thomas edison

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices
11. Later Years
After the mining failure, Edison adapted some of the machinery to process Portland cement. A roasting kiln he developed became an industry standard. Edison cement was used for buildings, dams, and even Yankee Stadium.In the early years of the automobile industry there were hopes for an electric vehicle, and Edison spent the first decade of the twentieth century trying to develop a suitable storage battery. Although gas power won out, Edisons battery was used extensively in industry.In World War I the federal government asked Edison to head the Naval Consulting Board, which examined inventions submitted for military use. Edison worked on several problems, including submarine detectors and gun location techniques.By the time of his death in 1931, Edison had received 1,093 U.S. patents, a total still untouched by any other inventor. Even more important, he created a model for modern industrial research.
12. Learning about electricity
The Grand Trunk Railroad connected Port Huron to Detroit, the nearest big city, and the young Edison at 12, always fascinated by the steam locomotives and eager for adventure, got a job selling newspapers and candy on the train. Edison continued to devour science books and the newspapers, magazines, and novels he sold on the train. He later claimed that he had decided to read through all the books in the library but gave it up after reading about 10 books that were pretty dry reading.Around this time, Edison realized that his hearing was deteriorating, and this grew worse later in his life. His deafness has been attributed to various things, but was probably caused by a childhood illness or ear infections that went untreated. In those days, without penicillin or other antibiotics for treatment of illnesses and infection, deafness was fairly common, even in young people. Edison said that his deafness was actually an asset He said it allowed him to work with less distraction and to sleep deeply, undisturbed by outside sounds.As a teenager Edison was very enterprising. In Port Huron he opened two stands selling newspapers and magazines and hired other boys to run them. For about six months in 1862 he also published his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald, which he printed in the baggage car of the train with the help of a friendly conductor. It concerned itself largely with local news and railroad matters and attracted many subscribers along the Grand Trunks Michigan line.

Some of the profits Edison received from his various businesses went into building a small laboratory in one of the baggage cars. Bottles, batteries, and test tubes filled the shelves in the little lab, which thrived until one of his experiments involving phosphorous started a fire in the train car. The conductor ejected Edison, his laboratory, and his printing press at the next station But Edison kept his job on the railroad.Then his life took an unexpected turna telegraph operators young son wandered out onto the tracks in front of a rolling freight car. Edison ran out onto the tracks and snatched the child to safety. As a reward the childs grateful father offered to teach Al the intricate skills of railroad telegraphy. At 16, Edison had found a new career as a telegraph operator. The job demanded very fast thinking and sharp reflexes to turn codes into words and vice versa. Not only were the wages excellent, the position was prestigious.

13. Variations on the telegraph
Riding the rails, Edison learned about the new technology of telegraphy. Morses telegraph, patented in 1840, was the 19th centurys equivalent to the World Wide Web and Edison wanted to learn all he could about navigating this information superhighway.Telegraphers in those days were the links that joined the country together. In many respects the telegraph molded the world in which Edison matured. Major newspapers relied heavily on telegraph reports purchased from news services. The telephone had not yet been invented and email was a long way off For the next 4 years, Al went on the tramp, traveling around the South and Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, that is, taking jobs as they came, never settling down in any one place for very long. Telegraphers translated messages into electric impulses and sent them over the ribbons of telegraph wires that stretched across the continent. Since telegraphers not only sent and received messages but had to keep the equipment running, Edison learned a lot about practical electricityhow batteries work, how to wire circuits, and all about electromagnetism. This curiosity spurred his first serious efforts at invention.In Boston in 1869, Edison earned his first patent, for an electrical vote recorder designed for the Massachusetts State Legislature. But he found that the politicians werent interested in speeding up their voting process, so they didnt want to use his machine. Edison later quipped that this experience taught him never to invent something people didnt want He refused to become discouraged or view anything as a failure. As he would say, Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward. (5)
14. Starting a business starting a family
In 1871, Edison set up a workshop and laboratory in Newark, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. Newark was known at the time for its community of fine machinists, the kind of people Edison needed to build his telegraph equipment. In that same year, he married Mary Stillwell, who worked for his Newark business.In 1874 Edison had his first big financial success with his quadruplex telegraph system. This was a way of sending more than one message in one direction over a single wirein this case, two messages in opposite directions simultaneously. Telegraph companies were eager for such a scheme because it let them send more messages over fewer wires, increasing their profits while cutting their costs.

The story goes something like this Thomas Edison approached the Western Union Telegraph Company with several inventions of his relating to the telegraph, especially the quadruplex telegraph system he had just completed. When asked how much he wanted for the inventions Edison thought of asking for about $2000, but instead he turned the question around and replied, Well suppose you make me an offer. Edison was amazed when they offered him $40,000 This was a lot of money for those days and it allowed him to fulfill his wish to become a full time inventor.Edison signed a highly profitable contract with Western Union, took the money to the New Jersey countryside, and built a laboratory complex at Menlo Park, nicknamed The Invention Factory.

15. The Invention Factory
Edison set up his new complex in rural Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. Menlo Park was a town on the main rail line between New York City and Philadelphia. He chose the location because the land was cheap and there was easy access to the resources of the cities (especially the rich investors Edison needed to support his work), but it didnt have the distractions of the big city.He had a large staff of specialists, ranging from machinists to physicists, who helped turn his ideas into realities. He created what he nicknamed The Invention Factory, a complex of a laboratory, machine shop, office, and a library. In short, he put everything he needed for inventing in one place.

