Thomas Edison's Greatest Inventions Thomas Edison's Greatest Inventions How the iconic inventor's ideas shaped America Getty Images Updated October 13, 2016. The Phonograph Thomas Edison’s first great invention was the tin foil phonograph. While working to improve the efficiency of a telegraph transmitter , he noticed that the tape of the machine gave off a noise that resembled spoken words when played at a high speed. This led him to wonder if he could record a telephone message. So he began experimenting with the diaphragm of a telephone receiver by attaching a needle to it based on the reasoning that the needle could prick paper tape to record a message. His experiments led him to try a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his great surprise, played back the short message he recorded, "Mary had a little lamb." The word phonograph was the trade name for Edison's device, which played cylinders rather than discs. The machine had two needles: one for recording and one for playback. When you spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of your voice would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle.

continue reading below our video Profile of Thomas Edison The cylinder phonograph, the first machine that could record and reproduce sound, created a sensation and brought Edison international fame. The date given for Edison's completion of the model for the first phonograph was August 12, 1877. It is more likely, however, that work on the model was not finished until November or December of that year since he did not file for the patent until December 24, 1877. He toured the country with the tin foil phonograph and was invited to the White House to demonstrate the device to President Rutherford B. Hayes in April 1878. In 1878, Thomas Edison established the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to sell the new machine. He suggested other uses for the phonograph, such as letter writing and dictation, phonographic books for blind people, a family record (recording family members in their own voices), music boxes and toys, clocks that announce the time and a connection with the telephone so communications could be recorded. The phonograph also led to other spin-off inventions.

For example, while the Edison Company had been fully devoted to the cylinder phonograph , Edison associates began developing their own disc player and discs in secret due to concern over the rising popularity of discs. And in 1913, the Kinetophone was introduced, which attempted to synchronize motion pictures with the sound of a phonograph cylinder record. A Practical Light Bulb Thomas Edison's greatest challenge was the development of a practical incandescent, electric light. Contrary to popular belief, he didn't "invent" the lightbulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. In 1879, using lower current electricity, a small carbonized filament and an improved vacuum inside the globe, he was able to produce a reliable, long-lasting source of light. The idea of electric lighting was not new. A number of people had worked on and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been developed that was remotely practical for home use. Edison's achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical.

He accomplished this when he was able to come up with an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread that burned for thirteen and a half hours. There are a couple of other interesting things about the invention of the light bulb. While most of the attention has been given to the discovery of the ideal filament that made it work, the invention of seven other system elements were just as critical to the practical application of electric lights as an alternative to the gas lights that were prevalent in that day. These elements included: The devices for maintaining constant voltage Safety fuses and insulating materials Light sockets with on-off switches And before Edison could make his millions, every one of these elements had to be tested through careful trial and error, and developed further into practical, reproducible components. The first public demonstration of the Thomas Edison's incandescent lighting system was at the Menlo Park laboratory complex in December of 1879. Industrialized Electrical Systems On September 4, 1882, the first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, went into operation, providing light and electricity power to customers in a one square mile area.

This marked the beginning of the electric age as the modern electric utility industry has since evolved from the early gas and electric carbon-arc commercial and street lighting systems. Thomas Edison's Pearl Street electricity generating station introduced four key elements of a modern electric utility system. It featured reliable central generation, efficient distribution, a successful end use (in 1882, the light bulb) and a competitive price. A model of efficiency for its time, Pearl Street used one-third the fuel of its predecessors, burning about 10 pounds of coal per kilowatt hour, a "heat rate" equivalent of about 138,000 Btu per kilowatt hour. Initially, the Pearl Street utility served 59 customers for about 24 cents per kilowatt hour. In the late 1880s, power demand for electric motors dramatically altered the industry. It went from mainly providing nighttime lighting to becoming a 24-hour service due to high electricity demand for transportation and industry needs. By the end of the 1880s, small central stations dotted many U.S. cities, though each was limited in size to a few blocks because of direct current’s transmission inefficiencies.

Eventually the success of his electric light brought Thomas Edison to new heights of fame and wealth as electricity spread around the world. His various electric companies continued to grow until they were brought together to form Edison General Electric in 1889. Yet despite the use of his name in the company title, the inventor never controlled this company. The tremendous amount of capital needed to develop the incandescent lighting industry would necessitate the involvement of investment bankers such as J.P. Morgan. And when Edison General Electric merged with leading competitor Thompson-Houston in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name and the company became simply General Electric. Motion Pictures Thomas Edison's interest in motion pictures began before 1888, but it was English photographer Eadweard Muybridge ’s visit to his laboratory in West Orange in February of that year that inspired him to invent a camera for motion pictures. Muybridge had proposed that they collaborate and combine the Zoopraxiscope with the Edison phonograph. Edison was intrigued but decided not to participate in such a partnership because he felt that the Zoopraxiscope was not a very practical or efficient way of recording motion.

However, he liked the concept and filed a caveat with the Patents Office on October 17, 1888 that described his ideas for a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" -- record and reproduce objects in motion. The device, called a " Kinetoscope ," was combination of the Greek words "kineto" meaning "movement" and "scopos" meaning "to watch.” Edison’s team finished development on the Kinetoscope in 1891. One of Edison's first motion pictures and the first motion picture ever copyrighted showed his employee Fred Ott pretending to sneeze. The major problem at the time, though, was that good film for motion pictures was not available. That all changed in 1893 when Eastman Kodak began supplying motion picture film stock, making it possible for Edison to step up the production of new motion pictures. To do this, he built a motion picture production studio in New Jersey that had a roof that could be opened to let in daylight. The entire building was constructed so that it could be moved to stay in line with the sun. C.

Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat invented a film projector called the Vitascope and asked Edison to supply the films and manufacture the projector under his name. Eventually, the Edison Company developed its own projector, known as the Projectoscope, and stopped marketing the Vitascope. The first motion pictures shown in a "movie theater" in America were presented to audiences on April 23, 1896, in New York City. Thomas Edison and Menlo Park | Thomas Edison Center Thomas Edison and Menlo Park Thomas Edison and Menlo Park Thomas Edison and Menlo Park The following excerpts are taken from Westfield Architects & Preservation Consultants’ 2007 Preservation Master Plan, Edison Memorial Tower, Museum, & Site. Young Edison Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in the town of Milan, Ohio. 1 His parents, Sam and Nancy Edison, were of Canadian origin and had six children prior to Thomas, only three of whom survived. Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan in 1854. Throughout his childhood, Thomas Edison was full of curiosity about how things worked and always asked a lot of questions.

He didn’t do very well in a traditional school setting, and often got punished for annoying the teacher with too many questions. As a result, after the age of twelve, he was home-schooled by his mother. His interest in science was first sparked when his mother bought him his first scientific book, The School of Natural Philosophy. He thoroughly studied the book and performed all the experiments described in it at home. He soon set up his own laboratory in his room and began performing original experiments. After a few disasters, he was asked by his parents to move his laboratory to the basement. The explosions from the basement constantly shook the house, often upsetting his father. To fund his experiments, Edison took a job as a newsboy on the new Grand Trunk Railway service that had recently begun operating between Port Huron and Detroit, selling candy and refreshments. 2 He made good use of his free time in Detroit by reading at the public library. He had set up a laboratory in the baggage car of the train where he performed experiments during his free time. An accidental fire on the train caused by one of his experiments led to his firing.

Edison was so interested in the working of the telegraph, which had been in use for about forty years, that he built one of his own in his home. At the age of sixteen he became a telegraph operator at the telegraph office in Port Huron. 3 Like most of his other ventures, this job also ended when Edison almost blew up the office while experimenting with the equipment. After that he traveled around the country for five years, mostly working as a telegraph operator at different offices. Although he was moderately deaf as a teenager, he was able to do his job as a telegraph operator because the sharp clicks of the telegraph machine were clearer to him than other ambient sounds. Finally, after being demoted and quitting his job at the Western Union Telegraph office in Boston for a prank he played on his bosses in December of 1868, he decided to quit working as a telegraph operator and decided to devote himself to his inventions. Edison stayed in Boston for a while and used his salesmanship skills to convince investors to finance his inventions. In 1869, he patented the Electrical Vote Recorder.

Another one of his earliest successful inventions was an improvisation of the “stock ticker” which received up-to-date stock price information from the stock exchange and displayed it at various locations. But after a few failures, he lost the faith of his investors. Broke, Edison moved to New York where he befriended a top telegraph engineer, Franklin L. Pope, who worked for Dr. S. S. Laws, the inventor of the earlier version of the stock ticker and who now owned New York Gold Indicator Company. 4 Pope gave Edison some space to board at the company’s Wall Street headquarters. Within a few days, the master ticker tape machine had a major breakdown throwing the entire office and many New York businesses in turmoil. Since Edison was always around the office, he offered to fix the machine. When he did so within two hours, he was offered a job the following day as Pope’s assistant. 5 After working for Dr. Laws, Edison set up his own engineering business and was soon hired by Western Union to be in charge of all of their equipment.

6 Within a short span of time, his boss at Western Union offered to buy out all his new inventions and improvements to the equipment for a lump sum price of $40,000. 7 An awestruck Edison took the money and invested it in an empty factory building in Newark where he set up his first workshop. Two of Edison’s earliest and most important assistants were John Kreusi, a Swiss-trained clockmaker and machine shop foreman, and Charles Batchelor, Edison’s chief mechanical assistant from England. 8 Edison immersed himself in his work with new inventions, but at the same time, his factory continued to produce constantly improved stock tickers and telegraphic equipment. All of Edison’s employees willingly worked long hours because they respected and trusted Edison’s commitment to science. In 1871, Edison, then twenty-four, fell in love with sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell, who was one of his employees at the time. He married her on Christmas day that same year. Their first child was Marion Estelle, born on February 18, 1873, who Edison affectionately called “Dot”. They had two other children after Marion, Thomas Alva Jr.

born January 10, 1876, called “Dash,” and William Leslie born October 26, 1878. By 1876, Edison decided to move away from the city and into a larger space where he could expand his operations to include a large scale inventions workshop. During the same time, Alexander Graham Bell invented the first version of the telephone which created waves throughout the scientific and engineering communities. Western Union commissioned Edison to improve upon the primitive telephone to put it into practical use. 9 ^top Menlo Park Menlo Park was one of the six neighborhoods that formed Raritan Township. It was a very sparsely populated rural area and the site of a failed residential development in the early 1870s. Edison purchased two parcels of land measuring approximately 34 acres from the family of William Carman who was one of his employees at Newark, in late 1875. The office of the real estate development company, Menlo Park Land Company, at the corner of Lincoln Highway and Christie Street, became Edison’s home. Edison’s father built the main laboratory building on the block south of Christie Street between Middlesex and Woodbridge (now Tower) Avenues.

