Neil Baldwin Interview: Thomas Edison Inventing the Century
Neil Baldwin is the author of Thomas Edison: Inventing the Century. He had and writes many history books.
LAMB: Thomas Edison made what? What did he
invent?
Mr. BALDWIN: Oh, heavens. Well, since this is only an hour program--well, he's known for 1,000--over 1,000 patents: the phonograph, the varion--varying im--permutations of the telegraph, the electric pen, the concrete house, the storage battery, the phonograph cylinder, the disc record, all sorts of dynamos, every component of an electrical system. I think that one of the points I--I try to get into in the book is it isn't just these free-standing inventions that we should think of when we think of Edison. We should think of systems of inventions.
And the light bulb, which is the most familiar to all of us, the one that we grow up learning about, really is
one component of an entire system of delivering electric power to domestic and corporate settings, so that you have to think of the--the dynamo that generates the electricity, the wire that goes under the streets, the wire that goes from the streets to the actual apartment or factory, the fuses, the--the measuring system for the--the meters, the filaments of the bulb, in addition to the bulb itself at the very end, the sort of end product. And Edison actually spoke about his pride in the entire system that he created. That was his real--in his mind that was the invention, rather than just the--the bulb or the lamp as it was known in those days. It wasn't called a bulb then. It was called a lamp,
actually.
LAMB: How long did he live?
Mr. BALDWIN: Let's see; 1847 to 1931, so that's 84 years. And that's why actually "Inventing The Century" was a concept that I thought very carefully about because I feel he represents the era and is a representation of the era at the same time. He exemplifies the century, the--the waning of one era and the beginning of another, as well as being a major prototype of the time. He defines the time and the times define him--both.
LAMB: The picture that we've been showing from
the cover was--what age was he?
Mr. BALDWIN: That would be probably about 40,
45 years old, when he was really reaching the--the apotheosis of his career. I
mean, he was a very, very entrepreneurial and very ambitious person. And I
wouldn't say he had a goal to be a millionaire by the time he was 40, but he was
a millionaire by the time he was 40 years old.
LAMB: Where was he born?
Mr. BALDWIN: He was born in Milan, Ohio, which
is a little town--it's still very much the same way it was in the 1840s. It's
about 60 miles west of Cleveland. And his forebears, actually, were Canadian.
His father came over from the north country and set up a shingle shop there
in--in Milan, Ohio, and Edison was actually one of seven children, and he was
born there. His mother--her mo--his mother's forebears fought in the
Revolutionary War, American Revolution, and so there was a kind of a strong
patriotic strain to his background, combined with the--the intrepid nature of
the northern Canadian blue bloods--bluenoses as they were called because of the
cold weather.
LAMB: Where'd he get the name Thomas Alva?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, actually, Alva was named
after Captain Alva Bradley, who was a steamship captain who helped the family
when they were coming in from Canada, helped them bring their goods and their
provisions over to Milan. And he was a very close friend of the Edison family.
LAMB: You say that in the early days he called
him--he wanted to be called Al.
Mr. BALDWIN: Little Al. Yes. well, he liked
to be called Al when he was a little boy, very young, and then he graduated to
Tom as a teen-ager. And later on in life even the people who knew him always
referred to him as Mr. Edison. As a matter of fact, in the travels I've been
doing and meeting with some of the people and--especially in Florida, where
Edison had a winter home, there are still people there who knew him when they
were children and their parents knew him, and they still refer to him as Mr.
Edison as a kind of a--a reverential feeling there.
LAMB: How long did he live in Milan, Ohio?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, he lived there till he
was--early childhood, and then his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, when he
was about eight years old.
LAMB: How long did he stay there?
Mr. BALDWIN: And he lived there--he worked on
the railroad. He worked for the--the Grand Trunk Railroad, which was a--a line
that ran down to Detroit from Port Huron and back. And that was when he began
publishing his own newspaper on the train, typesetting it h--by hand, publishing
it and selling it to all the people on the train. And he also ran a--he had
a--he worked on his father's truck farm growing vegetables and sold those on the
train also. He was extremely adept for a teen-ager, and he learned telegraphy
an--at the train station nearby in--in Mt. Clemens, Michigan.
Gradually
it expanded his universe. During the Civil War he was an itinerant telegrapher
throughout the Midwest, living in various towns and working part-time, learning
the craft of--of telegraphy, which was a very common profession for young men of
that period around the Civil War time. And he moved to Boston when he was about
20--20 years old, and then New York and then Newark, Menlo Park, and the rest of
his life in New Jersey as--which is where--most people, you know, think of him
as being a New Jerseyite, but in fact he had his formative years in the Midwest.
LAMB: At what time of--back in those years after
the Civil War, what about--wh--when did electricity and the telephone and
refrigeration and light bulbs--I mean, I know that he's all a part of this...
