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- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The jobs of tomorrow are not the jobs of yesterday.

- I'’m hopeful that this is the beginning to accountability.

- Life without dance is boring.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I did do the finale, and guess where my trailer was?

A block away from my apartment, it couldn'’t have been better!

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

-_ It'’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it'’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Remember Them", my colleague, our executive producer, and co-anchor of "Remember Them", Jacqui Tricarico.

Jacqui, who're remembering today?

Over my left shoulder is whom?

- Well, we have Thomas Edison first up.

So Thomas Edison, such a strong connection here in New Jersey, known as the father of modern technology, right?

He kinda always said, "There's a way to do it better, find it."

And you can really learn more about him in New Jersey in the Thomas Edison Laboratory Complex, which still is here in West Orange.

You can go there and do a self-guided tour to learn more about the over 1000-plus patents that were created here in New Jersey, and developed over his time.

- Couple things about Edison that struck me in this interview with Dr. Paul Israel, who's the author of the book over my shoulder.

He was an amazing team leader.

Jacqui, we have a great team here, and he was doing... We think what we do is important.

What Edison did (chuckles) was really important, but it struck me that he was a great leader, a great innovator, and a great team builder, by giving other people, 'cause he didn't do all of it himself.

- No, no, yeah, he had a lot of people behind him.

Scientists, mechanics, designers.

Just, it was a whole collaborative team that worked together to to help with, like we said, the father of modern technology.

We wouldn't be where we are today, in technology, without Thomas Edison.

- Okay Jacqui, beyond the obvious, the light bulb, right?

What else're we talking about?

I think, the phonograph.

- Phonograph, yeah, telegraphy, electric-power generation, obviously lighting, which was so significant, motion pictures.

I mean, list just goes on and on.

And you know, the technology of that time, he was just so advanced.

And what we have today, especially with us talking here, right?

And this technology, this world that we live in is definitely thanks for Thomas Edison.

And he was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame as well, - What year?

- 2008.

- Okay.

- As well as Albert Einstein, who we're talking about on the back end of this show.

Also 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee, as well as they should have been.

So significant to New Jersey, to America, to the whole world.

- One wonders what Thomas Edison would've thought of Zoom and remote broadcasting.

(Jacqui laughs) - Yeah, right?

- (laughs) Yeah, who knows?

Hey, listen, Jacqui and I and the whole team honor the great Thomas Alva Edison.

- Early 20th century "victory" music.

- (Narrator) Named "Man of the Millenium" by Time Magazine.

Thomas Alva Edison was probably more responsible than anyone for creating the modern world.

In all of history, there was never an inventor quite like him.

The phonograph, The first commercially practical incandescent bulb.

The first electric company, the first motion pictures.

The dictaphone, the mimeograph, the storage battery, They all contributed to his reputation as the wizard of Menlo Park.

Living more than a half-century in the garden state, Thomas Edison was revered the world over, and we'’re proud that he chose New Jersey for his home.

- (Thomas Edison'’s voice, old recording) The first words I spoke in the original phonograph.

A little piece of practical poetry.

"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.

- Remember Them, remembers Thomas Edison and someone who knows Edison better than most is Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor for the Thomas Edison papers at the Rutgers University.

Good to see you, Paul.

- Hi.

- So here's the deal.

Edison, light bulb, everyone gets that part.

Jacqui and I just talked about that.

Edison and New Jersey; put it in context.

- Sure, absolutely.

So one of the things we created actually was on our website we have a map of Edison in New Jersey and almost all places in northern New Jersey to middle New Jersey, there are locations for Edison.

He began his career in Newark, of course there's a famous Menlo Park laboratory.

Then his West Orange laboratory.

- Around the corner from where I'm taping right now, I drive past it all the time.

- There you go.

- That was a laboratory, correct?

- Yes.

That was his last laboratory.

So he began in Newark and that's where his first laboratory was.

Nobody knows about that.

- Menlo Park?

- Right, then Menlo Park and then West Orange, actually for a very brief period he was in New York, but we'll forget that since this is a New Jersey program.

- Hold on, we're also seen on WNET, but New Jersey was his primary- - Yes.

- Home for invention, correct?

- That's right.

- And describe his team because I always, as a student of leadership and innovation, I always think of Edison not just as a great inventor, but man, he was a great leader, a manager, a team builder, an innovator, am I making too much of that?

- No, you're not.

That's, in fact, one of the key features of Edison's career, is he was never the lone inventor of mythology, right?

He was always working with other people.

Initially it was primarily skilled machinists who could take his ideas and turn them into actual devices, and those people were important throughout his career at all of his laboratories.

But then he began to focus on chemical and electrical research.

And he had people who were, some were self taught, some were college educated.

