have all these working bulbs out there. i had them out there months, maybe even years before edison. why is he getting all the credit and no one knows me? set upever charles brush

his arc light, people said is that the new edison light? he hated that. >> was paris really the knockout punch in the competition to be not only the builder of the most efficient system, the best system to light the world, but also putting edison once more on the map as the man at the center of it? >> not really. it turned out to be really thick competition for at least a decade. there were people who found ways around edison's that it's. that were the patent wars went on and on about control of this technology. the 1880's,od of there were six or seven companies in the business that edison was a rival with. an invented because he had visibility, more capital than others. he had lots and lots of rivals. people were hungry for light.

there was this sort of chaotic war in the streets over who was going to get the lighting contracts between all these companies. >> edison comes back to america. what is the next step? how does this play out in his own vision for how he's going to roll his own system out? >> partly has to go into the manufacturing business. want tos said, i just go back to the laboratory and be an inventor. he felt as if he never got the support from his backers to just be free to run his invention factory. he had to go out and create a series of manufacturing companies in order to create the product. he had to work with lighting designers to think about chandeliers and various uses, using it in the theater. across the board, he was trying to sell all the way that electric light was going to be better than gas. contract withd to local companies who were willing

to buy his equipment and go into the lighting business. as it turned out, edison made a lot of money selling equipment. the people who went into the lighting business using his equipment found it much harder to make a living, partly because there were a lot of other competitors going after the same business. did he have a breakthrough that really was the instrumental moments when you could say whole sections of a city would be let? in manhattan, was at the place where he really took his system and showed everyone what could really happen if you had an electrified view of the world? >> the pearl street station in downtown manhattan, obviously a prime place with a lot of major newspapers. his wall street backers, jpmorgan and so forth. this was a highly publicized place to show. his system was decentralized ultimately because it was d.c. power.

we think in terms of the grid now, and edison was thinking in terms of a grid, but it was a small grid. he could light about five city blocks. essentially the city would have to have a power station about every five blocks. that was his model. >> let's talk about the social implications of all of this, with electricity being rolled out, edison's system being proven. not talk about the specific changes that it begins to bring to modern life. light is suddenly erupting on the scene. what are the first major things that begin to happen, especially in an urban setting where light comes to the average home? >> it does not arrive in homes, except for the homes of the wealthy, right away at all. where it common model

is an industry that invests first until the price comes down. it took decades, in that case, for the average person to be able to afford electric light. factories were early adopters. there is a lot of investment in these very expensive new machines. the possibility of keeping these running 24 hours a day was very enticing. for labor, there was a real battle. this was just at the point where labor unions were organizing to make the day shorter. along comes a tool that seems to erase what they thought of as god's distinction between the period of rest and the period of work. the workday looks like 24 hours a day. >> it changes the definition of a workday. >> the unions push for no night work. the compromise is working night work, often laborers were paid more. there was a real struggle over child labor. the things that

those early progressive reformers managed to battle first, was not illuminating child labor but eliminating it in the middle of the night. there were an awful lot of kids working the midnight shift at box factories and glass factories and textile mills. >> how successful was this pushback by labor during this period? >> successful enough initially to create mostly an extended work day, some extra night hours . it especially was important for the transportation industry. up to that point, train travel was very limited at night because passengers did not want to trust themselves to a train the could not see down the track very far for understandable reasons. there were terrible problems with ships at sea. the seas were very crowded in this period. steel hold ships moving much faster and also colliding into each other. electric light made sea travel

much safer in this period. like freight depots stayed open 24 hours a day, making possible the delivery system that accelerated the economy in this period. many workers love the electric light. it clearly was dangerous to workers in terms of opening up the possibility that the workday would never end, but office workers, people working in any sort of skilled occupation, postal clerks -- they were so happy to not be working under gaslight that they welcomed the electric light. fairfety -- you spend a amount of time talking about safety in the book, not of safety about working with , but just making cities safer, making neighborhoods safer, the fact that light can be brought not from a giant arc light but really to the street level. they like to call the

streetlight a policeman on a pole. this was a way to open up spaces so that working people, when they got off work at night, could enjoy parks and skating rinks and toboggan slides. it really opened up the city and made it available in a way that was inconceivable up to that point. >> let's talk about the kinds of professions that had to be invented. it's very easy to forget today that as you point out in the book there were no electricians. there were no standards bodies. electrical engineering was an entirely new idea. there were no electrical engineers until this all started to come about. architects building the links with electricity and lighting in them. there was a whole generation of jobs that "as this phenomenon moved forward. >> edison, one of the other things he had to do was create a

