essay on thomas edison

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Early years

• The phonograph
• The electric light
• The Edison laboratory

How did Thomas Edison become famous?

• When was the telephone patented?

Thomas Edison

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• Library of Congress - Digital Collections - Life of Thomas Alva Edison
• Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation - Thomas Edison's Inventive Life
• National Park Service - Biography of Thomas Edison
• National Academy of Sciences - Biographical Memoirs - "Thomas Alva Edison"
• Energy.gov - Top 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Thomas Alva Edison
• The Franklin Institute - Case Files: Thomas A. Edison
• Official Site of Edison Innovation Foundation
• The National Museum of American History - Lighting A Revolution - Lamp Inventors 1880-1940: Carbon Filament Incandescent
• American Chemical Society - Biography of Thomas Edison
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• Table Of Contents

When was Thomas Edison born?

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan , Ohio , on February 11, 1847.

When did Thomas Edison die?

Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, in West Orange , New Jersey .

Thomas Edison unveiled the phonograph —which reproduced sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus following a groove on a rotating disc—in December 1877. The public’s amazement surrounding this invention was quickly followed by universal acclaim. Edison was projected into worldwide prominence and was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park.

How did Thomas Edison change the world?

Thomas Edison played a significant part in introducing the modern age of electricity . His inventions included the phonograph, the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone , the incandescent lamp , the first commercial electric light and power system, an experimental electric railroad , and key elements of motion-picture equipment.

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Thomas Edison (born February 11, 1847, Milan , Ohio , U.S.—died October 18, 1931, West Orange , New Jersey) was an American inventor who, singly or jointly, held a world-record 1,093 patents . In addition, he created the world’s first industrial research laboratory .

Edison was the quintessential American inventor in the era of Yankee ingenuity. He began his career in 1863, in the adolescence of the telegraph industry, when virtually the only source of electricity was primitive batteries putting out a low-voltage current . Before he died, in 1931, he had played a critical role in introducing the modern age of electricity . From his laboratories and workshops emanated the phonograph , the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone , the incandescent lamp , a revolutionary generator of unprecedented efficiency , the first commercial electric light and power system, an experimental electric railroad , and key elements of motion-picture apparatus , as well as a host of other inventions.

Edison was the seventh and last child—the fourth surviving—of Samuel Edison, Jr., and Nancy Elliot Edison. At an early age he developed hearing problems, which have been variously attributed but were most likely due to a familial tendency to mastoiditis . Whatever the cause, Edison’s deafness strongly influenced his behaviour and career, providing the motivation for many of his inventions.

In 1854 Samuel Edison became the lighthouse keeper and carpenter on the Fort Gratiot military post near Port Huron , Michigan , where the family lived in a substantial home. Alva, as the inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for five years. He was imaginative and inquisitive, but, because much instruction was by rote and he had difficulty hearing, he was bored and was labeled a misfit. To compensate, he became an avid and omnivorous reader. Edison’s lack of formal schooling was not unusual. At the time of the Civil War the average American had attended school a total of 434 days—little more than two years’ schooling by today’s standards.

In 1859 Edison quit school and began working as a trainboy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Four years earlier, the Michigan Central had initiated the commercial application of the telegraph by using it to control the movement of its trains, and the Civil War brought a vast expansion of transportation and communication . Edison took advantage of the opportunity to learn telegraphy and in 1863 became an apprentice telegrapher.

Messages received on the initial Morse telegraph were inscribed as a series of dots and dashes on a strip of paper that was decoded and read, so Edison’s partial deafness was no handicap. Receivers were increasingly being equipped with a sounding key, however, enabling telegraphers to “read” messages by the clicks. The transformation of telegraphy to an auditory art left Edison more and more disadvantaged during his six-year career as an itinerant telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada , and New England . Amply supplied with ingenuity and insight, he devoted much of his energy toward improving the inchoate equipment and inventing devices to facilitate some of the tasks that his physical limitations made difficult. By January 1869 he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph (a device capable of transmitting two messages simultaneously on one wire) and a printer , which converted electrical signals to letters, that he abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.

