If you enjoy watching movies, or listening to music, or just...not spending half your
life in the dark...there’s someone you should thank.
Thomas Edison was responsible for bringing to market the popular forms of these inventions.
That would have been enough to guarantee his fame, but Edison held over 1000 patents for
life-improving gadgets and inventions.
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan (MY lan), Ohio.
Called Alva by his family, he was the youngest of seven children.
His parents were not terribly well off.
When Alva was seven, they moved to Point Huron, Michigan in hopes of improving their financial
situation.
Edison developed Scarlet Fever soon after the move, which delayed his schooling.
He finally began classes at age 8, and had a rocky start in the one-room schoolhouse.
He may have also been suffering from hearing loss as a result of his illness.
At any rate, Alva muddled through school, unhappy and failing, until his mother decided
to withdraw him and teach her son at home.
Under his mother’s nurturing care, Edison thrived.
The family had a well-stocked library, where Thomas Alva studied the classics, including
Newton’s Principia.
Little Alva was also allowed to have his own LABORATORY in the basement of the family home,
where he worked his way through a book of experiments.
Money continued to be tight for the Edison family, however, and Thomas Alva got his first
job at age 12, selling newspapers and snacks to train travelers on the new railway line
running through Port Huron.
Like a modern-day Benjamin Franklin, Edison wrote and published his own newspaper, called
The Weekly Herald.
It was the first time a newspaper had been printed ON a train.
Edison’s railroad career came to an abrupt halt when his lab caught fire (yes, that’s
right, he had a LAB in one of the spare baggage cars).
Edison’s time spent on and around trains was not wasted.
He got to know the telegraph operators, and, fascinated by their machines, built his own.
Remember, this was before the telephone, and Edison and a friend delighted in sending each
other messages via their own telegraph line.
After being kicked off the railway, Edison became a traveling telegraph operator for
Western Union.
He worked nights, but came home and carried on in his own lab during the day.
He continued to read widely, teaching himself about all the latest science and technology.
In 1869, Edison applied for and received his first patent - for an automated vote counting
machine he built for the Massachusetts Legislature.
The politicians weren’t actually interested in buying Edison’s device, but, flush with
this first success, Edison kept up his tinkering and inventing.
He made time to get married at age 24, to 16 year old Mary Stillwell, whom he had known
for just a few months.
They went on to have 6 children together.
Their first two children were nicknamed Dot and Dash, for the short and long sounds used
by telegraph operators.
During this decade, Edison invented stock tickers, fire alarms, a kind of waxed paper,
and many other creations and innovations.
His hard work paid off.
He received $40,000 from Western Union - a fortune in those days - in return for his
many contributions to telegraph technology, including a way to send two simultaneous messages
in two directions on a single wire.
This windfall allowed Edison to start his first full-time workshop, in Newark, New Jersey.
One success led to another, and in 1876, Edison moved his endeavors to a much bigger lab in
Menlo Park, New Jersey.
He employed many assistants, and together they would work all day, and long into the
night.
Edison was known to take short naps on a lab bench, before continuing his marathon work
hours.
This was not a punishment for the man - “I think work is the world’s greatest fun,”
he said.
Within a year, Edison received the patent for the invention that made him world famous
- the phonograph.
His invention made use of a metallic cylinder, that would get scratched to record sound signatures.
He shouted into a horn, “Mary had a little lamb!” and he was able to play back his
own voice.
People started calling him The Wizard of Menlo Park.
1876 was quite a year.
Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the patent for the telephone - a device many other inventors,
including Edison, were working on.
Edison thought Bell’s telephone was too quiet.
This may have been a sign of his hearing loss.
So, he invented a device to make it louder.
Edison also popularized answering the phone with “Hello.”
Alexander Graham Bell wanted to use the word “Ahoy.”
Now we come to the era in Edison’s life that most of us are familiar with: the dawn
of the electric light bulb.
Many people call Edison the inventor of the light bulb.
That’s a shorthand way to say he was the most successful innovator of the light bulb
- the one who brought the first commercially viable bulb to market.