school to train his employees about how to use electricity. then there was increasing pressure on universities to develop the first electrical engineering programs. many cities had what they called electrical clubs, where a young man who wanted to get into this exciting new field would pay a small membership fee and would get to hear lectures on a periodic asis -- basis. very often they would have a laboratory room in the back where they could try experiments. it was largely people who were self taught in that first generation, which produce an awful lot of safety problems. people were learning the hard way. >> they really were. the lines that were being strong were in some cases not far above the average person's head. why was it done that way? >> there were no regulations.

there were no guidelines for how to do this. this has started with the telegraph wires and the burglar alarm wires, fire alarm wires. if you have seen pictures of late 19th century cities with the specimens of wires sticking out of the poles. >> those presented no danger? >> kids loved to grab them and break them because they would give you a little tingle. once these are quite wires started to cross with those, it became extremely dangerous. these are quite companies were unregulated. there would be five or six of them in a given city looking for a market. it did not cost that much money to buy a dynamo and go into the lighting business. they started to throw wires over people's houses and tack them to people's nail them to houses without permission. once you put those things together, people started to be electrocuted in very graphic ways. >> have some graphic examples in your book.

a lot of your research was done with newspapers of the era. they loved the stories about mules being tied to electrified polls and dropping dead on the spot. >> especially the newspapers owned by the electric -- owned b y the gas companies. [laughter] >> what were the other things you discovered in the media's reporting of this phenomenon? not the danger, necessarily, but just the wonder of light coming to america. talk about that. >> my favorite part of the research was going back and finding at one point in every city, town and hamlet across the country there was the night that the light came on. by thewould show up hundreds into downtown streets and wait for the flip of the ceremonial switch. there would be speeches. when the lights went on, there would be cannon blasts. wyoming, the whole

town broke into song to serenade the electricians, thanking them for bringing the gift of electricity. sense of an enormous excitement, and people were aware they were stepping into what they saw as a new era in the modern world when the electric light came on. even though it wasn't in their many decades, electric light was something you visited. you might see it at work, you might see it downtown in amusement parks. it would be in the city square. you would go back onto a kerosene lamp or gaslamp. impact ofs the social that kind of distinction between homes that could afford electric lighting and homes to which it came much later? greeted as aen great democratizing invention. electric light was not something the rich wanted to horde to themselves, but the value of it

was only existed if more and more people could be brought online. even though it was something that was fairly expensive, much more expensive than gas up until the 1920's, people saw it as something which was reaching down into the middle class and ultimately into working-class homes. at the same time, it did sharpen the line between the haves and , especially the growing division between rural america and urban america in this period. when are the years americans moved from thinking of themselves as jeffersonian farmers to thinking of themselves as part of an urban nation. an electric light created a sharp divide between the old world and the new one that was emerging. in can see time and again the journals, especially farmers' magazines, they are very aware of the fact that somewhere out there, new york

city is where people are staying up late and going tonight baseball games. there is a whole world they are missing out on. that distinction was there right from the start. >> what is happening to edison at this point? is he now being hailed as the genius of the age to an even greater level than he had been at that point? now the democratizing and was making his own image that much greater? >> he was so committed to the d.c. our system, -- power sys tem, and that is replaced by the a.c. power system. control of the edison electric company and emerges and becomes general electric. >> ironically. >> that's right. he is really out of the lighting business within a decade.

he gets a very nice payoff to do this. he says, i'm going to take my money and go back to inventing and i'm going to come up with something so amazing that nobody is ever going to remember that i was associated with electric light. [laughter] which did not happen. >> the spurned entrepreneur, kicked out of his own company. >> yes. >> he continued to be remembered as a great expert on electricity and spent the rest of his life as a scientific pundit. everybody wanted to know what edison thought about whatever new technology came along. he was happy to play that role. >> how vigorous was his fight on this whole direct versus alternating current battle? he is most famously known for pushing the idea of using the electric chair for prisoners as a way to discredit -- he insisted if you're going to do that, you have to use westinghouse's a.c. system.