Edison moved to New York City , where he initially went into partnership with Frank L. Pope, a noted electrical expert, to produce the Edison Universal Stock Printer and other printing telegraphs. Between 1870 and 1875 he worked out of Newark , New Jersey , and was involved in a variety of partnerships and complex transactions in the fiercely competitive and convoluted telegraph industry, which was dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company . As an independent entrepreneur he was available to the highest bidder and played both sides against the middle. During this period he worked on improving an automatic telegraph system for Western Union’s rivals. The automatic telegraph, which recorded messages by means of a chemical reaction engendered by the electrical transmissions, proved of limited commercial success, but the work advanced Edison’s knowledge of chemistry and laid the basis for his development of the electric pen and mimeograph , both important devices in the early office machine industry, and indirectly led to the discovery of the phonograph . Under the aegis of Western Union he devised the quadruplex, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire, but railroad baron and Wall Street financier Jay Gould , Western Union’s bitter rival, snatched the quadruplex from the telegraph company’s grasp in December 1874 by paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds, and stock, one of the larger payments for any invention up to that time. Years of litigation followed.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is credited with inventions such as the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He held over 1,000 patents for his inventions.

(1847-1931)

Who Was Thomas Edison?

Early life and education.

Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. His father was an exiled political activist from Canada, while his mother was an accomplished school teacher and a major influence in Edison’s early life. An early bout with scarlet fever as well as ear infections left Edison with hearing difficulties in both ears as a child and nearly deaf as an adult.

Edison would later recount, with variations on the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident in which his ears were injured. But others have tended to discount this as the sole cause of his hearing loss.

In 1854, Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he 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 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, Edison 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 the 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 Edison 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.

Edison the Telegrapher

While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. After Edison saved a three-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 unrestricted 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.

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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 himself became an inventor.

In 1884, Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior.

Thomas Edison: Inventions

In 1869, at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called 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. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.

By the early 1870s, Edison had acquired a reputation as a first-rate inventor. In 1870, he 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 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.

Quadruplex Telegraph

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.

In 1876, Edison 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.

In December 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph . His innovation relied upon tin-coated cylinders with two needles: one for recording sound, and another for playback.

His first words spoken into the phonograph's mouthpiece were, "Mary had a little lamb." Though not commercially viable for another decade, the phonograph brought him worldwide fame, especially when the device was used by the U.S. Army to bring music to the troops overseas during World War I .

While Edison was not the inventor of the first light bulb, he came up with the technology that helped bring it to the masses. Edison was driven to perfect a commercially practical, efficient incandescent light bulb following English inventor Humphry Davy’s invention of the first early electric arc lamp in the early 1800s.

Over the decades following Davy’s creation, scientists such as Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans had worked to perfect electric light bulbs or tubes using a vacuum but were unsuccessful in their attempts.

After buying Woodward and Evans' patent and making improvements in his design, Edison was granted a patent for his own improved light bulb in 1879. He began to manufacture and market it for widespread use. 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 General Electric .

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.

Later Inventions & Business

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.

During the 1890s, Edison 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.

Motion Picture

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.

His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. K. L. Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device. Soon, Edison's West Orange laboratory was creating Edison Films. Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in 1903.

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 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, Edison was in his 80s. He 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.

During his lifetime, Edison received 1,093 U.S. patents and filed an additional 500 to 600 that were unsuccessful or abandoned.

He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, 1868, at the age of 21. His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time.

The two parted ways in 1885 and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. alternating currents, which Tesla championed. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power.

Elephant Killing

One of the unusual - and cruel - methods Edison used to convince people of the dangers of alternating current was through public demonstrations where animals were electrocuted.

One of the most infamous of these shows was the 1903 electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island.

Edison died on October 18, 1931, from complications of diabetes 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.

But by the time he died, Edison 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.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Thomas Alva Edison
• Birth Year: 1847
• Birth date: February 11, 1847
• Birth State: Ohio
• Birth City: Milan
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Thomas Edison is credited with inventions such as the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He held over 1,000 patents for his inventions.
• Technology and Engineering
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• The Cooper Union
• Interesting Facts
• Thomas Edison was considered too difficult as a child so his mother homeschooled him.
• Edison became the first to project a motion picture in 1896, at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City.
• Edison had a bitter rivalry with Nikola Tesla.
• During his lifetime, Edison received 1,093 U.S. patents.
• Death Year: 1931
• Death date: October 18, 1931
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: West Orange
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Thomas Edison Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/inventors/thomas-edison
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 13, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
• Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
• I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
• I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
• Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.
• To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
• Hell, there ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something.
• I always invent to obtain money to go on inventing.
• The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them.
• We know nothing; we have to creep by the light of experiments, never knowing the day or the hour that we shall find what we are after.
• Everything, anything is possible; the world is a vast storehouse of undiscovered energy.
• The recurrence of a phenomenon like Edison is not very likely... He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.” (Nikola Tesla)

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Thomas Edison

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 17, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor and savvy businessman who 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, the alkaline battery 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 who was highly skilled at marketing his inventions—and himself—to the public.

