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There's something God-like about it. Ultimately, Edison planned to supply electricity to a swath of city blocks a mile square, and provide light to every subscribing home and business in the district with the simple flip of a switch.

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Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. No competition means no invention. Record ad. Edison intended to keep the nation's steel mills humming -- with an ingenious new process for extracting iron from low-grade ore. Narrator : First, New York City officials had to be convinced of the wisdom of running electric current underground before they awarded Edison the permit to tear up the streets.

And then building the aqueduct to channel the river. They think of Thomas Edison, and the crazy guy in the Back to the Future movies, which is kind of an Edison lampoon. John Staudenmaier, Historian : This was a hot challenge. There are no reviews yet. His staff was already in place: a small group of experimental assistants and skilled machinists, many of whom he'd worked with for years.

And Edison said, you know we ought to combine my phonograph with your machine and we can produce you know talking pictures. Paul Israel, Thomas Edison Papers : Basically Gilliland put a lot of pressure on him that this was probably the best deal he was gonna get. Over the previous months, a variety of substances with the properties Edison was after had been rigorously tested as filaments, and dozens of bulb prototypes designed.

John Staudenmaier, Historian : Edison's public image, it's a mixture of things. And then drop it, and have it drop past just let it drop past some magnets, right? Near bankruptcy, Edison has failed at his ore project Narrator : Over the next several months, as sales agents fanned out across the country with demonstration models of the device, the phonograph's inventor became a full-fledged press sensation.

The nature of electricity itself was something he studied and learned how to think about how that system operated, how he might improve it. You had to be pretty bold to build this new thing -- invention laboratory. Narrator : On Pearl Street, in the heart of Manhattan's financial district, two adjoining warehouses now would be transformed into Edison's central power station -- equipped with six steam engine-dynamo sets weighing some 30 tons each, as well as switchboards and control instruments and a bank of 1, lamps for testing the system.

Nathan Myhrvold, Inventor and Entrepreneur : Most successful inventors throughout history were largely people trying to accomplish a task. Narrator : Already, the project had completely transformed Menlo Park. Images from movies, a couple kisses, a man flexes his muscles.

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Narrator : It was not enough that the effort required Edison to design and build a whole series of gargantuan new machines; he also intended to automate the entire plant, so that the ore processed there would never once be touched by human hands. Edison would not allow himself to be in a vulnerable position again. Returning to West Orange in , after a winter in Florida, he was in such a debilitated state that he was virtually unable to work.