Edison also built other ancillary buildings including the glass house, a carpenters’ shop, a carbon shed, and a blacksmith shop. By the Spring of 1876, Edison moved his operations to Menlo Park. Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was the world’s first such research and development facility. While Edison was working on perfecting the telephone, he started experimenting with the idea of being able to record the sound of the human voice. In November 1877, one of Edison’s first major inventions at Menlo Park was the phonograph, which was a basic machine that allowed a person to speak into a diaphragm that was attached to a pin that made indentations on a paper wrapped around wood. The first words Edison successfully recorded on the phonograph were “Mary had a Little Lamb”. By 1878, this invention was known all around the world and Edison soon earned the title of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” Menlo Park was suddenly known worldwide and started attracting visitors to see demonstrations of the phonograph. For his expanding inventions factory, Edison commissioned the engineering firm of Babcock & Wilcox from New York City to build a machine shop behind the laboratory building in 1878.

10 In that same year, Edison also constructed an office and library for himself at the corner of Christie Street and Woodbridge (Tower) Avenue. In this same year, Edison coined the name “Invention Factory” for the Menlo Park site. 11 Edison did not linger over the success of his phonograph. He quickly moved on to other inventions. His next big breakthrough came when he invented a bamboo filament to create a successful incandescent lightbulb. Other people had been working on the making of light bulbs in the past, but none of the earlier bulbs was ever able to work for more than a few minutes. Finally, on October 21, 1879, Edison’s light bulb burned for a continuous thirteen and a half hours. The following bulbs lasted for 40 hours and Edison and his team worked hard to light the laboratory and his home with several of the new light bulbs for Christmas. On New Year’s Eve of the same year, Christie Street became the world’s first street to be lit by incandescent light bulbs with the help of a power system designed by Edison.

By the summer of 1880, Edison had perfected the incandescent bulb enough to be able to produce and sell it in large quantities. He remodeled the wooden building on the east side of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and Lincoln Highway to serve as a Lamp Factory. 12 Edison also laid down an experimental underground system and put up several lampposts in Menlo Park and successfully tested the first underground electrical system in November 1880. 13 The first two homes to be lit by Edison’s incandescent lights were the home of Francis Upton (a mathematician who worked for Edison) located at Frederick Street at the corner of Woodbridge Avenue, and Sarah Jordan’s boarding house. Sarah Jordan was the widow of one of Edison’s associates from Newark, who Edison brought to Menlo Park to setup the boarding house for his single employees. This was also a place where the entire team gathered for social events during their free time. Edison established the Edison Electric Light Company and began working on using electricity for other purposes.

He built an experimental train running on electricity at Menlo Park that started from the west side of the Machine Shop at the corner Christie Street and Middlesex Avenue and ran about three blocks north to a copper mine called “Mine Gully”. When Edison had discovered copper ore deposits in the area he sank a shaft for his very own copper mine. 14 But very soon, the mining effort seemed uneconomical and inefficient and the mine was abandoned. The electric powered railway became a success in 1881. In the meantime, Edison continued to improve his earlier inventions and took them to the next level. In the summer of 1882 he began setting up a large generator plant at Pearl Street in downtown New York City. He fitted all the office buildings and homes on Pearl Street with about four hundred of his incandescent bulbs. On September 4, 1882, hundreds of people gathered on Pearl Street to witness a never before seen spectacle; at 3 p.m. the generator was turned on and the street was lit with electricity. This was a huge success for Edison in proving his theory of a central generator station supplying power in bulk. After this, Edison became rich and famous.

People thronged to Menlo Park to see his inventions first hand. The first floor of the laboratory constantly entertained business men and investors who came to invest in Edison’s projects. Thomas Edison created some the world’s most important and some of his greatest inventions at Menlo Park. While headquartered there, he applied for about 400 patents on inventions big and small. ^top Post-Menlo Park Years [By the early 1880s] Edison felt the need to be closer to where the business was in New York City, and his operations were quickly outgrowing the existing facilities at Menlo Park. The family moved into a house at 25 Gramercy Park in New York City but spent their summers in the Menlo Park home. 15 On August 9, 1884 Edison’s wife, Mary, died of typhoid fever. 16 Edison was devastated. In the summer of 1885, he met Mina Miller, a music student in Boston at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s residence. After months traveling between Boston and New York, Edison married Mina Miller in her hometown of Akron, Ohio on February 24, 1886.

17 Together they had three children, Madeline, born May 31, 1888; Charles, born August 3, 1890; and Theodore, born July 10, 1898. In 1886, Edison started building a new facility in West Orange, New Jersey. In 1887, his laboratory moved out of Menlo Park and into the new, much larger laboratory in West Orange. This is where Edison spent the remaining forty-four years of his life, continuing to improve his earlier inventions and creating new inventions such as the motion picture camera. He died on October 18, 1931 at the age of 84. After Edison left Menlo Park, the property was completely abandoned. Most of the buildings were occupied by squatters. The laboratory building was used as a theater, a dance hall, and a barn. Edison’s office and library building as well as his home were used as private residences. The carbon shed was used as a chicken shed. The buildings and site were in poor condition. In 1904, The General Electric Outing Club organized a dinner in honor of Edison at the site.

