Tinkerers, Inventors and Madmen

talking about kind of uh the spirit of invention and innovation. Well, we were kind of tying it into our buddies over at maker Fair, and we thought, wouldn't it be fun to sort of talk about some of the some of the crazy inventors of the past who have come up with really creative inventions. Uh. Many of these people are ones who worked on inventions on their own and either experienced amazing success or we've enjoyed their inventions though they

did not reap too many benefits from them at the time. Um, but we do you make a point, Joe in that in that episode that the not all inventions come from like the crazy guy working in a garage somewhere. A lot of them come from massive R and D departments. I mean, if we want to get real, it's not as fun to say, but it is true that most of the biggest inventions come from well funded labs in R and D departments, which is because it's easier to

make a living when you're making a living. Obviously, when when you've got the money where you've got endless resources at your disposal to to invent, it makes it a little bit easier to keep going down different roads. But one of the points I wanted to make in the video is that, um separating these two things is kind of an artificial distinction, saying though, well, on one hand you have these big, well funded invention projects, and on

the other hand you've got the little tinker. I mean, these are two ways of operating that feed into each other. They're they're both part of the inventing spirit. And lots of these great inventors who you know worked for big companies, were probably also hobbyists, many of them makers on their own. Many of them were very much makers on their own, and that's kind of how they ended up being where they they got this job. Yeah, so, uh, we wanted to kind of look back at some of the kind

of the godfathers of invention in a way. And uh, and one of the first ones we had was a fellow who whose inventions may or may not have ever happened. There's a lot of stories about his inventions that could

be completely apocryphal, and that is Archimedes Archimedies. Some of his inventions are more well attested than others, I think, but he's mainly known actually for his proofs, right, like, yes, stuff about physics and mathematics, calculating volume density, hydrostatics, so like how how you know, well, is this really made of pure goal old or something? Right? Right? The whole idea of displacement and things of that nature. Yeah, that you could figure out if something was pure gold if

it displaced the correct amount of water. But he's also remembered for all these strange inventions. Um. One of them, of course is the is the screw right right? The water lifting screw. And this is a pretty cool idea for the ancient world. I don't know how they figured this out, but well, yeah, it's kind of neat. It's so imagine that you have a an area of water that it's slightly lower than where you would like the

water to go. So, you know, when you're trying to irrigate a large part of of landscape to make it farmland, this is obviously something that you you know, if if the biggest source of water is further down, like downhill, how do you get that to come uphill? You could just dig a really deep trend. You could, but that's

not necessarily easy or safe to do. So what our commedees discovered was that by creating a actually what I think imagine a rod angled down so that the bottom of the rod is underneath the water and wrapped around this rod is essentially what amounts to be a straw or a hose, And by turning this you can actually scoop water into that hose. And because of the way that the uh, the hose curls, you keep on changing what the lowest point of that curl is and you

urge the water. Yeah, so it's essentially a pump in a way well that the angle the screw meets the water creates a little sort of moving bucket. Yeah. Yeah, So it's it's it's difficult to envision unless you actually have a picture in front of you. But that and this is something that's attributed to Archimedes, and as far as we know, that is in fact the origin of this particular invention. But even this is one of those that's a little under contention. Well, one of the big

ones that everybody always remembers is the death ray. Yeah, the Martian the one that was tested on mythbus is actually where multiple times. Actually yeah, and this was the way passionate about it. We really want a death ray, and so we're kind of upset when it doesn't work, but it's no. But this is this is actually the romantic inventor concept that we were just talking about, because we have death rays. I mean, we have really really good death rays that we can make with modern technology.

But people are still they're so attached to this idea that Archimedes made a death ray. So so here's the story. Um, Archimedes say, wants to defend a Greek city against attackers. Well, how do you do it? Um? What if you were to get a whole bunch of mirrors and polish them up.

And of course, in in Archimedes time, they didn't have really good polished mirrors like we have now, so would have to be like a highly polished copper or bronze or something, and you lined a bunch of those up so they all catch the sun's rays and you angle them toward a central pointed up. Yeah, creing a focal point, so that whatever the target is, we'll get heated up very very rapidly. And this is actually it's not a bogus idea. In fact, this is how we create solar

thermal power, isn't it. Yeah, I mean you just focus mirrors on something to collect the heat and turn that into usable energy. In this case, the usable energy would be death. Well that in this case the usable energy is heat, and the heat converts things what date of wood into fire like converts to death. Um, yeah, I know.

The various tests that have been done on this have shown that it's it's a feasible uh object, but it may not actually work in any kind of practical use like you could you can set Yeah, you might have to wait a while. Yeah. I read about some mixed results, like some experiments were like, yeah, this this would work pretty good, but of course when MythBuster did it got busted twice. Yeah, they just couldn't. They couldn't make it

work in any reasonable amount of time. It was like they had to sit there for a long You have to ask ask the Roman forces if they wouldn't mind waiting just a little while longer before they actually disembark from their ships and invade your city a cloud. You know,

we've got to start over. Uh. And of course there's just the fact that it would probably be way easier to just go and light the ship on fire or shoot it with a flaming arrow or something, right, right, But I mean, the idea of a device that could inflict huge amounts of damage without any visible sign of projectile was something that could easily frighten your enemies terrifying.

