[00:00:00] ​

[00:00:00] America loves its legends. We worship the bootstraps genius, the self-made man. The lone inventor bathed in the glow of a bulb he supposedly created, but some legends, they're just branding, well-funded, well lit, and carefully constructed. Thomas Edison has been called a wizard, a genius, even the father of the modern world,, but strip away the fanfare. And what's left is a man less interested in invention than domination. He just didn't want to innovate. He wanted to own it. The patents, the press, the story.

[00:00:40] He was ruthless, calculating, and relentless in pursuit of the spotlight. Less scientist, more showman, less innovator, more empire builder. And in the end, he didn't just rewrite the future, he rewrote his own legacy. See, tonight we're cracking open the legend of Edison because behind every bright light there's a shadow.

[00:01:06] Welcome to the House of six tonight's case, wires, wars, and the Wizard, the Twisted Legacy of Thomas Edison, America's original PR hyped genius.

[00:01:18] ​

[00:01:18]

[00:01:18] Jenn: Welcome to the house of six. I'm Jen,

[00:01:20] Jared: Jared. I never know how to say that. It's my name, but I never know how to say it. It's your

[00:01:25] Jenn: name. You, you do know how to say your name, right?

[00:01:27] Jared: Well, you know, you feel like you have to be all interesting during an intro and it's just Jared, so

[00:01:31] Jenn: you scream Jared.

[00:01:32] Right? That's interesting. Yeah.

[00:01:34] Jared: Yeah.

[00:01:35] Jenn: How are you? I wanted to get your opinion on what do you think are, are how our episodes are going and more like what do you think of me? You're a lovely human being. Like my storytelling, like how I tell a story or frame a a case.

[00:01:57] Jared: Okay. It was not a pause intentionally, it was just okay

[00:02:02] Jenn: for a dramatic effect.

[00:02:02] Uh, well,

[00:02:03] Jared: let's go, right? How, how do I think the episodes are going? First? I think that, oh, those are two separate, think progressively Better truth, right? I mean, yes, this is new to us. Um, it all probably to some people seems like it's all easy and Oh, I could do that. Well give it a shot. Maybe you can, but anyway, I wasn't trying to be rude.

[00:02:20] I'm just saying takes, you know, you do all the prep. Everybody, anybody that's watched the, I guess whatever episode it was where you make it clear that, uh, I just show up, you do the work. But that was the agreement, right? That's the

[00:02:34] Jenn: right, because right now I'm unemployed, not intentionally, but I am unemployed and so I have a little bit more time on my hands.

[00:02:42] Yeah.

[00:02:42] Jared: I bring this, whatever that is, it's glorious. Um, but yeah, I think they've gotten progressively better, um, your storytelling. Yeah, I think you do an excellent job, to be honest. Um, I never could do this. You, you know, I don't wanna talk bad about an episode, so I won't pick which one. I've only been not enthused about one episode.

[00:03:05] Jenn: Mary Celeste?

[00:03:06] Jared: No. Oh, wait a minute. Yes, it was. Yes. The ship. Yes it was. Sorry. Yes, it was the ship. Yeah. Yeah. My sister, I don't wanna talk bad. My

[00:03:13] Jenn: sister also, she's, she gave me a very good, good constructive criticism and she said that I am not interested in this shit. I'm only listening to it because it's you.

[00:03:25] Jared: Okay. I wouldn't say that, but maybe I thought it, I don't know.

[00:03:31] Jenn: Well, something else that I wanted to bring up too is that I go super deep into the historical context and I talk about the lead up. And I think a lot of people listen to true crime. And some people just want to hear the blood and the guts and the, how this killer is, is so terrible.

[00:03:51] And it's not you. It's not you. I, I mean, perversely, I'm also interested in those things, but I think, and I, I just wanted to tell everybody about this. I think that it is so important to talk about how these people came into being and that historical background to who they are and what they did. Because anytime we tell these, these stories about these people, I don't think they could exist in the same way in any other time.

[00:04:22] Jared: Fair.

[00:04:24] Jenn: Like recent cases that I won't talk about. 'cause I don't want to talk about two recent cases 'cause I feel like it's too fresh and it just feels weird in a way to talk about them. I, I'm not dissing anybody who does, 'cause I listen to podcasts that talk about all those things. Right? But like Gabby Petito and what happened to her, happened to her because of the, the vlog that she was doing.

[00:04:45] Like, it, it fed into what happened to her. And like John Benet happened because of the child pageants that she was in, not because of, but it was just a contributing factor, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And I think that those details matter and I think that's what makes the story compelling. So I go heavy.

[00:05:09] You

[00:05:09] Jared: do?

[00:05:10] Jenn: Into the historical context. And I know sometimes that might make some people shift away, but that's, this is why this is my

[00:05:18] Jared: podcast. Maybe. Yeah, maybe they'll get used to it. I mean, you've criticized yourself with going, holy shit, I've gotta quit going so deep sometimes. And, but you know, it's, it's still, it's just how you want to, it's how you wanna run it.

