Pod Insights American History Tellers Edison vs. Tesla | The Business of Discovery | 4 About this episode Thomas Edison is one of the most celebrated inventors in American history, having helped transform a world lit by candles and gas lamps into one powered by electricity. Over his lifetime he was granted more than a thousand patents, and pioneered the very idea of organized innovation at his ground-breaking research and development laboratories. But the story of how he did it is complicated. So, to help us understand Edison’s remarkable achievements, Lindsay is joined by Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He’s the author of Edison: A Life of Invention.
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0:15 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers: Our History, Your Story.
0:37 Lindsay Graham? Few figures in American history reshape daily life as much as Thomas Edison. The world he was born into in 1847 was lit by candles and oil lamps for most Americans, and gaslit for the wealthy few. But by the time he died in 1931, electricity flowed through homes and businesses across the country. Edison and the research teams he organized played a major role in that transformation. Over the course of his life, he was granted more than a thousand US patents. But his legacy extends beyond invention. Edison helped pioneer the very idea of organized innovation, building some of the first modern research and development laboratories in Menlo Park and later West Orange, New Jersey. In the process, he established
1:20 Lindsay Graham? a model for how the modern world would go about the business of discovery. To help us understand the man behind the myth, I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, and author of several books about Edison, including Edison: A Life of Invention. Our conversation is next.
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2:50 Lindsay Graham? Paul Israel. Thanks for joining me today on American History Tellers.
2:54 Speaker 03 My pleasure.
2:55 Lindsay Graham? So, Thomas Edison was a tinkerer from a young age, but where did his curiosity come from?
3:00 Speaker 03 Well, I think that kids tend to be naturally curious and some retain that and others become less curious over time. So Edison retained his curiosity. I think part of that was, in fact, his education and the environment that he was in. So the 19th century, it was easy to be not just curious about technology, but to learn it pretty easily since most technology was mechanical. You could literally see how a piece of machinery worked. And then Edison's own education was pretty informal. He was first in a private school when he was about seven or eight. And then, for a variety of reasons,
3:43 Speaker 03 including possibly the family not being able to pay for this private school in Port Huron where he grew up. He was born in Mylan, Ohio. And so his mother began to teach him by focusing on reading and reading a lot of the books in his father's library. That's one of the reasons why Edison was sort of imbued with the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers, especially Thomas Paine. And his father was an entrepreneur. So one of the things he began to understand was how entrepreneurship worked. And so between his parents, he developed a love of learning through reading and a sort of understanding how one could move from one project to another,
4:28 Speaker 03 not being worried about setbacks, figuring out how to move forward. And I think all those things were really important to his education.
4:37 Lindsay Graham? You mentioned Edison's getting used to setbacks. This became integral for his innovative approach. This iteration, this tireless perseverance. How did Thomas Edison get involved in scientific inquiry like this? How did he begin to learn how to innovate?
4:53 Speaker 03 Edison, as a child, and then as a young boy, is surrounded by an environment where there are very exciting technologies happening. So when they moved to Port Huron, it's a lumber town, but there's also shipbuilding going on there. So Edison's first experiments were when he was a kid. He briefly attended the New Public School in Port Huron, and that's where he encountered his first science book, Parker's Natural Philosophy. There was a lot in there about electricity and chemistry. In fact, the funnest piece of the book was the telegraph system. And he and a friend experimented with their own telegraph line. Edison began to think about chemistry since batteries,
5:38 Speaker 03 for example, were chemical batteries, right? So Edison began to learn about electricity and about the telegraph from this experience. And then he decided that he didn't really enjoy working on his father's truck farm out in the hot sun. And so he got a job on the local rail line. There was a new line, the Grand Trunk Railway, between Port Huron that moved down the line to Detroit, which was south of the town he grew up in. And he sold newspapers and magazines, candy and things like that. And over time, he began to collect a little chemical lab, buying materials in Detroit.
6:20 Speaker 03 The Detroit Free Press editor gave him a little printing press, and he actually printed a little newspaper for a while on the train. And so even as a newsboy on the train, he was beginning to experiment. And then there was this event going on at the same time he was doing this, the Civil War. That was obviously a major concern to all the people living in that area, especially when family members were in battles and there was one major battle where Edison knew that a lot of the people from the local area were involved in battalion. And so he got the Detroit Free Press editor to give him extra papers.