This was the first time Edison had returned to the property since he moved to West Orange. He emotionally toured the property, visiting every building. The last remaining official record of the buildings is a series of photographs taken by J. Lloyd Grimstead and Charles B. Carman in 1911. The buildings continued to deteriorate until they began to completely fall apart one by one. Edison’s home was destroyed in fire in 1914, and his office and library building met with the same fate in 1919. The laboratory, machine shop and other buildings were slowly scavenged for building materials. Edison returned to Menlo Park on May 16, 1925 to unveil a memorial tablet (see Commemorative History ) donated by the State of New Jersey to honor him and his work at Menlo Park. This memorial tablet still stands at the edge of site of Edison’s home adjoining Lincoln Highway. In 1928-29, Henry Ford, who was a close friend of Edison, decided to construct a replica of the Menlo Park complex at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

He moved the only two surviving buildings, the Glass House and Sarah Jordan’s Boarding House, to Greenfield Village. 18 (The Glass House had been previously moved to Parsippany by General Electric, the company that succeeded Edison’s original Edison Electric Light Company. 19 Henry Ford also hired Charles Carman to locate all surviving material that belonged to the original laboratory to be used in the reconstruction. A model of the laboratory building constructed of material from the laboratory is now located in the museum building. A steel framed tower was built as a memorial to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Edison’s perfection of the light bulb. The tower was built at the location of the laboratory with a large replica of the Edison’s original light bulb at the very top, lit for the first time on October 21, 1929. A frosted bulb called the “Eternal Light” was installed at the base of the tower. After Edison’s death in 1931, his family donated the property to the State of New Jersey to be converted into a state park. Meanwhile, plans for building a new, permanent tower were developed. The original design for the new tower was the creation of architects John A. Peterkin and Col. Hugh A.

Kelly. This was to be an elaborate Art Deco structure featuring a circular museum building, 180 feet in diameter, with four colonnaded entrances leading into a central circular space with Edison’s statue in the center surrounded by murals depicting events at Menlo Park along the circular walls. This museum building would form the base for a 175 feet high Art Deco Tower topped with a large replica of the incandescent bulb. Due to a lack of funds during the Depression, this design was never realized. Eventually, a new design in the Art Deco style for the tower, modest by comparison, was prepared by Massena & duPont, Architects. The construction of the new tower had begun while the old tower was still in place. The old tower was then destroyed by lightning in August 1937. Remarkably, the “Eternal Light” survived the disaster and continued to stay lit even after the tower had collapsed around it. 20 The bulb was then allowed to remain in place while the new tower was built. The new tower was the gift of William Slocum Barstow, the president of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Inc., on behalf of the Edison Pioneers.

21 The new tower was a 131 feet 4 inches high concrete structure built entirely with Edison Portland Cement. It featured aggregate- finish, precast concrete panels on the exterior and was topped with a replica of the incandescent bulb, 19 feet 2 inches in diameter. The bulb was cast by Corning Glass Works from a sketch of the first commercial light bulb. 22 The tower was dedicated on February 11, 1938. Since 1933, the property has been owned by the State of New Jersey. Several plans over the years to expand and beautify the property have fallen through, mostly due to lack of funding. When the Edison Memorial Tower Corporation, a non-profit organization, became involved with the property in 1999, the tower was in a neglected state and the gatehouse was almost completely abandoned. Since then, the group has assisted the Township in its efforts to rejuvenate the property by bringing back the memory of Edison and his work. ^top Notes Note 1: Anna Sproule, Thomas A. Edison, The World’s Greatest Inventor, Blackbirch Press Inc., Woodbridge, Connecticut, 2000, p. 11.

back Note 2: Ibid, pp. 14-15. back Note 3: Ibid, p. 21. back Note 4: Sproule, p. 25. back Note 5: Ibid, p. 26. back Note 6: Ibid. back Note 7: Ibid. back Note 8: Stacy Spies, Images of America Edison, Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2001, pp. 14 & 20. back Note 9: Sproule, p. 28. back Note 10: Spies, p. 13. back Note 11: Ian Burrow determined that the term “Invention Factory” is first mentioned in an interview with Edison in the Philadelphia Weekly Times on April 29, 1878 (Israel 1998 chapter 8, footnote 2 on page 486). back Note 12: The Edison Pioneers (compilers), The Story of Menlo Park, p. 14. back Note 13: Ibid, p. 20. back Note 14: Ibid, p. 21.

back Note 15: Kathleen L. McGuirk, Introduction — The Diary of Thomas A. Edison, The Chatham Press, Inc., Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 1931, p. 8. back Note 16: McGuirk, p. 9. back Note 17: The New York Times, Mr. Edison’s Wedding, February 25, 1886. back Note 18: Spies, p. 21. back Note 19: Ibid. back Note 20: State of New Jersey Department of Conservation and Economic Development, Edison State Park, Bureau of Parks, p. 1. back Note 21: Ibid. back Menlo Park, Thomas Edison's Invention Factory What was Menlo Park? Thomas Edison's Invention Factory Edison's complex at Menlo Park, showing house, laboratory, office and machine shop. sketch by Theo. R. Davis By Mary Bellis Updated August 10, 2016. Thomas Edison was behind the formation of the first industrial research laboratory, Menlo Park, a place where a team of inventors would work together to create new inventions.

