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The Cine-Files Presents BUSINESS HISTORY: Thomas Edison and the Movie Murder Mystery · The Cine-Files

0:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, Santa Falls fans.
0:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's John and Steve here, and today we're doing things a little bit differently and sharing a really fun episode of another podcast that we think you're going to enjoy.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called Business History, and it's made by our friends over at Pushkin Industries.
0:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Steve, you list to a lot of Pushkin podcasts.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell us more about this and what is business history all about?
0:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason I started listening to Pushkin podcast is because it was founded by Malcolm Gladwell, an author I have literally been listening to for 20 plus years, and that led me to a whole bunch of other podcasts like against the rules with Michael Lewis, a life in lyrics with Paul McCartney.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: These are exciting podcasts.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So when they reached out to us about business history, I got really, really excited because I knew that Pushkin made very quality podcasts.
0:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It was obvious that this was going to be a great show.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, business history is all about telling the most exciting stories in the history of business, the great mavericks, the incredible innovations, the huge surprises.
1:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But the reason that we're sharing this podcast right now is that it actually is a movie story, because they are telling the story.
1:14
[SPEAKER_01]: about how Thomas Edison claimed to invent the motion picture and then use that claim to dominate the early film industry before the turn of the century.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But this isn't just a story about one of the greatest innovators in American history.
1:29
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a real crime murder mystery because it is also the story of the real man who
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: actually invented motion pictures, and that is Louis LePrince, who got on to a train in 1890, ready to tell the world about his invention, and he was never seen again.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Did Thomas Edison murder the real inventor of motion pictures in order to steal his patent and dominate the industry the only way for you to find out is by listening right now
2:00
[SPEAKER_01]: to business history with Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith from our very good friends over at Pushkin Industries.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, well, here's the murky store and who deserves the credit for making movie magic.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We hope you enjoy it.
2:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you do, find more tales of Founder's business success and spectacular failures on business history available now on YouTube, Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Pushkin, to click.
2:29
[SPEAKER_02]: No, it was perfect.
2:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Wish it stopped.
2:31
[SPEAKER_02]: You got it.
2:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
2:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the fall of 1890, and there's a guy named Louis LePrinz, he's French, and he's about to show the world that he has invented the movies.
3:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Moving pictures.
3:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Love it.
3:08
[SPEAKER_02]: He's spent about a decade at this point developing a camera slash projector.
3:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Almost went broke a couple times.
3:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But finally now he has it.
3:17
[SPEAKER_02]: He has done it.
3:18
[SPEAKER_02]: He's built a camera.
3:20
[SPEAKER_02]: He has filmed the first movie ever made and he's going to go to New York to show the world.
3:25
[SPEAKER_02]: He's going to have the premiere of all premieres.
3:28
[SPEAKER_02]: The very first one.
3:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, the premiere premiere.
3:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Number one.
3:31
[SPEAKER_02]: But first, he decides he's going to go visit his brother, his brother who lives in, as you say, Dijon.
3:37
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the French historian.
3:38
[SPEAKER_02]: In French, yes.
3:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I think he does have a mustache also.
3:42
[SPEAKER_02]: From there, he's going to go, Dijon Paris, Paris, London, London, New York.
3:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Couldn't go direct at that time.
3:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he goes to visit his brother, spends a few days there, and then on September 16th, 1890, Louis Le Prince, the man who invented movies, gets on the train from Dijon to Paris.
4:02
[SPEAKER_02]: He is never seen again.
4:04
[SPEAKER_02]: He disappears.
4:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, his wife at that time was living in New York, his wife Lizzy, and, you know, she's waiting for him to show up, but at that time, people are late.
4:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Things happen.
4:15
[SPEAKER_02]: But she starts to get nervous and her nervousness turns into panic.
4:19
[SPEAKER_02]: She starts going down to the battery down to the southern tip of Manhattan every day to watch the ships come in and, you know, see if she can see him come off the ship.
4:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing.
4:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so she's contacting her family back in England.
4:31
[SPEAKER_02]: She's contacting his brother in France.
4:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Nobody knows anything.
4:36
[SPEAKER_02]: He's gone.
4:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on May 28, 1891, this is less than a year after he disappeared.
4:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Lizzie sees this headline on the front page of the New York sun.
4:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Why don't you give it to us?
4:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Read it to us.
4:53
[SPEAKER_03]: The Connecticut graph.
4:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Edison's latest and most surprising device pure motion recorded and reproduced.
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Lizzie reads this headline, and she thinks to herself, I mean, I know what happened.
5:05
[SPEAKER_02]: It's obvious what happened.
5:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Thomas Edison killed my husband and stole his idea.
5:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Jacques Hughes, I'm Jacob Goldstein.
5:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business History.
5:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll show about the history of business.
5:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, smug, smug in the read today.
5:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm proud of this show.
5:24
[SPEAKER_03]: This is our third and final episode about Thomas Edison.
5:27
[SPEAKER_03]: In the first episode, we talked about how Edison invented this whole new way of inventing things.
5:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Second episode, he brings electricity to the world, but also manages to screw it up a little and bet on the wrong horse.
5:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And today, we talk about Edison's last big success.
5:45
[SPEAKER_03]: the movies, the motion pictures.
5:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Kind of the key theme, the sort of big idea in the show today is simultaneous invention.
5:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the sort of classic invention story, and this was like, say, true of Edison and the phonograph, is one guy or one team just coming up with this idea that nobody saw coming, making this huge breakthrough out on their own.
6:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's unusual, right?
6:09
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the time, maybe most of the time, big breakthroughs are not like that.
6:12
[SPEAKER_02]: There are all these different teams, and everybody knows that a breakthrough is coming, and everybody is racing, working on different
6:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really interesting to look at the story and think, well, in that setting, who wins, who loses, and why?
6:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And in particular, in this case, it's the story of how Edison does not invent the movies, but still wins.
6:35
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also about a murder.
6:36
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a murder in the show today.
6:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Allegedly.
6:39
[SPEAKER_02]: I definitely died.
6:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's true, that's true.
6:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And he would have by now.
6:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yes, yes, they're all dead now.
6:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's pick up the Edison story.
6:47
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to pick it up in 1887 when Edison has just turned 40, he's 40 years old.
6:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And he moves his lab from Menlo Park to West Orange, the Wizard of West Orange.
6:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, that sounds pretty good.
7:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not bad, but he's still the Wizard of Menlo Park.
7:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But now,
7:05
[SPEAKER_02]: he has a much bigger and better lab, you know, you remember from the first episode he had everything in one place in one room essentially.
7:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and so now he is an international celebrity with backing from the most powerful and rich financiers in the world and this new lab reflects that actually lab isn't even a big enough word, it's a compound, right?
7:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So he builds like a factory where they're making photographs, you know, the record players and the records to go on
7:34
[SPEAKER_02]: multi-stories high, there's a machine shop, and then the sort of part of it is the lab, right?
7:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And now Edison can buy everything.
7:43
[SPEAKER_02]: He buys every metal in existence.
7:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Apparently, of course, thousands of dollars of chemicals.
7:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I found this one list that I guess it's just like the plant and animal products they bought and I love it.
7:57
[SPEAKER_02]: We read it.
7:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I picture this wall and we're
8:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Porky pine quills.
8:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Tanned walrus hide.
8:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Guess you don't want the raw walrus.
8:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
8:10
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it's right.
8:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Skins of every known animal.
8:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Every known animal.
8:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like Noah's Ark.
8:16
[SPEAKER_03]: A pound of peacock tails.
8:18
[SPEAKER_03]: A dozen bulls hordes.
8:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the case 11 isn't enough.
8:22
[SPEAKER_03]: A dozen walrus tusks.
8:23
[SPEAKER_03]: 25 pounds of marlin.
8:27
[SPEAKER_03]: The fish.
8:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Marlin.
8:28
[SPEAKER_03]: for eating, like I wonder 25 pounds of oil is that for snacking or for inventing.
8:32
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the whole thing.
8:33
[SPEAKER_03]: In Edison's mind, you never knew.
8:37
[SPEAKER_03]: If there was going to be some solution and some guys are going to say, Marlin, we got Marlin.
8:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's so right.
8:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a few ways to think about this.
8:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But like, the simple one is he wants to be able to invent everything all the time.
8:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of what he's doing at this point.
8:52
[SPEAKER_02]: He's got hundreds of workers and he's assigning all different people to all different projects all the time.
8:57
[SPEAKER_03]: But still at the age of 40, like it's been a while since Edison has like had a big hit kind of yeah right I mean he moved Menlopark in the late what 1870s and came out the phonograph right away right right away right away Everyone's like this is magic right light bulb everyone knows about this now what he's
9:19
[SPEAKER_02]: working on lots of different things.
9:21
[SPEAKER_02]: He's spending money.
9:23
[SPEAKER_02]: He's trying to invent iron mining.
9:25
[SPEAKER_02]: That's actually what he's really into at this point.
9:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He's bought it.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Iron mine and he's built this ore milling plant.
9:30
[SPEAKER_02]: He loves to go out there and get dirty.
9:32
[SPEAKER_02]: He's actually working on a little electric car sort of a protoelectric car.
9:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the key moment really in the movie story happens in 1888.
9:43
[SPEAKER_02]: when he meets with this guy Edward Mybridge, kind of this minor historical figure you might have heard of.
9:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Mybridge was a photographer who got famous.
9:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It was actually when he helped settle a bet for Leland Stanford, the guy who pounded the golden spike in the Transcontinental Railroad, there was this bet.
10:03
[SPEAKER_02]: do horses lift all four feet off the ground when they're running and they're running so fast you can't you can't tell you can't see it right and Stanford said yes and so my bridge had developed this technique where he could take rapid sequential photos of like animals in motion.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So we actually goes to Stanford's horse farm in Palo Alto with later be Stanford University.
10:25
[SPEAKER_02]: and take these pictures of the horse running.
10:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, you can see they do lift up all four feet when they run.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And so my bridge gets famous for these kinds of photos.
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's talking to Edison about it.
10:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, if you think about, oh,
10:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Rapid sequential photos of an animal in motion if you string them together fast enough.
10:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it will be a movie Yes, it seems obvious.
10:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes, and it was it was basically obviously at the time people in fact had started to make flip books Which is you know this idea there was this toy called the Zoatru.
10:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely These yeah, with the little slits in them and you you spin it and you can only see one picture at a time But it's like I do in cartwheels or you know Yeah, it's like it's animation.
11:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the simple little animation and so this is all in the air
11:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And after his meeting with my bridge, Edison assigns one of his assistants, like, okay, this is another project for us.
11:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Among all the other things we're working on, he says, go figure out how to build a photographic system that can capture motion.
11:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the time, this is Thomas Edison, the inventor, right?
11:31
[SPEAKER_03]: You have the idea, you delegate.
11:33
[SPEAKER_03]: You say you have a room full of all those animals, do what you have to do.
11:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
11:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And when Edison tells this guy to go off and work on it, he does not know that Louis LePrinz, the guy we talked about at the beginning of the story, is way ahead of him.
11:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's talk about Louis LePrentz.
11:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Louis LePrentz was born in 1841, a few years before Edison, Little Older Than Edison.
11:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And I should say, by the way, the details of his life come from this book called, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures by Paul Fisher.
12:03
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a good book.
12:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Paul Fisher was generous enough to talk to me actually.
12:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was quite helpful in putting together this show.
12:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Louie's father is a French army officer named Louie Le Prince.
12:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Louie has an older brother named Louie Le Prince.
12:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a perfect name.
12:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a very good name for another one.
12:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, why reinvent the wheel?
12:23
[SPEAKER_02]: His mother is not named Louie.
12:25
[SPEAKER_02]: His mother's name is Elizabeth.
12:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And he grows up moving around France because his dad's in the army and, you know, this time, the middle of the 18th century, is technologically incredible.
12:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And we talked about this, right?
12:38
[SPEAKER_03]: It feels like every day something new is coming.
12:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Louis falls in love with both technology and art.
12:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And he decides to devote himself to sort of combining technology and art, right?
12:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So he apprentices with a painter, but he also studies optics and chemistry.
12:56
[SPEAKER_02]: and he winds up as a photographer, which is like the perfect Venn diagram overlap, right?
13:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Photography is just like a few decades old at this point.
13:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's E.D.s a new technology.
13:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he's working on photography.
13:10
[SPEAKER_02]: In France, he falls in love with this young British artist named Lizzy.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Follows her back to to a town called Leeds, which I am informed is in the UK.
13:22
[SPEAKER_02]: They start on art school together and LePrinz is really into these sort of creative applications of photography He gets well known for combining photography with pottery.
13:33
[SPEAKER_02]: There is this moment in his life that comes in 1880 So years before Edison starts thinking about motion pictures LePrinz is 39 years old.
13:42
[SPEAKER_02]: He's married.
13:43
[SPEAKER_02]: He has a couple kids.
13:45
[SPEAKER_02]: He's kind of restless
13:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's 39-year-old man, he wants to spend time in the garage, tinkering with his tools, literally, the dream, right?
13:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So yes, and in fact, he does have a little workshop out by the house, you know, a little photo studio, and one day he's out there working, and he has, in his hand, like a glass plate and a piece of paper that both have the same photograph on them, like a portrait, I think.
14:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And for sec he sort of drops them, they start to slip out of his hands and he reaches down to grab him and as they're falling through the air, he sees this motion and he thinks, ah, you know, listen.
14:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like when people tell these stories what they're doing actually is trying to capture that feeling of an aha moment.
14:34
[SPEAKER_03]: You're saying it has truthiness, it is truthiness.
14:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it felt him that he had this insight and indeed he did have it inside.
14:41
[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, this is possible.
14:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, you're saying maybe it didn't happen.
14:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Louis LePrince from this point on devotes his life to figuring out motion pictures.
14:50
[SPEAKER_02]: He calls this moment the spark and you know he has this vision and it seems kind of hokey and retrospect but like admirable in its way that moving pictures are going to like bring the world together.
15:04
[SPEAKER_02]: You know people of different nations will see the way foreigners live and it will make them understand their common humanity or whatever.
15:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, he is in fact going to spend the rest of his life on this, and not long after this moment, he rents a bigger workshop, this one's in town, and he hires a machinist and a woodworker, and he hires his son adult to come and work with him.
15:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I know that we've spent
15:28
[SPEAKER_03]: two episodes talking about Thomas Edison, but I am kind of rooting for the artist at this point.
15:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
15:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm always rooting for the artist against the the the the big industrial mic at this point of Thomas Edison, but you have to think about like how hard this is going to be.
15:45
[SPEAKER_03]: right, film moves at 24 frames per second.
15:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you have glass plates, that's what he's working on.
15:53
[SPEAKER_03]: He's thinking about glass plates.
15:54
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what they're using at the time.
15:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, 24 times a second, you're going to go.
16:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it seems impossible.
16:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like how you could even have that many glass plates, how they got a dot break, right?
16:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet, and yet, this is a moment when somehow the movie's feel kind of imminent, right?
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, everybody is working on this problem.
16:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And more than that, everybody's paying attention to everyone else.
16:22
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics.
16:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Came up with this idea of these ages of innovation.
16:29
[SPEAKER_03]: We're really about communication.
16:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It was really about a time when everyone's sending letters to each other.
16:34
[SPEAKER_03]: You're reading about each other in the newspapers.
16:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously patents are coming through in the United States.
16:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, there are times when not only are people feeling the spirit of invention, but they're seeing exactly what other people are doing.
16:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Joel Mokier.
16:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Joel Mokier?
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: One that Nobel.
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And you mentioned patents, which is really interesting, right, because patents are in the US Constitution famously.
16:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The founders felt that strongly about them.
16:58
[SPEAKER_02]: In part because what a patent does is it makes you publish your idea, right?
17:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Patents are public, and that is the point.
17:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And like Edison is like reading every patent or having people who work for him, read every patent that comes through.
17:11
[SPEAKER_02]: That is core, this idea of sharing knowledge.
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And we see this with the invention of the internet.
17:15
[SPEAKER_03]: We see this with recently about AI.
17:18
[SPEAKER_03]: People are innovating, but they're innovating in public.
17:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And announcing almost immediately, we've done this.
17:23
[SPEAKER_03]: We've managed to do this and figure this out, and it leads their competitors to say like,
17:27
[SPEAKER_03]: if that's possible, maybe this other thing is possible.
17:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that is this big idea of simultaneous invention, right?
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And like the AI example is really interesting because, you know, the key breakthrough in AI in like the last decade was just a paper that Google researchers published, right?
17:44
[SPEAKER_02]: They figured out a better way to make AI work on basically on Nvidia chips on GPUs.
17:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And they could have kept that as a trade secret, right?
17:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Google could have just built its own AI model and people and, wow, why is that so good?
17:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But they did the opposite.
17:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They published it.
17:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, that is what's happening with the movies in the 1880s, right?
18:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody is working.
18:03
[SPEAKER_02]: They're kind of working in public.
18:04
[SPEAKER_02]: People are patenting things when they get patents.
18:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, LePrinz, as you said, he has this problem with the glass plates, right?
18:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so,
18:12
[SPEAKER_02]: first, he builds this 16 lens camera that is, you can see pictures of it.
18:18
[SPEAKER_02]: That is amazing to behold because his idea is like, well, what if you could just have one plate and have like 16 exposures like the I have a fly like the I have a fly, it's a fly camera.
18:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And then somehow you would, you know, play back each one, but like that doesn't work for an interesting reason, which is because the lenses are like next to each other, each one is from a slightly different point of view,
18:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, and so it has to be the exact scene shot for the illusion of motion.
18:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it'll it'll be jumpy.
18:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll be jumpy.
18:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Make a sec.
18:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
18:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So the real breakthrough for LePrinz comes from somewhere else.
18:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Also classic innovation kind of adjacency driving innovation.
18:55
[SPEAKER_02]: In this case, it's George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, perhaps you've heard of Kodak.
19:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I have used to be a great company.
19:02
[SPEAKER_02]: George Eastman invents paper film and you know George Eastman is not interested in the movies, right?
19:08
[SPEAKER_02]: He wants photography to be like a hobby for everybody instead of a thing you need professionals to do and obviously George Eastman is wildly successful But Louis LePrin sees this paper film and thinks ah, I don't have to use glass plates And in fact paper film is not ideal for the movies.
19:25
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not Translucincent entirely
19:29
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's a little bit translucent.
19:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Also it tends to catch fire because you've got to put a bright light behind it to be changed.
19:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a problem.
19:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But it works.
19:38
[SPEAKER_02]: The prince is able to build a movie camera and it's this beautiful, mahogany box with like brass hinges like in Williamsburg, they would go crazy for this camera.
19:49
[SPEAKER_02]: He was an artist at his heart.
19:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And in October of 1888, Louis LePrince,
19:57
[SPEAKER_02]: makes the first movies ever made.
20:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in Leeds where he's living.
20:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There's actually a few movies he seems to make on this one day.
20:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the movies survives and is in fact on YouTube.
20:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So I put a, I put a link in the notes.
20:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So here.
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to watch them okay.
20:15
[SPEAKER_02]: You want to count
20:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, uh, so it's called Brown.
20:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, garden scene 1888.
20:20
[SPEAKER_03]: The prints.
20:21
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, settle back.
20:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Get your big bag of popcorn.
20:25
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, relax.
20:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Really, you know, put yourself in the mood of watching a movie.
20:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's hit play in three, two, one play.
20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's over.
20:35
[SPEAKER_03]: That's it.
20:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That's it.
20:37
[SPEAKER_03]: It's two seconds long.
20:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Two seconds long.
20:39
[SPEAKER_03]: The very first movie.
20:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
20:41
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes it super hard to like show this in a movie theater.
20:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Imagine the movie phone, you know, round hay, garden scene shows at 2 o'clock.