7:02 Speaker 03 And as he went down the line and the number of papers dwindled, his price went up. And so he was learning some business values and entrepreneurial values from being on the train.
7:13 Lindsay Graham? He also grew even more interested in telegraphy from his time working with the Grand Trunk Railway. He became a telegraph operator in his teens. Why don't you discuss a little bit about the wild world of telegraph operators then, and how it might have shaped Edison's life, if I'm not mistaken?
7:29 Speaker 03 So the telegraph was still a relatively new technology at this time. The first line was established in the mid 1840s and the telegraph slowly spread through to the Midwest by the time Edison was a young boy. The telegraph was something that was also crucial for the trains. Often, this is what was alerting stations ahead that there was a train coming and a way to prevent trains from running into each other if there was a single track. And along the way were telegraph operators. Edison would visit their offices and talk to them about telegraphy. And then he got his first job as a telegraph operator in the Port Huron office, which was
8:13 Speaker 03 in a jewelry and clock repair shop. And then shortly thereafter, he got a job as a railway telegrapher on the Port Huron Railway. And over the next four so years, he literally was a itinerant telegrapher moving from place to place in the Midwest. And he became very skilled as a press wire operator. The Associated Press began as a telegraph wire service. And operators like Edison would take the stories down overnight and then deliver them to the newspaper office the next day.
8:54 Speaker 03 And as well, during these years, he experimented with the technology itself.
8:59 Lindsay Graham? Let's talk about those experiments. What were some of Edison's first inventions, made, I guess, while he was a telegrapher?
9:06 Speaker 03 Right. So probably his first invention was a little practice telegraph where he could, as the signal came in, he could slow down the message so he could practice his receiving skills. And this particular design, he would later adapt to his experiments in what was known as automatic telegraphy, which is a way of recording at very high speed and then the recording could be played back at a slower speed. One of the main things he experimented on is what were known as repeaters. So the United States is a very big country and battery power allowed you to send a signal about 250 miles.
9:48 Speaker 03 If the signal had to go further, then an operator had to retransmit it. And so what people began to develop were repeaters. And Edison had a lot of designs for repeaters, including one that was actually featured in a book on telegraphy is a repeater that could be set up in an emergency situation. And then he also was experimenting on things like ways to send more than one message over a single line. And Edison moves from the Midwest to Boston where he begins to work on his first important inventions, in particular, a stock printer. That was used to report gold prices. This, along with this double transmitter, bring him to New York,
10:32 Speaker 03 where he's involved with the Golden Stock Telegraph Company, and develops improvements in stock checker technology used not just on the stock exchange, but all market exchanges: gold, silver, produce, oil, cotton. This connects him up to Western Union, in part because he's also working on ways of sending two messages at the same time, and he invents something called the quadruplex, which allows four messages to in each direction. And this and other inventions in the telegraph industry lead Edison to begin to develop a small laboratory in Newark. And by the end of the year 1875,
11:14 Speaker 03 he decides that he wants to get his family out of the city, which is becoming increasingly polluted.
11:22 Lindsay Graham? So then, in 1876, Edison graduates to setting up his workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, his most famous location. He was only 30 years old. Describe the place for us.
11:33 Speaker 03 So he finds some land just off the rail line between Newark and Philadelphia in central New Jersey. And that's where he sets up this new laboratory. It's a wooden building. It has a machine shop in the bottom half of the building. Upstairs is an electrical and chemical lab. And by this time, he is working for Western Union. He convinces the company to provide him with $100 a week to help support the work of the machine shop and the machinists that are there. He only has five people, three machinists. Tells you how important the machine shop is for iterating designs. Edison could come up with a design, the machine shop could make it,
12:18 Speaker 03 they could experiment with it, and then modify it. And two experimenters. And he's working on additional telegraph technologies. One of those becomes what we know today as a telephone. At that time, it was called a speaking telegraph. Edison doesn't invent the first telephone. A guy named Alexander Graham Bell does. And in 1876, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, it becomes one of the big things, right? The demonstration of the telephone there. And Western Union is increasingly interested in having Edison work on this new technology. And one of the things that comes out of his work on the telephone
13:01 Speaker 03 is a way to record telephone messages because Edison thinks about it like a telegraph. And recording and playback would be important. And this becomes an entirely independent invention called the phonograph, the first ever system for recording and playing back sound.