His role in forming this "invention factory" gave him the nickname "the wizard of Menlo Park." Menlo Park, New Jersey Edison opened a research laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ, in 1876. This site later become known as an "invention factory," since Edison and his employees worked on several different inventions at any given time there. It was there that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph , his first commercially successful invention. The New Jersey Menlo Park laboratory was closed in 1882, when Edison moved into his new larger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Images of Menlo Park Six interior views showing Edison at Menlo Park The Wizard of Menlo Park Thomas Edison was nicknamed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter after his invention of the phonograph while at Menlo Park.

continue reading below our video Profile of Thomas Edison Other important achievements and inventions that Edison created at Menlo Park included: a carbon button transmitter (aka microphone) and the induction coil that greatly improved the telephone an improved bulb filament and successful incandescent lightbulb the first underground electrical system a prototype electric railway was constructed at Menlo Park the founding of the Edison Electric Light Company Christie Street in Menlo Park became the world's first street to be lit by incandescent lightbulbs In fact, Menlo Park became a tourist attraction because of the novelty of lighting Edison applied for over 400 patents for inventions made at Menlo Park Menlo Park - The Land Menlo Park was part of rural Raritan Township in New Jersey. Edison bought 34 acres of land there in late 1875. The office of a former real estate company, at the corner of Lincoln Highway and Christie Street, became Edison's home. Edison's father built the main laboratory building on the block south of Christie Street between Middlesex and Woodbridge Avenues. Also built was the glass house, a carpenters' shop, a carbon shed, and a blacksmith shop.

By the Spring of 1876, Edison moved his full operations to Menlo Park. The wizard of Menlo Park : Article : Nature Nature 397, 34-35 (7 January 1999) | doi :10.1038/16186 The wizard of Menlo Park BOOK REVIEWED-Edison: A Life of Invention by Paul Israel Wiley: 1998. 552 pp $30, £19.50 A man of many hats: by the end of his industrious career, Edison held 1,093 patents. The life of Thomas Alva Edison has all the ingredients of which Samuel Smiles, the well-known Victorian biographer of famous engineers, would have approved. Smiles's portrait of Edison would have been of a solitary inventor who, from humble beginnings, achieved greatness by dint of hard work and native intelligence; a man making the most of his opportunities in the best Victorian tradition. Indeed, so much has been written about Edison, the 'wizard of Menlo Park', that the real person has all but disappeared under a mountain of paper. Paul Israel in this latest biography has done a remarkable job.

Not only has he given us fresh insights into a complex personality, but he has set this against the backdrop of a dramatically changing American society driven on remorselessly by the second Industrial Revolution in which Edison was a pivotal player. What makes this book so authoritative is the unprecedented access the author has had to the more than five million pages (workshop diaries, notebooks and letters) that make up the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. The 18-year project to produce a multivolume documentary edition of these papers has been distilled into this detailed biography. Almost literally, no stone has been left unturned in the search for new and corroborating material. Thus, an archaeological dig at Edison's home turned up a wide variety of fragments of chemical glassware, supporting evidence for his fascination with chemistry that persisted throughout his career. It was a chemical accident that may well have led to Edison's deafness. While working as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway, he was allowed to carry out experiments in the baggage car of the train until a bottle of phosphorus broke and set the car on fire.

The severe boxing his ears were given by the baggage master after the fire had been put out may well have started the hearing impairment from which he suffered increasingly in later life. At times, however, he found his selective hearing quite useful. ADVERTISING ARCHIVES Leading light: Edison's work on developing the light bulb led to electric lighting in homes. Israelshows convincingly that a key aspect of Edison's scientific practice was his ability as a practical bench chemist. Often, to resolve a problem, his technique was to 'ransack nature's warehouse'; examples filled his laboratories. When he had trouble finding a suitable filament for his incandescent lamp in the 1880s, he determined, after testing numerous natural substances, that maduke bamboo from Japan was the best material. However, Edison was still not totally satisfied, and in November 1886 he sent agents to all parts of the globe looking for even better natural fibres for his lamps. In the end it was estimated that the Edison Lamp Company would "require a million and a half fibres at one cent a piece to pay for this expense".

Edison followed the same procedure to find the best phonograph record material when competition started to push him out of the market, and again when he took up X-rays shortly after Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery in December 1895. On that occasion Edison and his staff experimented with 150 different vacuum-tube designs over a two-month period, allowing him to produce considerably cheaper tubes. He and his staff also conducted experiments with nearly 1,300 compounds in order to find the best fluorescing salt for X-ray photographic plates and screens; this led to his calcium-tungstate fluoroscope. Near the end of his career, in 1927, he joined forces with his friend Henry Ford to discover the most suitable alternative source of natural rubber in an attempt to free the United States from its reliance on this British monopoly. The highlights of Edison's career are well known. After little formal education he became a telegraph engineer and roamed the country for work, while at the same time continuing a programme of self-improvement, in particular in chemistry and the electrical sciences as they related to telegraphy. He showed early signs of his entrepreneurial spirit in his keenness both for making money and for inventing.

His early patents concern telegraphy. Among them were an improved stock-ticker, an automatic telegraph repeater and the diplex telegraph which, combined with the existing duplex method, enabled four messages to be transmitted over the same wire. An interesting feature of his inventive process to which Israel draws our attention is how Edison exploited his knowledge in one field to develop what appear to be unrelated devices. Thus, his experience in telegraphy technology led him to invent an early copying system, the electric pen. Edison's best-known inventions are the carbon transmitter for the telephone and the phonograph (gramophone). The former led to a dispute over who held the ownership of this invention in order to exploit the market. With the latter Edison had to learn the hard lesson that it is not always easy to develop a prototype into a marketable commodity. Edison constructed the first central electric power station at Pearl Street, New York, but tried to hinder the development of alternating-current power systems by his competitors. To get the American public to believe that high-voltage a.c. power was dangerous, he advised the government that a humane form of execution could be achieved by means of the electric chair powered by Westinghouse's a.c. generators.