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. At age 12, he developed hearing loss—he was reportedly deaf in one ear, and nearly deaf in the other—which was variously attributed to scarlet fever, mastoiditis or a blow to the head.

Thomas Edison received little formal education, and left school in 1859 to begin working on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, where his family then lived. By selling food and newspapers to train passengers, he was able to net about $50 profit each week, a substantial income at the time—especially for a 13-year-old.

Did you know? By the time he died at age 84 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. But with the development of auditory signals for the telegraph, he was soon at a disadvantage as a telegrapher.

To address this problem, Edison began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness (including a printer that would convert electrical telegraph signals to letters). In early 1869, he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time.

Edison in Menlo Park

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 one year later—with the help of his father—Edison was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark.

With the success of his Menlo Park “invention factory,” some historians credit Edison as the inventor of the research and development (R&D) lab, a collaborative, team-based model later copied by AT&T at Bell Labs , the DuPont Experimental Station , the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and other R&D centers.

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.

Edison and the Light Bulb

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 Nikola Tesla, 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 .

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 called Glenmont and a 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. His Glenmont estate—where he died in 1931—and West Orange laboratory are now open to the public as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park .

Thomas Edison’s Greatest Invention. The Atlantic . Life of Thomas Alva Edison. Library of Congress . 7 Epic Fails Brought to You by the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison. Smithsonian Magazine .

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The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor.

Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house.

Not all these inventions worked or made money. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be; his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed; and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone. His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household—plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families.

Edison’s detractors insist that his greatest invention was his own fame, cultivated at the expense of collaborators and competitors alike. His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. The real nature of his genius is clarified in “ Edison ” (Random House), a new biography by Edmund Morris, a writer who famously struggled with just how inventive a biographer should be. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan. Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life.

Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. People had been making wires incandesce since 1761, and plenty of other inventors had demonstrated and even patented various versions of incandescent lights by 1878, when Edison turned his attention to the problem of illumination. Edison’s gift, here and elsewhere, was not so much inventing as what he called perfecting—finding ways to make things better or cheaper or both. Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

Born in 1847 in Ohio and raised in Michigan, Edison had been experimenting since childhood, when he built a chemistry laboratory in his family’s basement. That early endeavor only ever earned him the ire of his mother, who fretted about explosions, so, at thirteen, the young entrepreneur started selling snacks to passengers travelling on the local railroad line from Port Huron to Detroit. He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. In 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh, he bought a thousand copies, knowing he would sell them all, and marked up the price more and more the farther he got down the line. While still in his teens, he bought a portable letterpress and started printing his own newspaper aboard the moving train, filling two sides of a broadsheet with local sundries. Its circulation rose to four hundred a week, and Edison took over much of the baggage car. He built a small chemistry laboratory there, too.

One day, Edison saw a stationmaster’s young son playing on the tracks and pulled the boy to safety before an oncoming train crushed him; as a reward, the father taught Edison Morse code and showed him how to operate the telegraph machines. This came in handy that summer, when Edison’s lab caused a fire and the conductor kicked him off the train. Forced out of newspapering, Edison spent the next few years as a telegrapher for Western Union and other companies, taking jobs wherever he could find them—Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky. He had time to experiment on the side, and he patented his first invention in 1869: an electric vote recorder that eliminated the need for roll call by instantly tallying votes. It worked so well that no legislative body wanted it, because it left no time for lobbying amid the yeas and nays.

That failure cured Edison of any interest in invention for invention’s sake: from then on, he cultivated a taste for the practical and the profitable. Although legislators did not want their votes counted faster, everyone else wanted everything else to move as quickly as possible. Financial companies, for instance, wanted their stock information immediately, and communication companies wanted to speed up their telegram service. Edison’s first lucrative products were a stock-ticker device and a quadruplex telegraph, capable of sending four messages at once. Armed with those inventions, he found financial support for his telegraphy research, and used money from Western Union to buy an abandoned building in New Jersey to serve as a workshop.

