>> he held 1093 patents in his lifetime. in everything from the botany to the phonograph. his collected papers at rutgers university number 500 pages scholars have been working on them since 1978. on exhibit there, among other things, is his personal desk. it includes a pigeon hole labeled new things. which is crammed full of papers and notes on ideas he never got

to. we can know at least what one of those idea might have been near the end of his life, he said i put my money on the sun and solar energy. what a source of power, 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 the next best thing. while the electric light is not a natural subject for the computer history museum. i have invited professor freeberg to have conversation because of his profound observations and the lessons that he draws out speak across the decade to a time and place here and now and in silicon valley. in both cases the world has changed forever because of it.

ernest is a distinguished professor of humanities at the university of tennessee. his documentaries are heard on public radio and he lectures frequently for the organization of american historians, please join me in welcoming ernest freeberg. [applause] >> welcome to the museum, we're thrilled to have you here. let's talk about the book is not. it is first of all not a biography of edison. 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, it is a social, and to a great extent a technological history of the incandescent

light and the enormous impact the lighting of america had on our society and on the world. >> that's right. >> and i think it is 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 ubiquitous. >> did you have a theory about edison going into this project? >> i think i began with the premise that shows up in our textbooks that edison was nthe inventor of the light bulb. looking at what he actually did, i began to realize it was a lot more complex and interesting than i had expected. >> you used the phrase about

past examinations of edison being more hero worship than history. why as a historian do you see it necessary to make that distinction? >> well, i think partly, we need to understand how important it is for inventors themselves to turn themselves into heroes, that part of what they are doing when they are selling a product is selling their own identity and edison was really a master of this. he cultivated it very conscie e consciencely, and it was a tool for him to develop funding and a good idea to put this powerful force of deadly electricity into their houses. >> it did turn out to be a deadly thing. we're going to talk about that.

>> there are parallels about the way you talk about the evolution of edison finally perfecting the incandescent light. first of all, you talk about and debunk the motion that most great progress stems from the single brilliant inventor alone in the lab. that there's an eureka moment, that the innovation happens in the isolation and not so much in an ecosystem. all three of those things you take on early in the book. you say that's not really what happened, it is not true in edison's time. >> frankly i think people long for that great eureka moment story. it is exciting and accessible to people. it is a lot more complicated to understand the exchange of idea.

the competition for relevant patents, the battles over the marketplace. it is much easier to think of these great ideas being passed down by technological creativity. >> in the case of edison and the light bulb, how did it happen. >> first of all, edison entered late into the work. and there were five or six other rival inventors who held patents ahead of edison, crucial patents, all of them recognize the key elements. so edison was entering into a crowded field, and he learned a lot from the mistakes and successes of his rivals. 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, competitively trying to achieve the same things.

another character is hyram maxim. joseph swan in new castle in england also was working for years on developing a working light bulb and put one into the field. his house lit a nearby mansion. set up the first outdoor streetlight in front of his shop in new castle and had a patent six months before edison did. there were many people converging when the big test of this was in paris at the electrical exhibition. edison won the day when he arrived with this. he was there with five other people who had working incandescent systems. >> were they all aware of each other's work and the progress

they were making? >> yes. the first person to identify the possibility of incandescent live was davie and once they did that they were trying to do that for years, they didn't have all of the pieces together. for more than half a century, people were trying to create the incandescent light. what did you discover about how edison found about these other increment incremental stages of progress that other inventors were making? >> i suspect he had a real sense of rivalry, he announced quite arrogantly when he entered the field that he had figured it out the way no one else had. they were tying to create a carbon fillament bulb.

people were convinced if edison said he could do this, he can. six months later, he had to say he was going back to carbon with the rest of the crowded fields. >> let talk about the wonderful phrase that you have early in the book which is that edison invented a whole new style of inventions. >> his model at menlo park was to create the first research and development laboratory. he often was very critical of college education and sort of proud of the fact that he was largely self-taught. he knew enough to hire university mathematicians and people who understood the latest chemistry to help him in this

project. he needed a glass blower that could realize the various ideas they were to experiment in. really it was the entire teamworking collaboratively and intensively, but edison was the guiding elect, many of them knew a lot more about their particular specialty, but edison was the one who set the agenda and negotiate with the capitalist to get the money which turned out to be a very expensive research development process. he called an invention factory and he promised he would come up with a minor invention every ten days and a great one every six months. >> he announced this to the world. i'm going to continue to roll these things out. >> he had two other things, access to capital and from his