[00:05:30] Yeah.

[00:05:31] Jenn: It's also, while I'm researching these cases, I find a little tidbit of information and I get stuck on it, and then I have to, and then I dig deep into it and I can't pull myself out of it, so I just keep going further. Right. Instead of pulling out and moving away from it, I'm like, Nope. Gotta go harder.

[00:05:51] That's

[00:05:51] Jared: no. Pulling out go harder was a very graphic analogy. Noted. Good grief.

[00:06:00] Jenn: Today's episode. I got into the historical context about HH Holmes and I went into the details and the background and I got stuck on Thomas Edison.

[00:06:12] That theme continued of what a, what kind of person he was.

[00:06:17] Jared: It brought out anger in you is what it did

[00:06:19] Jenn: it. I got really angry talking about Thomas Edison, and this is anybody that knows me that has ever heard me talk about Tom and Edison before.

[00:06:27] And unfortunately I have probably more than I'd like to admit, but he's one of those people that I think of as a horrible human being that got remembered as this genius.

[00:06:40] Few people have benefited from that kind of mythology more than Thomas Edison. And you know, he's the light bulb guy. Everybody remembers him as this. Genius. But if you're imagining this mild manner, tinker in a lab coat, , selflessly inventing for the good of mankind, just it's all absolute nonsense. , Just buckle up

[00:07:06] Jared: reading too many history books.

[00:07:08] Jenn: , Wrong history books. He gets all of the fame and glory and, he shouldn't, it's not fair or correct. And so this week's case is not about a killer. It's a man who built a legacy by outsmarting, outspending, and outright erasing everybody in his path.

[00:07:32] Jared: Okay. That's electrifying.

[00:07:34] Jenn: You're bringing the puns.

[00:07:37] ​

[00:07:42] Jenn: Let's go back and add some historical context. This isn't too long because I hashed out a lot of this in the HH Holmes episode. You can go back and rewatch that. I encourage that you do. Our numbers , need to go up.

[00:07:58] The years after the Civil War were messy. Reconstruction was a political power keg, as I'm sure you can imagine. Labor was cheap and expendable. And the wealth gap between the rich and the poor was widening fast. But to the industrials and up and comers of the day. It wasn't chaos.

[00:08:18] This was about opportunity. Steel railroads, oil telegraphs. Every industry was exploding. Explode. You didn't have to be ethical. You had to be first. It was the perfect setting for a new kind of public figure. The inventor, not the bookish type, locked in a basement workshop.

[00:08:43] This was something new. Someone who could sell an idea, not so much as created, someone who could wrap himself in the American dream, bootstraps and brilliance, and walk straight into history class with a name we'd all memorize. And at the center of this stood Thomas Edison. But he just didn't benefit from this era.

[00:09:06] This dude defined it. He was not the smartest man in the room, even though he wanted everybody to think that, but he knew how to control the room. He understood the power of publicity, and he saw an invention not as an act of curiosity or public good, but as a businessman, an empire to build upon patents, lawsuits, and relentless self-promotion.

[00:09:30] And this guy is just the epitome of this.

[00:09:33] To understand the world that Edison walked into, you have to look at how invention and ownership started to blur. The US patent system had existed since the country's earliest day, but by the mid to late 18 hundreds, it had become a frenzy. People started to understand how to work the system.

[00:09:52] Everyone wanted to patent something. At this point, if you could tweak a screw, file the paperwork and slap your name on it, you could own a piece of the future. You didn't have to invent something. Brand new. Patents don't have to be a brand new invention that the world has never seen. They just have to be unique enough to bypass the previous patent if there already was one. I was saying,

[00:10:15] Jared: I would assume and also improve the product,

[00:10:17] Jenn: it could be an improvement on the product.

[00:10:19] Yeah. I personally worked for a man that has hundreds of patents. You were

[00:10:23] Jared: reading my mind. I

[00:10:24] Jenn: know. He does have a ton of patents in the digital space. Yeah. And truly brilliant businessman. There's no doubt about that. But he didn't come up with the first version of those things. Right. He just made them better and he made them better in a very brilliant way.

[00:10:43] Yeah, he did.

[00:10:45] Jared: But he's, uh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:46] Jenn: So he's doing, he's doing okay. Yes. The patent race was about filing your patent first. Not fairness. And in that scramble, something new emerged, which was the patent troll. This is not the guy in the lab with sitting his hands and his hair on fire, but a businessman with lawyers on speed dial.

[00:11:09] I don't think they had speed dial. You know the point memorization of your numbers people, Edison was not the first person to exploit the system, but he became the poster child for how to weaponize it. That was his game. Meanwhile, the energy world is still in the awkward teenage phase. Kerosene was the lighting method of choice.

[00:11:30] It is very flammable. Smelly. And. Affordable cities were lit by gas lamps powered by massive coal-fired plants. Electricity existed technically, but it was all more fringe experiments and more like a science fair situation than what we have today. And most Americans at this point had never seen a light bulb or electric light, much less , , expecting one to be on in every room in their house.

