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CHM Revolutionaries: The Age of Edison with Author Ernest Freeberg

3,350 views · Published 17 April 2013 · 1:01:38 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: Computer History Museum · 2013 · Science & Technology

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[Recorded: March 14, 2013]
The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of all was Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed the American public with the sense of the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, the electric light marked the arrival of modernity.

The Age of Edison places the story of Edison's invention in the context of a technological revolution that transformed America and Europe in these decades. Edison and his fellow inventors emerged from a culture shaped by broad public education, a lively popular press that took an interest in science and technology, and an American patent system that encouraged innovation and democratized the benefits of invention. And in the end, as Freeberg shows, Edison's greatest invention was not any single technology, but rather his reinvention of the process itself. 

Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility, in which the greater forces of progress and change are made visible by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.

Please join us as we welcome Ernest Freeberg, the distinguished professor and historian, for a conversation with John Hollar about the technological revolution Edison's light bulb unleashed.

Intel Free Press Interviews:

Ernie:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8dZLLpnDxv6mGxytlMaGUSwe

Daniel Kaufman:
http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/darpa-director-calls-for-change-in-tech-industry/1299

Rick Rashid:
http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/talent-collaboration-key-to-innovation/2627

Lot Number: X6831.2013
Catalog Number: 102746828

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