own considerable wealth at that point. he was making tremendous royalties off of other inventions, the phonograph. >> the biggest chunk he had made was from the telegraph. he started as a lowly telegraph operator and figured out how to send transmissions on the same wire. which was very valuable to western union. >> i don't think he made as much off the phonograph. people said this was his most ingenious, but useless invent n invention. people bought tickets to see it on stage and once you had seen it, what is it good for. edison being deaf didn't think

about music. >> play a cylinder. >> once. >> he wanted to invent things that had commercial potential and really put them out. >> absolutely. he was not a scientist, he drew very heavily on scientists, he did the thing which many american inventors were doing at that time which was to borrow very heavily from european scientists to take their idea and to 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, very important. edison, even with the electric light, he had to go out and frustrated with the lack of capital support. he had to very often go out and create his own electrical manufacturing companies for example. he had to market this and work out thee aesthetics.

>> let's talk about the technology itself and drill down into this a little bit. so, talk for a minute about what was available at the time, what was lighting europe, america, the average home and the problem that edison was trying to solve for us. in the 19th century people were hungry for light and moving into cities, buildings were getting taller, coal smoke was covering windows and there was an enormous hunger for light. we see that in the spread of the whaling industry. the development of kerosene and gas lighted from coal. it was a capitalized powerful business. that was really what edison was taking on. everybody recognized that people wanted light. that they would pay an enormous

amount for life. edison knew there was a market there. >> in fact in the major cities, gas lights were actually pervasive, weren't they? >> they were. >> they were throughout manhattan, pittsburgh, philadelphia, baltimore, boston. >> right. it was a terrible technology. the gas had to be kept under pressure in large tanks, often kept in poor neighborhoods and they would explode periodically and cause terrible disruption. the pipes leaked so that the soil became terribly poisonous, people were very often asphyxiated if they didn't adjust it right. it sucked ok oxygen out of the

air. if you were wealthy enough to afford gas light, you had to replace your furniture every year, because of the damage that the light would do to your leather bindings and so forth. >> there was a tremendous hunger for an alternative. >> yes. >> and everybody knew there was a lot of money to be made. >> is it edison and the other inventors did they come to the incandescent naturally? >> sir humphrey davie demonstrated two kinds of light in his experiment. he was not interested in these as an examiner, not as a

commercial product. he demonstrated the arc light, which was much more powerful light. it uses two carbon rods. kept close enough so the powerful current jumps across the gas and creates a light that's many of thousands teams brighter than an incandescent bulb. >> why did edison choose one and not the other? >> somebody beat him to the arc light. the person who really lit downtown streets in area was charles rush. he was largely self-educated. he had access to scientific american and popular science monthly and hunger for this sorts of information. he, following the magazines, figured out how to make his own

arc light. europeans were experimenting with this in paris, particularly. he figured out how to make one that was cheaper and more efficient than anyone else had done before. >> so when we think about the lighting up of broadway and public streets that was done by arc light. he had really not just the american market but the global market quite quickly. >> the way they were deployed, these massive towers that were built in the hearts of cities. almost like a light house. >> one of the exciting things about an invention is good ideas that go bad. san jose being a famous location for one of these towers. and because arc lights were expensive and because they were so brilliant. the idea was you could just

create one artificial moon above the town, and that would -- rather than putting a lot of lamps down low, and often when you erected one moon, you discovered that it cast terrible shadows. there were large parts of downs were it didn't reach. so you had to do another and another. detroit was the high watermark of this idea. they had to put up 77 different towers to try to hit every spot of town. it worked so badly, 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. >> to make the light visible, it was one thing to make one massive life of many thousands of candle power, it was another to break that up into useable

pieces that you could bring indoors. when they brought the arc light indoors, the light made everybody look so cadaverous, you know, every wrinkle and gray hair stood out. many people after attending an event with an arc light said i'm never going near an arc light again. >> somehow i'm thinking main frames versus pcs. >> can you talk about the various attempts that were tried? >> the filament was one of the missing pieces. you needed to have a vacuum bulb

an many people tried to do this, it was really late developments in the improvement of create ago vacuum that allowed a lot of these people to have a break through. when edison developed the filament he was 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. >> even the meter, he had to invent a meter to put on people's housing so they knew they were getting what they were paying for. >> he thought in systemic pieces about these big problems.

