Thomas Edison

1. People often say Edison was a genius. He answered, Genius is hard work, stick to it iveness, and common sense.Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio (pronounced MY lan). In 1854, when he was seven, the family moved to Michigan, where Edison spent the rest of his childhood.Al, as he was called as a boy, went to school only a short time. He did so poorly that his mother, a former teacher, taught her son at home. Al learned to .....

Edisons Early Years

2. Thomas A. Edisons forebears lived in New Jersey until their loyalty to the British crown during the American Revolution drove them to Nova Scotia, Canada. From there, later generations relocated to Ontario and fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Edisons mother, Nancy Elliott, was originally from New York until her family moved to Vienna, Canada, where she met Sam Edison, Jr., whom she later married. When Sam became involved in an unsuccessfu .....

Telegraph Work

3. In 1862, Edison rescued a three year old from a track where a boxcar was about to roll into him. The grateful father, J.U. MacKenzie, taught Edison railroad telegraphy as a reward. That winter, he took a job as a telegraph operator in Port Huron. In the meantime, he continued his scientific experiments on the side. Between 1863 and 1867, Edison migrated from city to city in the United States taking available telegraph jobs.In 1868 Edison moved to .....

An Improved Phonograph

4. Edisons wife, Mary, died on August 9, 1884, possibly from a brain tumor. Edison remarried to Mina Miller on February 24, 1886, and, with his wife, moved into a large mansion named Glenmont in West Orange, New Jersey. Edisons children from his first marriage were distanced from their fathers new life, as Edison and Mina had their own family Madeleine, born on 1888, Charles on 1890, and Theodore on 1898. Unlike Mary, who was sickly and often remain .....

Other Ventures Ore milling and Cement

5. Another Edison interest was an ore milling process that would extract various metals from ore. In 1881, he formed the Edison Ore Milling Co., but the venture proved fruitless as there was no market for it. In 1887, he returned to the project, thinking that his process could help the mostly depleted Eastern mines compete with the Western ones. In 1889, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works was formed, and Edison became absorbed by it .....

Motion Pictures

6. In 1888, Edison met Eadweard Muybridge at West Orange and viewed Muybridges zoopraxiscope. This machine used a circular disc with still photographs of the successive phases of movement around the circumference to recreate the illusion of movement. Edison declined to work with Muybridge on the device and decided to work on his own motion picture camera at his laboratory. As Edison put it in a caveat written the same year, I am experimenting upon a .....

Edisons Later Years

7. In 1911, Edisons companies were re organized into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. As the organization became more diversified and structured, Edison became less involved in the day to day operations, although he still had some decision making authority. The goals of the organization became more to maintain market viability than to produce new inventions frequently.A fire broke out at the West Orange laboratory in 1914, destroying 13 buildings. Although th .....

Early Inventive Career

8. In 1868 Edison became an independent inventor in Boston. Moving to New York the next year, he undertook inventive work for major telegraph companies. With money from those contracts he established a series of manufacturing shops in Newark, New Jersey, where he also employed experimental machinists to assist in his inventive work.Edison soon acquired a reputation as a first rank inventor. His work included stock tickers, fire alarms, methods of se .....

Menlo Park

9. In 1876, Edison created a freestanding industrial research facility incorporating both a machine shop and laboratories. Here in Menlo Park, on the rail line between New York City and Philadelphia, he developed three of his greatest inventions.Urged by Western Union to develop a telephone that could compete with Alexander Graham Bells, Edison invented a transmitter in which a button of compressed carbon changed its resistance as it was vibrated by .....

West Orange Laboratory

10. In 1887, Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, that remained unsurpassed until the twentieth century. For four years it was the primary research facility for the Edison lighting companies, and Edison spent most of his time on that work. In 1888 and 1889, he concentrated for several months on a new version of the phonograph that recorded on wax cylinders.Edison worked with William Dickson from 1888 till 1893 on .....

Later Years

11. 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 batt .....

Learning about electricity

12. 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 .....

Variations on the telegraph

13. 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 repor .....

Starting a business starting a family

14. 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 .....

The Invention Factory

15. 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 physici .....

Telephone

16. 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 prod .....

Phonograph

17. 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 cyl .....

Electric light

18. 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 e .....

Starting fresh

19. 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 ch .....

Failure

20. 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 s .....

Electricity in a box

21. In 1899, Edison began working on a better storage battery for electric vehicles. He thought that electric cars were better than gasoline or steam powered vehicles, but realized that the storage batteries in existence limited the practicality of electric cars. With typical optimism, he announced to the press in 1902 that his batteries would run for 100 miles or more without recharging, and he proclaimed, I do not know how long it would take to wea .....

Leisure time

22. Edison was the most famous inventor of his time. Never shy around reporters, Edison spent more time in the spotlight as he grew older, serving on boards, attending public ceremonies, receiving awards, and more.In his leisure time, he became good friends with other famous people, like automobile maker Henry Ford, tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, and naturalist Luther Burbank. He began taking annual camping trips with them in 1916.Henry Ford was .....

Serving the nation

23. In 1915, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels asked Edison to head the newly created Naval Consulting Board. The United States was on the brink of entering World War I and the Board was tasked with reviewing inventions of military promise submitted to the government. Though more than 100,000 invention ideas came to the Board, only one of them was ever built. Still, the Naval Consulting Board marked the beginning of increased collaboration betwe .....

One last grand experiment

24. In 1886, the Edisons built a winter home in Fort Myers, Florida. Edison also established a laboratory on the estate and carried out his last grand experiment there in the late 1920s. To lessen U.S. dependence on foreign sources of natural rubber, Edisons friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone encouraged him to find a domestic substitute for rubber.In a search reminiscent of his hunt for the light bulb filament, Edison tested thousands of plant s .....

Legacy

25. Troubled by diabetes and stomach ailments for many years, Edisons health declined and he died at West Orange, N.J. on October 18, 1931. Crowds lined up for blocks to pass by his coffin in the labs library. President Herbert Hoover requested a minute of silenceand darknessto honor the great inventor and at 10 p.m. on October 22, 1931, people around the United States turned off their electric lights.Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, nev .....

Death

26. Thomas Edison died of coplications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, Glenmont in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina. He is buried behind the home.Mina died in 1947. Edisons last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventors room shortly after his death, as a me .....