Thomas Edison Bio
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman, who has been described as America’s greatest inventor. Edison developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.
His inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb, had a widespread effect on the modern industrialized world. Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention. He worked with many researchers and employees. Edison established the first industrial research laboratory.
Thomas Edison established his first laboratory facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876, where many of his early inventions would be developed. He later established a botanic laboratory in Fort Myers, Florida in collaboration with businessmen Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, and a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey that featured the world’s first film studio, the Black Maria.
Thomas Edison Age|Family
Thomas Edison was born, in 1847, in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. Edison was raised in the American Midwest and early in his career, he worked as a telegraph operator, which inspired some of his earliest inventions.
Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. Around the middle of his career, Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire.
He was then thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. 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.
At the time of his death on 18th October 1931, Edison was 84 years old.
Thomas Edison Education
In 1854, Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he attended public school for a total of 12 weeks. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction, he was deemed difficult by his teacher.
His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home. At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects. In this wide-open curriculum Edison developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him throughout his life.
At age 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Exploiting his access to the news bulletins teletyped to the station office each day, Thomas began publishing his own small newspaper, called The Grand Trunk Herald. The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity.
Thomas Edison Childen
Edison married twice and fathered six children. He married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses in 1871. In their 13-year marriage, they had three children, Marion, Thomas and William, who himself became an inventor. Mary later died in 1884 at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor.
On February 24, 1886, Edison married Mina Miller from 1865 to 1947 in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children together: Madeleine Edison, Charles Edison who took over his company and experimental laboratories upon his father’s death and Theodore Miller Edison
Thomas Edison Inventions
Thomas Edison’s inventions included the telegraph, the universal stock ticker, the phonograph, the first commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries and the Kinetograph, a camera for motion pictures.
Edison moved to New York City in 1869, at 22 years old, and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers’ transactions.
The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed that they paid him $40,000 for the rights. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.
Thomas Edison Light Bulb
In 1878, Edison started working on a system of electrical illumination. He hoped it could compete with gas and oil-based lighting. He began by tackling the problem of creating a long-lasting incandescent lamp, something that would be needed for indoor use.
Many earlier inventors had earlier devised incandescent lamps, including Alessandro Volta’s demonstration of a glowing wire in 1800 and inventions by Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans.
The early bulbs were either extremely short life, high expense to produce, or high electric current drawn, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. Edison realized that to connect a series of electric lights to an economically manageable size and using the necessary thickness of copper wire, he would need to develop a lamp that used a low amount of current. This lamp was to have high resistance and use relatively low voltage, around 110 volts.
After many experiments, first with carbon filaments and then with platinum and other metals, Edison returned to a carbon filament. His first successful test was on October 22, 1879. It lasted 13.5 hours.
Edison continued to improve this design and signed on 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”. This was the first commercially practical incandescent light.
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 that could last over 1,200 hours.
The idea of using this particular raw material originated from Edison’s recalling his examination of a few threads from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the present-day state of Wyoming, where he and other members of a scientific team had traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July 29, 1878, from the Continental Divide.
In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan, Spencer Trask, 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.”
Thomas Edison Quotes
» Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
» I start where the last man left off.
» Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.
» If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.
» When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.
» Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
» The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense.
» Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
» Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.
» Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
» Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
» I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
» I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
For more inspiring and motivating quotes by Thomas Edison, check out this link.
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