>> that seems to be the thing that meant that he emerged out of this contest as the person we remember as the electric light. what he really did was figure out how to create a marketable system that he could put into the field and have some chance of taking on the gas companies for that market. >> i just want to talk about his idea, he called it simply light. his notion was that this bulb had to be extraordinary simple, and 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. 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. it involved no matches, cleaning

of lamps, in fact, you didn't even change your own light bulb. you would contract with the electrician and they would change those periodically. edison recognized 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. >> yes. >> there are local and modern examples of that all over the place. >> certainly. >> i want to talk about this famous showdown at the paris exhibition that you talked about. he roughly brought the incandescent bulb to life in 1879. >> he still had not perfected the system but convinced a lot of people that he had. those bulbs looked great, but a few weeks later they were burned

out. by the exhibition in 1880, in the fall, he had something that could last much longer. >> by the way what was that that he figured out about the filament that wouldn't burn out so quickly. >> he knew it was carbon. >> he would try anything. he's famous for saying i failed a million times and that's fine because i learned something each time. he tried fishing line and cork, whatever carbon element he could find. he stuffed his laboratory full of whatever possible element. he finally locked in on loops of bamboo filament, when he decided it was going to be the key to his initial success. he hired with great fanfare three explorers and sent them

around the globe. it was a great form of publicity for them. especially when the explorer who went to latin america never came back here. the one who went to japan found a species of bamboo that seemed to mistake the most consistent fiber. those early break-through bulbs were a 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. let's talk about what he did in paris. i just want to read what you write in the book about how he set up his demonstration at the exposition. as you said, there were lots of people in paris who were trying to show off their approach to electric lights.

he built a 220-ton generating machine. >> the dynamo. >> the dynamo. he shipped it from america to paris. he designed a giant display in the grand hall with two massive electrified e's, for edison, and an electrified portrait of himself. only edison won the gold medal of honor for lighting. >> this was a marketing and public relations master stroke. >> in fairness, he did have the better system, he brought there a much more complex elaborated system. the dynamo that he brought. the 220 ton jumbo dynamo was more efficient than anybody thought possible at the time.

>> why was that? >> he had certain insight into the construction of the dynamo, and he also had a big break through with the filament, it need to be a high resistance filament, but it was counter intuitive to electrical experts at the time. that proved to be the stroke that made his much more efficient than others. he did win fair and swear, but he had a great sense that this was about showmanship that winning the gold medal was going to ultimately let him win the patent war that was coming. and that if people were going to invest with this new technology. they would want to put their money on the man with the spinning resolving picture of

himself. >> brush was crushed by this. i had all of these working bulbs out there, why is he getting all of the credit and no one knows me. >> wherever he set up his arc light, they would say is that the new edison light? and he would hate that. >> not only the builder of the most efficient system, the best system to light the world, but putting edison once more on the map as the man at the center of it? >> not really. it turned out to be thick competition for a decade. there were ways that people found around his patents. really in that period of the 1880s. six or seven companies were in the business that thomas edison

was a rival with. he had visibility, he had more capital than others, but he had lots an lots of rivals, people were hungry for light, there was a chaotic war in the streets over who was going to get the contracts for all of these companies. >> over the next decade how does this play out in his own vision for how he's going to roll his own system out? >> partly, he has to go into the manufacturing business. he always said i just want to 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 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.

across the board he was trying to sell all of the ways that electric light was going to be better than gas. he had to contract with local companies that were going to buy his equipment and go into the lighting business. the people who used his equipment found it much hard tore make -- harder to make a living, partly because there was a lot of competitors going into the same business. >> did he have a break-through that was the instrumental moment that you can say whole sections could be lit. in manhattan, for example, where he really took a system and showed everyone what could happen if you had an electrified view of the world. >> right in the pearl street station in downtown manhattan,

obviously a prime place with his wall street backers, jpmorgan and so forth. it was a publicized system to show. it was d.c. power. we think in terms of the grid now. edison was thinking in terms of a grid, but a small grid, with his system he could light five city blocks and then you would have to have another city. essentially the city would have to have a power station about every five blocks and that his model. >> so let's talk about the social implications of all of this now, with electricity being rolled out, edison's system and others being proven. you then talk about the specific changes that it begins to bring to modern life. light is suddenly erupting on the screen. what's the first major things that begin to happen, especially in an urban setting where light comes to the average home. >> it doesn't arrive in homes,

except for the homes of the wealthy, right away at all. i think this is a common model, it is an industry that invests first, until the price comes down, and then it took decades for the average person to be able to afford electric light. factories were early adopters for example. the possibility of keeping these running 24 hours a day was enticing. for labor, there was a real battle. labor unions were organizing to mistake the day shorter and 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, basically the work day looks like it is 24 hours a day. >> it completely changes the whole definition of the work day. >> there's a real struggle over this. unions push for no night work.