[00:11:59] The infrastructure didn't exist yet for electricity. The trust wasn't there and not too many inventors were tinkering with it just yet for one. Uh, super dangerous. Mm-hmm. , The ones that did mess with it probably electrocuted themselves at least five times a day.

[00:12:15] This was just the game that Edison wanted to win. He didn't want to invent a better light bulb. He wanted to create the system where he could light up every light bulb in the country. That is what he was thinking. The idea where everybody needed his wires, where people needed his energy and his system, and his hardware and his name stamped on every single piece that is the Edison model.

[00:12:41] Not inventing, but controlling everything.

[00:12:45] I think it's easy to picture this era as some glorious age of genius. You know, Tesla with all of his coils glowing coils and bells making phone calls. And the Wright brothers were basically like the 19th century bungee jumpers. Those guys were absolutely bonkers, fun but crazy., fact of the matter is no one told a better story than Thomas Edison, and by the time he was done, he wasn't known for what he invented. He was known for everything, the light bulb, the phonograph motion pictures, even concrete houses at one point, which most people have forgotten about that.

[00:13:24] , He created an image of himself so durable. So shiny that generations of school kids would grow up thinking he personally lit up the world with a single aha moment. We're here for what he actually did.

[00:13:37] ​

[00:13:42] Jenn: Before we dive into the actual timeline, I wanna be clear, this is not a traditional timeline that I normally do, that I go and order from moment to moment. He had his hands in so many different pots stirring everything up, and I felt like that would be a little bit boring.

[00:14:00] So I've created a collection of stories that spanned over years, but I'm going to tell those stories in their full parts. I'll wrap it up at the end.

[00:14:12] Jared: There you go.

[00:14:13] Jenn: This is more of a mosaic than a straight line. A portrait made up of power grabs, press coverage, and a whole lot of conveniently timed patent filings.

[00:14:23] That's the key to everything here. Starting with his early life, Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in Millen. Ohio. It's spelled like Milan, but apparently that's not how you say it. Millon, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven, homeschooled by his mother after being pulled from school at age 12.

[00:14:47] According to one version of the story, his teacher called him adult, which is a 19th century word for can't sit still and shut up. Mm. He was probably a DHD, maybe I'm making that up. But track

[00:15:01] Jared: a DH ADHD before it was a thing.

[00:15:04] Jenn: Yep. Naturally he went on to become the first tinker in American history. But why was he pulled outta school?

[00:15:11] I found this very strange. So his mother was a former school teacher and she homeschooled him. From that point forward, he did not graduate from high school or college. In fact, many kids ended education after elementary or grammar school, especially in rural areas. High school mostly existed in cities or maybe for wealthier families. This wasn't the normal.

[00:15:36] Way to go. And a diploma wasn't expected or even common unless you were aiming for law clergy or higher academia. He never attended college. He didn't apply. He was mostly self-taught through books, hands-on work, and pure obsession. He did read Newton, Faraday and chemistry manuals like fire. So That's interesting.

[00:15:58] He was very well self-taught. Yeah, right.

[00:16:01] But I think in Edison's Day, a college education was rare and not necessary for if you were going to go into business or in innovation. Formal credentials were less important than who, you know, what you could build and of course, how fast you could patent it.

[00:16:16] Edison loved to paint himself as a self-made genius, and to be fair, he was self-taught and he was a genius of a kind. He was also a relentless self-promoter from the very beginning. As a teenager, he worked in the railroad system eventually learning telegraphy, which was kind of like the Silicone Valley of its day.

[00:16:40] He used downtime on the job to read technical manuals and experiment with electrical systems. That sounds dangerous. One of the more theatrical stories is that he set up a chemistry lab in the baggage car of a train, then accidentally burnt it down and got kicked off the train and maybe even slapped around by the conductor.

[00:17:01] Hmm. This may or may not be true. What is true is that he was learning to tell a good story and market and promote himself. By his early twenties, he started selling his inventions, or depending on who you ask, his versions of other people's inventions that he tweaked

[00:17:21] his most famous early payday came from improving the stock ticker, which was a financial communication device that printed real time stock prices for Wall Street traders. Of course, this was not the first of this invention or even the most innovative, but it was very efficient, marketable, and he filed the patent before anybody could stop him or get up ahead of him.

[00:17:45] Jared: Do we know what he did to it?

[00:17:47] Jenn: He improved it.

[00:17:48] Jared: Okay. Thank you.

[00:17:50] Jenn: That's what I said.

[00:17:51] Jared: Maybe improve the speed of it or something. I don't know. He

[00:17:54] Jenn: said it made it more efficient. I mean, it was a real time stock ticker. Yeah. Obviously he sold the rights for this for around $40,000, which is an obscene amount of money at the time.

[00:18:09] Well over a million dollars in today's money for one invention. That's bonkers. He's

[00:18:15] Jared: already off to a good start.