There were you know, the reason why Archimedes came up with some or at least why we attribute these ideas to Archimedes and the whether or not they ever actually came from him or that's a matter of debate. But the reason why all of these were coming from this guy, this this brilliant inventor, because he was in Syracuse, which was under siege for like two years by Roman forces. And another one of his supposed inventions was a giant

arm that could rush or not. Yeah, the idea mean that you would be able to destroy incoming ships or foul them in some way, so that uh a besieging force would be toppled, at least the the naval part of it would be toppled. These these these are things that repeat throughout history. I mean, it's it's we We've we've got the maker fare here in a giant robot arm,

cruscious stuff. And then you know, and everyone is always talking about Tesla's hypothetical and sorry that you were going to say, oh no, well, I was just gonna say. It's funny how with the arm, there's this great diversity of how people have envisioned it. I've found some site on the Internet that just had this huge list of different illustrations of the arm, and they all completely different. Like one looks like a literal arm. It's like a big metal hand that slapping down on the ship somehow,

and I don't know how that would work. The other ones that seem more feasible is that it's um it's using a big sort of grappling hook, like it shoots over the ship and then you can pull it using the leverage of this big lever back at the joint. Sounds slightly more useful maybe than just um, but who knows.

And he certainly worked on things like block and tackle systems and stuff that made it a lot easier to move very large heavy loads by just a few people, really simple machines, right, And he's famous for his discussions about the lever and the applications of a lever. And you know, of course there's the saying that's attributed to him, you know, find me the right place to stand and I can move the world. You know, that kind of idea, UM. And also you know there are other UH inventions that

are attributed to him. His death, of course completely tragic. That was the story that the invading Romans were sacking Syracuse, and that the Roman soldiers had been given the UH the order not to hurt our Coimedes because he was

considered to be two precious, right and yet Braun. But but a soldier killed him, and they're different reports on what happened, Like some people say that what happened was the soldier commanded our commedees to come to meet with the general, and our commedees refused, and the soldier got

upset and then put a sword through our comedies. And then there are other ones that said that our committees was carrying some equipment that he used in his experiments, and the soldier thought that they were valuables, and so he killed our committees to loot his body. At any rate, our commedees was a casualty of war. And so, uh,

the big inventions he had suggested weren't actually built. But that's one of those early examples of someone who was really creative and came up with some very uh, out of the box ways of of inflicting huge amounts of damage. Um the night. This one I have on my list is similar to that in that he took many commissions for instruments of war, even though he himself was not someone who was particularly warlike. And that's Leonardo da Vinci. So good old Leo came up with lots of different ideas.

He did also improve over previous ideas things that had already been invented, like ball bearings. That was one of those things that had been around since Roman times. But Leonardo kind of showed new applications for ball bearings. Were were devices that needed to be able to turn freely without too much friction and um, and began to show some of the first really practical uses for ball bearings. Da Vinci invented or not invented, but designed a tank.

Didn't he look like had Yeah, it looks kind of like a flying saucer. It had thirty six guns. Uh in the design and uh what's interesting about that tank is if you really take a close look at the drawings, it was supposed to move based on a big series of gears, and you would, you know, turn these gears

and that would make the wheels turn. But if you really pay attention to the way the gears are laid out in the drawing, it would never move because the front wheels would be turning one way while the back wheels would be turning the other way. So you would what he needed in there was a transmission. We need to have some sort of differential. But what what what some people suggest is that da Vinci was a pretty smart guy and that maybe maybe you know, it could

have been a mistake. But it's also possible that maybe he put it in there on purpose because he one didn't want anything to ever really, no one. He didn't want anyone to really build it and to and too he thought that or to maybe that he wanted to do this in case it ever fell into the wrong hands. Whoever did get a hold of it would not be able to make a working tank because if they followed the instructions in the in the drawings, they would have an immobile structure. So it would be more like a

hut with a whole bunch of guns in it. Um, that's not guess. In the Renaissance period of tank was kind of like a nuclear bomb. Well, you'd just be he definitely, he definitely came up with other ideas that were equally terrifying in this and and part of that was these were inventions that were never actually built. Uh And and maybe it was just that you knew that da Vinci had designed this thing, and that would give you second thoughts before you tried to muscle in on

one of da Vinci's patrons. You know, this is a guy who received patronage from various very wealthy people. And so one of the inventions was a thirty three barreled gun. And so imagine imagine a triangle. All right, So you got a triangle, and you got it mounted on a tripod, and across each edge of the triangle you have eleven guns. Now the idea was that you would be able to fire those eleven guns along the top edge and then

you would rotate at once one click. Now when it's rotated, that those eleven guns start to cool, and then you can fire the next eleven guns. So now you fired off twenty two, you rotate it. Now that second of guns is starting to cool while you start to load the first set of guns, and you can still fire the third set. So the idea is that you're constantly cooling and reloading these guns while firing off the top