He had some PhD chemists and this was true at Menlo Park and at West Orange.

And he really was the one that developed the idea of a research and development laboratory for developing new technology.

And team research was crucial to that.

Edison could attack a wide variety of problems by having individual teams focused on various parts of it.

So for example, the electric light, we think of Edison.

Oh, he invented the light bulb.

Well, there have been people working on light bulbs for 40 years before Edison.

He figured out how to make it part of a system and the requirements for a light bulb for that system.

And that's what made him successful.

And he had people who could work on all the elements of that system.

- Do this for us, Paul, in addition to the light bulb, there's the phonograph.

Name some other really important Edison invention.

When I say Edison inventions I wanna be clear Edison and his team- - Sure.

Absolutely.

- What they invented, please go ahead, Dr. Israel.

- Okay, so the phonograph of course also involves sound recording.

And so there were a lot of inventions related to sound recording, including materials for records, motion pictures.

Edison invented the first successful motion picture camera and viewing system, but other people actually developed technology that superseded Edison's pretty quickly.

But he was there at the beginning.

So we're now finally getting to the point where electric automobiles are becoming feasible.

Edison was working on that problem at the beginning of the 20th century.

And if not for World War I, interrupting the development work on that, but also changing the direction of the automobile industry because as automakers were producing equipment for war, the last thing that was useful in a battlefield was an electric automobile.

And so that kind of put the kibosh on that development and took another century, really more than a century for us to get to a point where electric automobiles could really emerge.

And so Edison's work on storage batteries was important and his battery actually was very commercially viable for a lot of industrial uses.

He had another battery that he developed in the late 19th century initially for his phonograph that was used widely in telegraph, telephone and systems, railway signals, things like that.

His most unsuccessful invention was trying to process low grade ore. - Say it again, low grade what?

- Low grade iron ore.

So, rock that had magnetite in it in northern New Jersey.

He crushed, separated out with electromagnets, had a whole system for combining it into briquettes that could be used in steel wheels, but the economics of that system changed when the Mesabi Range was discovered in the upper Midwest, but the system he developed was the basis for another researcher at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s as the Mesabi Range began to run low on iron ore.

He took what Edison had done and adapted it to what was now low grade ore in what had been the rich Mesabi Range.

And so the technology was feasible, the economics weren't but Edison transformed some of that technology, the rock crushing technology to the cement industry 'cause he was actually producing- - Wow.

- Sand that was desired by other cement manufacturers, developed a new innovation in Kiln Technology that became standard in the industry.

- In what?

- In the cement industry.

- Okay.

- So the original Yankee Stadium was constructed with Edison Portland Cement.

- Back in the 1920s- - Yes.

- The House that Babe Ruth built- - Yes!

- Was actually built- - Edison built it.

- By Edison?

(Steve and Paul laugh) So hold on one second.

Put this in perspective for us.

I think Apple, Steve Jobs, the whole bit, Steve Jobs and people like that, constantly looking for not only what consumers want and need, but helping consumers decide they want those things that didn't even know they existed, comparable to what Edison did at a very different time?

- In some ways- - Or is Jobs influenced more by Edison, obviously?

- So Edison, I think was more... - So here's the thing that I would say about Edison that he kind of established the modern style of developing new technology.

So it's not just the invention but it's the innovation stage.

Figuring out how to develop it into commercial technology, how to manufacture it, how to market it, right?

- How to mass produce it as well.

- How to mass produce it.

That was Edison's real advance, right?

On invention.

So when he died, the science header of the New York Times wrote "Edison was the last of the great lone inventors", right?

Like a poet, but in fact had now been displaced by the leaders of industrial research.

But he was the first of those, right?

Those leaders of industrial research.

But by the time he died, that had been forgotten.

- What year did he die?

- 1931.

- I wanna be clear, Thomas Edison's in 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame Inductee.

And thank you to our friends, Steve Edwards and the folks at the New Jersey Hall of Fame for providing a lot of the visual footage you see.

Last question before I let you go?

- Sure.

- Even though the museum, I don't know what it's called, the West Orange- - Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

- Why don't more people visit it?

I visited one time years ago.

Why don't more people go, why don't more people honor this guy?

- Right.

So I think there's a couple of reasons.

One, it's kind of off the beaten path, right?

- It is.

- It is in West Orange, New Jersey- - Main Street.

- Yeah.

- But it's not really a main street.

- Right?

It isn't really a main street.

I mean it's a main street for the town, but right, it's not- - I know it because it's around the corner.

- Most people are taking, It's easy to go right by it on Highway 280 there, right?

So that's part of the problem.

I think also when people think of national parks, they think of the natural parks rather than the historic parks.

it's a national park, but this is a park about somebody.

It's a museum really.