13:18 Lindsay Graham? What impact did the phonograph have on Edison's work at Menlo Park?
13:22 Speaker 03 The phonograph changes everything. It's what makes Edison famous. It attracts investors associated with the Bell Company, who set up the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. He begins to hire more experimenters and more machinists. And so this is in 1878 that Edison gains this new fame. And by the end of the year, he's beginning to think about something called electric lighting. If the phonograph makes him famous, it's the electric light research and development that transforms Menlo Park from what one reporter called an invention factory
14:02 Speaker 03 to really the first industrial research and development laboratory in the United States. In October of 1878, Edison is driving to the press that he thinks he's solved the problem of creating an electric light system and providing small incandescent indoor lights. And people connected with the telegraph industry, especially Western Union, are the first to invest in this. And they set up a company called the Edison Electric Light Company. And one of the things that happens is that Menlo Park Laboratory grows. There'd been maybe about a dozen men at Menlo Park by the end of 1878. He begins to hire new researchers.
14:45 Speaker 03 And he hires a German scientific instrument, glass blower. And they set up a small, little building for the glass blower. There's a carpenter shop, a big brick machine shop, and the number of experimenters expands. He's got 25, then 30. And then, as they finally reach a point where they have a basic lamp design and a basic generator design, by the fall of 1879, Edison exhibits his new lamp. And he actually sets up a pilot station in Menlo Park on the model of what he wants to build in New York.
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17:37 Lindsay Graham? Before the electric light, the phonograph was Edison's most famous invention. And as I think about it, until the electric light, all of his work was in communications and kind of auditory communications, but he had hearing loss. How might that have influenced his invention and innovation?
17:54 Speaker 03 So, yes, this is one of the ironies of Edison's career, is how much someone who had some hearing difficulties, it was progressive, it got worse over time, how much he was involved in technologies that involve sound. So he used to say that he saw his hearing difficulties as an advantage. So when he was a telegraph operator, it allowed him to focus on the dots and dashes of the telegraph instrument, because he wasn't hearing other noise in the room, right? And then as a inventor of the phonograph, of improved telephone technology...
18:33 Speaker 03 In some respects, his hearing was treated as a test instrument. His ability to hear something meant that it was both articulated and loud enough that it should work in a commercial setting.
18:49 Lindsay Graham? So we know that Edison kept copious records of the work underway at Menlo Park and his other lab at West Orange. This wasn't just because he liked to take notes, though. Talk a bit about how he was savvy in applying for patents to secure and promote his innovations.
19:04 Speaker 03 One of the things that Edison learned very early in his career as a telegraph inventor, the fellow who was the president of the Golden Stock Telegraph Company, which was the main company using those small printing telegraph stock tickers for various market reports, took Edison to his patent attorney. And the patent attorney had Edison write down all the things he was working on at the time. And the last page of the book has this very interesting notation that he clearly was told by the patent attorney, "Hereafter, I will keep a complete record of all inventions." Right? In the US system, it's not first to file,
19:48 Speaker 03 which is what it was in many European countries, such as England. In the US, it was first to invent. And so part of that was proving that you invented something before a competitor did. And one way to do that was to keep a very good record of your experimental work. And so Edison learned this lesson. And that's why there are about 4,000 notebooks, not just Edison's, but everybody that worked for him kept notebooks. And we don't even have all the notebooks that were kept by all the other researchers. Some of them walked off with theirs. So this is why we have a great record of the experimental work that went on in Newark, in Menlo Park, and then at West Orange.
20:33 Speaker 03 Edison understood the value of these records. But he also learned, and in part this was because he was in the telegraph industry, where people like the head of Golden Stock and then later the president of Western Union, began to see controlling the technology through patents was a way to prevent competitors from entering into the industry. Right? Didn't always work, but it gave those companies an advantage. And this is something Edison learned. And so one of the things he did was he patented variations on an invention, realizing that he could use that to protect his patent position and that of his companies.