In 1875, having outgrown that site, he bought thirty acres not far from Newark and began converting the property into what he liked to call his Invention Factory. It was organized around a two-story laboratory, with chemistry experiments on the top floor and a machine shop below. Workshops are at least as old as Hephaestus, but Edison’s was the world’s first research-and-development facility—a model that would later be adopted by governments, universities, and rival corporations. Menlo Park, as it came to be known, was arguably Edison’s most significant invention, since it facilitated so many others, by allowing for the division of problems into discrete chemical, electrical, and physical components, which teams of workers could solve through theory and then experimentation before moving directly into production.

Menlo Park also included a three-story house for Edison’s family. In 1871, when he was twenty-four, he married a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Stilwell, who had taken refuge in his office during a rainstorm. They had three children, two of whom Edison nicknamed Dot and Dash. It is likely thanks to them that the first audio recording ever made, in November of 1877, features Papa Edison reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

The phonograph came about because Edison had been experimenting with telephones, trying to improve on Alexander Graham Bell’s transmitter to achieve better sound quality across longer distances. He first had in mind a kind of answering machine that would transcribe the contents of a call, but he quickly realized that it might be possible to record the voice itself. To test the idea, Edison spoke into a diaphragm with a needle attached; as he spoke, the needle vibrated against a piece of paraffin paper, carving into it the ups and downs of the sound waves. To everyone’s surprise, the design worked: when he added a second needle to retrace the marks in the paper, the vibrating diaphragm reproduced Edison’s voice.

So novel was the talking machine that many people refused to believe in its existence—understandably, since, up to that point in history, sound had been entirely ephemeral. But once they heard it with their own ears they all wanted one, and scores of new investors opened their pockets to help Edison meet the demand. With this infusion of cash, Edison was able to hire dozens of new “muckers,” as the men who worked with him would eventually become known. (The endearment may have taken hold during his ill-fated mining days: “muck” is a term for ore, which his men tried, and failed, to remove from mines more efficiently.)

This was the team that banished the darkness, or at least made it subject to a switch. By the eighteen-seventies, plenty of homes were lit with indoor gas lamps, but they produced terrible fumes and covered everything in soot. Arc lights, which buzzed like welders’ torches in a few cities around the world, were, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare.” What Edison and his muckers did was figure out a way to regulate incandescent light, making the bulbs burn longer and more reliably, and at a more bearable brightness. The filament was the trickiest part, and he and his team tried hundreds of materials before settling on carbon, which they got to burn for fourteen and a half hours in the fall of 1879. (A year later, when they tried carbonized bamboo, it burned for more than a thousand hours.)

By the New Year, individual light bulbs had given way to a network of illumination around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light. Gawkers came every night to see the apricot smudges of light through the windows of Edison’s house and along the streets, marvelling at how the bulbs stayed lit through wind and rain, shining steadily and silently, and could be turned on and off with ease. The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles. Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon.

Edison’s patent attorney worried about the publicity, especially when the likes of George Westinghouse and Edward Weston came calling. But, by February, 1880, Edison had executed Patent No. 223,898, for the electric lamp, and No. 369,280, for a system of electrical distribution. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers. While supervising the construction of the plant, Edison moved his family to Gramercy Park; then, in August, 1884, Mary died suddenly, officially from “congestion of the brain,” though possibly of a morphine overdose. She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good.

One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution. She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory. This new complex improved on the already astounding pace of invention at Menlo Park and greatly expanded Edison’s manufacturing capacity. “I will have the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant,” he bragged in a letter, “and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention.” He wanted to be able to “build anything from a ladys watch to a Locomotive,” and employees were soon working, in separate teams, on alkaline batteries, sound recordings, fluoroscopes for medical radiography, a device that measured infrared radiation, motion-picture cameras and projectors and the pictures themselves, and anything else that Edison thought he could market.

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Like tech C.E.O.s today, Edison attracted an enormous following, both because his inventions fundamentally altered the texture of daily life and because he nurtured a media scrum that fawned over every inch of his laboratory and fixated on every minute of his day. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. A recent book by Jeff Guinn, “ The Vagabonds ” (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the publicity-seeking road trips that Edison took with Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford every summer from 1914 to 1924, driving a caravan of cars around the country, promoting themselves as much as the automobiles. Edison’s life had already been thoroughly documented for the public: the first authorized biography, two full volumes’ worth, appeared in 1910. All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.

