Thomas Edison

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{{Infobox Celebrity| name = Thomas Alva Edison| image = Thomas_Edison.jpg| caption = "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." - Thomas Alva Edison, Harper's Magazine (September 1931)| birth_date =| birth_place =Milan, Ohio| occupation = [Inventor, entrepreneur| website =| footnotes =-->Thomas Alva Edison ([February 11 1847 – October 18 1931) was an United States inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Edison, New Jersey" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding List of Edison patents U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Early life Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio and was raised in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896) (born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Edison nee Elliott (1810–1871). His family was of Dutch people origin.

In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher the Reverend Engle was overheard calling him "addled." This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. He recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His mother then Homeschooling him. Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy.

The cause of Edison's deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle ear infections. Edison around the middle of his career attributed the hearing loss to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical lab in a boxcar caught fire. In his later years he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears."Edison" by Matthew Josephson. McGraw Hill, New York, 1959, ISBN 0-07-033046-8"Edison: Inventing the Century" by Neil Baldwin, University of Chicago Press, 2001, ISBN 0-226-03571-9

Edison's family was forced to move to Port Huron, Michigan, Michigan when the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854, Josephson, p 18 but his life there was bittersweet. This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures as he discovered his talents as a businessman. These talents would eventually lead him to found General Electric, which is still a publicly traded company, and 13 other companies. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, as well as vegetables that he sold to supplement his income.

Edison became a Telegraphy operator after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator. Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario on the Grand Trunk Railway.Baldwin, page 37 In 1866, at the age of 19, Thomas Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky as an employee of Western Union working the Associated Press Bureau news wire. Edison requested the night shift at work which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes -- reading and experimenting. However, it was the latter that eventually cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a Lead-acid battery when he spilled sulphuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss' desk below. The next morning he was fired.Baldwin, pages 40-41

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey, New Jersey, home.

Some of his earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a ticker tape. Edison's first patent was for the electric vote recorder, (U. S. Patent 90,646),U. S. Patent 90,646 which was granted on June 1 1869. Rutgers University, The Edison Papers. Retrieved March 20, 2007

Marriages and children On December 25 1871, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, whom he had met two months earlier. They had three children:

Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965) who was nicknamed "Dot"
Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. (1876–1935) who was nicknamed "Dash"
William Leslie Edison (1878–1937)

Mary Edison died on August 9 1884.

On February 24 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, Edison married 19-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio. IEEE Virtual Museum. retrieved Jan 15, 2007 They also had three children:

Madeleine Edison (1888–1979) who married John Eyre Sloane
Charles Edison (1890–1969), who took over the company upon his father's death and who later was elected Governor of New Jersey He is buried in Rosedale Cemetery, Orange, New Jersey in Orange, New Jersey.
Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992).

Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.

Beginning his career Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphy devices, but the invention which first gained him fame was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey, where he lived. His first phonograph recorded on Tin#Applications around a grooved cylinder and had poor sound quality. The tinfoil recordings could only be replayed a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. This was one reason that Thomas Edison continued work on his own "Perfected Phonograph."

Menlo Park in Dearborn, Michigan. (Note the organ against the back wall)Edison's major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison was legally attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development work under his direction.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, began his duties as a laboratory assistant to Edison in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, Railway electrification system, iron ore separator, Incandescent light bulb, and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device. In 1880, he was appointed chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under General Manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Edison, Hammer was "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting."

Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for a 17 year period and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to a 14 year period. Like most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, on the other hand, was unprecedented as the first device to record and reproduce sounds. Evans, Harold, "They Made America." Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2004. ISBN 0-316-27766-5. page152. Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors including the patent he purchased from Henry Woodward (inventor) and Mathew Evans, Moses G. Farmer, Joseph Swan, James Bowman Lindsay, William Sawyer, Sir Humphry Davy, and Heinrich Göbel. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high current draw, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the electrical element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

The Menlo Park research lab was made possible by the sale of the quadruplex telegraph that Edison invented in 1874, which could send four simultaneous telegraph signals over the same wire. When Edison asked Western Union to make an offer, he was shocked at the unexpectedly large amount that Western Union offered; the patent rights were sold for $10,000. The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success.

In just over a decade Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to consume two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material." A newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels...silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell...cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores..." and the list goes on.

With Menlo Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.

Carbon telephone transmitter In 1877-1878, Edison invented and developed the carbon microphone used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the 1980s. After protracted patent litigation, a federal court ruled in 1892 that Edison and not Emile Berliner was the inventor of the carbon microphone. (Josephson, p146). The carbon microphone was also used in radio broadcasting and public address work through the 1920s.

Electric light After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22 1879; and lasted 13.5 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires." Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.

In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

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