Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all time, acquired an astounding 1,093 patents, and almost single-handedly shaped the modern world as we know it today. He was a large force in getting the common man many inventions and devices that by now are just commonplace, thanks to him. Obviously, then, he is a big reason that we have inventions like the CD, the telephone as we know it, the incandescent light bulb, the fluorescent light bulb, the alkaline storage battery, and the safety miner's headlamp. Amazingly, Edison might have had a hand in the first Internet photographs! Even today, he is still recognized for all his many highly developed inventions and prestigious awards. To find out more about Edison's interesting life, read on!
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the seventh and the youngest child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Amazingly, little Al, as he was called, did not learn to speak until he was nearly 4 years old. Soon after, he began to ask adults to explain how everything mechanical worked. Even before he could talk, Al showed a fascination for mechanical objects.
When Edison was 7, the family moved to Port Huron, MI, where Samuel Edison ran businesses in land inventing and lumbering. Soon after their move, Edison's parents put him in a one-room school with 38 other students.
Thomas Edison was a poor student. He had a relatively self-centered behavior and wanted to know the answers to many complicated questions. Finally, after 3 months in this situation, Tom's overworked and short-tempered teacher lost his patience with the boy. He pointed out that, since Tom's head was slightly larger than average, his brains inside must be addled, or scrambled. That did it for Edison?'s schooling. His enraged mother pulled him from the school, and proceeded to teach him herself. Edison later said of his her, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint." (Beals, 1).
Edison's mother taught him at home for a number of years, and it was there that his love for books and knowledge was noticed. In particular, he had a deep interest in world history and English literature. His father gave him a $.10 reward for each book that he completed, be it at the Edison home or at the library. At age 11, when he was first introduced to a library, young Edison marched right over to the last book alphabetically and declared that he was going to read every single book in the whole library. His parents, realizing that that was impossible, gently told him that he would have to be selective, and choose the books which he thought would be the best.
Amazingly, by age 12, Edison had Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Sears' History of the World, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, The World Dictionary of Science, and a number of books on practical chemistry. As you can probably guess, all this reading led Edison to experiment with chemicals and to construct intricate models. Two of these were a working sawmill and a railroad engine, both of which were powered by steam.
Even when he was a child, Edison was proficient in business. At a young age, he had a vegetable garden on his father's farm and sold the veggies in town. When he was 12, he started selling newspapers, candy, and sandwiches on the passenger trains between Port Huron and Detroit. Later, he employed others to sell his goods on the train and at the stops. By the time he was 15, he wrote and published a newspaper for the train called the Weekly Herald, which he published in an empty freight car that doubled as his laboratory.
When Thomas Edison was about 15, he saved the life of the stationmaster's child from a runaway boxcar which was ready to run over the 3-year-old, who was playing on the railroad tracks. As a reward, the stationmaster promised to teach Edison telegraphy. By 1863, Edison began work as a telegraph operator for the Western Union telegraph Company in Port Huron. During the next 4 years, he worked as a telegrapher in a number of Midwestern cities. He learned lots about the mechanical, electrical, and chemical elements of telegraphy. He also read scientific and scientific telegraphic journals and books and experimented with telegraphic equipment.
Edison had hearing difficulties, but that did not stop him from becoming an awesome telegraph operator. In fact, he used his hearing disability to his advantage. He used a skill used by hearing-disabled people called "filling the gaps" or guessing. Most operators used this skill to finish incomplete interrupted messages, but Edison used it even more (mainly because he had to). In his spare time, Edison read newspapers. The information from the papers enabled him to finish incomplete messages accurately and quickly.
In 1868, Thomas Edison moved to Boston to continue his work as a telegraph operator. Boston was important to Edison because it was generally considered to be the center of the scientific, educational, and cultural world at that time. It was there that he applied for and was granted rights to his first patent - an electronic vote recorder. Unfortunately, it was not a success. Edison received many critical remarks from the politicians of the day at the vote recorder's first public showing. One, in particular, said that it's speed in tallying votes would disrupt the delicate political status-quo. "This is exactly what we do not want" (Beals, 4-5). The reason for this man's harsh remarks was that manually counting votes took quite a while, and many politicians made last-minute speeches, hoping for the later voters to vote for them. "Tom was very distressed by this turn of events and determined never again to waste time inventing things that people would not want to buy" (Beals, 5).