How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away. In the earliest years after his death, those biographies expanded on Edison’s personality, revealing the complexities of his family life and his work habits. He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal. He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding. His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr., he sued in order to stop him from selling snake oil under the family name.

Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on. Then, a dozen years ago, Randall Stross, who has written extensively about Silicon Valley, published “ The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World .” Despite its admiring subtitle, Stross’s book sought to reveal the man behind the curtain—in his view, a humbug whose bigotry and bad business sense were salvaged only by the creativity, savvy, and cowardice of his munchkins, who toiled away on invention after invention for which their wizard took credit.

That kind of correction was surely inevitable, given Edison’s status and the culture’s increasing skepticism about great men and their ostensible genius. Although Stross’s book was not the first to consider Edison’s faults—Wyn Wachhorst probed his self-promotion in “ Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth ,” from 1981, and Paul Israel catalogued his belief in racial stereotypes and phrenological theories in “ Edison: A Life of Invention ,” from 1998—Stross portrays Edison as a patent-hungry P. T. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Edison’s hype was not for its own sake; it was to raise capital, which he rarely held on to for long, partly because he never was much of a businessman, and partly because he only wanted more of it in order to keep working. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. And he didn’t hide the borrowing: like Santa’s elves, the muckers were always a part of the mythology.

So, too, was the drudgery. Edison not only rhymed “perspiration” with “inspiration”—he also talked endlessly about his experiments and trials, emphasizing just how much work went into every discovery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. “I never had an idea in my life,” he once said. “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.”

In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another. In Merton’s terms, “multiples” are more common than “singletons,” which is to say that discovery and invention are rarely the product of only one person. The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies.

Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his. It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs. Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. Stross makes much of that failure in his biography, but consumer markets are hardly the only, and rarely the best, measure of genius—a point made clear, and painfully so, by Edison’s preference for and optimism about electric cars. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

The delight of Edmund Morris’s “Edison” is that, instead of arguing with earlier writers or debating the terms of genius, it focusses on the phenomenological impact of Edison’s work. He tries to return readers to the technological revolutions of the past, to capture how magical this wizard’s work really felt. He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. And he makes plain the cosmological significance of Edison’s phonograph—how, against all understandings of human impermanence, it allowed the dead to go on speaking forever. “Here now were echoes made hard,” Morris writes, “resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them.”

Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. And “Edison” does it doubly, because it is the last book that Morris finished before his death, earlier this year, at age seventy-eight. Morris’s first book, “ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt ,” won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize after it was published, in 1979, but it was his second book that really caused a stir. The success of Morris’s Roosevelt biography was shortly followed by the election of Ronald Reagan, and, after the Inauguration, the new Administration courted him to be the President’s official scribe.

Morris spent fourteen years working on a book that he ultimately published under the confused title of “ Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan .” Devoured by the public, scorned by the academy, debated by the Boswells of the world, the book featured a fictional narrator, who claimed to have known the fortieth President since they were teen-agers. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material. It was easy to assume that the invented voice belonged to Morris himself, since the “I” of the book expresses frustration about holding off on a planned trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt in order to write about Dutch Reagan. But many of the details contradicted those of Morris’s own life. When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an artist of the court adding himself to the portrait, as Diego Velázquez did in “ Las Meninas .” Morris’s transgressions lay first in making things up and second in failing to disclose what he was doing. His critics found those actions disqualifying in a biography; his champions found “Dutch” formally innovative. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging.

There is a faint echo of that formal tomfoolery in “Edison,” which begins with the inventor’s death and then takes a turn for the Benjamin Button. Morris moves backward through the decades of Edison’s life; like Merlin, this wizard ages in reverse. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in 1920 and runs until 1929, Part 2 goes from 1910 to 1919, and so on. The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.

Reverse chronologies might work well in fictions like Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” where they are serving grander themes of the fragility of memory and the failures of fidelity, but they are an unsatisfying solution to the problem of how to structure a biography. Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy. Tracing someone’s intellectual interests across a lifetime can be more meaningful than dragging the subject and the reader ever onward through calendrical time. But a backward biography, while certainly an invention, is, as Edison might have pointed out, neither practical nor profitable.