the compromise that often laborers were paid more and a real struggle over child labor, that was one of the things that those early progressive reformers managed to battle first was not eliminating child labor, but eliminating it in the middle of the knignight. >> how successful was this pushback by labor during this period? >> successful enough initially to create mostly just an extended workday of some extra night hours. it especially was important for the transportation industry. where it did create a 24 hour a day transportation delivery system. train travel was very limited at night. passengers didn't want to trust themselves to a train that couldn't see down the track. there were terrible problems

with ships at sea. very powerful steel-hauled ships moving faster and colliding into each other. electric light made sea travel much safer in this period. depots stayed open 24 hours a day. workers, many loved the electric light. it clearly was dangerous in 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 gas light that they welcomed the electric light. >> safety, you spent a fair amount of time talking about safety. just making cities safer, making neighborhoods safer, the fact

that light could be brought not from a giant arc light, like an artificial moon, but really to the street level. >> they like to call it streetlight, policemen on a poll. so that working people, when they got out off work at night. it opened up the city and made it available in a way that was inconceivable to a points. it is very easy to for get today as you point out in the book, there were no electricians, electrical engineering was an entirely new idea. architects building buildings with electy electricity and lig.

there was a whole generation of jobs that opened up 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. there was pressure to develop the first electrical engineering programs. many cities had electrical clubs. they would pay a fee, and have a laboratory room in the back and try an experiment that type of thing. largely people who were self-taught in that first generation, which caused safety problems. people were learning the hard way. >> they really were. the electrical connections, the lines that were being strong, especially through these cities were not up on tall power lines.

they were in some cases not far above the average person's head. that strikes me as incredible, why was it done that way? >> there were no regulations or guidelines on how it do this. this had started with the telegraph wires, burglar alarm wires, fire alarm wires. >> those presented no danger. >> kid loved to grab them and break them because they would give you a tingle. >> once these arc light crossed with those, it became extremely dangerous. it didn't cost that much money to buy a dynamo and go into the lighting business. and they started to throw wires over people's houses and tack them to trees and nail them to people's houses without

permission. once you put those things together. people started to be electrocuted in graphic ways. >> you have graphic examples in your book. a lot of your research was done with newspapers of the era. of course, they loved the stories about mules being tied to electrified poles and dropping dead on the spot. >> especially gas companies. >> what were the other things that you discovered in the media's reporting of this whole phenomenon. not the danger necessarily, but just the wonder of light coming to america. talk about that. >> i think my favorite part of the research was going back and finding, really at one point in every city, town, across the country. there was the night that the light came on. and people would show up and by the hundreds into downtown streets and wait for the flip of

the ceremonial switch. there would be speeches and cannon blasts, in cheyenne, wyoming, the whole town broke into song. there was an enormous sense of excitement and people were very much aware that they were stepping into what they saw as a new era, the modern world when the electric light came on. even though it wasn't in their homes. for many decade electric light was something that you visited. you might see it at work and downtown, and in amusement parks, it would be in the city square. but you would go back home to a kerosene lamp or a gas lamp. >> what was the social impact of that kind of distinction between homes that could afford electrical light and homes to which it came much later?

>> it was often greeted as a great democratizing invention. people, even though it was something that was fairly expensive, much more expensive than gas, up until the 1920s, people saw it as something that was reaching down into the middle class and ultimately into working class homes. at the same time it did sharpen a line between the haves and the have nots electrically. especially the growing division between rural america and urban america in this period. these are the years when americans moved from thinking of themselves as farmers.

you can see time and again, especially in farmers magazines and journals, they are very aware of the fact, somewhere out there there are cities where people are staying up late and going to night baseball games and going to coney island, and there's a whole world they are missing out on. that distinction was there right from the start. >> what's 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 democratization of light was making his image that much greater. he was committed to the d.c. power system and that was replaced by the a.c. power system. and edison loses control of the

electric company. >> ironically. >> he's out of the lighting business within a decade. in fact, vows as he's leaving the business, 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 going to remember i was associated with electric light. >> kicked out of his own company. >> yes. >> he continued to be remember as the great expert on electricity and spent the rest of his life as a scientific pundit. everybody happy to play that role. >> how vigorous was his fight on this whole direct versus alternating current battle? >> i mean, he's most famously