- Yeah, right.

It is a museum, that's right.

But it's also the actual site where he was, you can see his laboratory like it was when he was alive.

Dr. Paul Israel Director and General Editor for the Thomas Edison papers.

I wanna thank our friends at Rutgers University.

Professor, thank you so much.

- My pleasure.

- Remember Them, Jacqui and I continue right after this.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- So now we remember Albert Einstein.

And Jacqui, I talked with Thomas Levenson, award-winning writer, filmmaker, produced a NOVA program that was on PBS.

"Einstein Revealed", that's his book over my shoulder, Einstein in Berlin, Germany.

Big connection to Hitler and that incredible period of time in the 1930s.

Biggest takeaway for you about this extraordinary physicist?

I couldn't even think of the word, (Jacqui laughs) Albert Einstein.

And what's the New Jersey connection, again?

- Yeah, he immigrated here from Germany to New Jersey.

He was in Princeton.

Lived in Princeton for 22 years.

Became part of the Institute for Advanced Study, which is now Princeton University.

So he, you know, had his roots here in New Jersey.

Did amazing things here.

And just hearing from Thomas Levenson about his migration from Germany.

To hear why that all happened, I'll let him explain it in better, great detail, the reasoning for Einstein to move here to New Jersey, to the United States of America and what that meant, the implications of that.

And then what he brought to the great State of New Jersey and to the United States.

- Jacqui, you almost screwed up as I do all the time, Einstein and Edison, as if they're the same.

- That's I wanted them on the same show.

There's just such connection.

- I know, but again, I always think, oh, they're the same time period.

No, they weren't.

Edison was well before Einstein.

I believe Einstein passed in 1955.

Buried in Princeton.

1931 for Edison.

But they weren't the same time.

They didn't do the same thing.

And so even though we confused them sometimes, part of the reason for Remember Them, Jacqui, is to remember what made them so distinct, right?

For Jacqui, Remember Them.

Team, this is Einstein.

- (Narrator) Albert Einstein, his name is synonymous with genius.

Born in Germany in 1879, Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933.

Settling in Princeton, where he spent the next 22 years at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Regarded as the greatest scientist of the 20th century and one of the supreme intellects of all time, Einstein was named "Person of the Century" by Time Magazine in 1999.

Best known by the public for his Theory of Relativity, Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.

We are proud to call this great man a New Jerseyan.

- (Swelling orchestral music) - We're now joined by Professor Thomas Levenson, award-winning writer, filmmaker, and the author of "Einstein in Berlin".

You see that book?

You may not see the graphic but that is the book, "Einstein in Berlin", Professor at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tom, good to see you.

- Good to be here.

Thank you.

- Talk to us about Einstein, New Jersey, and why he continues to be an incredibly important figure in the state, the nation, and the world.

- Einstein lived in New Jersey for actually, you know, a third of his adult life, at least.

He died there.

His final resting place, where his ashes were scattered is unknown, but is almost certainly within the state.

So he's very much a Jersey guy.

Even though his accent may have fooled you.

There's an enormous amount about Albert Einstein that can be said in any context.

In a specific context of, of the state, I think one of the most important things to understand is why he came there, given that he was born in Germany, lived in and loved Switzerland, held Swiss citizenship, then held German citizenship, won the Nobel Prize as a German.

All those, you know, facts of his youth and early maturity were in Europe, in Central Europe.

And yet, he became a, you know, for the rest of his life, from 1933 forward, another 20 plus years, he was a New Jersey person.

Why did he make that move?

And the answer is, he left before he had to flee an intolerable political situation with the rise of Nazism, in Germany.

He came to New Jersey because he had an offer there to think, to create, to be unfettered by the crushing weight of fascism and the antisemitism of Nazi Germany.

And New Jersey became his home because it allowed him to be Albert Einstein.

- In New Jersey, was it, in fact, Princeton?

- It was actually not quite Princeton, it was the Institute for Advanced Study, which is at Princeton.

It was then housed on the Princeton campus.

It now has its own campus, basically just next door.

But it was never formally part of Princeton University, though it then had and still does, close ties to the university.

- Countless physicists.

What sets Einstein apart?

- Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton are considered, sort of, 1 and 1A, for the greatest physicists of all time.

And the reason is similar for both.

They basically took an enormously wide view of what they were trying to understand, and solved more of the problems, across more of the areas, in the most fundamental ways available to them, given the knowledge of the time.

Einstein set the landscape for so much.

Not all of it, but so much of modern physics.

His work extends from figuring out how the basic structure and evolution of the entire universe, to really useful calculations that are still relevant, to things like, you know, properly mixing paint.

I mean that literally, one of his most cited papers for a long time was actually a paper that dealt with statistical mechanics that really does, you know, help people figure out how to mix fluids together.