level of guns. So it's kind of like a very primitive version of a machine gun, although it's all still you know, manually reloaded, and you know, it's not that you would fire all eleven simultaneously, but it would allow you to fire them in quick succession right right, and you know, in comparison to the to the muskets of the day, right where you would fire and then three

minutes later you'd be able to fire again. I mean, if you were really really good, you could probably fire I think it's it might be as frequently as three times in a minute if you were really really good, But otherwise it was just like boondock Saint style if just you know, like drop the guns, pull out more more kind Yeah, why why reload? I have more guns? Yeah? And then the he had other inventions that were never built,

things like the aerial screw. So you know, our commedees figured out how to use a screw to to pull water out of a low area into a higher area. Uh da. Vinci was looking at using the screw shape to try and generate lift. So this is sort of a precursor to the helicopter. And the idea would be, if you could turn this screw fast enough, you might be able to generate enough lift to get off the ground. He also tried to design oriandopters, didn't he yep, which

kind of a precursor to airplanes or gliders. Flapping wings. Flapping wings, and the wings were more were designed more after the wings of a bird. Um right, Yeah, not not stiff enough to actually create the lift that we would need to. Yeah, but none of them would have really generated enough lift for anyone to to get off the ground or survive a great fall, if that's how you wanted to start. Uh He also but he didn't

invent parachutes which would have worked. Um. They again, we're not built, but they would have worked had they been built. People have built parachutes based upon his designs and shown that they would have slowed the descent so that you would be able to, uh, in his words, throw yourself down from any great height without suffering injury. Although without suffering injury part may not be completely valid. But you wouldn't you probably wouldn't die. Um, so right there. Yeah,

but you know, davincion bounce in that day. We're not a good You might die later, um, or you might just find yourself a couple of legs short, um, significantly shorter than the da Vinci though, was you know, truly the Renaissance man, right, I mean, that's the guy we think of when we think of the Renaissance. Is this, here's this guy who was an artist and a scientist and an inventor. He had sort of the leading one

of the leading thinkers of the day. Uh. And then, Lauren, you have some information about another person who just a few decades after da Vinci, well more like a century after da Vinci, was really taking that role. Yeah, sir Isaac Newton you might have heard of him. He built the first reflecting telescope. I believed that another fellow had created a design for it earlier, but he was the

first person who actually put it into practice. UM. And I was also just doing some of the most important mathematical stuff, you know, really building the Western foundation for calculus and um, doing important work with with gravity and

light and uh and stuff. Yeah, he designed this, um, this so called orbital cannon, which was basically a thought experiment to explain how how we could put an object in orbit of the Earth and you know which which which in is that the late sixtus was pretty cool, I mean, you know, and in the design involved putting a cannon on top of a mountain so high that it was in space, so it was not really feasible,

but as a thought experiment was really cool. Um. This whole idea of that you're falling at the same rate that the Earth is turning, so therefore you're just constantly in that same position relative to the Earth. I mean that's the basis of orbit, which is that's a pretty pretty yes. Yeah. Um. He He also, according according to

some sources, was was a great animal lover. And although you know, he never really had um any any deep friendships or deep romantic relationships that he had a lot of cats and dogs kind of running around in his life, and uh supposedly at Cambridge UM he created the first cat door to to let so so that cats would stop scratching at the door and interrupting his calculus. I think I think we can all blame Newton for all

the cat videos that are on the internet. I think I think that if you were to trace it all back, there's some some contention about that maybe, but maybe you could argue ancient Egypt. But um also one of one of Newton's contemporaries, Robert Hook is occasionally referred to as the British Da Vinci. He he was. He was, you know again living in the sixteen seventeen hundreds and created what was also working with with light and gravity in conceptual ways and created just a lot of really pervasive

simple machines. The he was the one. Hook's law, the that the extension of a spring is proportional to the weight hanging from it, is named after Robert Hook. Also Hook's joint or the universal joint, which is a way of connecting two immobile rods in a way that lets them uh create rotational force around each other. Also compound microscopes kind of an important thing. He was doing a

lot of research into biology. He was the one who coined the term sell in terms of like a unit of biology um, which he was a He was a connected to the Catholic Church and they these these He was examining cork under a microscope under a microscope, and the walls of the cork reminded him of monastery cells. So supposedly that's where that comes from. Well, uh, moving forward just a bit, we get up to uh to an American Benjamin Franklin, known for his uh inventiveness. He

invented lightning. Right, you gotta go stand the corner for the rest of the episode. Uh, I'm just gonna sit over here, Allison in the corner. You guys take over now. Benjamin Franklin, who invented many things. He's also known for, you know, his his diplomatic missions over to Europe. He's known as one of the founding fathers of the United States. One of the things Benjamin Franklin, well he didn't invent it,

but he did improve upon it was the odometer. Odominters has been around for quite some time, but he created a really practical precise one. And the reason he made one was because he was working with the postal service at the time. This is before the Revolution, so he's technically working for the British authorities at this point, and they were having trouble figuring out how to get mail from various cities and in a way that was efficient