Even if you make your peace with this reverse narration—which, to be honest, I did, partly because Edison feels so much like a time traveller—“Edison” is still a frustrating book. It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life. If anything, Morris offers the same strange apologia for “Edison” that he did for “Dutch.” “Nobody around him understood him,” Morris said of Reagan. “Every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, ‘You know, I could never really figure him out.’ ” In the same vein, Morris once compared Edison to electricity itself, an invisible force seen only when it acts on the world around it. “What he was in person is harder, maybe impossible to say,” Morris concluded, “because he put so much of himself into his work.”

And yet figuring people out is the fundamental task of the biographer. Every person is elusive in one way or another, sometimes even unto herself, but it is possible to confront those inner mysteries in a biography without resorting to fabrications or gimmicks. It’s a lesson Morris could have learned from Edison: sometimes, what’s called for isn’t invention but perfection. ♦

Biography Online

Thomas Edison Biography

Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed and made commercially available – many key inventions of modern life. His Edison Electric company was a pioneering company for delivering DC electricity directly into people’s homes. He filed over 1,000 patents for a variety of different inventions. Crucially, he used mass-produced techniques to make his inventions available at low cost to households across America. His most important inventions include the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, an electric car and the electric power station.

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”

– Thomas Edison, interview 1929

Short Biography Thomas Edison

As a youngster, he tried various odd jobs to earn a living. This including selling candy, vegetables and newspapers. He had a talent for business, and he successfully printed the Grand Trunk Herald along with his other newspapers. This included selling photos of his hero, Abraham Lincoln . He was able to spend his extra income on a growing chemistry set.

Unfortunately, from an early age, Edison developed a severe deafness, which ultimately left him almost 90% deaf. He would later refuse any medical treatment, saying it would be too difficult to retrain his thinking process. He seemed to take his deafness in his stride, and never saw it as a disability.

From childhood, Edison loved to experiment, especially with chemicals. However, these experiments often got Edison into difficulties. A chemistry experiment once exploded on a train, and when working on a night shift at Western Union, his lead-acid battery leaked sulphuric acid through the floor onto his boss’ desk. Edison was fired the next day.

However Edison was undimmed and, despite scrapping by in impoverished conditions for the next few years, he was able to spend most of his time working on inventions. He received his first patent on June 1, 1869, for the stock ticker. This would later earn him a considerable sum.

In the 1870s, he sold the rights to the quadruplex telegraph to Western Union for $10,000. This gave him the financial backing to establish a proper research laboratory and extend his experiments and innovations. Edison once described his invention methods as involving a lot of hard work and repeated trial and error until a method was successful.

“During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”

– “Talks with Edison” by G.P Lathrop in Harper’s magazine, Vol. 80 (Feb. 1890), p. 425

By 1877, he had developed the phonograph (an early form of the gramophone player) This received widespread interest, and people were astonished at one of the first audio recording devices. This unique invention earned Edison the nickname ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park ‘ Edison’s device would later be improved upon by others, but he made a big step in creating the first recording device.

With William Joseph Hammer, Edison started producing the electric light bulb, and it was a great commercial success. Edison’s great advance was to use a carbonised bamboo filament that could last over 1,000 hours. In 1878, he formed the Edison Electric light Company to profit from this invention. Edison successfully predicted that he could make electric light so cheap, it would soon come universal. To capitalise on the success of the electric light bulb, he also worked on electricity distribution. His first power station was able to distribute DC current to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.

Edison’s studios now took up two blocks, and it was able to stock a huge range of natural resources, meaning that almost anything and everything could be used in trying to improve designs. This was a big factor in enabling Edison to be so successful in this era of innovation.

During the fledgeling years of electricity generation, Edison became involved in a battle between his DC current system and the AC (alternative current) system favoured by George Westinghouse (and developed by Nikola Tesla , who worked for Edison for two years before leaving in a pay dispute.)

This became known as the ‘current war’ and both sides were desperate to show the superiority of their system. The Edison company even, on occasion, electrocuted animals to show how dangerous the rival AC current was.

During World War One, Edison was asked to serve as a naval consultant, but Edison only wanted to work on defensive weapons. He was proud that he made no invention that could be used to kill. He maintained a strong belief in non-violence.

“Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

Edison was also a great admirer of the Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine . He wrote a book praising Paine in 1925; he also shared similar religious beliefs to Thomas Paine – no particular religion, but belief in a Supreme Being.

Edison made many important inventions and development in media. These included the Kinetoscope (or peephole view), the first motion pictures and improved photographic paper.