By the end of his career Edison held 1,093 US patents. It can be argued, however, as becomes clear from Israel's book, that perhaps Edison's most original and significant invention was to establish the industrial research laboratory, his "invention-factory", at Menlo Park, and at his final home at West Orange. The book dispels the popular myths surrounding Edison's laboratories. He was not the 'lone inventor', although this was a myth he was happy to foster. He appreciated the importance of research teams and employed men who had had a scientific education. It was his experience in trying to find such scientifically trained people for his laboratories that made him promote technical education. For all Edison's success, Israel identifies several important weaknesses in his approach. Edison was good at developing a technically superior product but not at meeting the tastes of consumers. That is why ultimately he was not successful in spotting the trends in either the gramophone or the motion-picture business. As scientific research became more specialized, Edison's approach seemed increasingly anachronistic. Early on in his career he had exclaimed that "There is as much difference between an inventor and a scientist as there is between an explorer and a geographer".

For Edison the gathering of facts continued to take precedence over the development of theory. This approach had been successful when developing the telegraph but in the end was no longer viable. He was still following this approach in the 1920s when looking for new sources for natural rubber, while the real research was now the theoretical study of the molecule that was to lead to synthetic rubber. As Israel concludes, echoing the historian Thomas Hughes, the word 'inventor' had fallen into disuse by the time of Edison's death, to be replaced by 'industrial scientist'. Israel's detailed analysis shows how 'the wizard of Menlo Park' was a seminal figure in this transformation. Thomas Edison - Inventions - HISTORY.com Thomas Edison A+E Networks Introduction In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1,093 patents (singly or jointly) and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. He also created the world’s first industrial research laboratory.

Known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” for the New Jersey town where he did some of his best-known work, Edison had become one of the most famous men in the world by the time he was in his 30s. In addition to his talent for invention, Edison was also a successful manufacturer and businessman who was highly skilled at marketing his inventions–and himself–to the public. Google Thomas Edison’s Early Life Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio . He was the seventh and last child born to Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliott Edison, and would be one of four to survive to adulthood. Thomas Edison received little formal education, and left school in 1859 to being working on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan , where his family then lived. Did You Know? By the time he died on October 18, 1931, Thomas Edison had amassed a record 1,093 patents: 389 for electric light and power, 195 for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for storage batteries and 34 for the telephone.

During the Civil War, Edison learned the emerging technology of telegraphy, and traveled around the country working as a telegrapher. He had developed serious hearing problems, which were variously attributed to scarlet fever, mastoiditis or a blow to the head. With the development of auditory signals for the telegraph, Edison was at a disadvantage, and he began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness (including a printer that would convert the electrical signals to letters). In early 1869, he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time. Edison’s Emergence as a Leading Inventor From 1870 to 1875, Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey , where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company (then the industry leader) and its rivals. Edison’s mother died in 1871, and that same year he married 16-year-old Mary Stillwell.

Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late 1875, but with the help of his father was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark. In 1877, Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity. That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced. The device made an immediate splash, though it took years before it could be produced and sold commercially, and the press dubbed Edison “the Wizard of Menlo Park.” Edison’s Innovations with Electric Light In 1878, Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight–a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of prominent financial backers like J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family, Edison set up the Edison Electric Light Company and began research and development.

He made a breakthrough in October 1879 with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of 1880 hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb. In 1881, he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family (which by now included three children) to New York . Though Edison’s early incandescent lighting systems had their problems, they were used in such acclaimed events as the Paris Lighting Exhibition in 1881 and the Crystal Palace in London in 1882. Competitors soon emerged, notably George Westinghouse, a proponent of alternating or AC current (as opposed to Edison’s direct or DC current). By 1889, AC current would come to dominate the field, and the Edison General Electric Co. merged with another company in 1892 to become General Electric Co. Edison’s Later Years and Inventions Edison’s wife, Mary, died in August 1884, and in February 1886 he remarried Mirna Miller; they would have three children together.

He built a large estate and research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking. Spurred on by others’ work on improving the phonograph, he began working toward producing a commercial model. He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K.L. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in 1891. After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by 1918. In the interim, he had had success developing an alkaline storage battery, which he originally worked on as a power source for the phonograph but later supplied for submarines and electric vehicles. In 1912, automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T . The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs.

Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions (including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator), Edison continued working into his 80s. His rise from poor, uneducated railroad worker to one of the most famous men in the world made him a folk hero. More than any other individual, he was credited with building the framework for modern technology and society in the age of electricity. Tags Thomas Alva Edison Thomas Edison can be thanked for much more than the lightbulb... He was not only an inventor, but also a research scientist and a businessman. He even was credited for starting the first industrial research laboratory! Edison’s inventions and devices not only were awe-inspiring pieces, but they also influenced the way people live all across the world. How many inventors can say that they have changed the world?! Some of these “life-influencing” inventions include the phonograph, a motion picture camera, a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, and recorded music. No wonder he was often referred to as “the Wizard of Menlo Park!” Hey, thanks, Mr. Edison! Flip the switch & Let there be light!