The Menlo Park gang produced an incredible variety of inventions and improvements to existing inventions. They include the followingThe phonograph An improved telephone transmitter The electric pen (a machine that created a stencil that was could be used to make multiple copies of a document)The electric light bulbEdison worked long hours in his laboratory, quite unaware of the time. He would say, I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. He would work for 16 hours at a stretch, gaining a reputation for not sleeping Actually, he took cat naps whenever he needed them and wherever he was located, sometimes snoozing in the middle of the day stretched out on the ground under a bush, on his workbench or on his cot located in the back of his laboratory.The Menlo Park Laboratory was equipped with 2,500 bottles of chemicals lining the wall and a pipe organ at the back, which was the focal point for after hours singing and beer drinking. Many times the various scientists and technicians would stay up all night inventing, working and munching on ham, crackers, beer, soda, and cheese. About midnight, Edison himself would sit down at the pipe organ and everyone would join in for a sing along. Many years later his employees would say that these were the happiest years of their lives.

16. Telephone
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone. Edison, with the help of Charles Batchelor, came up with an invention that vastly improved the transmission of the speakers voice across the wires. The carbon button transmitter is a part of the mouthpiece of a telephone. Western Union wanted to get around Bells patents so they wouldnt have to pay Bell to use the technology hed invented, so they put Edison on the problem. His transmitter produced clearer, stronger sounds and is still used in most telephones today.
17. Phonograph
Edisons experiments with the telephone also got him thinking about ways to record telephone messages so they could be copied later, this idea was similar to the devices used with the telegraph to write down the dots and dashes of Morse code. But then Edison turned the problem in a new direction and started to think about recording soundany soundas something separate. He sketched and tested and modified ways to capture sound on the surfaces of cylinders or disks.In 1877, one of these designs worked He wrapped a thick sheet of tinfoil around a metal cylinder. Then, turning a crank that moved the cylinder along a screw and shouting into a cone attached to a thin diaphragm and needle (or stylus), Edison tested the new machine. When the sound waves of his speech vibrated the diaphragm, it moved the needle up and down, making dents in the tinfoil. Cranking the cylinder back to its original position and putting the needle back into the grooves it had made, Edison and his workers listened in amazement to the first recording of a human voiceEdison reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb.One of his first reactions to hearing the playback was to be worried He often said, I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Originally, Edison didnt think of using the phonograph for entertainment. He expected that businesses would use it for dictating letters. He manufactured an entire line of Ediphones for office use. But the real future of the phonograph lay in bringing music into peoples homes.Edisons company not only made phonographs but also ran recording studios and produced cylinder recordings of some of the most famous talent of the day. He also tried putting miniature phonographs inside of dolls, but the talking doll was never a commercial success.
18. Electric light
Of course, Edisons most famous invention to come out of Menlo Park was the light bulb. Edison didnt invent electric lightsthere were arc lights already, which were similar to todays street lights. They were very, very bright so people didnt want them inside their houses. At home, people used gas lights, but their open flames were dangerous and they flickered a lot.Edison didnt just invent a light bulb, either. He put together what he knew about electricity with what he knew about gas lights and invented a whole system of electric lighting. This meant light bulbs, electricity generators, wires to get the electricity from the power station to the homes, fixtures (lamps, sockets, switches) for the light bulbs, and more. It was like a big jigsaw puzzleand Edison made up the pieces as well as fitted them together.One tough piece was finding the right material for the filamentthat little wire inside the light bulb. He filled more than 40,000 pages with notes before he finally had a bulb that withstood a 40 hour test in his laboratory. In 1879, after testing more that 1600 materials for the right filament, including coconut fiber, fishing line, and even hairs from a friends beard, Edison and his workers finally figured out what to use for the filamentcarbonized bamboo.The first large scale test of the system in the United States took place when Edisons Pearl Street station in New York Citys financial district sent electricity to lights in 25 builidings on September 4, 1882.
19. Starting fresh
After the success of Menlo Park, Edison built a new laboratory complex in 1887, bigger and better equipped in every way, in West Orange, New Jersey. There, he worked on all sorts of projects, ranging from movies to ore mining to batteries to cement.There were happy times and sad ones in his personal life. His first wife, Mary, died in 1884 and he remarried two years later to a young socialite named Mina Miller. From the two marriages, he had 6 children, one of whom became governor of New Jersey, another who followed his own career of invention.
20. Failure
Through most of the 1890s, Edison focused his attention on the iron mines of northwestern New Jersey. As the demand for the raw materials for steel production grew, Edison thought he could develop a system for retrieving the remaining valuable iron ore from exhausted mines. His idea was to crush the leftover rock and send it past an electromagnet that would attract the iron particles and let the other, worthless material pass.Unfortunately, the system never worked as planned. The iron ore produced was lower in quality than expected, the machinery broke down often, and the fine, crushed iron was difficult to work withand then the price of iron fell. After investing millions of dollars in the iron milling venture, Edison had to admit defeat.Never one to be beaten by failure, though, Edison later redesigned the ore milling machinery for the production of Portland cement, a new building material that was gaining favor around the turn of the 20th century. While his cement works didnt prove to be his biggest money maker, Edison did realize some projects of notefor example, the original Yankee Stadium was made of Edison Portland cement. He also tried to market a line of prefabricated cement houses and cement furniture, but that wasnt a big success