and made sense. Franklin the first post pastor of General Yeah, yeah, you know, we think about him when we talked about

the post office as well. But he so what he did was he actually designed this odometer as a set of gears that would fit on against the rear wheel of his horse drawn carriage, and he took the carriage between cities and every four hundred revolutions of the wheel would be equivalent to a mile or one point six kilometers and uh and it turned out to be pretty pretty accurate, and so he was able to measure the distance between the different cities and with those measurements start

to help plan out more efficient routes. So that uh so that mail carrying even made sense in a place has spread out as the United States, and so that was a pretty cool early invention. He's also known, of course for the invention of the Franklin stove. Um. He was working in Philadelphia at the time, which if you are unaware during winter, it can get a bit chili and uh. Fireplaces are not terribly efficient at generating heat

in a way that is useful for us. A lot of that heat just goes straight up the chimneys, so you're losing a lot of the energy that you are trying to generate, which meant that you were going through a lot more fuel for a lot less heat. You could just like heat up something thick, and which is

exactly what he did. He came up with this idea of the Franklin stove, which was much more efficient at distributing heat and at at preserving fuel, so you didn't have to, you know, start ranging even further out from Philadelphia in order to gather the fuel you need to stay warm. And then um. He also, of course was

famous for inventing bifocals. He had trouble both with near sightedness and far sightedness towards the latter part of his life, and so he essentially took glasses for far sightness and glasses for near sightedness, cut the lenses and then put them together and UH, and that was the basic design for bifocals for for decades and uh yeah, I mean it was one of those things where out of necessity

he invented. So now, the next person I have on my list is another American, someone who the the only US president to ever have received a patent, and that of course is uh Abraham Lincoln. He received a patent for a a method of helping ships navigate shallow waters or or things that are like in a river that a boat would need to get over or around. And so it's really was a design to try and prevent ships from or boats from grounding or or getting stranded.

And um, his invention was pretty pretty clever. It was a series of waterproof bladders that could be inflated. So what you would do is inflate the bladders and create more clearance between the bottom of the boat and whatever. Yeah yeah, like like if if the river gets pretty shallow, you inflate these, you raise the level of the ships the body of the ship or bottom of the boat. I shouldn't say ship, I should just say boat because

we're talking your rivers here. Um. And it would give enough clearance so that you could get through the shallow parts without the boat just grounding. But that's interesting. The the only president who holds a patent so far anyway, and um, he was known as kind of a tinkerer and an inventor beyond just this, but this was the only patent he was ever awarded. And then we've got three people who are kind of another Yeah, big names. UH. They were all involved in in some pretty well known

UH competitions and all electric personalities. Yeah. I want to start with George Westinghouse because out of the three, he's probably the one that people know the least about from a general perspective. Like, you know, everyone's probably heard of Westingham, they've heard of Westinghouse, but they probably have seen comic strips about Edison and Tesla at the Thank You Oatmeal, But Westinghouse people don't know as much about him, I

think in general. So he was the son of a machine shop owner, and he actually served time in both the Army and the Navy during the Civil War. UH. He returned home after the Civil War to enroll in Union College, which he would subsequently drop out of. UH. And then he started using his practical experience of working with his father in the machine shop to start inventing things. Over his lifetime, he held over three hundred patents, more than three hundred patents, I should say not over and uh.

One of his inventions I thought this was pretty interesting was a gas shock absorber for cars. So in the early days of cars, back in uh, one of the problems that you had with those early cars was that if you were to go over a bumpy road, and back then almost all roads were bumpy, it was a jarring experience. I mean, if you've ever been in a car with really bad shocks, or on any other kind of vehicle that doesn't have any sort of shock system, then you know, you feel every single one of those

bombs and like being on a wooden roller coaster or something. Yeah, something something that you know has just got a lot of bumps to it where it's just not a very comfortable ride. And so a lot of the shock systems that were around back then all were dependent upon metal springs, so you get a bit of a bouncy ride and it was kind of jostling. It wasn't necessarily comfortable. Yeah.

He used compressed air used gas shock absorbers or air shock absorbers that were designed to kind of um to to cushion you on this so and it was a system that a lot of luxury cars use now. I mean they essentially use an updated version of that same invention. It's, you know, obviously a more sophisticated implementation now than it was back in Westinghouse's time, but it's the same principle.

And he also invented air brakes for trains. One of the problems that trains had in those early days is that the brake systems were not uh, we're not accessible by the conductor the engineer. They actually had brakeman who worked on the train, and so the engineer had to give signals to the brakeman for the train to break, and sometimes these signals would get lost, which means that you could have a massive, horrible accident. So we'll just go past the station, right past. The best case scenario,

you miss your stop. Worst case scenario, you just hit another train or something else. That's funny when I think back on you know, trains, it seems like you always see them in movies, no matter how far back you hear that pneumatic break sound, hissing and the popping, But you're saying that that came along, that was that was Westing else who created the actual early Yeah, he was.