[00:18:16] Jenn: , That's an amazing start. That cash did not just buy him status, it bought him control. And with that money, he used it to open his first proper laboratory, and this is where the real shift happens.

[00:18:30] Edison wasn't just an inventor anymore. He became a patent machine because here's the thing. You didn't have to be the first. We've already talked about this. You didn't even have to be the most brilliant. You had to be the loudest, the fastest, and the meanest. The patent office didn't care who had the best idea, it wanted the paperwork bottom line.

[00:18:52] And once you had the paperwork, you could sue everybody else into oblivion. And that's what Edison did. He became the model. In fact, take an idea that already exists, tweak it just enough to make it unique. File the patent. Boom. You now have the most UpToDate version of that thing. You now own it, right? You own the rights to it.

[00:19:17] And with this, you can beat the competition to the market. Not just making something better, but now you've made it legally yours. They can't take it back from you. That's terrible. He filed or genius. It is genius, actually. It's just also awful

[00:19:35] historians now agree that many of them weren't really his. They came from employees, collaborators, or rival inventors whose work Edison absorbed into his empire and by absorbed, I mean he took credit, locked it down, and then took them to court , to sue them.

[00:19:52] So their pants off, he took their pants.

[00:19:56] Jared: Okay,

[00:19:57] ​

[00:20:02] Jenn: this is where the myth goes off the rails just a little bit. Because the Edison that we've all been sold, the genius lighting up the world from scratch does not match the reality of this awful man. He was definitely smart, brilliant even, and he was relentless, but he was not some benevolent wizard inventing for the good of mankind.

[00:20:25] He was a businessman, first and foremost. Yeah. To make a book, it all comes down to the bottom line, and he understood that the illusion of invention is just as valuable as the invention itself,

[00:20:37] and this is the strategy that made him rich, it made him litigious and very dangerous to anybody else with a good idea.

[00:20:45] Let's move on to the myth making machine. In 1876, Edison opened his legendary research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. This was the birthplace of his brand. He started calling it the Invention Factory, and he positioned himself as a modern day wizard. A wizard. I'm not making that word up.

[00:21:09] Did he have a cool hat? Unconfirmed. Okay. Reporters ate it up. He worked long hours. He told wild stories and he gave the press enough spectacle to keep his name , in the papers. Hence the nickname that he earned. The Wizard of Menlo Park.

[00:21:26] Jared: Better about at it with that, a hat, with that damn name.

[00:21:30] Jenn: I'll put one in post. You're welcome. Many of his lab assistants at Menlo Park worked excruciatingly long hours in incredibly unsafe conditions. They were inhaling chemical fumes for his next big invention. And he was not a team player. He was a CEO that was all do it for the brand before CEOs even started doing that today.

[00:21:54] It adds to the theme of his empire being built not on genius, but exploitation.

[00:22:00] Jared: Running a little sweatshop.

[00:22:01] Jenn: He was running a sweatshop. And I have to mention it here, even though I'm sure everybody gets tired of me all on women's lib and rights. But, there were women in his realm that got completely erased, , Sarah, good, Margaret Knight and Mary Keys. They were contemporaries with valid patents or tech contributions, and they were completely erased by Edison's narrative. He didn't just elevate himself, he flattened everyone around him.

[00:22:29] And now let's talk about the light bulb. The thing that school children everywhere are still told that he invented. He didn't invent it. He didn't invent it. Edison did not invent the light bulb. He improved on existing designs, most notably the work of British inventor Joseph Swan, who had already filed a similar patent in the uk.

[00:22:55] Edison's true contribution was less about science and more about the infrastructure. He figured out how to make light bulbs that could be mass produced and wired for a broader electric system. It was innovative and absolute marketing genius and logistics and all that, but he didn't invent it. What he did was he packaged it, he patent it, and then he sold it louder than anybody else around him.

[00:23:21] Yeah. Yeah. So most notably

[00:23:23] joseph Swan got left in the dust. Poor buddy. Yeah, poor buddy. Another example is the phonograph. Edison did actually invent it sort of. He created a version of it that actually worked. He improved upon previous models, but only briefly. And it was functional, but just barely.

[00:23:46] But I think he just got bored with it and he abandoned it to focus on the light system. That was his true calling. So other engineers would go on to refine it into something more practical. But here's the thing, everybody still remembers the phonograph as his invention.

[00:24:02] He overshadowed other creators, notably Eduard, Leon Scott de Martinville. Woo. He created the phone autograph 17 years before Edison. It recorded sound waves visually, which was the stepping stone that Edison used to actually improve upon it. Interestingly enough, in 2008, scientists actually played back his recording of AAU Claire D from 1860.

[00:24:31] That's the earliest known recording of a human voice. It's not Edison's. Yeah, it's Edouard. Okay, Edouard. I'm not gonna say that whole name again 'cause that is a rough, this is the pattern that emerges. Edison has a lot of ideas, but what he really excelled at was owning ideas.