Edison did make things that brought good to Boston while he resided there. These included improvements to the city fire alarm system, improved telegraphs for stockbrokers, and a device to transmit horn-like sounds and even crude images (was this the first Internet?) over telegraph wires. He also made a model engine that actually ran on steam. Unfortunately, it is forgotten and not used today.
In 1869, Thomas Edison worked in New York City. There he found a job working for Samuel Laws at the Gold Indicator Company. The purpose of this company was to provide people in NYC with up-to-the-minute gold prices around the U.S. One day, however, the machines stopped. While others were frantically searching for the cause to the problem, Edison promptly went to the machines, and within 2 hours, he had the problem fixed. Samuel Laws was so ecstatic over the quick fix that he offered Edison an advanced job fixing the machines for $300 a week!
During the year of 1870, Thomas Edison moved to Newark, N.J. There he worked on other inventions, in cooperation with machine shop operators. In 1874, Edison developed the quadruplex telegraph, which was faster and much more efficient than the regular telegraph. As its name implies, the quadruplex telegraph could send 4 messages at the same time, 2 in each direction. "This invention strengthened Edison's reputation as an inventor in the telegraph community" (Jenkins, 78). In the spring of 1876, Edison built a new, bigger laboratory in New Jersey where he had more space and equipment with which to use for more inventions. The lab was made in rural Menlo Park, approximately 25 mi. south of Newark and his old laboratory. It included a machine shop, phonograph and photograph departments, a library, and auxiliary buildings for metallurgy, chemistry, woodworking, and galvanometer testing. Western Union gave Edison and his assistants financial support, which they used to conduct their research. Much of their early research was devoted to working on the "speaking telegraph", as the telephone was called then. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and a year later, Edison improved on Bell's invention, developing a much better transmitter, which helped to make the speaker's voice much louder and clearer when talking on the telephone.
One of Thomas Edison's most interesting inventions was an electric pen that he developed in 1875. Not much is known about it, except that it is definitely not used today!
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the predecessor to the CD player. Edison originally wanted the device for playing back messages sent over the telegraph or the telephone. Eventually, all this experimentation led to the creation of the tin foil phonograph, the first of Edison's many versions of the device. Unlike the records that he later used, this phonograph used a tin cylinder for each recording. Also, Edison experimented with recording sound on tapes and disks. It was this invention that gave Edison the title "The Wizard of Menlo Park".
Later, the phonograph, which was originally designed as a dictation machine, was given many other uses thought up mostly by Edison. Some of them were the Business Phonograph, the Spring Motor Phonograph, the Army & Navy models of the phonograph, and the Edison Disc Phonograph. The Business Phonograph was specially designed as a dictation machine for those in business, while the Spring Motor Phonograph was used for the general public. The Army & Navy models of the phonograph were used in World War I, and the Edison Disc Phonograph, which was one of Edison's last phonograph models, was the first Edison phonograph to use a disc instead of a cylinder for use.
Also around the time of the birth of the phonograph, Edison improved upon an important item that many take for granted - the incandescent light bulb. He had seen a 50-year-old machine that created light but that was very expensive to run, so he wanted a light bulb for the common man. He had been working on a light bulb for only a few months, but in 1879 he got his big break, and the incandescent light bulb, as we know it, was born. However, it was not as easy as this. Edison had to invent 7 system elements that were essential to the practical application of the electric light as a superior alternative to gas lights, which were vastly used at that time. The 7 elements were: 1. The parallel circuit, 2. A durable light bulb, 3. An improved dynamo, 4. The underground conductor network, 5. The devices for maintaining constant voltage, 6. Safety fuses and insulating materials, and 7. Light sockets with on/off switches. "The reason that the incandescent light bulb was developed by Edison in such a short time was that he was disappointed that Alexander Graham Bell had beaten him to the first authentic transmission of the human voice" (Beals, 7). Therefore, Edison stepped up his speed of progress of inventions in order not to be beaten to any patents again.
In 1880, the Edison gang improved the bulb by adding bamboo filaments, which greatly increased the life of the light bulb. In order to promote the use of the incandescent light, Edison moved to New York City to help promote the building of power plants there and in other large U.S. cities. This was quite successful, and the incandescent light bulb quickly became common in many city and large town homes.
