S01 · E03Season one · Thomas Edison
Admits He Didn’t Invent the Light Bulb
Atlas challenges the lone-inventor myth and asks Edison what innovation really means when discovery, business, and a team of collaborators collide.
Episode overview
The conversation
Thomas Edison enters the conversation as both an inventor and a builder of systems. Atlas presses him on the distance between a celebrated breakthrough and the many experiments, collaborators, and earlier ideas that made it possible.
The episode examines the machinery of innovation: not only the artifact, but the laboratory, the commercial strategy, and the public story that determines whose name survives.