Mr. BALDWIN: Yes.
LAMB: ...but wh--when did the first part of
the--that--those things come in--into being and--and--you know, like, wh--when
did the telegraph start being used?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, telegraphy was a--a very
nascent industry that grew up sort of in tandem with the railroad. You have to
see them as sort of brothers in technology, if you will. That is to say that
telegraphy sort of progressed in complexity in the 1850s, 1860s. I always like
to say that Edison grew up with the railroad. He actually was born at a time
when canals were the major infrastructure system that was used for commerce.
That you could--you could travel through the waterways actually from the Midwest
all the way to New York through the canals, the Great Lakes and so forth.
But with the rise of the railroad, the--the change in the way in which
goods and information were transported necessitated an upgrade in the
accompanying technology. That's sort of my--the way I see it, anyway. So I
think that what Edison--Edison--that's what I mean by the fact that he defined
his era and was defined by his era. He was--had his ear to the ground in the
sense of what was required by this growing nation. And he understood the
first--the first sort of telegraphy that he got into, the first sort of
communication that he got into after the railroad was between businesses, a very
rudimentary kind of--I guess you would call it a local area network now--is
what--the way I analogize it is LAN of today, really, because Edison saw that
the best way to grow an--a--an industry was in concentric circles. So he
started by marketing these telegraphic services to related businesses in a
community. And I think he really had a sense of the pulse of--of the need of--of
corporate America because, you have to remember, this is, you know, ei--late
1860s, early 1870s we're talking about. And, you know, he--he had--always had
one eye on the future when he was developing his inventions.
LAMB: Milan, Ohio; Port Huron, Michigan...
Mr. BALDWIN: Right.
LAMB: ...Boston.
Mr. BALDWIN: Right.
LAMB: About how old was he when he got to
Boston?
Mr. BALDWIN: Let's see; that would be late
1860s, so early 20s.
LAMB: Was he married yet?
Mr. BALDWIN: No. Actually, what happened was
he moved to--he opened his own shop right outside of Newark, New Jersey. This
would be about 1870 or thereabouts. He was 23, 24 years old. And that was
where he met his first wife. Her name was Mary Stilwell, and her family was
from the Newark area--Newark, New Jersey. And she was working for him as a--in
a clerical capacity. And she was very attractive, very young, blond, gray-eyed
woman. Her father was a sawyer, a--a merchant. And so they were married at
Christmas of 1871, and they had three children.
LAMB: What were their names?
Mr. BALDWIN: Tom Jr., of course, William and
Marion.
LAMB: How long were they married?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, she bore him these three
children over 13 years, during the course of which--as I--as I said earlier,
this was the period when Edison was building his empire. He was proud of the
fact that certain times of the year he was away from the home for 100 nights in
a row--100 nights in a row working in the lab. And his notebooks, which I
studied very carefully because I think they are the true chronology of his
career--he left over 3,000 laboratory notebooks behind.
LAMB: Where are they?
Mr. BALDWIN: Those are housed in the Edison
historic site in West Orange, New Jersey. That's where the major Edison archive
is located.
LAMB: The actual notebooks.
Mr. BALDWIN: Yes, they are.
LAMB: And you read the notebooks, not on
microfilm or microfiche.
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, I wanted to get--I read them
in both ways actually, now that you mention it. I wanted to--see, I--I have a
background in studying manuscripts as a kind of way to build my biographies.
And I decided to approach these notebooks a--as--as almost a freestanding
literary genre in and of themselves because Edison says in one of the first
notebooks, `I am going to make a full record of my career.' And so I said to
myself, `Well, knowing his--his--the importance of them from a documentation
point of view, knowing that--if you're going to create a patent, you have to
keep a record of the time, the place, the date of the invention. You have to
keep a record of who was working on it with you. You have to have a witness for
the invention. You have to have the most assiduous documentation when you're
trying to create a patent for--you know, for the consumer industry.'
So
on that level the notebooks are important because they are Edison's chronology
of his work, but they also contain ideas and half-formed thoughts and sketches
and perceptions for other works and other creations that he w--had thought of
that did not become fully realized as--you know, in the marketplace. And that's
where you get the vision of Thomas Edison's imagination. That's where you get
the vision of him as a--as a--introspective, creative person. He writes down
all the names of all the books he's wri--he's reading. He writes down the names
of people that he meets who give him ideas. He writes down chemicals that he
wants to purchase, tools that he wants to purchase. You get some sense of what
direction he's going in his research.
I mean, these are--these are
really the--the chronicle of his entire life. And I--I think that it's
significant that he kept writing in these notebooks long after he was able to
visit the lab. When he was a sick man, when he was in bed, when he couldn't
lift his head off the pillow, he's still writing in the notebooks, because it's
the process that's important to him, not just the manifestation, not just the
thing, but the process of how you get through an idea, how you track your
thoughts and how you monitor your thoughts.