The electric light bulb was an idea that many people were pursuing.
It was a fairly simple concept - run an electric current through a material so it heats up
and glows, providing light.
So many others had tried, and failed.
Some attempts at the light bulb were too dim.
Others burned out immediately.
Why did Edison’s team succeed, where so many others could not?
Menlo Park had money, manpower and perspicacity.
In other words, they brute-forced it.
As Edison liked to say, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
Edison and his team tried hundreds of different designs - various shapes for bulbs and all
kinds of materials.
Most importantly, they experimented with a variety of different FILAMENTS.
They needed something that would get hot and glow brightly, but not burn up immediately.
They found success with sewing thread coated with soot.
This bulb could last for 40 hours.
In 1879, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, another inventor who simultaneously developed a similar
bulb, were jointly awarded the patent for the carbon thread incandescent lamp.
Edison didn’t stop there.
To be able to get electric light into people’s homes, he went on to design power stations
to make electricity to power the light, and to lay underground wires to carry the electricity
to people’s houses.
In December 1879, Menlo Park hosted a public display of their system - it included electric
power generation, wires to carry the electricity via direct current, and, most dramatically:
lighting.
Electric light didn’t become standard for quite some time.
Edison was now faced with the challenges of making it a viable option for homes and businesses.
This meant ramping up production of light bulbs, and digging extensive tunnels for the
wires leading to generators.
What’s more, the wires were a real weakness of the system.
As they heated up, energy was lost, so there was a limit to how long the wires could be.
This meant you could only really expect to deliver electric light to homes and businesses
within one mile of a generator.
But there was no stopping progress.
In 1882 they opened the Pearl Street generator in Manhattan.
Now, a page turns in Edison’s personal life.
In 1884, Edison’s wife Mary died.
A year later he met Mina Miller, who would become his second wife a year after that.
They went on to have 2 sons together.
The family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, to a bigger house and a bigger lab.
Edison’s story takes a dark turn here.
A competing electrical company owned by another inventor, George Westinghouse, was being demonized
by certain members of the press.
Westinghouse was using an alternating current system, designed by Nikola Tesla.
Tesla’s AC system had some major advantages over Edison’s DC, especially that it was
possible to transmit electricity at high voltages through the power lines, leading to less line
loss over long distances.
In one shocking example of Edison fighting dirty, there were disturbing public demonstrations
in which animals were subjected to electric shocks to show how dangerous AC current was,
compared with Edison’s DC current.
An exposé in the New York Sun showed that these PR stunts and the bad press coverage
of Westinghouse were bankrolled by the Edison Company and their business partners, the Thomson-Houston
Company.
Edison and Thomson-Houston went on to merge to form General Electric, GE.
GE and Westinghouse continued their rivalry, including competing for the right to light
the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Westinghouse won that one.
A disgruntled Edison refused to sell them light bulbs for their display, so Westinghouse
introduced their own, more efficient bulbs.
The spectacular display of almost 100,000 Westinghouse light bulbs at the World’s
Fair proved to the fairgoers that there was nothing remarkably dangerous about the AC
system.
These two titans continued to fight for dominance in the ensuing years.
Eventually, both Edison and Westinghouse moved on to other interests.
In his later years, Edison returned to work on his phonograph, making records of music
on wax cylinders.
This delighted the public, now able to enjoy recorded music in their own homes.
Working with William Dickson, Edison co-invented early movie technology: the kinetograph, the
kinetoscope, and the kinetophonograph (kinetophone).
{music: a sweet violin melody}
Over the years at the labs in Menlo Park and West Orange, Edison and his team filled over
3000 notebooks with ideas and sketches for inventions.
Edison worked right up until a few months before his death.
During his lifetime, he received 1,093 US patents - 2,332 worldwide.
Most remarkably, he had created a new kind of intellectual pursuit: innovation-invention.
Thomas Edison died on October 13, 1931, at 84 years old.
On October 21st, 1931 at 10PM, people across the country turned off their electric lights
for a full minute in tribute to this great thinker.