21:17 Lindsay Graham? So after the phonograph, after the light bulb and with the race to electrify entire cities now underway, this is the introduction of Nikola Tesla. He went to work with Edison Machine Works and there's this, I guess, popular image of Edison as a savvy businessman who's best at patenting things as we just described, but Nikola Tesla as a genius who's just overrun by men like Edison. How accurate is this story?
21:41 Speaker 03 Right. So here's how I like to describe the difference between Edison and Tesla. Edison was somebody who was very good at understanding how to move new technology into a commercial phase, how to do the development work, not just the inventive work, but the development work, to move it from the laboratory out into the real world and how to continue a process of innovation to make it work. From the start, Edison is never really a lone inventor. It's always collaborative, right? So he has experimenters that he works with very closely.
22:21 Speaker 03 They work closely with machinists to design and improve the instruments, to test them. So it's basic applied research rather than basic scientific research designed to gain insights into nature, more to gain insights into the technology itself and the sciences around it, like electromagnetism, for example. Tesla was more a kind of idealist inventor. This actually comes out of the work of W. Bernard Carlson at the University of Virginia. Bernie wrote a book about Tesla that was published in 2013 and he points to the way in which Tesla
23:02 Speaker 03 Was happy to reach a state where he could demonstrate that his idea could work in the laboratory, but was much less skilled at figuring out how to bring it out of the lab into the real world. And so oftentimes, the technologies that Tesla had, he spent years working on them, but they never reached a commercial phase. The one technology where Tesla was successful was with his alternating current motors, and then later the polyphase alternating current distribution system. Alternating current worked on higher voltages than Edison's direct current.
23:44 Speaker 03 You needed fewer stations, you could distribute electricity over a much greater area with very high voltages and then step those voltages down so they'd be safe once they reached into buildings. The reason that Tesla's work in this area succeeded was because the Westinghouse Company employed its own inventors and engineers who were able to take Tesla's ideas and figure out how to make them commercially viable. Tesla told this story about his motor, about how he knew it would work and would wear well over time because he ran it in his head over and over, imagining the wear and how the motor worked.
24:27 Speaker 03 Edison did that in practice with real devices, and that's what the Westinghouse engineers did as well. So there's this sort of difference between Tesla, the sort of idealist inventor, and someone like Edison who's really more an inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator.
24:44 Lindsay Graham? So it seems the real rivalry then was between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, who backed Tesla. So what was their rivalry like?
24:53 Speaker 03 When Westinghouse established his first alternating current station, he had a number of very skilled inventors and engineers working for him who developed that system. And they drew also on work that was going on in Europe at the same time. So in 1886, the first Westinghouse station appears in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Edison begins to pay attention to AC and does some investigation. And there are a couple of things he's very concerned about. One is... The AC system works at these very high voltages.
25:32 Speaker 03 And that can be unsafe if not dealt with by the way in which the system is developed and designed. And so Edison writes this memo about AC in which he says, sooner or later, Westinghouse is going to electrocute someone. And one of the things you have to understand at this very moment is that the higher voltage arc light systems that were used for street lighting in American cities were strung along the streets, the wires were strung along the street right next to telegraph and telephone wires. And there were occasional accidental electrocutions of linemen from telegraph and telephone companies whose lines crossed with an arc light.
26:16 Speaker 03 And so this fear of the electrical system was real on the part of many people. And Edison was concerned about this. The other thing was the AC system had these transformers and other elements that Edison thought would add to the cost. Now, what he didn't recognize is that the advantage of AC is that you could build larger central stations that could distribute power over longer distances. It meant you didn't need a station every couple of miles in a city like New York. So between the Pearl Street Station that Edison built in Lower Manhattan, and then another station around 23rd, another station
26:58 Speaker 03 a little farther north of that, in order to power the bottom half of Manhattan, the AC system could build one larger station and distribute that power. And this was especially important as you begin to get the electrification of the suburbs, which are growing at this period. You don't want central stations if you live in a nice suburb because you have steam engines and the smoke from them and the noise. And so AC had some real advantages and Edison never really recognized that those advantages would make his DC system less desirable for central stations. It doesn't mean that DC disappeared.