He was known as Thomas Edison / Useful Notes - TV Tropes YMMV "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was an inventor and businessman. Nicknamed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by the press. Edison made his first invention, a type of stock ticker, when he was only 22. By the time he died, 1,093 inventions were patented to him, which was the record for several decades. Born in Ohio, he moved with his family to Port Huron, Michigan, when he was young. As a child, Edison's inquisitive mind wasn't challenged by his school work and his teachers called him "difficult," so his parents pulled him out to home school him. Edison was thus largely self-taught. Port Huron is just across the border from Canada, and at the time was a major railroad crossing, bringing the Grand Trunk Railway into the US on its way from Toronto to Detroit and Chicago.

As a teenager, Edison rescued a little boy from an oncoming runaway train; in gratitude, the boy's father, who worked as a telegrapher along the railroad, offered to give Edison lessons in telegraphy. Edison accepted, getting his first job on the Grand Trunk telegraph line in Canada, and worked as a telegraph operator in Michigan and Kentucky before his poor hearing—and an incident where the lead-acid battery he was tinkering with spilled sulfuric acid that dripped on to his boss' desk on the floor below—forced him to look for other means to make money. He found refuge with one of his telegraphy friends, who let him stay in his basement in Elizabeth, New Jersey , starting around 1869. By 1871, he had gotten married and moved to nearby Newark, as his inventions were making him enough money to live on. It was at that point that he had his biggest idea. In 1876, Edison found a likely spot of land near Menlo Park in Raritan Township in Middlesex County, about 20 miles southwest of Newark. Here he built his new invention: an industrial research lab.

It was responsible for world-changing inventions within just a year. Some of the most important inventions to come out of Edison's lab include the phonograph, a practical light bulb, storage batteries, transmitters, motion picture cameras, and microphones. Needless to say, the research conducted by Edison and his assistants were groundbreaking and forever changed the world. The proud Edison would often take credit for inventions largely completed by his workers, leading many people throughout history to claim that he stole them, which may be true. He is today, however, known to have stolen at least a few designs from other inventors. For what it's worth, often Edison was only taking previous inventions and making them practical; this includes his famous lightbulb.note Edison's light bulb was not the first, but it was the first that could actually be considered useful. Joseph Swan, an Englishman who invented one before Edison, openly admitted as such. Also, he eventually hit upon the idea of crediting the patents to the various corporations he established to manufacture and market his inventions,note An unexpected advantage of his living in New Jersey; New Jersey had the country's first modern general business corporations law, allowing you to easily establish a corporation for running a business without too many strings attached.

rather than to himself or to his researchers; this meant that nobody could accuse him of stealing credit for the products of his lab, as technically he didn't claim to be the inventor. More important than the things he invented though was the technique he developed for it. After a fashion, you could say that Edison invented inventing. He came up with the modern R&D cycle: Identify a market, get backing before you start, publicize it ahead of time so the public is wiling to pay for it, and plough back the profits into making more inventions. He also developed the world's first real R&D team—his numerous and largely nameless assistants, working hard on inventions for which Edison would get all the credit (eventually, he had the sense to start crediting things to his corporation, about which see below); before this, invention was usually one guy or a few, and it wasn't their only job. He was also very important as a businessman. In 1892 he merged the aforementioned various corporations he had founded into one company: the General Electric Corporation. Yes, that General Electric Corporation. ( That one, too ).

He used several extravagant public demonstrations to bring attention to his inventions, such as lighting up entire city streets using his light bulbs. He aggressively used his media attention and his powerful connections to make his company the nation's chief electric powerhouse. One of the unfortunate side effects of this was pushing out Nikola Tesla 's alternating current in favor of Edison's own direct current, despite AC being superior in terms of efficiency, flexibility, and long-range transmission. Edison tried to get AC banned, even going so far as inventing the electric chair (which set its first victim on fire) , spreading false information, and electrocuting an elephant and making a movie out it . However, there are some factors everybody is forgetting. It is possible that Edison honestly believed Tesla's AC was a dangerous as he claimed it was, and many people who mention the incident with the elephant confidently leave out that the elephant was going to be put down no matter what Edison did.

And to top it off, there is serious doubt that Thomas Edison was even involved in the particular event, as it occured nearly a decade after the War of Currents and several years after he had been forced out of the General Electric company; however, Edison was responsible for electrocuting cats, dogs, mules, and horses (and appeared on screen with the animal executions.) The association may have stemmed from the fact that several Edison companies were involved, with the Edison Manufacturing company filming the event, and the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn supplying the power. Regardless, Edison was so horrified by the prisoner execution, he became an ardent anti-death penalty activist. Still, this might have set back electrical development by decades, though most modern day devices use both rather than one or the other. He also tried to use his law connections to keep a monopoly of the motion picture camera, forcing many aspiring film moguls to move to a town in California named Hollywood, which was out of his reach. He was known to be quite a Jerkass .

For example, Nikola Tesla (his employee at the time) said that Edison offered US$50,000 to improve his DC generators, but when Tesla accepted the offer, Edison said that it was just a joke . (Whether this story is true or not, though, has been disputed.) Because of his numerous inventions and his influence on world history, he's depicted quite a lot in popular culture. Any help listing and organizing all of them will be appreciated! Tropes as portrayed in fiction: Historical Hero Upgrade & Historical Villain Upgrade : Thomas Edison is either portrayed as a quirky underdog genius who had to fight to get his honest hard work recognised, or as a concept-stealing Corrupt Corporate Executive who swept away all opposition with threats and slander. There's plenty of evidence for and against both portrayals , but the market for energy and electricity was absolutely feral back then. From a more meta standpoint, it is nowadays known that Edison can be credited with far fewer inventions than he laid claim on during his lifetime, most prominently the incandescent light bulb and the microphone. Massive Numbered Siblings : Thomas Edison had six children over his lifetime.