He, as a sort of side, you know, just a side project, one time, gave the formal physical analysis of why the sky is blue.

But of course, he's remembered mostly for his fundamental work on relativity, the special and general theories, and for his absolutely crucial role in creating quantum theory, which is the, you know, as it developed, has become the theory that sort of drives all of our understanding of just such a huge range of natural phenomena.

- But professor, do me a favor, break it down so that our audience, really smart audience, can understand what exactly this quantum physics, quantum mechanics.

Example?

- Okay, so let's use Einstein's own history as the example.

In the early, very early 20th century, people noticed something really weird.

That if you shine a light on a wire you get these little discreet bursts of energy and they couldn't figure out why this was happening.

And there were particular details that really, sort of, framed the problem in an interesting way.

And what Einstein did, this was his first big contribution to quantum theory, was he showed that the only way this made sense is if you understand light is not a wave, it's not, you know, all those things that makes us think it's a wave, like the, you know, way it spreads out into a rainbow and all these other beautiful effects, you know, and, you know, not just the sort of phenomena but there was an underlying theory that was incredibly successful that powered the electronic, the electricity revolution, of the 19th century that treated light as a wave.

There's all these reasons to think that light was a wave, and Einstein said, "No, this one weird thing only makes sense if you understand light can be a particle."

And, you know, he said, "If you think of it, the light hitting this wire, as ping pong balls, as a stream of ping pong balls, hitting this, you know, hitting this wire and knocking electrons, into, you know, into motion creating the measurable effect, the electrical effect, the so-called photo..." This is all called the photo electric light electricity.

And he said, "Look, if you think of it as ping pong balls you can see why this all works and the math all works out."

And that sounds like kind of a little technical thing but it's revolutionary.

In fact he won the Nobel Prize for this one discovery.

- What year?

What year?

- This was 1905.

- 1905.

His peak years, I hate to put it that way.

What were his peak years of incredibly important work in the area of physics?

- 1905 was his breakthrough year.

1915 is when he did the general theory of relativity, which is a theory of gravity and explains the large scale structure of the universe and the, you know, lots of other things, including why your GPS works.

And then he was still doing leading edge work up till about 1925.

So he had a 20 year run as a, just an absolutely, you know, vital, fundamentally, creative physicist, which is a lot longer than most people.

- Real quick on this, if Einstein hadn't done the extraordinary work that he did during that period, do you believe we would have the modern technology, the lifestyle that we do that's so tied to advancement, innovation, and frankly making our lives a lot comfortable, a lot more comfortable and easier?

- Honestly, I think so.

I mean, yes, there is, you know, Einstein was undoubtedly a genius.

The word is a word I hate.

It's, it's a, you know...

But if it applies to anyone, it applies to Einstein.

But ultimately, nobody in physics, or in any creative endeavor is truly isolated.

There were other people thinking about the same problems that he was interested in.

I think some important discoveries would've been delayed.

In some cases, they would've been delayed for quite some time but they all would've been made eventually.

Same was true of Newton, by the way... - Say that again?

- Same was true of Newton, by the way.

I mean, Newton is the ultimate genius.

- Isaac Newton.

- But there were others working on those problems, and they were coming up with really interesting results, as well.

- Yes or no?

If Einstein were alive today in the United States, given his awareness of societal issues, politics, tyranny, et cetera, et cetera, would you believe he'd be in the United States?

- I think he would be in the United States just as he stayed in Germany for, you know, several years of the rise of Hitler.

But I think he would also be, because he was in fact a smart guy, thinking about an exit plan.

You know, there's enough dangers going on in our society.

There's enough rising antisemitism, which he was acutely aware of.

There are enough threats to individual autonomy and freedom.

There are, as there was in Germany, a sort of captured set of courts, which were, you know, producing rulings that served authoritarian power but not necessarily the law, as it was previously understood.

He would see all those things.

He would recognize the science and he would, I think, be making sure that there was a university, in Canada or someplace, that might want to have his services.

- I wanna thank Professor Thomas Levenson, as you listen to him and talking about Einstein, also the book "Einstein and Berlin", you think about the anti-science thinking on the part of so many people in New Jersey and the nation.

It'd be fascinating to imagine how Einstein would've dealt with that.

Professor Levenson, I wanna thank you so much for joining us on, Remember Them.

- Thank you very much.

Great to be here.

- I'm Steve Adubato, for my colleague Jacqui Tricarico, and the team at Remember Them.

Thanks for watching us.

See you next time.

- [Narrator] One on One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by PSE&G, NJM Insurance Group.

RWJBarnabas Health.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Prudential Financial.

And by The Russell Berrie Foundation.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by New Jersey Monthly.

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