It was an idea that involved using the compressed air so that the conductor, the person in the actual engine, could use So it's not that they weren't ever using compressed air before. It was that they didn't have a brake system that was accessible from the engine before the brakes were elsewhere on the train. So uh, that ended

up making him quite a bit of money. He also invented a valve that was useful to reduce the pressure in uh natural gas lines so that someone could actually have natural gas in their home because the you know, they could tap into a well and they could get natural gas, but they had to pressurize it so that

they could move it through distribution pipes. Well, the problem was that if you tried to have your natural gas come out of your distribution pipe into your home at that pressure, it would be way too high for you to operate it in any kind of safe way. So the heat created a valve that would reduce that pressure so that you would get it at a controlled rate

and not just turn your oven into a flamethrower. Um. But you can see that all of these inventions are kind of wrapped up together in things like air pressure, compressed air valves, things like that, and through that he was able to build the Westinghouse Corporation, which branched out into all forms of invention. One of the inventors that westing House, Yeah, Westinghouse hired a a guy by the name of Nicola Tesla. Tesla also for a while had

worked for the Edison Company. He worked for the Edison Company while he was still in Europe, and so it was not part of the company that was I mean, ultimately they answered to Edison, but he did. He didn't work for Edison himself until he came over to America a little bit later and then had a falling out and then went to work for west western House for a while. Yeah, and so a lot of people credit Tesla as the guy who quote unquote invented alternating current,

which is not true. Alternating current existed before Tesla was even going to school. Uh. It existed mostly in Europe. It wasn't really being used widely at all, and it wasn't being used in the United States. But it did exist. But four he came over. He did, however, create lots of improvements that made it practical. It wasn't practical before, and he was a lot of the work he did made it practical, the turbines that he was working with,

the turbines, his improvements to things. Westinghouses Company was the one the company that was in charge of making transformers, and some of Nessla, some of Nesla's some of Tesla's work. Boy, it's warm in here. So of Tesla's work UH went into improving transformers as well. So Tesla was known as an inventor. He was known for making some stuff that again kind of like Archimedes, may be pretty apocryphal. What

he earthquake machine would be a big one. Death ray that Lauren mentioned, the death ray in his in his case, was supposed to be some sort of ray that would make aircraft drop out of the sky. UH, and that his idea was that if you were to create such a thing, you would end all war because no one would want No one would ever brave the the the death ray because it would mean that they would lose immediately.

You know. It's that whole idea that if you just create a weapon strong enough, you in war because no one would be crazy enough to engage in war, which we've disproven multiple times throughout our history. But he was also there's also the legend about him creating the the broadcast towers that could broadcast electrical power over over miles and miles. Uh. There's no really, there's no great proof that that ever worked. There's there are accounts, but the

accounts could are not necessarily reliable. And I do want to make it clear that wireless electricity is a thing. Yeah, you're talking about I think a lot of people don't even realize that that you actually can harvest ambient wireless electricity. But it's you're talking about scale. Can you get enough of it? And Tesla's version was using a a tower and then turning it on and essentially lighting up light

bulbs that were twenty miles away. That's different than either using some sort of of magnetic resonance so that you can create a wireless power transfer, or using an antenna to uh to gather in radio waves and create electricity that way, which by the way, you can do. It's just not efficient at all. You don't get enough juice

there to really do anything useful. You'd have to have an enormous antenna, and even then, by by the time you get to that you're talking about pouring in more energy into building the antenna than you would ever get from harvesting radio waves. Well, I did see something about some cool I can't remember the kid's name now because it was a while back, but he was some young guy who would come up with an invention that, uh,

it would harvest ambient radiation from electrical towers. So you just go stand by an electrical line and turn this thing on and it would I mean still wouldn't get that much, but yeah, at least then what you're talking about is maybe a system that could recapture wasted energy. Yeah. Yeah, when ech case, you're talking about improving efficiencies over uh, you know, established systems. There's nothing wrong with that. That's

a fantastic invention. You know. It means that we end up getting more for what we're you know, what we're putting into it. It does not mean that we're you know, suddenly tapping into free energy or anything like that, but it's still important. Um well, even Tesla's towers wouldn't be free with the idea, but the idea was that it would.

Uh Like the the conspiracy theorists all say that the reason why these don't exist is because power companies don't want that information to ever get out because it means that they would no longer have because how, yeah, how would you meter it? Like if you're just broadcasting electricity, then you don't know who's using what and you can't charge people. You can charge a flat fee for everybody,

but that's all you could do. I can believe that power companies would definitely be against this, but I don't buy the conspiracy. There's there's also you know, there was that brief period of time after he passed away that that his notes kind of sort of disappeared in the fans of the U S government. The US government ended up essentially commandeering his notes u partially because they didn't

want it to fall into other other government's hands. Um, So there was there was a definitely a conspiracy theory there for a while that the US government was trying to to to keep it quiet, like the death ray and all this kind of stuff. But then it may very well be more along the lines of they just didn't want some other nation to get hold of this and then take advantage of it and uh and set the United States back. The papers were eventually released, so