that will work best to kill people. to demonstrate this, he had an assistant who would round up stray dogs and any journalist who would be willing to watch, he would electrocute them in order to demonstrate this. >> that is a side of edison we are not familiar with. >> yes. >> he was a ruthless competitor, as they all had to be. these time edison thought people who are being electrocuted in the streets, they were dying from a.c. power. power wast that a.c. reckless, it would discredit the electrical industry entirely. he had a personal vested interest in d.c. power, which clearly clouded his judgment. there was no such thing as effective wire insulation in those days. they would put cloth and paint on these high-powered wires and

hope that would work as insulation. eidson felt like many people were disturbed by these very public deaths that were happening in city streets. edison felt that if ac power continued, alternately the public would reach a point where it was not willing to go forward with electricity. european engineers came to america and they saw the chaos of the wires. they saw these people being fried in the streets. they said, how can you put up with this? americans said, we have a lot more light than you do. it's a fair trade. we have more, but light in the united states than all the rest of europe combined. i'm looking at the questions that have been passed up from the audience. there are some really great questions.

i'm going to ask you a couple here. the filament in the light, was that standardized very quickly once the more or less perfect technology had been decided upon? >> it was an evolutionary process. edison's bamboo filament won the day for a brief period. patent, goorrow a into a partnership with his great rival maxim who figured out how to use a gasoline treatment to flash treat the bamboo, which was really necessary to make it last much longer. swan, another one of his rivals, pioneered the idea of thating a cellulose paste made it much more consistent filament than the bamboo fiber. that ultimately replaced that. this was an evolutionary

process. it got better and better until finally it culminated in the metallic filaments which 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. thatwas the breakthrough allowed electric light to really compete against gas. general electric said, this is edison's dream finally realized. this was three decades after edison launched his bulb, promising this would be an abundant, cheap form of light that everyone was going to enjoy. it really wasn't until the 19 teen's that he started to enter into the marketplace. if you had carbon filaments in companyb, electric would provide them free, come over and exchange the bulbs for you. if you wanted to buy the more

efficient bulbs, you had to buy your own bulbs. that slowed things down, the entrance into this. it was so much more efficient that within a decade or so, everybody switched over to metallic filaments. >> there are modern parallels there that as transformational as a piece of technology can be, it can still take a very long time for it to get penetrated widely available, made inexpensive enough for it to be accessible to many people. that was as true for electricity as it is for computing. 70 percent of urban homes were wired for electricity. it took that long just to get the wire into people's houses. that really was created by the building boom in the 1920's. many people were reluctant to retrofit their houses, to tear up the walls.

bywas really new housing 1920, electricity was considered to be the standard. >> you touched on the next question i was going to ask, which is isn't it true that some people were actually afraid of wiring their homes? is there something that held this back? does it have something to do with people not wanting electricity to come in because of the danger it represented? >> yes, although everybody recognized how nasty gas light was. in comparison, people suck electric light as safer -- saw electric light as safer and cleaner. the most famous story about that is when edison installed his first system in the pearl street station in manhattan, one of the early adopters was one of the and installed this.

rather than ripping up the walls, they would sort of run the wires up along -- tax into the walls. it interacted badly with the metallic thread in the wallpaper and basically said the room on , of one of his major backers. wanted one of the first desk lamps. he ordered a specially designed desk lamp. he had a short and burned his desk to cinders, yet he remained an enthusiast. >> a major booster, even after that. if the kind of investor you want. [laughter] >> willing to allow you one mistake. >> absolutely. management style, i want to touch on that for a extent that you uncovered that in your research. he is at the center of this. he had a factory that employed thousands of people.

his laboratories were populated with many researchers, brilliant individuals working under him. how did he manage that? do we know much about how edison took that task on in this context? >> it changed, as his industries became broader. aat menlo park group was small group. there were about 20 people working with him. he had a very personal, intense relationship with them, working essentially 24 hours a day. he was a famous napper. you would sleep on ours here in there for a few minutes, but all night long he would be working in his entire team was expected to be working with him. almost all of them, including many who knew a lot more about the scientific elements of this, always credited edison with being the guiding spirit of their enterprise, that he managed to create a spirit of

teamwork that most of them remembered for the rest of their lives. >> one of the questions i was going to ask.is from the audience . the mystical idea that this was fire inside a bottle, did you run across that at all, that there were also people who were intrigued by that or who were afraid of that? both here and in europe i have heard that story told. was time was struck by and again journalist tried to explain to their readers what an incandescent bulb looked like. they always found it to be incredibly beautiful. they use a lot of organic metaphors. it looks to them like a droplet of fire in a teardrop or an italian sunset, or it looked like a flower.