[00:24:50] ​

[00:24:55] Jenn: Now let's get into the juicy bits. The war of the Currents. This is one of the pettiest most public and most electrifying business feuds in history. Pun intended. And it deserves to be told in full. By the 1880s, Edison had gone all in, in his version of electrical power, direct current, or dc.

[00:25:20] It was safe, stable, and worked over short distances, and that's really important. If you wanted to power a single building, DC Power could handle it, but if you needed electricity in a neighborhood a few miles away, you needed miles of copper, endless substations, and a mountain of cash.

[00:25:39] It just wasn't practical over long distances. In turn, Nicola Tesla, he's the real hero here. Tesla once worked for Edison briefly. He was brought in to improve Edison's systems and allegedly promised $50,000 if he succeeded. Tesla delivered. And when he asked for the money, Edison reportedly laughed in his face and said, you don't understand our American humor.

[00:26:09] Tesla quit immediately. And that should tell you something. That moment, whether it happened like that or not, captures everything about their dynamic. Because Tesla was a visionary. He was a futurist. He was a man chasing wireless energy and scientific progress for humanity. He wanted to give it away. He cared.

[00:26:31] Edison dude is all in it for the money. He's in it for the headlines. Tesla's idea was alternating current AC a system that was far more efficient than dc. It could travel long distances without needing substations every few blocks, and it required far less infrastructure. Hands down, it was the better system.

[00:26:53] And Tesla partnered with George Westinghouse. George Westinghouse. Edison immediately had a serious problem on our on his hands, and so what did he do? Edison went to war, not with better tech or innovation, but with a smear campaign that was absolutely brutal and set the bar for corporate sabotage. This guy,

[00:27:18] Edison couldn't beat AC current on Merit, so he tried to make the public afraid of it. He staged grotesque demonstrations where he electrocuted animals. That's what I figured. Stray dogs, cats, calves, even a horse, just to prove how dangerous AC was. And in 1903, he went absolutely nuclear and electrocuted, a circus elephant named Topsy, and people filmed it.

[00:27:50] You can still find that film footage. It's horrifying. It's

[00:27:55] Jared: pretty bad.

[00:27:56] Jenn: It's as gruesome as it sounds, and the PR war did not stop there. Edison also lobbied to have AC used for the electric chair, a new method of state sanctioned execution. The first man to die by it was William Kimmler in 1890.

[00:28:19] It was botched and an absolutely horrifying event that made headlines across the country, which is exactly what Edison wanted. He celebrated it. It was for him a win because there was a huge public backlash. And rather than backing off, he continued to promote the electric chair as a humane alternative.

[00:28:41] Alta smear ac. , Ugh, I can't even, anyways. Edison's own team coined the term to Westinghouse someone as a euphemism for execution.

[00:28:54] That's horrifying. That's sadistic.

[00:28:56] Jared: It's, yeah.

[00:28:59] Jenn: This is where the myth takes hold because a lot of people assume that Edison won the current war, because of all that noise. But he didn't. In the 1890s, Tesla and Westinghouse had pulled ahead. Their AC system was cheaper, cleaner, and scalable, and in 1892, they landed the contract to power the Chicago's World's Fair.

[00:29:20] And it was a dazzling showcase. Were over 100,000 electric bulbs lit up the sky. The world saw the future. It was not dc it was ac, but of course, Edison controlled the narrative while Tesla and Westinghouse powered the nation. Edison powered the myth textbook skipped all the smear campaigns and all the shit talk that he did.

[00:29:42] The public forgot about topsy somehow, even though it's on video. And most people don't realize that their homes were lit by Tesla system, not by Edison's, because he wasn't selling electricity. Edison was selling himself and he won. Tesla on the other hand, got the footnote. He didn't play the patent game.

[00:30:03] He didn't sue rivals into oblivion. He believed in a future where science served the people. He was a good man. He did not think that it should serve Wall Street, but without the ruthless business engine behind him. Tesla really struggled. He burned through money on brilliant, bizarre, and often impractical experiments.

[00:30:25] Wireless towers is a win earthquake machine. Good death rays. Crazy. Some of these ideas were decades ahead of his time, and the rest of them were just absolutely unhinged. And in the end, Tesla died alone in a New York hotel room in 1943 in poverty. His papers were seized by the US government, and his name at the time faded into obscurity.

[00:30:54] Jared: He didn't die from a death ray though, right? No. Okay. Making sure

[00:30:58] Jenn: that would've been fun. Not for him. Not for him, but at least he would've gone out as a legend. Yeah.

[00:31:05] Jared: Damn thing worked.

[00:31:06] Jenn: It did work.

[00:31:07] I always found, if you ever see pictures of Nicola Tesla, he's a very sad looking individual. I always feel bad for him.

[00:31:17] ​

[00:31:22] Jenn: Moving on to the next story, you would think that electricity would be enough, but Edison wasn't content with just powering the world. He wanted to project it too by the late 1880s. So we're backing up in time a little bit. 'cause again, these stories go span over decades.