they were not held forever. Um Beyond that, we then have Edison. Thomas Edison. He actually did invent quite a few things, although many of the things that are attributed to he was more of a businessman honestly than an inventor. Not that he wasn't a terrific inventor, but he's I think to some extent. I think it's a little fairly vilified. Okay, yeah, so so Tesla on the Internet gets lionized, Edison gets demonized. Yeah. So, I mean it's like I said in the Oatmeal comic strip,

it's very which is a funny little comic strip. Yeah. I don't mean to say little either. It's a funny comic strip. I don't mean to I'm not trying to to belittle it. But it oversimplifies the relationship between Tesla and Edison and their contribution. It does, And the author has come out and said that, yes, it oversimplifies it, and I was I was making a comic that is the funny and so therefore, you know, please don't take

that meant to be an Encyclopedia entering. For some reason, though this meme really latched on the thing about Tesla. People had been crazy about Tesla for a while, but the Oatmeal comic strip kind of put it into it, put it into a framework that people really identified. Yeah, and you combine that on top of like David Bowie's performance and the prestige and stuff like that, and it's

just a great story. You know, You've got where Edison's like this mob ball, He's got goons that come in and spoiler alert, some of us haven't seen it yet. So anyway, uh So, Anyway, what I was going to say, though, is that is a great story that you have the idealistic inventor who is and he's downtrodden because the corporations are the ones that keep pulling the rug out from underneath him. The actual story is way more complex than that.

And anyway, going back to Edison and talking about what he actually did invent, he did invent lots of telegraph improvements. In fact, one of his earliest jobs was working for a telegraph company. Um the story I heard was that he rescued a young man from certain death and the young man's father ended up employing Edison in his telegraph company.

And then Edison eventually in one of his wacky experiments because he did like to experiment with stuff, accidentally spilled some acid in his work room which was directly over his boss's office, and the acid leaked down and ended up earning holes and papers on the boss's desk, and

he was subsequently let go. But that he he did create some improvements to telegraph operation and then his first major invention was an improved stock ticker, which he sold to the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company for the princely sum of forty thousand dollars, which back in those days was quite a bit of cash. Still not not a bad haul, but it was a lot back then. He used that money to help create his first R and

D facility. Uh, and then eventually he ended up selling other inventions and moved that facility to Menlo Park, which is the famous one that everyone associates with Edison though, yeah, he was the wizard of Menlo Park. And Uh. The other big invention, the one that got him lots of fame was the phonograph that was and that that seems to be Edison's invention. It wasn't that, you know, he had he didn't have a team working on that that

was now in Menlo Park. He end up getting a team of engineers and technicians together and you know he would direct the company, but a lot of the actual work in inventing, testing, discarding ideas, trying new ideas fell to his team. So while Edison was quite the inventor, many of the things, including things like the incandescent light bulb, were really the products of lots of people working together.

That's true. But to be fair, a lot of the people we think of as uh discoverers inventors are project managers, you know, that's triple who were in charge of groups of people who were doing the hands on work. Well, especially the later you get and the more complex the technology is, the more important it becomes to have that team of people because it's getting increasingly complex for a

single person to do one of these things. Also, we just have better records as we as we move up through history, And that's true to like this brilliant guy who comes up with these amazing ideas as fantastic, Thank goodness, he hasn't learned to read it write yet. Um. The impression I get when I look at Edison is like the name of the game was volume, so he is responsible for tons of Also he had hearing loss, so

it would have been important. No, I just mean he had tons and tons of inventions and so lots were great. And then there are all these things that you look at and be like there. The one I saw the other day, just the other day online was something about Edison's patent for the single poor concrete house. Yeah, he was big on concrete. He he had a single park

concrete house. He was big on concrete furniture. UM. Other patents that he held included a pneumatic stencil pen, which is basically a tattoo machine made use of those, an electric power meter which worked off of zinc cells UM and that that would have to be changed out by by the meter reader. UM. An electrographic vote recorder that that could have, you know, sent a basic on off signal to to record votes like for example, from the lobby of Congress or something like that. Right, okay, not

one of those old voting machines. No, No, like that. The whole show about that. But moving moving on from our great triumvirate of Tesla, Westinghouse and Edison, the next name I have is a Philo Farnsworth, which is this is funny because it's we're talking about television here, and electronic television. Now, a lot of different people were working on the idea of television at this time, and this time being like in the early twentieth century, a lot

of different people from all over the world. We're working on this and uh. And Farnsworth was developing ideas that other people had kind of started, and then he was picking up and carrying on. Uh. It's interesting, you know, he was fifteen years old when he first thought of using a lens to focus an image through a tube onto a section of photo electric cells. I was back in nineteen twenty two. Uh. And then he eventually would file a patent for the idea he came up with

in nineteen seven. And he wasn't the only person to come up with an idea of this nature that would eventually lead to the way we think of television today, because, like I said, there were other inventors who had come up with ideas for television, including some mechanical sets that weren't using electronics. They were using other means to try and bring a picture to a screen. So he was