they were drawn really to its .eauty above all else they love to look at it. you were supposed to look when you got the metallic filaments. that is a part of the story i had not expected to find. the lightingght reformers had to tell people to use lampshades. people said, why should i be paying money for light and then put a top on it? they had to say, it's not going to spare the light. it is uncomfortable if you looked right at it. it is not meant to do that. there are manuals that would show you, put the light up here and cast it on to your book here. there was a real concern that the world had become so bright that people's eyes were going to be damaged. there was a lot of complaints about this booming business for oculists. was one of the most

surprising things when you did the research? what surprised you the most that you did not expect to uncover? >> i think it was the development in this later ofiod, this movement illumination engineering. in the early 20th century, people decided there was too was entire focus had been on maximizing the amount of light for the minimal amount of coal burned. suddenly there was so much light that people were -- begin to think differently about shaping the light. it is at that moment that a whole other level of invention of the electric light occurred, as these illumination engineers try to work out the details of what each interior space that we move in and out of ought to feel like. this is when window designers figured out how to use light in order to make different kinds of asds, look as alluring

possible. theater artists, thinking about using these new metallic bulbs to create all sorts of effects that had not been possible before. in the 1880's, you could tell that a restroom very fancy because it was brilliantly lit. by 1920, you could tell if it was a great restaurant because it was very dark. move in and out of a vocabulary of light that was carefully worked out by these illumination engineers in this period. they had to think about things like, what should a church look like? catholics had different ideas than protestants and mormons about what light ought to look like to be sacred, and whether not electricr or light was an intrusion on their sacred space or a way to enhance their sacred space. asound all these things something we completely take for granted.

we move into a room. it's lighting is often carefully designed to make us feel a particular way, without a stopping to think about all the intentionality that was involved in that. >> this is a great question. developedship that between edison and henry ford, you talk about that in the book a bit. can you go into that? it is fascinating to think of edison and ford existing side-by-side, bringing so much change to society. >> right. ford deeply admired edison, and edison at one point men toward. ford -- mentored. ford was always grateful for that afterwards, and really lionized edison when they ,reated his museum in dearborn michigan. he not only gathered up everything he could find of the menlo park building and the equipment, but even dug up the topsoil, edison's topsoil, and

carried it over to lay there in michigan. toward the end of their life, they would go on long camping trips together where they both nounced the- de modern world they had done so much to create. the world is too bright and hectic and we are just going to go fishing. it became a celebrity event with a huge entourage, a lot of specially designed for trucks to carry all the cap the equipment and electric lights. they could not quite let it go. [laughter] that? you track was their friendship and important part of the social history you were trying to tell? >> really more just part of a wide movement that ford and edison both participated in to suggest the country had gone too far in

creating these artificial systems. that was the part that interested me the most. ford certainly did everything he could to cement that image of edison as a great hero that we started our conversation talking about. >> we are coming to that point said, edison starts to reflect back on these things. there is this great quote in the book. when you talk about him going on these vacations, he says, i don't want to be near electricity. i want an old suit, an old hat, a few french novels and a fishing rod. it was as if he seemed too long for that simpler time, or he wanted to get away from the more complex age and just be himself again. >> yes. many people were grappling with -- there were a lot of critics of electric light tom as much as people were hungry for it and it created these wonderful public

spaces and made work safer and more effective, many people were there solutions. -- were disillusioned. they said, we have a much more beautiful night time but we have made it a much uglier daytime. we have these poles and wires and ugly signs. why would we trade day for night? many people were concerned about that. they were concerned about the psychological effects. up too late.taying the things we know now about the disruption of the circadian arehms and sleep -- people more energized by electric light, but they are also more exhausted by it. people started to be romantic about candles and the good old days of the hearth, the colonial revival movement, as an attempt to convince people to turn off the light and live with candlelight and little bit so they can get more in touch with something that has been lost in the modern world.