Taken from C-Span Booknotes
LAMB: Thomas Edison made what? What did he
invent?
Mr. BALDWIN: Oh, heavens. Well, since this is only an hour program--well, he's known for 1,000--over 1,000 patents: the phonograph, the varion--varying im--permutations of the telegraph, the electric pen, the concrete house, the storage battery, the phonograph cylinder, the disc record, all sorts of dynamos, every component of an electrical system. I think that one of the points I--I try to get into in the book is it isn't just these free-standing inventions that we should think of when we think of Edison. We should think of systems of inventions.
And the light bulb, which is the most familiar to all of us, the one that we grow up learning about, really is
one component of an entire system of delivering electric power to domestic and corporate settings, so that you have to think of the--the dynamo that generates the electricity, the wire that goes under the streets, the wire that goes from the streets to the actual apartment or factory, the fuses, the--the measuring system for the--the meters, the filaments of the bulb, in addition to the bulb itself at the very end, the sort of end product. And Edison actually spoke about his pride in the entire system that he created. That was his real--in his mind that was the invention, rather than just the--the bulb or the lamp as it was known in those days. It wasn't called a bulb then. It was called a lamp,
actually.
LAMB: How long did he live?
Mr. BALDWIN: Let's see; 1847 to 1931, so that's 84 years. And that's why actually "Inventing The Century" was a concept that I thought very carefully about because I feel he represents the era and is a representation of the era at the same time. He exemplifies the century, the--the waning of one era and the beginning of another, as well as being a major prototype of the time. He defines the time and the times define him--both.
LAMB: The picture that we've been showing from
the cover was--what age was he?
Mr. BALDWIN: That would be probably about 40,
45 years old, when he was really reaching the--the apotheosis of his career. I
mean, he was a very, very entrepreneurial and very ambitious person. And I
wouldn't say he had a goal to be a millionaire by the time he was 40, but he was
a millionaire by the time he was 40 years old.
LAMB: Where was he born?
Mr. BALDWIN: He was born in Milan, Ohio, which
is a little town--it's still very much the same way it was in the 1840s. It's
about 60 miles west of Cleveland. And his forebears, actually, were Canadian.
His father came over from the north country and set up a shingle shop there
in--in Milan, Ohio, and Edison was actually one of seven children, and he was
born there. His mother--her mo--his mother's forebears fought in the
Revolutionary War, American Revolution, and so there was a kind of a strong
patriotic strain to his background, combined with the--the intrepid nature of
the northern Canadian blue bloods--bluenoses as they were called because of the
cold weather.
LAMB: Where'd he get the name Thomas Alva?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, actually, Alva was named
after Captain Alva Bradley, who was a steamship captain who helped the family
when they were coming in from Canada, helped them bring their goods and their
provisions over to Milan. And he was a very close friend of the Edison family.
LAMB: You say that in the early days he called
him--he wanted to be called Al.
Mr. BALDWIN: Little Al. Yes. well, he liked
to be called Al when he was a little boy, very young, and then he graduated to
Tom as a teen-ager. And later on in life even the people who knew him always
referred to him as Mr. Edison. As a matter of fact, in the travels I've been
doing and meeting with some of the people and--especially in Florida, where
Edison had a winter home, there are still people there who knew him when they
were children and their parents knew him, and they still refer to him as Mr.
Edison as a kind of a--a reverential feeling there.
LAMB: How long did he live in Milan, Ohio?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, he lived there till he
was--early childhood, and then his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, when he
was about eight years old.
LAMB: How long did he stay there?
Mr. BALDWIN: And he lived there--he worked on
the railroad. He worked for the--the Grand Trunk Railroad, which was a--a line
that ran down to Detroit from Port Huron and back. And that was when he began
publishing his own newspaper on the train, typesetting it h--by hand, publishing
it and selling it to all the people on the train. And he also ran a--he had
a--he worked on his father's truck farm growing vegetables and sold those on the
train also. He was extremely adept for a teen-ager, and he learned telegraphy
an--at the train station nearby in--in Mt. Clemens, Michigan.
Gradually
it expanded his universe. During the Civil War he was an itinerant telegrapher
throughout the Midwest, living in various towns and working part-time, learning
the craft of--of telegraphy, which was a very common profession for young men of
that period around the Civil War time. And he moved to Boston when he was about
20--20 years old, and then New York and then Newark, Menlo Park, and the rest of
his life in New Jersey as--which is where--most people, you know, think of him
as being a New Jerseyite, but in fact he had his formative years in the Midwest.
LAMB: At what time of--back in those years after
the Civil War, what about--wh--when did electricity and the telephone and
refrigeration and light bulbs--I mean, I know that he's all a part of this...
Mr. BALDWIN: Yes.