[00:31:39] His lab had begun to work on an early motion picture system called the Kinetta Graph, which was a motion picture camera and the Kinetoscope, which was a peep hole viewer for short films. I don't quite understand that one. Okay. I'll have to look up some pictures. But anyways,

[00:31:55] Jared: there were polls started from, I don't know,

[00:31:58] Jenn: no.

[00:31:59] Maybe, I don't know. It was still primitive. But Edison knew , that his tech had the potential to be huge. And in true Edison fashion, he wanted to be the first, or at least seen as the first, and he wasn't alone across the Atlantic. A French born inventor named Louis La Prince had already shot moving pictures using a single lens camera as early as 1888.

[00:32:27] This is predating Edison's devices. By years, LA Prince was preparing to go public. He had a portfolio of patents and functioning prototypes. He would've had a strong case as the true father of motion pictures then in 1890 while traveling by train from Dijon to Paris, Louis La Prince vanished off the face of the earth.

[00:32:51] His brother. Saw him to the train station and saw him board the train, but he never arrived. There was no body and no luggage. It was all gone from the train with no trace just gone poof. And within weeks, Edison began filing his own patents on motion picture devices. Hmm.

[00:33:14] Coincidence.

[00:33:15] Jared: Convenient.

[00:33:18] Jenn: That's very funny. 'cause my next line was a damn convenient one. If you wrote that into a script, I think that would be cut from the movie. 'cause that's just way too, it's just way too clean. Louis La Prince's family tried to sue and uh, they lost Edison brought the heavy hitters.

[00:33:39] That's with him. Yeah, he bought 'em. Yeah. Yeah. Louis La Prince was effectively erased from the picture, literally and legally. Edison totally stole the spotlight. He presented himself as the father of cinema, complete with public demonstrations and press fanfare to go. , He wasn't interested in just inventing film.

[00:34:01] He was interested in controlling it. And in 1908, he founded the Motion Pictures Patents Company, commonly known as the Edison Trust. It is the cartel of studios and patent holders that demanded licensing fees from anyone using film technology. Regardless of whether they were using Edison's actual patents.

[00:34:26] This is where he got dirty. If you didn't pay, you didn't just get a nasty letter. Edison's agents were notorious for rating independent studios. Smashing cameras, destroying reels and choking filmmakers with lawsuits, not literally choking. Oh, well, he maybe did that. I don't know. He might've done that. He might've done that.

[00:34:48] They created an atmosphere of fear and suppression. Creative freedom was not crushed by critics. It was bulldozed by legal teams and private thugs. I had to finish that sentence. , And so filmmakers fled, literally fled. They moved west as far from New Jersey as they could get, and they conveniently moved closer to the Mexican border in case they needed to dodge injunctions.

[00:35:18] This is what made Hollywood, which I find so fascinating. It wasn't because of the lovely weather, it was because of Thomas Edison. That's nuts. , The trust eventually collapsed in court. It was ruled an illegal monopoly, thank goodness. But by then the damage was done and the film industry was permanently relocated and it never recovered.

[00:35:41] Yeah, really. Edison did help create the film industry, but not by nurturing it, but or innovating it. He chased it away.

[00:35:50] The sad thing is that Louis Le Prince, who may have truly invented the motion picture, in fact, there is a film reel that is considered one of the first ones ever shot, and it has his mother in it walking around. And she died shortly after that film was made. And her death predates the first film that Edison ever shot by several years.

[00:36:14] Right, right.

[00:36:17] Jared: Oh, well,

[00:36:17] Jenn: what a shit back.

[00:36:21] ​

[00:36:26] Jenn: By the early 20th century, Edison was no longer inventing much, but he was rewriting his legacy. He formed a friendship with Henry Ford, another Titan of branding and industry control. Ford helped cement Edison's status as a national hero.

[00:36:42] He hosted events in his honor and promoted him as the ultimate American success story. Meanwhile, Tesla died poor and alone. Le Prince was scrubbed from textbooks, and Edison was turned into a folk hero along with school, books, museums, public monuments. All of those things to help polish his public image.

[00:37:05] Edison gave interviews. POed for photos and repeated stories about his childhood curiosity, tireless work ethic. He positioned himself as a symbol of ingenuity. Nevermind all the lawsuits and sabotage and theft or the sad, sad topsy elephant. He didn't mention that again, but he, when he died in 1931, communities across the country dimmed their lights and tributes.

[00:37:32] Jared: Oh geez.

[00:37:32] Jenn: Fitting right? A nation raised to believe. He lit up the world.

[00:37:39] Jared: Hey, you know, it's the reason. It's in history books.

[00:37:43] Jenn: What lies. It's just

[00:37:44] Jared: No, exactly. It's just the way it's been built up. It's the spin. I'd imagine there's somebody that listens to this that goes, what the fuck is she talking about? I guarantee it.

