When Thomas Edison died in 1931, lights across the United States were dimmed in his honor. This episode looks past the textbook inventor to the ruthless businessman and master of publicity behind him. We trace his childhood hearing loss, his teenage work as a train news butcher with a laboratory in the baggage car, the quadruplex telegraph that funded Menlo Park, and the “intellectual assembly line” of employees who worked 18-hour days.

We cover the carbon microphone and the phonograph, including how he judged music by biting a piano, and the system he built around the light bulb: the bamboo filament, the Pearl Street Station, and direct current. We then explain why DC lost to Westinghouse’s alternating current, the dark propaganda war Edison waged against it, his removal from what became GE, his failed ore mining and concrete house ventures, and the toll his workaholism took on his family.

• How deafness, early entrepreneurship, and a near train collision shaped Edison’s applied approach to invention
• Menlo Park as the first industrial research lab, and who really did the work
• The science behind the phonograph, the carbon transmitter, and bone conduction
• Why AC beat DC, and Edison’s campaign of animal electrocutions and support for the electric chair
• The X-ray tragedy of Clarence Dally, his neglected family, Henry Ford’s “last breath” test tube, and the birth of hustle culture