Inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born
on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the last of the seven children of
Samuel and Nancy Edison. Thomas's father was an exiled political activist from
Canada. His mother, an accomplished school teacher, was a major influence in
Thomas’ early life. An early bout with scarlet fever as well as ear infections
left him with hearing difficulties in both ears, a malady that would eventually
leave him nearly deaf as an adult. Edison would later recount as an adult, with
variations on the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident where
his ears were injured. But others have tended to discount this as the sole
cause of his hearing loss.
In 1854, the family moved to Port
Huron, Michigan, where Edison 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 set out to put
much of that education to work. He 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 opportunity.
Edison also used his access to the
railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a
train baggage car. During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and
the car caught fire. The conductor rushed in and struck Thomas on the side of
the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He was kicked off the
train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route.
While he worked for the railroad, a
near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. After Edison saved a
3-year-old from being run over by an errant train, the child’s grateful father
rewarded him by teaching him to operate a telegraph. By age 15, he had learned
enough to be employed as a telegraph operator. For the next five years, Edison
traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those
who had gone to the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and
experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical
science.
In 1866, at age 19, Edison moved to
Louisville, Kentucky, working for The Associated Press. The night shift
allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed
an unrestrictive style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself
through objective examination and experimentation. Initially, Edison excelled
at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of
paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap. However, as the technology
advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling
telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left
Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.
In 1868, Edison returned home to
find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out
of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take
control of his future. Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston,
landing a job for the Western Union Company. At the time, Boston was America's
center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it. In his spare time, he
designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes
in the legislature. However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As
they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly. They wanted
time to change the minds of fellow legislators.
In 1869, Edison moved to New York
City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker, the Universal
Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions. The Gold
and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed, they paid him $40,000 for the
rights. Edison was only 22 years old. With this success, he quit his work as a
telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.
In 1870, Thomas Edison set up his
first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, and
employed several machinists. As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed
numerous partnerships and developed his products for the highest bidder. Often
that was Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, but just as
often, it was one of Western Union's rivals. In one such instance, Edison
devised for Western Union the quadruplex telegraph, capable of transmitting two
signals in two different directions on the same wire, but railroad tycoon Jay
Gould snatched the invention from Western Union, paying Edison more than
$100,000 in cash, bonds and stock, and generating years of litigation.
With his ever-increasing financial
success, in 1871 Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee
at one of his businesses. During their 13-year marriage, they had three
children, Marion, Thomas and William, who became an inventor. Mary died of a
suspected brain tumor at the age of 29 in 1884.
By the early 1870s, Thomas Edison
had acquired a reputation as a first-rate inventor. In 1876, he moved his
expanding operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent
industrial research facility incorporating machine shops and laboratories. That
same year, Western Union encouraged him to develop a communication device to
compete with Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He never did. However, in
December of 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the
phonograph. Though not commercially viable for another decade, the invention
brought him worldwide fame.
The 1880s were a busy time for
Thomas Edison. After being granted a patent for the light bulb in January 1880,
Edison set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power
and light the cities of the world. That same year, Edison founded the Edison
Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later
became the General Electric Corporation. In 1881, he left Menlo Park to
establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being
installed.
In 1882, the Pearl Street generating
station provided 110 volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower
Manhattan. In 1884 Edison's wife, Mary, died, and in 1886, he married Mina
Miller, 19 years his junior. In 1887, Edison built an industrial research
laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the primary research
laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent most of his time there,
supervising the development of lighting technology and power systems. He also
perfected the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera and the
alkaline storage battery.
Over the next few decades, Edison
found his role as inventor transitioning to one as industrialist and business
manager. The laboratory in West Orange was too large and complex for any one
man to completely manage, and Edison found he was not as successful in his new
role as he was in his former one. Edison also found that much of the future
development and perfection of his inventions was being conducted by
university-trained mathematicians and scientists. He worked best in intimate,
unstructured environments with a handful of assistants and was outspoken about
his disdain for academia and corporate operations.
On a couple of occasions, Edison was
able to turn failure into success. During the 1890s, he built a magnetic
iron-ore processing plant in northern New Jersey that proved to be a commercial
failure. Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for
producing cement. On April 23, 1896, Edison became the first person to project
a motion picture, holding the world's first motion picture screening at Koster
& Bial's Music Hall in New York City.
As the automobile industry began to
grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power
an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed,
Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and
admirer Henry Ford in 1912. The system was used extensively in the auto
industry for decades.
During World War I, the U.S.
government asked Thomas Edison to head the Naval Consulting Board, which
examined inventions submitted for military use. Edison worked on several
projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However,
due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work
only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I
never invented weapons to kill."
By the end of the 1920s Thomas
Edison was in his 80s and he slowed down somewhat, but not before he applied
for the last of his 1,093 U.S. patents, for an apparatus for holding objects
during the electroplating process. Edison and his second wife, Mina, spent part
of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his
friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to
work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic
source for natural rubber.
Thomas Edison died of complications
of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont," in West
Orange, New Jersey. He was 84 years old. Many communities and corporations
throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical
power to commemorate his passing. Edison's career was the quintessential
rags-to-riches success story that made him a folk hero in America. An
uninhibited egoist, he could be a tyrant to employees and ruthless to
competitors. Though he was a publicity seeker, he didn’t socialize well and
often neglected his family. By the time he died he was one of the most
well-known and respected Americans in the world. He had been at the forefront
of America’s first technological revolution and set the stage for the modern
electric world.
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