given the credit of being the inventor of television. But there are a lot of people who point out there are many other names that you could mention when you come to television in general. Uh and this this kind of illustrates how complex this is. Same sort of thing is true when you get to the discussion of who invented the radio. Uh, there's it's far more complex than

just saying it's Mark, Yeah exactly, don't you remember. Uh So, the the point being that that Farnsworth, while we mentioned him as the inventor of television, it's the truth is it's far more complex. There was like one common part he was most directly responsible for, right, it was like the image dispersed or it was it was an anode finger that was it was a all right, magnetic coils that would move an anode finger with a scanning aperture

over an image. That's the specific patent. Uh. And he also, you know, you would have thought that the guy who invinced TV, especially with how important TV is, that he would have you know, made a million billion dollars from it. But it didn't work out that way because what happened was he gets the invention just as electronic TVs are starting to get some traction, the United States goes into World War Two. As a result, almost all broadcasts halt, so just as television is about to get started, TV

broadcasts essentially stopped. There were a few markets where they continued, but as a nation, it kind of ended. So suddenly he didn't have any money coming in from licensing. By the time World War Two ends, his patent had entered into public domain, so no one had to pay him licenses because now it's public domain information. Patents don't last forever,

so less longer now than they used to write. I think it's the same amount of time actually, so because maybe it was seven was when he filed for the patent, and you know, we're nine six really at the end of the think you're thinking copyright, which has changed dramatically, but patents have been pretty much the same the the The interesting thing to me is that he got so disillusioned by how this turned out that he, according to his wife, would not even allow the use of the

word television in the home because because he was burned by it. I mean, it was his work that was being used and he didn't really benefit from it. Um he towards the end of his life. He died in nineteen seventy one. Towards the end of his life, he was actually working on a different idea that we're still kind of hoping will pan out, which is using atomic

fusion as a means of generating power. So he was invited to be part of the Manhattan Project but turned it down supposedly, I mean he definitely turned it down if he were, if he were in fact invited the invitation parts of the supposedly. Um. And then we've got some information about some some some wacky crazy inventions that weren't intended wacky crazy. I'm silly at least. Yeah, speaking of in the video, we talked about how so there were all these things where oh, people were messing around

doing their thing and they discovered something important. But it also goes the other way, right, they were trying to discover something important, working towards something important, and then yeah, and accidentally discovered something really fun. Um. One of my favorite examples is the super soaker um so water gun. I used him when I was a kid. I thought it was great because the things sprays so hard it kind of hurts, and and what you really want to

do with the gun is inflict pain. But it's hard to do that when it's a regular squirre gun. Unless you get them right in the eyes right so, or you're filling it with lemon juice or something, yeah, or anything cost it yet as a kid, no idea. I'm just saying that if you wanted to, I did not want to. I'm like Joe, I did not wish to inflict harm. Yeah, oh sure yeah. Um, so you've got the super soaker where well where did it come from? Turns out it was invented by accident, um by a

nuclear engineer named lawn E. Johnson. And this he was an engineer who had worked for NASA before, and he was trying to design a cooling pump. Um and so what with the way he thought he could design this cooling pump was to use water to compressed water to disperse heat. And when he was testing a prototype at home, he was shooting the water out of the tank and it went, you know, and he thought, wow, I make

a great water gun. Boom, there's your fortune. Change change change tracks go from the cooling pump to the water gun market and child satist rout he made crazy bank on that. But we also mentioned like, um, there's this Well, so we were talking about World War two earlier with Farnsworth. A couple of inventions came out of World War two era efforts. One was the slinky um, which was supposed to be Originally it was a steel torsion spring, and if you can imagine this, what it was supposed to

do was stabilize a naval instrument. So if you imagine you're out on the ocean in rough weather and the ships being tossed around a lot, I, how do you keep your instruments stable energy to prevent exactly? Yeah, So you'd hang it from a thing like a slinky, and then it wouldn't it wouldn't be shaken, right, It ends up. It ends up. Yeah. Um. But so what this guy discovered was while he had this prototype sitting on a table and he knocked it off and just watched this

beautiful arc. Yeah. The way it traveled was just so elegant, and then it's on your back. It's great for a snack. Yeah yeah, but the same thing, really log slinky, same thing. Another World War two era accidental invention that turned out really fun was silly putty, which was originally supposed to be a rubber substitute. Right in World or two, there was a rubber ration because you had to use rubber for boots, tires, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, stuff for

the war effort. Um, So what are you going to use for the rubber you need? While people were trying to come up with another way to make something like rubber, synthetic rubber instead, what he made was a really fun toy that's cool to put, you know, in your sister's shoe or something like that. Exactly. Yeah, if you want to, you know, pick up the Funnies Sunday paper. Oh yeah, yeah,

because he could actually transferred stuff. Yeah, you can pick up newsprint and then you could also make it balance. It was, yeah, it was, but it was just one of those things that accidentally happened. We got the names here, Yeah, the the slinky guy was Richard James and the silly Putty Guy was James, right, yep. And uh you know, the spirit of invention, of course goes all the way up till today. We've got you know, we mentioned uh LYE. Johnson who invented the super soaker. Of course, he was