the psychologist, was particularly interesting on that. his argument was that god had designed twilight as a way to cultivate the spiritual, creative side of human beings, that zone that people dream and contemplate, and that human beings were going to cut themselves off. as soon as it gets dark, we flip on the light and we deprive ourselves of a whole piece of the human experience. he studied children and felt like children who lived under too much artificial lights became irritable and lacked a spiritual dimension. >> did you find any indication that edison at the end of his life was reflecting back on that at all, or was it always for him about pushing forward, the future, the next great thing? edison was right to the end a great defender of artificial

light. he said you put somebody under an artificial light and they will improve. this was somehow going to make you a better person. more energetic, more -- he never was clear on exactly how it was going to make you better, but he was pretty convinced it would. he was a salesman for electric light right to the bitter end. >> has been called the greatest innovator of his age. would you agree with that statement? >> he certainly deserves the book isdit, but designed to suggest the fact that the age itself is more interesting than edison, and in some ways it is the age that invented edison rather than edison shaping the age. obviously an important figure, but in many ways he's important because he is representative of a much broader enthusiasm about intervention and a sense that human beings in humaned a new stage history where invention is not just something that comes along once in a while, but you can actually create a factory and

churn out new ideas all the time. edison is important that way, but not unique. >> one final point one final point is that he created what you call perpetual expectation of innovation. he did not totally created, but the sum total of this age was we would be moving into an era where innovation would be something we would be living with day after day for the rest of our lives. it was an entirely new concept, wasn't it? >> americans particularly embraced this. they were enthusiastic consumers of the new technology but also were proud of their growing reputation as a nation of inventors. as we consider this to be particularly an expression of democratic values, and as you educate people broadly, you create an open patent system which encourages innovation,

that if you remove barriers between workers and thinkers, that edison seemed to embody the ability to do both, that this to in a sense america's gift history. not high culture, not literature, but rings, material objects, great machines that the whole world wants to have. >> indeed, we did enter into of perpetual innovation, and it seems to be going right on. thanks so much for being with us today. great look. book.at thank you. [applause] >> on history bookshelf, here from the country's best-known american history writers of the past decade every saturday at 4:00 em eastern. to watch these programs any time, visit our website, /history.n.org you are watching american history tv all weekend every .eekend on c-span3

>> the c-span city's tour takes book tv in american history tv on the road, traveling to u.s. their to learn about history and literary life. we partnered with time warner cable for a visit to green bay wisconsin. >> wisconsin is known as america's dairy land because we make the most cheese and also the best cheese. the industry developed in what was from homestead cheese where each -- each farm family made cheese for their own use. it was recognized that we had an ideal environment for raising dairy cow, and cheese was just a way to take that perishable product. if you make cheese, cheddar cheese can last for a decade. this was late 1880's when industry got started in wisconsin. generally, farmers and a neighborhood would form a

cooperative. they would build a cheese factory and would hire a cheese maker, and the cheese maker would work for a cooperative on shares. the cheesemakers tended to move around a lot. 1930, all of our 2000 cheese plants in wisconsin had transportation in the road system improved. there was consolidation among the saw -- smaller plants, and that continued up until about 1990 when there were only about 200 cheese factories in wisconsin. >> in 2008, i publish a book on torture. i was looking at torture and the war on terror. as i wrote the book, i realized that some of the techniques we were using in the war on terror appear in our prison system. i noticed all these odd connections between overseas policies and method policies, so i started looking at what was happening in the prison system, and that led me to start teaching in the prison system.

.t led me to another book psychologists and psychiatrists have studied what happens to a person, and they develop he's very distinctive -- one psychologist calls it the shoe syndrome. a horrible paranoia, a real aggressiveness, a sense that you are -- yourself is disintegrating. people, the kind of bodily harm they do to themselves. the damage, the self-mutilation, the cc that they put on the door, this kind of deterioration of your whole sense of self. i have no more respect for myself. i'm going to damage my body. i don't have a lot of strong thatical evidence necessarily makes people better.

i have anecdotal evidence. i have people that i talk to but i see it as more of a spiritual thing with these inmates. it's very difficult to measure the kind of spiritual effects of being valued. >> watch all of our events from green bay throughout the day on "tv" and sunday afternoon on c-span3.history tv on >> next, colonial williamsburg vice president of collections ronald hearst --ronald hurst talks about how what people imported, made, and used in the colonial south was often influenced by their ethnicity and religion. he talks that how furniture, musical instruments, and other household items were shaped by community traditions and daily needs. this program lasts about 50 minutes. >> it is now my pleasure to introduce ronald l hurstth