LAMB: ...but wh--when did the first part of
the--that--those things come in--into being and--and--you know, like, wh--when
did the telegraph start being used?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, telegraphy was a--a very
nascent industry that grew up sort of in tandem with the railroad. You have to
see them as sort of brothers in technology, if you will. That is to say that
telegraphy sort of progressed in complexity in the 1850s, 1860s. I always like
to say that Edison grew up with the railroad. He actually was born at a time
when canals were the major infrastructure system that was used for commerce.
That you could--you could travel through the waterways actually from the Midwest
all the way to New York through the canals, the Great Lakes and so forth.
But with the rise of the railroad, the--the change in the way in which
goods and information were transported necessitated an upgrade in the
accompanying technology. That's sort of my--the way I see it, anyway. So I
think that what Edison--Edison--that's what I mean by the fact that he defined
his era and was defined by his era. He was--had his ear to the ground in the
sense of what was required by this growing nation. And he understood the
first--the first sort of telegraphy that he got into, the first sort of
communication that he got into after the railroad was between businesses, a very
rudimentary kind of--I guess you would call it a local area network now--is
what--the way I analogize it is LAN of today, really, because Edison saw that
the best way to grow an--a--an industry was in concentric circles. So he
started by marketing these telegraphic services to related businesses in a
community. And I think he really had a sense of the pulse of--of the need of--of
corporate America because, you have to remember, this is, you know, ei--late
1860s, early 1870s we're talking about. And, you know, he--he had--always had
one eye on the future when he was developing his inventions.
LAMB: Milan, Ohio; Port Huron, Michigan...
Mr. BALDWIN: Right.
LAMB: ...Boston.
Mr. BALDWIN: Right.
LAMB: About how old was he when he got to
Boston?
Mr. BALDWIN: Let's see; that would be late
1860s, so early 20s.
LAMB: Was he married yet?
Mr. BALDWIN: No. Actually, what happened was
he moved to--he opened his own shop right outside of Newark, New Jersey. This
would be about 1870 or thereabouts. He was 23, 24 years old. And that was
where he met his first wife. Her name was Mary Stilwell, and her family was
from the Newark area--Newark, New Jersey. And she was working for him as a--in
a clerical capacity. And she was very attractive, very young, blond, gray-eyed
woman. Her father was a sawyer, a--a merchant. And so they were married at
Christmas of 1871, and they had three children.
LAMB: What were their names?
Mr. BALDWIN: Tom Jr., of course, William and
Marion.
LAMB: How long were they married?
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, she bore him these three
children over 13 years, during the course of which--as I--as I said earlier,
this was the period when Edison was building his empire. He was proud of the
fact that certain times of the year he was away from the home for 100 nights in
a row--100 nights in a row working in the lab. And his notebooks, which I
studied very carefully because I think they are the true chronology of his
career--he left over 3,000 laboratory notebooks behind.
LAMB: Where are they?
Mr. BALDWIN: Those are housed in the Edison
historic site in West Orange, New Jersey. That's where the major Edison archive
is located.
LAMB: The actual notebooks.
Mr. BALDWIN: Yes, they are.
LAMB: And you read the notebooks, not on
microfilm or microfiche.
Mr. BALDWIN: Well, I wanted to get--I read them
in both ways actually, now that you mention it. I wanted to--see, I--I have a
background in studying manuscripts as a kind of way to build my biographies.
And I decided to approach these notebooks a--as--as almost a freestanding
literary genre in and of themselves because Edison says in one of the first
notebooks, `I am going to make a full record of my career.' And so I said to
myself, `Well, knowing his--his--the importance of them from a documentation
point of view, knowing that--if you're going to create a patent, you have to
keep a record of the time, the place, the date of the invention. You have to
keep a record of who was working on it with you. You have to have a witness for
the invention. You have to have the most assiduous documentation when you're
trying to create a patent for--you know, for the consumer industry.'
So
on that level the notebooks are important because they are Edison's chronology
of his work, but they also contain ideas and half-formed thoughts and sketches
and perceptions for other works and other creations that he w--had thought of
that did not become fully realized as--you know, in the marketplace. And that's
where you get the vision of Thomas Edison's imagination. That's where you get
the vision of him as a--as a--introspective, creative person. He writes down
all the names of all the books he's wri--he's reading. He writes down the names
of people that he meets who give him ideas. He writes down chemicals that he
wants to purchase, tools that he wants to purchase. You get some sense of what
direction he's going in his research.
I mean, these are--these are
really the--the chronicle of his entire life. And I--I think that it's
significant that he kept writing in these notebooks long after he was able to
visit the lab. When he was a sick man, when he was in bed, when he couldn't
lift his head off the pillow, he's still writing in the notebooks, because it's
the process that's important to him, not just the manifestation, not just the
thing, but the process of how you get through an idea, how you track your
thoughts and how you monitor your thoughts.
Taken from C-Span Booknotes