working on one thing and came up with another. We've got some great examples of modern day inventors. I mean they're they're companies that are built on the fact that the founders were really enthusiasts who were trying out new things Apple example. Especially as we get into electronics, it starts getting really Yeah, if you're listening to this on a computer right now or an iPod or something like that, you want to thank a couple of pranksters from the

nineteen seventies. Yeah, Steve Jobs, and Steve wasn'tiac. Wasn'tiac was of course the really the computer whizz of the two Jobs was not that he was bad at at computers, but he was really good at business, the business side and the marketing side. And Wasn'tiac he he actually, you know he was. He was known as a bit of a prankster. In fact, still is known as a bit of a prankster. But back in the day he was.

He was one of those guys who was really interested in learning how things work and then kind of playing with them. So one of them was so, yeah, back in the back in the late sixties, early seventies, really the seventies, um was where it began to floor. There was this, uh, there was this culture called phone freaking

freaking spelled with a pH. Yeah, So so phone freaking was all about finding ways to manipulate the telephone system, not necessarily just to make prank phone calls, although there were plenty of those being made, but also just learning that if you created certain tones on certain phone systems, for example, you could make a free phone call anywhere

you wanted. You know, you would learn what tones the system relied on, and if you could replicate those tones, then you would be able to take advantage of it. One of the famous phone freakers was known as Captain Crunch because because he discovered that a little toy plastic whistle that came in the box of Captain Crunch created the exact tone he needed in order to manipulate one of the telephone systems, and so that that's where his nickname came from, was the fact that he discovered this.

And uh Wozniak was known as one of the guys who was really into this phone freaking thing, like learned, and it was really more about he had the sensatiable curiosity to learn how these systems worked and to kind of learn how to do things within the system that the system was not necessarily designed to do, which is the very the very heart of hacking. And and innovation and tinkering, this idea of taking something that exists and then tweaking it in a way so it does something

new and unusual. Um and sometimes it with amazing results. Yeah. I mean people probably don't even realize that the computer you have now you you can thank hobbyists for that. I mean, computers came from people who were screwing around doing something fun, right, Yeah, they were they were taking yeah yeah, yeah, well yeah, because the before the micro computer, we're talking about computers that took took up entire rooms

in the research lab. That's a really good distinction. Actually we are talking about personal computers because because the macro computers, if you want to put it that way, we're all being developed by unif space at the time, absolutely in government. But so Wozniak built the Apple one for his computer club. You know, he was hanging out with his buddies and I guess it was Palo Alto, the Homebrew Computer Club. Yeah, And they would just try to impress each other by

building computers. And there was another interesting pair of people who would visit the Homebrew Computer Club in order to talk about a programming language. They had developed a programming language, a variant of basic which had been invented back in the sixties. Um, those two people were Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who would go on to found Microsoft. So you even had Apple and Microsoft both coming out of

this culture at the same time. Now, in one case, we're talking about invention through software as opposed to hardware, but the same spirit was there, this idea of learning how things work and then creating new things based upon those principles, and we still see that today. So um, I think that's a good coverage of the history of invention from a link a ten thousand mile high perspective. Yeah, yeah, I do want to mention that, you know, all of

our examples are basically here in the West. That's because we live in American and we speak English and and and and our research base is very Western, and a lot of our information comes from you know, the U. S. Patent Office and stuff that, and they have a terrific blog if you ever want to check it out. Um. They mentioned all kinds of really cool random stuff like the pattern that Michael Jackson got for the shoes that let him do the smooth criminal lean stuff like very important.

So yeah, yeah, critical critically. I remember seeing that video and thinking I want to be able to do that, and uh, two broken noses later, I said, I'm done. I'm done. Yeah, it's shoes that hook into the stage. Yeah that I did not realize that that was an important thing to to to learn later on, actually more important to learn you're not quite a smooth criminal yet sort of a rough criminal. Yeah, yeah, rough delinquent, that's yeah. I think the linquent is is probably the best best

phrase to use. So, uh yeah, there are a lot of like you were saying, Lauren, there are a lot of inventions that have come out from other parts of the world, obviously, and they have been terrific. But yeah, there have been some fantastic examples. But uh yeah, we were looking at this from a Western perspective just because

that's where we're from. Not to suggest that that's the only perspective, but anyway, that that's kind of a roundup of just some of the people we were thinking of when we were talking about this spirit of invention and innovation, and uh, in our next show, we're going to start talking about some of the really fun, crazy inventions that people have come up with as as part of the maker fare movement, and uh I can't wait to talk about them because some of them are not practical at

all and incredibly awesome kind of like me. All right, So that wraps this up. Guys, if you have enjoyed this show, let us know, send us an email. Let's know what you would like us to talk about in the future. Our email addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com. Go to FW thinking dot com for all the videos, the blog post, the podcasts, and all the

other information we've got there. We've got some really great articles linked on there that I think you will enjoy, So go check it out and let us know what you think, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places.