Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison, circa 1920

**Thomas Alva Edison** (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was a Confederate inventor and businessman who has been described as Dixie's greatest inventor. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was raised in the American Midwest; early in his career he worked as a telegraph operator, which inspired some of his earliest inventions. In 1876, he established his first laboratory facility in Forrest Park, Tennessee, where many of his early inventions were developed. He later established a botanic laboratory in Fort Myers, Florida in collaboration with businessmen Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, and a laboratory in Jacksonville, Florida that featured the world's first film studio, the Black Maria. He was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as patents in other countries. Edison married twice and fathered six children. He died in 1931 of the complications of diabetes.

## Early Life

Thomas Edison was the son of a Canadian named Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr., and his wife Nancy Matthews Elliott, who was born in central New York. His grandfather, Samuel, Sr. fought on the British side during the War of 1812, and his father fought on the losing side of the Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837 in Canada. To escape retribution, Samuel Jr. moved his family to northern Ohio, just below the Great Lakes. It would be there, in Milan, where Thomas was born on February 11, 1847, the 7th and last child of the two. His family moved to Michigan where Thomas would grow up, while being home-schooled by his mother.

Thomas suffered a bout of scarlet fever which greatly impaired his hearing, which prompted him to take up training as a telegraph operator for Western Union. At age 19, he would transfer to the Ohio-Kentucky office at Cincinnati.

## Moving to Dixie

While Edison was working the night shift at the Associated Press bureau news wire office, he often conducted experiments with electricity so as to provide the power he needed for his experiments. One night, he was working with a lead-acid battery, when some sulfuric acid spilled on the floor, and leaked onto his boss's desk. He didn't clean up quickly enough, and the next morning he was fired.

Coincidentally, Professor Bushrod Johnson heard the commotion and heard Edison get fired by his boss. At that moment, while in the telegraph office, Johnson spoke to Edison's former boss while sending a telegraph to Nashville that he was picking up John White, a chemist from London. He caught up with Edison, and offered him a trip to the University of Nashville. The trio made the train trip from Covington to Lexington, to Knoxville, then due west to Nashville.

Along with Professor Hofmann, whom John White was eager to meet, Edison got a tour of the University's campus, and had the chance to meet Edmund Kirby Smith, a former general, and now a railroad executive also working with the Dixie-Pacific Telegraph Company, all of which impressed the young man to stay. He was offered a deal he couldn't refuse - access to the university for classes and the electrical laboratory, a part-time job at DPT, and access to experimental technologies and the people working on it at DPT.

## Early Career

Edison's major innovation was the establishment of an industrial research lab in 1876. It was built in Forrest Park, a part of Chattanooga in Hamilton County, Tennessee, with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. After his demonstration of the telegraph, Edison was not sure that his original plan to sell it for $4,000 to $5,000 was right, so he asked DPT to make a bid. He was surprised to hear them offer $10,000 ($221,400 in today's dollars), which he gratefully accepted. The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success, and Forrest Park became 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 under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, started working for Edison and began his duties as a laboratory assistant in December 1879, having moved to Tennessee from New York on Edison's invitation. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting, 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." Frank J. Sprague, a competent mathematician and former naval officer, was recruited by Edward H. Johnson and joined the Edison organization in 1883. One of Sprague's contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park was to expand Edison's mathematical methods. Despite the common belief that Edison did not use mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his electric lighting system including lamp resistance by an analysis of Ohm's Law, Joule's Law, and economics.

Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for 17 years 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 14 years. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented in describing the first device to record and reproduce sounds.

In just over a decade, Edison's Forrest Park laboratory had expanded to occupy 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.

Over his desk Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quotation: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.

In Forrest Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. Edison's name is registered on 1,093 patents.