known for using the electric chair for prisoners. if you're going to do that, have you to use westinghouse's a.c. system, because that's going to work best to kill people. he had a system that would round up stray dogs and any journalist who would be willing to watch, he would execute this. >> that's a side of edison we're really not that familiar with. >> he was a ruthless competitor, as they all had to be. at the time though, however, edison that these people who are being electrocuted in the streets. they were dying from a.c. power. he felt it was reckless, that it would discredit the electrical industry entirely. but at the same time there was

no such thing as effective wire insulation in those days. basically they would put cloth and paint on these high powered wires and hope that would work as insulation. so many people were disturbed by these very public deaths that were happening in city streets. edison felt that if a.c. power continued. ultimately the public would reach a point where it was not willing to go forward. european engineers came to america and they saw the chaos of the wires, and they said how can you put up with this? >> americans said, well, we have a lot more light than you do. we have more light in the united states than in all of the rest of europe combined. >> i'm just looking at the questions that have been passed up from the audience.

there's some really, really great questions, we just touched on a.c. versus d.c. i'm going to ask you a couple here that start with the technology. was the filament in the light bulb was that standardized 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. he had to go into partnership with his great rival maxim. who had a flash treatment that was necessarily to make it last longer. pioneered the idea of creating a

cellulose paste that made a much more consistent filament fiber. so this was an evolutionary process. a lot of people working on this. it got better and better until finally it culminated in the metallic filament and pioneered in this country by general electric. which totally changed everything in a way, because they were so much more efficient than the old carbon filaments, that was the break-through that allowed electric light to really compete against gas. and general electric said this was edison's dream finally realized. this was three decades after edison launched his bulb. it really wasn't until the nineteen teens that these started to filter into the

marketplace. if you had carbon filaments in your bulb. the electric company would provide them free. they would exchange them for your. if you wanted the more e efficient, you had to buy them. >> i think that's so interesting, because, again, there are modern parallels there. as transformational as a piece of technology can be, it can take a long time for it to get penetrated broadly. made widely available, made inexpensive enough to be for other people. >> so in 1930, the estimate is that about 70% of homes were wired for electricity. it took that long. that's 50 years, just to get the wire into people's houses.

>> and that really was created by the building boom in the 1920s. many people were very reluctant to retro fit their house, to tear up the walls and install. it was new housing by the 1920s that electricity was considered to be the standard. >> you touched on the very question i was going to ask. isn't it true that some people were afraid of wiring their homes. 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. they saw electric light as safer and cleaner. still, yes, there was a resistance to putting this deadly force into your house. that was especially a problem initially. i mean the most famous story about that is that when edison

installed his first system in the pearl street station in manhattan, one of the early adopters was one of the vanderbilts and installed this, rather than ripping up the walls, they would run the wires up along the -- just attaching to the walls and interacted badly with the metallic paper and the wallpaper and basically set the room on fire of one major backer. the other backer, jpmorgan wanted one of the first desk lamps. it had a short and actually burned his desk to cinders. >> a major booster even after that. >> that's the kind of investor you want. >> willing to allow you one mistake. >> absolutely. >> edison's management style, i

want to touch on that for a minute. to the extent you uncovered that in your research. he had a factory that employed thousands of people. his laboratories were populated with many researchers working under him. how did he manage that? do we know how edison took that on? >> the period that i was focusing on, that menlo park group was a small group. he had an intense relationship with them. working essentially 24 hours a day. he was a famous napper. he would sleep odd hours here and there for a few minutes. all night long he would be working and his entire team was expected to work with him. almost all of them, including

many of them who knew more about the scientific elements, always credited edison of 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 here from the audience that i was going to ask, the sort of mystical idea that 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 think i've heard that story told. did you run across that? >> i did not. what i was truck by time and again journalists trying to explain to their readers what an

incandescent bulb looked like. it looked like a droplet of fire in a teardrop, or an italian sun set, it looked like a flower. they were drawn really to its beauty, above all else. and they loved to dolook at it. the problem came, you weren't supposed to look at it once you got the metallic filament. lighting reformers had to teach people to use lamp shades. why should i be paying money for a light and then put a top on it. it is not good to stare at the light. there were actually manuals that would show you, put the light here and cast it on to your book here. this is how you do this. 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. >> what was the most surprising thing when you did the research, that you didn't expect to uncover. >> i think it was the development in this later period of this movement of ill louminan engineering. suddenly there was so much light that people began to think differently about shaping the light. it is really at that moment that a whole another invention of the electrical light occurred. as these engineers tried to work out the details of what space to move in and out of would feel