27:42 Speaker 03 In fact, DC was used for what were known as isolated plants, for individual buildings. In fact, more people in the 19th century experienced incandescent lighting from a building that had its own power station than from central stations. It's really not till the 1920s that you really begin to get the emergence of what would later become the modern grid. And a lot of those were DC stations. And in fact, the last DC station decommissioned by Con Ed was decommissioned in 2007. It was running motors that drove elevators up and down apartment buildings because those kind of motors work better as DC than they do AC.
28:27 Speaker 03 And in fact, even today, right, DC is what powers all of our laptops and phones and other small electrical devices. And now increasingly what they're discovering is high voltage DC is actually better for long distance distribution than high voltage AC. So DC actually still has a place in our electrical system.
28:50 Lindsay Graham? But even ultimately Edison's own company switched over to AC at the time. That must have been a big deal for him.
28:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was. So what happens because the Edison company resists, and it's really Edison because there are people in the company saying, we need AC. Edison resists that and there's a second company, Thomson Houston, that is also developing AC technology at this time. And the two companies had discussions about merging at various points. And in 1892, early in the year.
29:25 Speaker 03 The investors in Edison Electric, which had become Edison General Electric, and the Thompson-Houston Company decide to merge. And what happens is that the people who are running Thompson-Houston take over the company, and this new company is called General Electric. The Edison name disappears. Edison is put on the board of directors, but really has nothing to do with the running of the company. After that, he goes on to many other projects over the last 40 years of his life. But what's significant is that this marks the transition to AC for central stations.
30:07 Speaker 03 And in 1893, the Chicago Columbian Exposition, both General Electric and Westinghouse compete. Westinghouse wins the award, and then two years later, Westinghouse uses Tesla's poly-phase AC distribution system to win the award for a new power station at Niagara Falls, where the electricity is sent down to Buffalo. And suddenly, the potential of AC to create a much larger electrical grid that can power a much bigger area becomes evident.
30:49 Speaker 03 And this marks the transition from small central stations and individual plants for buildings to the growth of the grid that we all use today.
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32:26 Lindsay Graham? So then here we are with Edison fundamentally losing the war of the currents. AC is ascendant. His name is removed from his company. He moves to a new workshop facility at West Orange. What is he doing now after this period?
32:47 Speaker 03 Well, he built West Orange in 1887 and opened it in 1888. He was still in the electrical industry at the time. And in fact, it was the R and D facility for the Edison General Electric Company. But once GE is formed, Edison decides that he's going to move on to other projects. He had some that he was already working on. The biggest one for the period of the 1890s is an effort to use electromagnetic separation to be able to take low-grade iron ore from the played-out iron mines of the East Coast and produce iron for the steel mills.
33:30 Speaker 03 That project, a fully automated mining operation and processing operation, tactically successful, it fails because a huge new iron deposit in the Great Lakes region of Lake Superior is discovered, the Massabi Range. So it fails. He takes the technology that he'd been using for rock crushing and applies it to the production of sand for cement and investigates the cement industry and designs new technology, including a much improved rotary kiln that becomes the industry standard. He develops an automated plant out in western New Jersey. The original Yankee Stadium is built with Edison Portland cement.
34:15 Speaker 03 Two other projects of the 1890s. The phonograph became a commercially viable technology. And Edison helps to found the modern sound recording industry. And through the 1890s and into the first three decades of the 20th century, Edison's phonograph is a crucial part of that technology. Now, there are competitors such as the Victor Company. Edison competes with his cylinder against the Victor disc. Eventually Victor wins out as the shift is made to electric recording with the development of vacuum tube technology and electronics.
34:59 Speaker 03 And then the other technology that he spent a lot of time on, beginning in the 1890s through World War I, is the motion picture industry. Edison develops the first commercial camera and viewing system. Later, this becomes a industry that grows. Edison is in the industry until World War I and then he gives it up. He's never really quite sure what the market is for motion pictures. And so his company kind of fades away in a sense. And then also in the first decade of the 20th century, he develops the first alkaline storage battery for electric automobiles. There were actually more electric automobiles in the first few years
35:42 Speaker 03 of the 20th century than internal combustion cars. And they ultimately lose out as Henry Ford develops his mass production system for automobiles that drives the cost of internal combustion cars down. But also World War I where electric vehicles are not useful on the battlefield and all the companies shift to production of gas powered automobiles. There are still a few things like delivery trucks that use batteries, but electric cars don't really reemerge until the 1960s and 1970s. And we're still on the cycle of the development of that industry as it reemerges after more or less disappearing during Edison's.