Appears in the following works: Comic Books The graphic novel Tales from the Bully Pulpit features his ghost and Theodore Roosevelt stealing a time machine from H. G. Wells and going to the future to fight a descendant of Adolf Hitler and his army of evil martians. Atomic Robo stars a robot invented by Nikola Tesla, so naturally Edison is one of the series' Big Bads . Here he's presented as doing highly immoral things in a quest for immortality; and the War of the Currents was a fight to stop one such scheme. He dies in a climactic battle with Tesla in 1931, but somehow re-forms as a ghost in 1999. Mad Scientist The Inventor, one of the major villains in Ms. Marvel (2014) , was intended to be a clone of Edison. However, the clone's DNA got scrambled with that of a cockatiel, so he wound up as a Half-Human Hybrid / Mix-and-Match Man . Film - Live Action Spencer Tracy played him in the 1940 film Edison, the Man. Also in 1940, the movie Young Thomas Edison features Mickey Rooney as Edison during his earliest years.

The Back to the Future ride features the short film "Doc on the March," which features Doc going through time and witnessing various historical events. He witnesses Edison giving an important speech and then gets an autographed light bulb from him. Literature Edison is the titular Science Hero of Garrett P. Serviss's Edison's Conquest of Mars , a 1898 science fiction Fan Sequel to The War of the Worlds that spawned a genre known as "Edisonade." Edison's ghost is a character in Expiration Date , which gives a relatively sympathetic portrayal of him.

Live-Action TV On NewsRadio , Joe insists on making his own components for every device he fixes rather than buy "any of that mass-produced garbage." When an impatient Bill asks Joe to just give up and buy the piece in question, Joe answers, "Did Thomas Edison give up?" Bill points out that "Thomas Edison wasn't trying to invent something that was readily available in a variety of stores near his home." In the short-lived show The Secret Adventures Of Jules Verne, the protagonists meet a young American boy named Al, deaf in one ear, who makes amazing inventions and is able to reverse-engineer a hovering machine from the future (or the past; not sure about this one). When leaving, he reveals that Al is a shortened form of his middle name - Alva. Yep, that's Thomas Alva Edison. Edison makes an appearance in Murdoch Mysteries as a rival to fellow inventor James Pendrick. He's shown to be so ruthless as to be suspected of trying to kill Pendrick for his revolutionary sound equipment. He's not the murderer, though after Pendrick rejects his offer to collaborate, he does vow to freeze him out of any success in the moving picture industry in America at the end of the episode.

In Kamen Rider Ghost , Edison is one of fifteen Ghost Eyecons based from fifteen different famous people in the world. In this form, Takeru wields Gan Gun Saber in Gun Mode. Music The Bee Gees ' song "Edison" is about him . Tabletop Games Edison is the Big Bad of the role-playing game Punk Rock Saves the World . His goal is to be credited as "the greatest inventor of his time", even if he has to take credit for other people's inventions, such as the Time Machine that spurs the plot (and was actually created by Tesla). Theater Edison is one of the main characters, along with Henry Ford and President Warren Harding , in Camping with Henry and Tom, a 1995 play written by Mark St. Germain. These men were in fact friends in real life and the play is based on real life road trips that these men actually took, along with another of their inventor-businessman friends, Harvey Firestone. Video Games Appears as an antagonist, and later on an ally, in the America chapter of Fate/Grand Order as a Caster-class Servant. As a man with a lion head , and in a red, white, and blue jumpsuit.

Yes, really ◊ . And he's also the President of the United States due to an altered timeline. Tesla also appears as Archer-class Servant and is Edison's Rival / Sitcom Arch-Nemesis / Worthy Opponent . Web Comics One of the more bizarre depictions of him is the webcomic Edison Hate Future , which features him listening to primitive headphones and complaining about the future . He is portrayed in a very unflattering light in The Oatmeal 's "Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived" , mainly because of his feuds with rival Nikola Tesla. The Oatmeal also sells a variety of Tesla > Edison merchandise in its store. Web Video In Epic Rap Battles of History , he makes an appearance alongside Nikola Tesla and he's depicted as an outright Jerkass , deriding Tesla as a poor businessman(which he was) and claiming that he(Edison) was mainly in it for the money.

Edison: The truth hertz , you're broke and washed up Don't give a smidgen 'bout your visions if they can't make a buck Western Animation The Schoolhouse Rock song "Mother Necessity," about the great inventions of American history, features him inventing a light bulb to help his mother, who had poor eyesight. In The Simpsons episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," Homer becomes obsessed with Edison and tries to invent something to become famous just like he was. When Homey finally makes something useful, it turns out that Edison already made it. Made even better when it's later disovered that Edison stole it from Leonardo da Vinci . On The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius , Jimmy brings Edison to the present to show up Cindy, then has trouble sending him back when he falls in love with his teacher. Edison is featured in the "American Inventors" episode of This is America, Charlie Brown . :: Indexes :: Which inventor was known as "The wizard of Menlo Park"? Home » Trivia Crack » Which inventor was known as “The wizard of Menlo Park”? Which inventor was known as “The wizard of Menlo Park”?

Posted in Trivia Crack By emoji On January 14, 2015 Question: Which inventor was known as “The wizard of Menlo Park”? Options:

Question: Which inventor was known as ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’?
Answer: Thomas Edison