like. this was when window designers figured out how to use lights in order to make different kinds of goods look as alluring as possible. and theater artists think about using these new metallic bulbs that had not been possible before. you get strange moves like in the 1880s, you could tell a restaurant was very fancy, because it was brilliantly lit. by 1920, it was a great restaurant because it was very dark. so we sort of move in and out of a vocabulary of light that was carefully worked out by these illumination engineers. what should a church look like and catholics had different ideas than protestants than mormons about what light ought to look like.

whether it was an intrusion of their sacred space or an improvement. it is carefully designed to make us feel a particular way. without us stopping to think about all of the intentionality that was involved in all of that. >> this is a great question. one that i'm glad someone sent up. >> the friendship that developed between edison and henry ford. you talk about that in the book. but 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 mentored ford at a crucial period in his development and encouraged him and ford was always grateful for that afterward and really

lionized edison when he created his museum in dearborn michigan. he gathered anything he could find and dug up edison's top soil to carry it to lay it over there in michigan. toward the end of their life, they would go on long camping trips together. where they denounced to the modern world that they had done so much to create. we're going to get away from it all, the world is too bright and hectic. we're going to go fishing. they couldn't quite let go. >> did you track that? >> their friendship was that an important part of the social history that you were trying to draw?

>> edison did everything he could to cement that image of edison that our conversation talks about. >> so we're coming now to that point whereas you said, edison starts to reflect back on these things, and there's 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. he seemed to long for that simpler time.

. >> people are more energized but also more exhaust about it. the colonial revival movement i talk about in the book as an

attempt to convince people to turn off the light and live with candlelight a little bit. so they can get more in touch with something that's been lost in the modern world. his argument was that god had designed twilight as a way to cultivate the spiritual creative side of human beings. that it is in 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 zone and a piece of human experience. he studied children and felt like children who lived under too much artificial light became irritable and lacked a kind of spiritual dimension. >> did you find any indication that edison at the end of his life was reflecting back on that at all.

a or was it always pushing forward the future or the next great thing? >> edison was a great defender of an artificial light. that this was somehow going to make you a better person. more energetic, he never was clear on exactly how it was going to make you better. he was an salesman for electric light right until the bitter end. he's been called the greatest innovator of his age, would you agree with that statement? >> he certainly deserves enormous credit. the book is designed to suggest the fact that the age itself is more interesting than edison. in some ways it is the age. he's representative of a much more broader enthusiasm about

invention and a sense that human beings had entered a new stage in human history where invention is not just something that comes along once in a while, you can create a new factory and churn out new ideas all of the time. edison is important that way, but not unique. >> that one final point is that he created what you call a kind of expectation of perpetual innovation and he didn't personally create it, but the sum total of this age was that we would then be moving into an era when innovation would just be something we would be living with day after day for the res of our lives. it was an entirely new concept, wasn't it? >> americans particularly embraced this. they were very proud of their growing reputation as a nation of inventors. and considered this to be particularly an expression of

democratic values, if you educate people broadly, if you create an open patent system that encourages innovation, that if you remove barriers between workers and thinkers. that this was in a sense, america's gift to history. not high culture. not literature, but things. material objects, great machines that the whole world wants to have. we did enter into that period of perpetual innovation and it seems to be going right on. >> yes. >> thank you. >> you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter @c-span

history for information on our schedule, upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. >> monday night on the communicators. meredith baker president of the wireless association. >> if you remember i was at the commerce department, and this process the lessons learned have really been learned, it is going wonderfully. it is paired, internationally harmonized. 65 megaherz. i think that the green hill report which the sec puts out which values the spectrum, those numbers have tushd the discussion from a policy discussion to a business decision. we're excited about that, too.

it is going to be a win-win turned for every one. >> with the 2014 mid-term election just over a week away. c-span's campaign debate coverage continues. monday at 7:00 p.m. eastern. followed at 8:00 with live coverage of the massachusetts governor debate. at 9:00 the georgia senate debate. at 10:00, the minnesota senate debate. then at 11:00 p.m. eastern the hawaii's government debate.

>> next on american history tv. vice president of elections ronald hurst talks about what people imported made and used in the colonial south it was often influenced by their ethnicity and religion. he talks about how furnitures and musical instruments were shaped by conditions