Surprisingly, Thomas Edison helped found the motion picture business. He got a start in this by viewing Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, which showed crude videos. Edison was inspired, and by the end of the year, had a machine that looked like a cylinder phonograph, but showed videos. About 5 years later, the kinetoscope was unveiled. It showed a number of images on celluloid film, and by showing all the pictures in rapid succession, would show a video of the images. However, after a 1917 Supreme Court ruling declaring that Edison?s company, the Motion Picture Patents Company, was an illegal monopoly, Edison left the motion picture business forever.
In the 1880's and 1890's, Edison also invented the alkaline storage battery, which improved the life of regular batteries. He worked on the carbon telephone transmitter as well, which cleared up the caller's voice even more than it already was, and also increased the volume - another plus!
Even though Thomas Edison was a great inventor, he was human and made mistakes. Some of his patents were utter failures or were just disliked by the general public. One of the failures was the manufacture of cement. Edison envisioned the use of cement in almost every piece of furniture and accessory in homes, including cement foundations, phonograph cases, furniture, beds, and houses that were built of cement. Once again, Edison was too far ahead of his time, and the cement stuff was disliked by the general public. After promoting cement use for about 2 years, Edison finally left the cement business.
Another failure of Edison's was the ore-milling process, which he envisioned that, by sifting ore through big machines, would bring the ore business back to the East Coast. Unfortunately for Edison, huge deposits of ore had recently been discovered in the Midwest and therefore, Edison's dream of an ore-milling process came crashing to a halt. Finally, Edison's last major failure was an attempt at a substitute for rubber, which never panned out. He worked on this for approximately 1 ½ years, but when he ended up wasting money with no positive results, he abandoned the substitute rubber business forever.
Edison's later life was not filled with action and lawsuits from jealous competitors, as his early life was. Instead, it contained resignations from companies, perfections of inventions, and eventually, his death.
The last 2 major inventions by Edison in what would be designated his "later life" were the fluorescent electric lamp and the electric safety miner's headlamp. Edison had done so much in his earlier life that he was not really close to his kids or wife, as he would often stay in his laboratory for days at a time working on an invention, even sleeping there! Therefore, he deemed that it would be wise to resign from many of the companies that he had helped create and spend time with his family. Before Edison could do such a thing, however, he had to tinker with one of his inventions - the phonograph. For years the company had sold these devices with cylinders to store the data, not the discs. The rationalizing behind this idea was that the cylinders stored more than the discs and were more reliable. However, others had began to use discs and the sales of the Edison cylinder phonograph were rapidly declining, so Edison was forced to make another model of the phonograph - the Edison Disc Phonograph was introduced in 1912. When the U.S. entered WWI, Thomas Edison was named the head of the Naval Consulting Board. The reason behind this was that he had advised all to be ready because he felt that technology was the future of war It turns out that he was right.
In 1926, Edison resigned from Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and became its chairman of the board. His son, Charles Edison, became the president in his place.
Thomas A. Edison received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1926 for all his contributions to the world. Edison had a couple of last contributions to make, however. In 1929, he made programs for the radio on long-playing discs, which was first used by the radio station WAAM in Newark, NJ. Also in 1929, Edison made his final tweaking to the phonograph - a portable model. It was called the Edison Portable Disc Phonograph with New Edison Needle Records. This was to be Edison's last invention. He continued playing with inventions and trying out ideas, but nothing more panned out. Unfortunately for Edison, no one can go on forever, and after a series of illnesses, Thomas Alva Edison passed away in his mansion in October of 1931. His loss was felt around the world.
Thomas Edison did not get married until he was 24 years old. When he did, it was to Mary Stillwell on December 25, 1871. They had three kids: Marion Estelle, who was born on 1873, Thomas Alva, Jr., who came on January 10, 1876, and William Leslie (born October 26, 1878). Mary eventually died in 1884. Edison felt her loss greatly but met another woman, Mina Miller, who worked for his company. Although she was only a little older than Edison's daughter, he married her in early 1886. They (surprisingly) lived together happily for the rest of their lives.
Thomas Edison has many famous quotes credited to his name, a couple of which I will mention here. One was "I never quit until I get what I'm after. Negative results are just what I'm after. They are just as valuable to me as positive results" (Life, 2). Another was "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" (Jenkins, 81).
Thomas Alva Edison was a great force in creating the modern world as it is known today and should still be recognized for all his achievements. Even today, many devices are really just tweaked versions of Edison's inventions. He was a great man who really worked hard to help every person around the world live a better and easier life. Even though he died over 70 years ago, his ideas are still hard at work, helping others come up with whole new ideas that even Thomas Edison himself might never have dreamed of!