[00:37:52] Jenn: I, I know you know who you

[00:37:53] Jared: are,

[00:37:54] Jenn: and it's the same like when I went off on my. Tangent about Columbus in the last episode, which it got cut for the bonus 'cause it was just too long. Yeah. Uh, 'cause I ranted and raved about Columbus for about 10 minutes. Yeah, there's, it's the same thing. There's, there's

[00:38:07] Jared: people that are gonna believe the history that they grew up on, whatever

[00:38:11] Jenn: it's lies.

[00:38:12] By the time the 20th century was in full swing, Thomas Edison had done more than file patents. Of course. He had built a persona, the arch type of the American inventor hands, dirty brain whirring quotes, flying. And somehow through sheer force of reputation, he managed to stay a hero in the stories where he was very clearly the villain.

[00:38:35] But let's talk a little bit about that brand, because that is really Edison's greatest invention, is his brand himself. Edison has been credited with dozens of quotes, and most of them are either not real, not verified, or just straight up fake. So here's a classic quote.

[00:38:53] Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. That's supposed to be Edison. It's widely attributed to him, but there's no contemporary source that confirms. He actually said it. It sounds like something he might have said, which may be why it stuck. Have you never heard that one? You look confused. I have not.

[00:39:13] Jared: I was like, yeah, not a hundred percent sweat. Okay.

[00:39:16] Jenn: Okay.

[00:39:16] Here's a few more that he supposedly said, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that it won't work.

[00:39:25] There's a better way. Find it. I bet he did say that.

[00:39:30] Jared: Yeah. I've had bosses that say that.

[00:39:32] Jenn: Oof. If we all did the things we were capable of, we would literally astound ourselves. Okay. I don't know. They're motivational, they're memeable. They're also probably all fabricated or paraphrased or taken wildly out of context.

[00:39:50] Some were probably written about him, and over time it just got blurred to be from him. But here's the thing. Edison never corrected the record. Why would he? These quotes help solidify his brand as a relentless, brilliant, dirt covered genius with a heart full of innovation and a pocket full of wire. I was on.

[00:40:13] I was on fire with that one. Was a good one. That was a good one. But yeah, it was all part of image first's, truth, second approach that made him famous. And that's why over a hundred years later, we're still unpacking just how much of the Edison legacy was real, or how much of it was just good marketing.

[00:40:30] And to be fair, it worked. He became the go-to genius for America. Right? Right. He brought us light, sound, and motion. Nevermind how he erased half of history's actual geniuses bastard.

[00:40:47] ​

[00:40:52] Jenn: The cultural impact of Thomas Edison. Edison wasn't just a man, he was a story. In fact, a perfect story. Poor kid dropped outta school, self-taught, tinkered his way into gr, into greatness, invented light. Change the world. It's the self-made man myth in its purest form, and America loves that story.

[00:41:15] That's the American story right there. And we eat it up because it reinforces the idea. If you just work hard enough, get all dirty and get down in there into the details, you can be a household name by the age of 30. There you go. Most people don't, nevermind the fact that Edison had an army of assistance behind him, not to mention all the lawyers and the ghost writers and the PR campaigns.

[00:41:40] This isn't just about Edison, it's about how American culture mythologizes men like him. We teach kids about the Edison light bulb, but we don't talk about Joseph Swan. We mention the phonograph, but not the lab team that actually built the working version of it.

[00:42:00] We praise his persistence, but we skip the part where he electrocuted animals for headlines and we talk about the the motion picture system that he built. And Louis Lare just fell off the face of the earth. I hate it. So we have our museums full of Edison exhibits and his name is carved into plaques, but what we're really honoring is his publicist.

[00:42:26] The good news is cultural memory does shift over time. And in fact, Tesla's has been reclaimed. He's the scrappy underdog now. He's the tragic genius. He gets biopics and fan art, and for the past decade, Louis La Prince's name has been getting out there and it has been talked about.

[00:42:45] I don't think it's enough to change the narrative. Unfortunately, Joseph Swan is, is buried and Edison is going to be known for the light bulb, not because of. Light bulb, but because of the system he did that, he put in place, which he did, he deserves credit there. He did create the first power plant, electrical power plant.

[00:43:06] Jared: Okay?

[00:43:08] Jenn: I like to give credit where credit is due. All right, I'm letting it happen. I know, I, I don't want to, but he did do that. , But even with those redemption arcs, Edison still dominates. His name is tied to invention, innovation, and the very concept of American genius. I'm making very big eye rolls, but I think that says less about Edison and more about us Americans, human beings, because this kind of mythologizing is not new.

[00:43:36] We've done it with men like HH Holmes, Jack the Ripper, who was framed as, you know, masterminds instead of con mens and lunatics. Founding fathers get painted as demigods instead of deeply flawed human beings. Industrialists, who we rebrand as captain of industry instead of robber barons and crushers of the peasants.

[00:44:03] I don't know what to call 'em. I don't know. But Edison fits right into that same pattern. We build the legend, we polish the story, we slap a quote on the wall, and then we skip all the footnotes and the parts that feel messy and human and real. We didn't just mythologize Edison. We turned 'em into a blueprint and we still hand it out today.