20:49
[SPEAKER_03]: 2 o'clock in 10 seconds.
20:50
[SPEAKER_03]: to a clock in 20 seconds.
20:52
[SPEAKER_03]: But think of how many tickets you can say.
20:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my God, bigger packet.
20:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So, okay, so let's actually talk for a second about what's going on in the movie.
21:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
21:00
[SPEAKER_03]: How many people ice four people on the screen?
21:03
[SPEAKER_03]: They'll awkwardly, I would say standing there, except it's as if Louis LePrentz, I assume, is behind the camera.
21:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
21:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Told them I'm about to hit record.
21:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what you would have called it.
21:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm about to start the machine.
21:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
21:15
[SPEAKER_03]: move around.
21:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, just start doing something.
21:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's a main guy who's sort of walking directly at the camera and then starts circling around.
21:24
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a dolphin.
21:25
[SPEAKER_03]: That's Luis Sun.
21:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, and there's in the back an old guy with a top hat who is dancing.
21:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess he's doing a little jig.
21:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so that is a dolphin grandfather, Louis LePrinces father-in-law.
21:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's a couple other people who are just like, there's a woman and they're just sort of like, yeah,
21:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But here is the thing, you're mocking it, we're watching the invention of movies.
21:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And the first time, it's like that first photograph record that Mary had a little lamb.
21:56
[SPEAKER_03]: The moment you see two seconds of this and I assume it was longer.
22:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was originally longer, this is like what lasted.
22:02
[SPEAKER_03]: But even at two seconds.
22:05
[SPEAKER_03]: you can see exactly what it's going to be.
22:08
[SPEAKER_03]: You're like, oh, I can have a whole scene here and I can see people's faces and I can see movement.
22:13
[SPEAKER_03]: And I can see cities I've never seen before.
22:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the dream that he had of bringing people together is obvious as we make fun of people from 150 years ago on YouTube.
22:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and you know, this is just a guy.
22:28
[SPEAKER_02]: in a little workshop, in leads with a few people, like, you know, you talked about rooting for the loan inventor.
22:35
[SPEAKER_02]: This is at least at this moment, the victory of the loan inventor.
22:39
[SPEAKER_03]: For a moment, save it because there is someone else who's going to come back into the story, Thomas Alva Edison, and we'll have his part of the story after the break.
23:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're back.
23:12
[SPEAKER_03]: We watched the around-hey garden scene 400 more times.
23:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's get back to Edison now.
23:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
23:19
[SPEAKER_02]: When we left Edison, it was early 1888.
23:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And he had just told one of his boys, one of his muckers, to go off an invent moving pictures.
23:31
[SPEAKER_02]: The guy he told to invent moving pictures was named William Kennedy-Lory Dixon.
23:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Four names.
23:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Four names I need liked all four.
23:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
23:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's fine things.
23:42
[SPEAKER_02]: WKLD.
23:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
23:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So a little full of himself, but like also a hustler.
23:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
23:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And an important player in the movie story as we'll see.
23:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So WKLD grew up in England.
23:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And when he was like 18 or 19, he actually wrote to Edison to ask for a job, as I'm sure thousands of young hustlers did.
24:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Edison says no, but WKLD comes to the U.S. anyway, and eventually does get a job working for Edison.
24:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Shows Moxie.
24:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he's kind of Moxie.
24:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And he is an engineer, but he also is Edison's personal photographer.
24:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, Edison has a personal photographer, which, you know, at this point in Edison's life, like he realizes that he is a brand.
24:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
24:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe the most famous person in America, like it's, it's, we've got to make it clear.
24:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Like he's not just like nerd's loving, like everybody knows who he is.
24:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but I say the word brand because he uses that.
24:38
[SPEAKER_03]: to get what he wants to make progress, to get money, to get investment, to get his inventions out there and to win.
24:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Like he knows that it's good for business, that whenever something's invented in the middle of the night, he can step in at the last minute and have his personal photographer take a photo of him next to it.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
24:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Bye, William Kennedy, Laurie Dixon.
24:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, this is part of the reason Edison assigns him moving pictures.
25:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
25:02
[SPEAKER_02]: He did knows how to use a camera.
25:05
[SPEAKER_02]: So remember,
25:08
[SPEAKER_02]: LePrinz has been working for like eight years on the camera, just a few months after Edison assigns WKLD to work on moving pictures.
25:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Edison writes a letter to his patent lawyers.
25:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Which I am contractually obligated to read everything that you tell me to read.
25:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So please read it.
25:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye.
25:30
[SPEAKER_03]: What the photograph does for the
25:33
[SPEAKER_03]: which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.
25:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And in such form as to be both cheap, practical, and convenient.
25:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's like a little drawing of a machine in the letter.
25:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, although that machine is not going to work at all.
25:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in fact when the movie camera is invented, it's not going to be that.
25:51
[SPEAKER_03]: It was the poetry of this that was going to get Thomas Edison had.
25:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So he has not invented the movies, but he's written a thing that
25:58
[SPEAKER_02]: That kind of sounds like maybe he did and when he does, he can say, well, I wrote this beautiful paragraph, yes, yes, it is a legal gambit and and I just want to note part of the reason I want to talk about this letter is it's October 8th 1888.
26:22
[SPEAKER_02]: 14th, 1888, same week.
26:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not legal precedence.
26:27
[SPEAKER_02]: The prince already has the patent, but just the vibe of simultaneous is what I want to capture here, right?
26:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it is extraordinary how much everybody is working on this.
26:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And Edison's first instinct is to get his lawyers to lock it down.
26:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Like put it on paper.
26:44
[SPEAKER_03]: file it.
26:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
26:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And what Edison is applying for isn't even a patented to this thing called a caveat that is just like, well, I'm not ready for a patented yet.
26:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But I got the idea and so if anybody else tries to get in on it, you got to come check with me.
26:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, you were talking a minute ago about Edison being aware of his own brand and that's serving him and it certainly did for sales and for raising capital.
27:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But it also served him in intellectual property.
27:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's a pretty compelling
27:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, in the same way that, you know, LeBron James can get away with committing fouls and not getting called, the way ordinary players would because he's famous and it's like, no, surely LeBron James wouldn't commit that foul.
27:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, Edison could do that with patents, right?
27:27
[SPEAKER_02]: If a bunch of people have competing claims, which is often the case, because simultaneous invention, Edison will get the benefit of the doubt, because he's Edison, he's the most famous inventor in the world.
27:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, he must have really invented this thing.
27:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and LaPrance back in his backyard shed has to know this that he is not the most famous guy in this race.
27:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And so his motivation is I need to make it work, and I need to show it to people that it actually works.
27:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Not just written on a piece of paper, like...
27:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Thomas Edison did.
27:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes.
27:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Like everything gets litigated, right?
28:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything is a race.
28:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the way you win is not just in court with patents, it's being first to market, being first to show the thing.
28:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Being first to go in a room and say, hey, look, I built this movie camera.
28:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Here is a movie.
28:14
[SPEAKER_02]: No one has ever made a movie before.
28:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Le Prince, yes, he is built his camera and made his movie in his patents.
28:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Now he needs to show it to the world.
28:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, the battle is set.
28:25
[SPEAKER_03]: The lone inventor versus the most famous man in America, the little guy versus the industrial invention machine.
28:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, this would make a great movie.
28:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, they existed yet.
28:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Go on.
28:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Lou is going to go to New York, right?
28:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He's going to have his premier in Edison's backyard, basically.
28:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But first,
28:45
[SPEAKER_02]: as you may recall from the beginning of today's show.
28:48
[SPEAKER_02]: He's going to go visit his brother, Indy John, and France.
28:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not exactly clear why, you know, maybe just wanted to see him, but it is the case that Louis had had some money problems.
28:58
[SPEAKER_02]: There wasn't inheritance, like a house I think that they'd inherited from their mother.
29:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, maybe there's some money situation, classic going to argue with the family.
29:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Classic, classic.
29:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
29:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So he goes to see his brother, Indy John.
29:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Gets on a train to Paris?
29:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Disappears?
29:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Is never seen again?
29:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And let's just do that New York Sun Head line one more time.
29:18
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't like to do it forever.
29:19
[SPEAKER_03]: The Connecticut graph, Edison's latest and most surprising device pure motion recorded and reproduced.
29:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And that little disease sees that headline and thinks Tom Settison stole my idea and killed my husband.
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: With five pounds of peacock feathers.
29:35
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what the 25 pounds of my life was.
29:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Lizzie at the time because this has taken over husband's life and now he's missing and sees this like she has got to be so full of rage.
29:49
[SPEAKER_03]: They do have the film, though.
29:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, they have the film, they have the camera, it's there in leads, and he has a patent, right?
29:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So it seems like a robust legal case.
29:59
[SPEAKER_02]: It's obviously not gonna bring her husband back, but at least you know, you could whatever.
30:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Have his name, make your move.
30:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But, but there is this element of intellectual property law at the time that is devastating for Lizzie making this case.
30:18
[SPEAKER_02]: If someone is missing, there is eight years of waiting period before they can be declared dead.
30:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And while they're missing, their property, including their intellectual property, is in this kind of limbo.
30:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So Louis LaPrinz owns this intellectual property, and maybe he's still alive as far as the law is concerned.
30:39
[SPEAKER_02]: So in this key moment in the development of movies, Lizzie can't do anything.
30:44
[SPEAKER_02]: She can't bring a case because it's not her intellectual property
30:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Do we think at this point that Edison has seen the film?
30:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, has this fingers in everything?
30:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, he would have probably seen the patent, right?
30:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody who worked with him would very likely have seen the patent.
30:57
[SPEAKER_02]: But as far as I know, not the film, the film is there in the UK.
31:01
[SPEAKER_02]: The big moment was going to be the New York premiere.
31:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And remember, this is just like less than a year before that he has disappeared.
31:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So Edison is probably not seen the film or the movie camera.
31:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Liz, it can't like do much during this waiting period.
31:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell you who can do something, Thomas Edison's invention factory never sleeps.
31:19
[SPEAKER_03]: They've already started to work on and they are going to be relentless.
31:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes.
31:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, as you'll remember, William Kennedy, Laurie Dixon, are going to forget on the job.
31:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, WKLD, he's keeping up with all this stuff that people are doing with all the patents.
31:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, tries to do like a movie projector style movie at some point, but can't get that to work, the film just isn't whatever, good enough or clear enough.
31:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it comes up with this other model instead, which is instead of projecting the movie onto a screen, onto the wall, they build a little box with a little hole in the top, and you look down into the books like one person, and you see a little short movie of like, you know, a strong man lifting weights or whatever.
31:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And actually, you know, this fits with Thomas Edison and his strength as a businessman, right?
32:05
[SPEAKER_03]: He wasn't looking at the movies as some sort of artistic form that was going to bring the world together, Kumbaya.
32:11
[SPEAKER_03]: He was like, well, how do I put something in a box?
32:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Get someone to put a nickel inside and put my face on it and put it in Coney Island.
32:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And eventually, like, I will have so many nickels.
32:22
[SPEAKER_03]: kind of a big room filled with them in a West Orange.
32:24
[SPEAKER_02]: He'd dive into him like a not very rich, scroogeic duck.
32:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So many nickels, right?
32:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And Edison does, in fact, do this.
32:31
[SPEAKER_02]: He builds his little money machine and people line up because it is this miraculous thing.
32:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's the pictures.
32:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And now he actually needs movies to show.
32:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, oh, no, we got the box.
32:41
[SPEAKER_02]: People are lining up.
32:42
[SPEAKER_02]: We got a show of new movies.
32:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So they'll give us weird nickels.
32:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, Dixon oversees construction of this movie studio.
32:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the world's first movie studio although other people are working on things and it's this it's this weird building and it's there in West Orange right by the lab and it's optimized to get sunlight right because early cameras aren't very good early lighting is still not that good they need a lot of light so they do two things with this building that are just delightful one they have like a hinged roof so they can open it up and let the sunshine in and two it's on a big like
33:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a retractable roof stadium.
33:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, crossed with like one of those restaurants at the top of the tall building that's been surrounded.
33:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you ever been to one of those?
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I've never been to.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I have been to.
33:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They move very slowly.
33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: They move very slowly.
33:28
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I would pay a nickel just to like be in the studio and have it rotate with the side.
33:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, for sure.
33:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
33:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Now you've invented the studio tour early films include.
33:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Blacksmith scene.
33:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's good one.
33:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Washing the baby.
33:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, Oscar nominee.
33:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And the boxing cats know way.
33:47
[SPEAKER_03]: What are the first movies ever as a cat video?
33:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
33:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And like, this has a very kind of whatever.
33:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, Instagram, TikTok vibe.
33:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
33:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The watching the baby is these trad-wise.
33:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Blacksmith, I feel like there must be blacksmith influencers.
34:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So, so, Edison's in the movie business.
34:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But he doesn't have it to himself for long, right?
34:05
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the simultaneous invention thing again, right?
34:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Over the next few years, more and more people are developing their own movie cameras, making their own movies.
34:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But of course, Edison has, you know, as many lawyers as he wants at his disposal and so he's does what is, I guess the obvious thing, decides to basically sue everybody else out of existence.
34:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
34:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Clear the field.
34:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, the first few companies, he goes and sees the fact, oh, it's at a sin, okay, bye, whatever, we're done.
34:35
[SPEAKER_02]: But then he gets this one company that is doing pretty well, it's called the Muda Scope Company.
34:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And by this point, that company, which is Edison's main rival, is run by one, William Kennedy Laurie Dixon.
34:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Job, you KLD, who laughed at us and I assume left, who left, who left to go.
34:55
[SPEAKER_03]: To go to a competitor.
34:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
34:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Ah, and like this is...
34:59
[SPEAKER_03]: classic.
35:00
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a classic moment in the age of innovation, right?
35:02
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not just ideas.
35:04
[SPEAKER_03]: It's this process knowledge of people who know how to do something and immediately are valuable and can go and start their own business or get hired by someone else.
35:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, we saw this at the dawn of Silicon Valley, right?
35:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not it's not.
35:18
[SPEAKER_03]: as you know, the guy who led the invention of the transistor, William Shockley, it's not even starting his big company, right?
35:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Shockley, semi-conductor.
35:27
[SPEAKER_03]: It's his employees.
35:29
[SPEAKER_03]: The traitorous traitorous aid, I love.
35:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they leave they start their own company and then they go start intel like this is how it works.
35:37
[SPEAKER_03]: This is simultaneous invention and taking those ideas and
35:40
[SPEAKER_03]: and really seeding them to a bunch of different companies and competitors.
35:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
35:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
35:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, the mutascope machines, the machines that Dickson's company is making, are quite like Edison's machines, right?
35:53
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not projecting on a screen.
35:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They're still looking to a little box.
35:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And
35:58
[SPEAKER_02]: In the UK, the mutoscope machines were known as the what the Butler saw machines because their most famous movie was You look into this thing and you have the point of view like you're looking through a old school people like a little key lock You know, and what you see is a woman taking off some of her clothes
36:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of her clothes and this was a smash hit and so yeah, of course it was a soft corpore Yes, which by the way, so now we're like whatever a few years into the history of movies not a decade into the history of movies And you have like cat videos and soft corpore and so you can basically Shut it down now no more innovation.
36:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
36:37
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the thing that drives innovation frankly, right?
36:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah classic classic story of video, right?
36:41
[SPEAKER_02]: The porn industry and like video the internet Also the mutoscope it turns out so okay
36:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Edison, Susan, you to scope, you to scope does not roll over.
36:52
[SPEAKER_02]: They hire their own lawyers.
36:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And their lawyer's legal strategy is to prove that Edison was not the first person to invent moving pictures.
37:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Because they know who was.
37:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Louis LePrentz?
37:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
37:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Louis LePrentz did.
37:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Patent is right there, you know, for everybody to see.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he's not there.
37:12
[SPEAKER_02]: He's not his patented.
37:14
[SPEAKER_02]: His patented is.
37:15
[SPEAKER_02]: and the mutesco players get in touch with Lizzy, you know, Louie's wife and a dolphin son.
37:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, like this, to them feels like their moment, right?
37:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they're just two people, there's no way they're going to be able to go up against Edison, but mutesco is a real company with revenues.
37:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Adolf gets ready to testify.
37:36
[SPEAKER_02]: He goes back to England.
37:37
[SPEAKER_02]: He gets the camera, the machine.
37:40
[SPEAKER_02]: He takes the round-hig garden scene and like pace the images onto like, you know, bored for so they can have it in court.
37:47
[SPEAKER_02]: He gets like sworn statements from people who are working with him.
37:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And the family of Louis, the Prince could finally get this confrontation.
37:53
[SPEAKER_03]: In a courtroom with I assume reporters there, the trial of the century, like it's the Edison, right?
37:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what?
37:59
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to be in the papers because Edison is involved, right?
38:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So, with trial happens, Adolf in fact gets called to testify, and the mutus gobler asks him, do you have any films from this camera that your father invented?
38:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And Adolf, you know, shows the pictures of the Round Hey Garden scene, which you remember, he was in it and his grandparents were in it, and then the lawyer says, when were these photographs taken?
38:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And Adolf says October 1888, which again is well before Edison had his claim.
38:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the lawyer for Edison, like I guess in cross-examination, says to Adolf, well there's no way you can prove that October 1888 is when the movie was filmed.
38:43
[SPEAKER_02]: These are just pictures.
38:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And Adolf says, I can fix the date exactly by the fact that my grandmother, who remember was in the movie, by the fact that my grandmother died on the 24th of October 1888, courtroom gasps, and yet, and yet.
39:02
[SPEAKER_02]: doesn't really work out for Adolf and Lizzie.
39:06
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the high point for them, but it becomes clear that, the mutoscope lawyers are not there to validate the claim of Louis-Lipperance.
39:16
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, at some level, they don't want, like, you know, leprances, ears.
39:22
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't want Adolf and Lizzie to be able to, like, take away the movies from them.
39:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So they want to, like, do enough to undermine Edison.
39:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're not so much that they undermine themselves like they don't even want to see the camera And then there are these details where like Louis US patent was for the 16 lens camera and not the one lens camera And they don't want to know about that and so ultimately ultimately
39:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Adolphin Lizzie, don't get the victory they want.
39:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And afterwards, people aren't putting up statues to Louis Le Prints and putting them in the textbooks as this huge inventor, I mean, kind of gets lost to toilet.
39:55
[SPEAKER_03]: He gets totally lost.
39:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And the court case, as intellectual property cases tend to do, goes on forever, right?
40:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Goes on for years and years, back and forth.
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: The end of this Edison versus mutascope case is this very strange to me outcome.
40:11
[SPEAKER_02]: and that's this.
40:12
[SPEAKER_02]: The two companies get to keep their intellectual property and everybody else gets sort of wiped away.
40:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, okay, you too, whatever.
40:20
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to sort it out between you two, but you two are good.
40:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys can keep making movies.
40:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what Edison and you to scope decide to do?
40:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there's only two, what do you do if it's whatever, 1900-ish, you form a trust.
40:34
[SPEAKER_02]: You're like, you know what?
40:34
[SPEAKER_02]: We could just compete each other down to bits, or we could just team up and not have to compete.
40:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And share all those nickels.
40:42
[SPEAKER_03]: At a since got like a playbook, either invented first or you patented first or you get the caveat or you sue everybody.
40:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know if it looks like you're not gonna win, you just say let's get together.
40:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Like let's dominate this industry.
40:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And in this particular case,
40:57
[SPEAKER_03]: they dominated the technology, they were making the movies, they had this vertical corporation, they were inventing.
41:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and they really locked down not just the cameras and the projectors, but the whole industry.
41:09
[SPEAKER_02]: They actually bring in to their trust.
41:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It's called the Motion Picture Patents Company, is the official name.