36:25 Speaker 03 So these are the technologies Edison continues to work with. He builds a huge factory complex in West Orange, New Jersey, has another one a few miles away that includes his chemical laboratories. And so Edison is both a inventor, entrepreneur, and increasingly a captain of industry.
36:46 Lindsay Graham? In this period of losing out to AC and losing his name off his company, was Edison personally bitter?
36:53 Speaker 03 So the question of whether Edison was bitter is one that I think, you know, there's some uncertainty about what his initial reaction to this was. There are conflicting news reports, some saying Edison favored the merger, others that he opposed it. But in later comments, right, so the person who was his private secretary at the time, guy named Alfred Tate, later talked about Edison was very embittered and felt like the company no longer had his name associated with it. He says something like, you know, apparently I never knew anything about electricity. And then later on in newspaper reports, you see Edison saying, I'm going to do something even bigger now than the electrical system.
37:38 Speaker 03 That was his process for mining low-grade iron ore. He thought that would be his next big project, and it was, even though it failed. But Edison essentially left the electrical industry behind. And so I think there was a way in which he was somewhat bitter about what had happened.
37:55 Lindsay Graham? So we spend a fair amount of time going through Edison's remarkable career, but I wonder what you might personally consider to be his most important invention or innovation?
38:05 Speaker 03 Well, I think ultimately his most important innovation, and influenced what came after, is the industrial research and development laboratory. Edison created a model that others took and improved upon, so that by the 19-teens, increasingly industrial research laboratories are emerging in many industries. And by the end of the 1920s, almost every major industry has its The companies in them have industrial research laboratories. There are some leading ones like General Electric and Bell Labs, but many other industries have this kind of process for developing the technologies that they're using.
38:48 Speaker 03 You know, if there's one central thing that's sort of most important about Edison's career, it's that. And then I would say next would be the sound recording industry. It's the one that he stayed with the longest. And, you know, it clearly changed the way we think about sound, right? As instead of being something that disappears, it's something that can be captured. And then finally, the electrical industry, because Edison designs the essential electrical system. You know, most of the elements of it even before AC are part of Edison. So those are the big three, if I were to say what are the most important things that Edison worked on.
39:26 Lindsay Graham? Throughout his career, Edison was on the vanguard of several very different technologies, but almost always in communications. And he could be compared to what we are experiencing now in Silicon Valley. I wonder what you think of the comparison between entrepreneurial innovators of his age and ours today?
39:46 Speaker 03 So I think there are some very definite parallels, right? So Silicon Valley in its earlier years was very much a startup place. And that's what happened with Edison and electric light and sound recording and movies. All those things were startups. And lots of other companies emerge that compete. And then what happens is what happens in the electrical industry. In the 1890s, after the formation of General Electric, Westinghouse and General Electric decide that they're just going to cross-license each other, and they drive every other company out of the business, which is essentially what's happened in Silicon Valley. All those startups get eaten up by the big guys.
40:31 Speaker 03 And so we have oligopoly power where there are a few big firms and they eat everybody else up.
40:39 Lindsay Graham? Well, Paul Israel, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers.
40:44 Speaker 03 My pleasure.
40:45 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with Dr. Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He's also the author of Edison: A Life of Invention.
40:56 Lindsay Graham? In our next series, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we explore the most extraordinary struggle in our nation's history: the American Revolution. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1775, British regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, and the shot heard round the world that day would change everything. For the next eight years, American men and women would fight, suffer, and sacrifice in order to forge a new nation, one built on the idea that power lay with the people.
41:31 Lindsay Graham? American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
42:07 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals, this is the fourth and final episode of our series Edison vs. Tesla. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Senior producers Alida Razansky and Andy Beckerman. Managing producer Desi Blylock. Music by Throm. Sound design by Molly Bach. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer-Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief content officer, Rachel Giatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.
43:01 Lindsay Graham? By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress
43:45 Lindsay Graham? to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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