[00:44:24] Mm-hmm. I mean, look at our CEOs and politicians of today. It's the same thing. It's a spin.

[00:44:32] After all that, the patents, the pr, the lawsuits, the smear campaigns, the missing rivals, the branding so thick, it might as well have been lacquer. What are we left with? He was not a wizard. He was not a genius in the inventor sense. In fact, he wasn't even an inventor in the way that most people think. He was a master manipulator, a man who saw innovation as a race, not to the best idea, but to the first signature on a form.

[00:45:03] He's a man who stole credit buried competition and electrocuted animals in public just to win a marketing war. He did not illuminate the world out of curiosity or wonder. He did it because he wanted its name on the books

[00:45:20] Jared: mission accomplished.

[00:45:23] Jenn: Edison was only brilliant in the way that he was branded. He wasn't ethical, he was efficient, he didn't invent the future. He monopolized it, . Which makes him less the father of innovation and more the prototype for every corporate sociopath that came after him. We still tell the kids that he invented the light bulb, but he didn't light the world.

[00:45:46] He made sure he got paid every time someone did.

[00:45:50] Jared: Yeah. You feel better since you've gotten all this off your chest.

[00:45:56] Jenn: I'm really angry about this guy. Like you really are. I'm, I want people to know I'm not just, this is me. I'm so mad about this. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me upset because I think innovation, you know, we talk about, we talked about the American dream and how.

[00:46:17] We are taught as Americans that if you believe it, if you work hard enough, and if you do all these things, you can really do it. You can go out and be a podcaster and make thousands of dollars. Right. And that's just really not true. I mean, you can, there are people that do it every day, but it's rare.

[00:46:40] Jared: Well, and you also can be that innovator that gets screwed over by paperwork.

[00:46:46] Jenn: Yeah. Because those are the real people. Those are, there were real inventors out there during the industrial revolution that were literally inventing something that had never been seen before. Right. Like electricity, which is had to have been mind bending at the time. Yeah. And this guy took it and was like, cool.

[00:47:10] That's neat, bro. And stole it. Just did a better job at marketing and I'm, look, I know it happens all the time, this is what CEOs do. It does,

[00:47:19] Jared: it does.

[00:47:20] Jenn: And I'm sure there are CEOs out there that are absolutely mindbogglingly brilliant. But also there are plenty that are just crooks and sociopaths and it's, I find it really frustrating because it, it overshadows some of the truly brilliant people that are out there.

[00:47:41] Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, yeah, I, um. Thanks for, for listening to our episode.

[00:47:46] I know I went off on too many tangents and thought that I'd make a tangent into a, into a story.

[00:47:53] Jared: Yeah. I mean, you know, it was a good story. It really was. I learned a few things and uh, I imagine it's, again, so people are like, man, is she okay? Damn, that bitch really doesn't like him.

[00:48:05] Jenn: I don't, yeah. I think he's a trash human being.

[00:48:08] I think he was brilliant, but trash. Yeah,

[00:48:11] Jared: it's a good story. It was. I think he probably, uh, I, I'd be willing to bet whether he, believe it or not, you taught a few people, uh, a little, little something, something.

[00:48:21] Jenn: Anger fuels my podcast. Yes. Anger fuels this podcast. Right, right. It's okay. Right, right. So thanks everyone for listening to me go off on rants and raves about things that just don't impact us, but are interesting nonetheless.

[00:48:44] We drop episodes every Tuesday. Hopefully we'll be back next Tuesday. We've got a lot going on. We've gotta get our house on the market, and I've gotta take down my podcasting room a little bit, so I don't know if we'll be back next week or not, but hopefully we will.

[00:49:03] Jared: Yep. And be minus all of the sickness that we've had for the last week and a half.

[00:49:07] So yeah.

[00:49:08] Jenn: Yep. Yep. Cool. Rate review and subscribe wherever you listen. It is extremely helpful. We have seven whole followers right now, so you know, you wanna get on this early luck all up. Get on board, you gotta get 'em that stuff. You gotta get involved.

[00:49:25] Jared: All right, so next week.

[00:49:27] Jenn: Thank you.

[00:49:28] Jared: See ya.

[00:49:28] Jenn: Bye.

[00:49:29] Follow us on TikTok at House of Six for extra weirdness, video clips, or anything that I just thought was funny. And if you want bonus episodes, case files, polls, and anything else that didn't make it into the main episode, please go to patreon.com/houseofsyx and join our key holder tier. You can get in on the good stuff.

[00:49:48] We've got more strange history, twisted stories and unsettling legacies coming soon. And if you think this one was good, wait till you see what's next.

[00:49:57] We hope you stick with us on this journey. Thank you.

[00:51:15] He powered the streets and claimed the stars. He bought the fame and sold the scars. The current fades, the scream goes black, but ghost of truth, they're crackling back.

[00:51:34] He lit the world with other men's flames, took their work and claimed their names. A wizard, yes, but not so wise. He built his fame on borrowed lies.