41:16
[SPEAKER_02]: They bring into their trust codec, because codec is making the film, right?
41:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And they already have their studio, so the actors are working for them.
41:23
[SPEAKER_02]: and this Edison Trust dominates, just dominates the early movie business, and the lightful twist, this dominance helps to create Hollywood.
41:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So Hollywood, the place?
41:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yes, but also like Hollywood, the idea, the movie industry as we know it.
41:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
41:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So here's what happened.
41:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So the people who are buying from the Edison Trust are theater owners, right?
41:50
[SPEAKER_02]: They are not in the cartel.
41:52
[SPEAKER_02]: They are the ones paying the cartel.
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are not like big highly capitalized ventures, right?
41:57
[SPEAKER_02]: These are like basically immigrant hustlers, guys who are like in the fur business a year ago.
42:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they're real estate guys, right?
42:03
[SPEAKER_02]: They own a maybe maybe maybe they have like a Vaudeville theater, right?
42:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And they realize like, oh, so they haven't been to pay the actors.
42:10
[SPEAKER_02]: We could just put a movie up there and people will still pay, right?
42:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they really come to resent this Edison Trust.
42:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, of course, because like buy from a cartel is terrible.
42:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You have no negotiation fee.
42:22
[SPEAKER_03]: They can lock you out of the business.
42:23
[SPEAKER_03]: They can put you out of business.
42:24
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't buy what they're asking for.
42:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's great to be a cartel.
42:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It's terrible to be the customer of a cartel.
42:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly right.
42:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Not only because they can jack up prices, right, but also because they can sell you a crap product.
42:37
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like, well, you're not going to buy from anybody else.
42:39
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't have any incentive to make a better movie.
42:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and that's an unappreciated danger of a monopoly, right?
42:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so we always talk about the money.
42:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I'm gonna have to pay more if it's monopoly.
42:50
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's really that there's no reason for the monopoly to innovate.
42:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, why would the movies have to be better or longer or nicely lit, you know, or something beyond what the buttersaw, you don't have to innovate at all?
43:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I mean conversely, like the other side of the same coin is,
43:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Like competition is core to why a market economy is great, right?
43:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you want many people firms competing to make something better.
43:17
[SPEAKER_02]: You want five different companies, 20 different companies, trying to make a better movie to sell it to the movie theaters.
43:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And when there's a cartel, you don't have that.
43:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do they get to Hollywood, right?
43:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So just distance from the New York Cartel.
43:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's so it's part of it, right?
43:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So here's what happens.
43:32
[SPEAKER_02]: The theater owners who are the ones getting jammed by the cartel, they start making their own movies.
43:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But doing it on the slide, they're these stories where like they'll like have an Edison camera there, but then have secretly like one of the band cameras or a camera from Europe or something on the side.
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, part of trying to avoid the Edison Trust, which is headquartered in, you know, New Jersey, New York is let's go far away like how far away can you get and the answer in the United States just look at a map continental United States Southern California and plenty of that suddenly need.
44:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so, so, right.
44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not just Edison, it should be clear.
44:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, there were a few other things.
44:14
[SPEAKER_02]: There was plenty of sun, land was cheap, so you could, you know, buy your studio lot for cheap.
44:20
[SPEAKER_02]: There were lots of different landscapes, so you could film like your western, out of the desert, you could go to the mountains, you could go to the beach.
44:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And they weren't just hiding, right?
44:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, they were suing.
44:29
[SPEAKER_02]: There were anti-trust laws, and, you know, we're into the kind of 1900s, 1910s at this point.
44:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is a moment when,
44:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Finally, the anti-trust laws that have been on the books for decades are finally starting to be enforced in a meaningful way.
44:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are these Supreme Court decisions in 1917 and 1918 that say, oh, yeah, it's the Addison Trust is a trust and we have these anti-trust laws.
44:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't have a cartel.
44:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It's right there in the name.
44:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It's right there in the name and they break up the trust.
44:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's basically the end of Addison in the movie business and the beginning of Hollywood.
45:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We still have one thread to pick up.
45:07
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened to Louis LePrince?
45:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and we're going to tell the rest of the Edison story in just a minute.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the end of the ads.
45:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Robert, give us an outline for the rest of the show.
45:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, three things we have left to do today.
45:40
[SPEAKER_03]: One, figure out what to make of Lulu Prince and Edison in the movies.
45:44
[SPEAKER_03]: What's our lesson here?
45:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, we're gonna do the true crime thing.
45:49
[SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna figure out who killed Lulu Prince.
45:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It's good, good.
45:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And three, we're gonna end our Edison series and talk about the end of Edison's life.
45:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so first on that list is what to make of Edison and LePrinse in the movies, like what is this story really about?
46:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And on this one, I want to go to Schumpader.
46:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought it was Schumpader, but I looked it up.
46:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Schumpader.
46:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Joseph Schumpader.
46:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, I've never said it like that.
46:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Joseph Schumpader, also known as Schumpader in Silicon Valley, where they love this guy, creative destruction.
46:21
[SPEAKER_03]: If you've heard that term,
46:23
[SPEAKER_03]: that's what he came up with and is still cited to this day.
46:26
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea that in order for progress to be made, big companies often fail and young scrappy companies come up to take their place.
46:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for Schumbader, this sort of T-hero was the entrepreneur.
46:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And there is this thing he wrote in 1911 that distinguished the inventor from the entrepreneur.
46:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Talked about how they're different.
46:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that distinction is the key for me in understanding this story, in understanding Louis LePrinz, definitely the inventor, and Edison, who is clearly an inventor, but is also an entrepreneur.
47:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So read, Robert, read if you would this little thing that I pulled.
47:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It's quote in time.
47:09
[SPEAKER_03]: As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant, and to carry an improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it.
47:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes.
47:24
[SPEAKER_03]: It is therefore not advisable, and it might be downright misleading to stress the element of invention, as much as many writers do.
47:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not about the invention and it's interesting like that last part as much as many writers do, right?
47:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So he's sort of distinguishing here between what's happening with technology with the economy and how do we tell the story, right?
47:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's saying the story, the writing of it is like the invention, of course, the person discovering the thing.
47:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But he's also saying like that's
47:56
[SPEAKER_02]: only one piece of it.
47:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And making the invention a thing in the world, a thing in the world that people will pay for, is hugely important and super underrated.
48:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, if you map that idea to this story, you can say,
48:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so what that Louis LePrinz came up with the movie camera first, right?
48:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody was working on it.
48:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Someone was going to do it in the next year or two.
48:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, somebody was going to do it.
48:18
[SPEAKER_02]: What's important is, in Shumpator's words, carrying it into practice, making it a thing in the world.
48:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, with LePrinz have done that, if he had survived, maybe, but maybe not, right?
48:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that part is hard, he didn't have any money.
48:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We do know that Edison,
48:35
[SPEAKER_03]: was really good at making things real, branding, the manufacturing, the money part, the lawyers, the patents, the building of the studio that could rotate feels like the kind of practical, like we need to solve a problem and we need to film a new jersey and this is what we've come up with.
48:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, go back to that letter that you read that he wrote in October of 1888 when he just started working on this, you know, in the very first sentence, he says, yeah, we want to invent whatever a camera, but then he says, in that first sentence, a camera in such a form as to be both cheap, practical, and convenient, right?
49:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Like first sentence, he's not like, oh, movies, going to change the world.
49:13
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, I want to make a thing that is cheap,
49:19
[SPEAKER_03]: This actually reminds me of the discussion we're having today about China, because, right, there's a whole thing about, well, China, like, do they really invent anything?
49:28
[SPEAKER_03]: We're the United States of America.
49:30
[SPEAKER_03]: We are the inventors, but what they have is process knowledge.
49:34
[SPEAKER_03]: They have what Schumpeder's talking about, focusing on cheap, practical, and convenient applications of technology, and through that constant iteration,
49:43
[SPEAKER_03]: can often come out ahead without the aha loan inventor moment.
49:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, fast follower.
49:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that fast follower?
49:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that what they call that?
49:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
49:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So think about Edison in this context, right?
49:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Like he didn't just want to invent the like bulb.
49:57
[SPEAKER_02]: He wanted to deliver electric power to millions of people cheaply, you know, at scale.
50:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And he did.
50:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was definitely an entrepreneur.
50:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, also he was a flawed entrepreneur, right?
50:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Like he invented the phonograph.
50:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Unlike with this, like phonograph, he was way out in front.
50:13
[SPEAKER_02]: and was not the first one to bring it to market because he got distracted.
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: He was the first one to build a big electric grid, but that on the wrong kind of current, right, as we talked about.
50:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But fundamentally, he was an entrepreneur, and I would argue that that's why he is so famous as an inventor, right, because we love stories of inventors, but we want stories of inventors who things get out into the world, and so
50:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Edison became the most famous inventor in history.
50:45
[SPEAKER_03]: This is where we will leave Edison for a moment and let's move to number two, Louis the Prince, who killed him.
50:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It was probably not Thomas Alva Edison.
50:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It was probably not Thomas Alva Edison.
50:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So for this one, I go back to Paul Fisher, the guy who wrote this relatively recent book about Louis LePrens.
51:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I talked to Paul Fisher, we actually got into who killed Louis LePrens in some detail.
51:06
[SPEAKER_02]: He has a pretty compelling theory.
51:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And it goes like this.
51:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Last thing we know, Louis LePrens did was he went and visit his brother.
51:12
[SPEAKER_02]: in Dijon.
51:13
[SPEAKER_02]: In Dijon.
51:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Same as for the mustard.
51:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yes, I guess so.
51:18
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there was this inheritance, right, that was something of an issue between them.
51:22
[SPEAKER_02]: The brothers, the last one ever to seem alive.
51:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, after he disappears, Lizzie's like, what should we do?
51:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Should we take out ads in the papers?
51:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, see if anybody's seen him?
51:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And the brothers says, no, no, I'm taking out ads in the papers.
51:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't worry.
51:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But when Paul Fisher, this author went back to look,
51:40
[SPEAKER_02]: in the papers, no ads.
51:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so like, that one seems pretty compelling to me.
51:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the brother, was the brother probably because of money, like boring, but boring is what you want, right?
51:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like the Occupers Reiser answer.
51:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And I guess if Thomas Edison were listening to this show, he'd be like, yeah, of course, like I have lawyers.
52:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have to kill people, that's right.
52:03
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why you get rich.
52:04
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why you become Thomas Edison, so you could take their ideas without killing them.
52:08
[SPEAKER_02]: that's the end of the movie story and it seems like maybe this is the end of the series right so let's just do the rest of his life like what is left for Thomas Edison to do at this point I mean it's interesting right because he's in his forties when he gets into the movies isn't it's like prime of his life and he certainly doesn't feel like he's done he's not done he for decades after this keeps working I mean he's super famous
52:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And he works on lots of different things.
52:37
[SPEAKER_02]: He works on a new kind of battery, still working on an electric car.
52:41
[SPEAKER_02]: He gets into the cement business.
52:43
[SPEAKER_02]: He goes to the Edison cement works or something.
52:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And actually pours these concrete houses in New Jersey as this dream for the concrete house.
52:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you can still see some of these houses.
52:53
[SPEAKER_02]: He tries like 17,000 different plants looking for a domestic source of rubber rubber, so you don't have to go on the Amazon.
53:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right.
53:00
[SPEAKER_02]: This was like a national security concern at that time.
53:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I don't know, like, rare earths today or something, but bigger.
53:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But none of these, I mean, like, he makes some technical progress on them.
53:09
[SPEAKER_02]: But none of them are like,
53:11
[SPEAKER_02]: big breakthroughs he says famous right famous enough that remember like when he dies in 1931 the president of the United States declared us this national moment of mourning but if we take Edison by his own measure you know his own measure was not incremental progress not the ideas for ideas themselves it was
53:33
[SPEAKER_02]: things people will pay for.
53:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It was things that become a big thing in the world.
53:38
[SPEAKER_02]: In the second half of its life, he doesn't have any big heads.
53:41
[SPEAKER_03]: But still, you really just have to step back and say not only did he invent all these things, he created at least three industries, entire transformative industries, photographing the recording industry, the movie business, the electric business, which is in
54:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like electricity was like the fundamental transformative technology of the 20th century.
54:07
[SPEAKER_02]: We can say, Thomas Edison had a very good run.
54:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, without Thomas Edison, you couldn't have like two guys talking into microphones and calling it a job.
54:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang, our engineer is Sarah Brugher, and our showrunner is Ryan Dilly.
54:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and I'm Robert Smith.
54:26
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll be back next week with another episode of Business History.
54:32
[SPEAKER_02]: wait for it.
54:43
[SPEAKER_03]: We tried and it was described as two gray men in a gray box.
54:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And reasonably so, fortunately for us in an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office, there is the show room of a company called Busy Space.
54:58
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a company where we're sitting right now.
55:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And what they do is they design furniture and acoustic solutions that make unreading here, workplaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun.
55:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I would even say cozy, their furniture is sort of curved and interesting colors, and I guess keeps things quiet.
55:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, honestly, I wish our office was this showroom.
55:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You can find more at buzzy.space, that's BUZSI.space.
55:29
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, that was an episode of the new podcast business history.
55:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Find more business history on YouTube, Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.