The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About from Business History
Solvable
Pushkin Industries
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas Alva Edison helped transform America and the world. He registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931 - and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technology, music recording and even the movies. But his biggest breakthrough doesn't get nearly enough attention.
In many ways, Edison invented modern inventing. Join Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith as they trace the life story of a scrappy young boy with bad hearing who almost singlehandedly invented R&D.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Got a business problem? There's a TED Talk for that. Stay updated on everything business, on TED Business, a podcast hosted by Columbia Business School Professor Modupe Akanola. Every week she'll introduce you to leaders with unique insights on work, answering questions like, how do four-day work weeks work? Do will a machine ever take my job? |
| 0:25.0 | Get some surprising answers on TED Business wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 0:32.3 | Pushkin. |
| 0:33.3 | Too quick? |
| 0:34.4 | No, it was perfect. |
| 0:35.0 | Pushkin. Stop. |
| 0:35.8 | You got it. |
| 0:38.6 | Business history, episode two, Edison, part one. |
| 0:42.6 | What if that's the segment that's sponsored? |
| 0:45.1 | Sponsored by what? |
| 0:46.1 | By whoever wants to pay for it. |
| 0:48.8 | We can talk about that afterwards, I suppose. |
| 0:50.5 | We can talk about that afterwards, I suppose. |
| 1:08.2 | Thomas Edison died in 1931. He was 84 years old. And when he died, the president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, decided that Edison was such a big deal |
| 1:12.3 | that the whole country, the entire United States, needed a moment of mourning. So Hoover is |
| 1:18.0 | talking this over with this age. What should we do to honor Edison? And somebody says, |
| 1:22.2 | what if the whole country turns off the electricity for one minute to honor Thomas Edison, the man who brought |
| 1:29.3 | electricity to the masses. And you're laughing for what I think is an obvious reason, right? |
| 1:34.8 | Because if you think about it, who needs electricity all the time, right? Everyone. |
| 1:40.8 | Fire departments, hospital, sanitation systems, they all need it every minute. |
| 1:46.0 | They need this thing that Edison helped create electric power. |
| 1:50.6 | This thing that nobody had, nobody had, you know, a few decades before this, crucially, right? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pushkin Industries, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Pushkin Industries and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.