After the death of his first wife, Mary Stilwell in 1884, Edison left Menlo Park and moved to West Orange, New Jersey. In 1886, he remarried Mina Miller. In West Orange, he became friends with the industrial magnate, Henry Ford and was an active participant in the Civitan club – which involved doing things for the local community. His pace of invention slowed down in these final years, but he still kept busy, such as trying to find a domestic source of natural rubber. He was also involved in the first electric train to depart from Hoboken in 1930.

Throughout his life, he took an active interest in finding the optimal diet and believed a good diet could play a large role in improving health. In 1903, he was quoted as saying:

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.”

He had six children, three from each marriage. Edison died of diabetes on October 18, 1931.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Thomas Edison” , Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net   Published 17th July 2013. Last updated 5 March 2018.

Quotes by Thomas Edison

“Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. … All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.”

As quoted in Makers of the Modern World: The Lives of Ninety-two Writers, Artists, Scientists, Statesmen, Inventors, Philosophers, Composers, and Other Creators who Formed the Pattern of Our Century (1955) by Louis Untermeyer, p. 227

“We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.”

As quoted in Golden Book (April 1931), according to Stevenson’s Book of Quotations (Cassell 3rd edition 1938) by Burton Egbert Stevenson

“If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

As quoted in Motivating Humans: Goals, Emotions, and Personal Agency Beliefs (1992) by Martin E. Ford, p. 17

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

As quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

“Everyone steals in commerce and industry. I’ve stolen a lot, myself. But I know how to steal! They don’t know how to steal!”

As quoted in Tesla: The Modern Sorcerer (1999) by Daniel Blair Stewart, p. 411

“I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.”

The Philosophy of Paine (1925)

“In ‘Common Sense’ Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again..”

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

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Related pages

• Top 10 Inventors
• Greatest modern inventions
• Americans who changed the world
• 100 most influential people

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•  Thomas Edison homepage

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Collection Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies

Inventor Thomas Alva Edison profoundly influenced modern life through inventions such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. During his lifetime, he acquired 1,093 patents, and marketed many of his inventions to the public.

A brief biography of Edison is featured here, along with articles from journals of his day in which he offered his views on music, films, inventions, and other topics. Famous for his motion picture and recorded sound inventions, Edison himself appears here in a film ( A Day with Thomas A. Edison ) and on a disc recording ( Let Us Not Forget ).

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Chapter 12 – Thomas Alva Edison

Karen garvin.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was an American inventor. Considered to be a true genius, Edison created the world’s first research laboratory, where his systematic approach to inventing focused on practical results rather than theoretical knowledge. Although best known for his improvements to the light bulb and for creating the phonograph and motion picture camera, much of Edison’s work was related to the generation and distribution of electricity.

Figure 1. Thomas Alva Edison, c. 1904. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collection, LC-USZ62-108087.

Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven children and had limited formal education, which would later feed the myth that he was “a poor boy, uneducated and entirely self-taught.” [1] In fact, during 1854 Edison attended a private school run by Reverend George Engle and from 1859 to 1860 he attended the Port Huron School. [2] Edison, who would later describe himself as a “delicate” small boy, was mostly homeschooled by his mother, a former high-school teacher, who taught her son “how to read good books quickly and correctly.” [3] Edison devoured books on history, philosophy, and science. He liked to do chemical experiments and even strung up a telegraph wire to a friend’s house so they could send messages to each other. [4]

In 1859, Edison began working as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad line, where he earned pocket money to buy materials for his home chemical laboratory. [5] The twelve-year-old Edison rode the train and sold newspapers and magazines, but he also had a great deal of free time. In 1862 he purchased a small printing press, which he set up in the baggage car. From this makeshift office, Edison printed his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald . [6] Edison also conducted chemical experiments until a fire broke out and he was evicted from the train. [7]

Edison learned telegraphy and, despite noticing that he was developing a hearing loss, spent the next several years working as a telegraph operator. In early 1868 he moved to Boston and took a job with Western Union. During his free time there he designed and patented his first invention: an electronic vote recorder, which was met with indifference by lawmakers in Washington. [8]

Despite this initial setback, Edison quit his job at Western Union in January 1869 so that he could become a full-time inventor. He moved to New York City in April 1869, and in February 1870 he signed a contract with Gold and Stock Telegraph Company to do research and development on improvements to telegraph equipment. Edison began working on designs for an improved stock ticker, which he named the Universal Stock Printer. [9]

Edison sold the rights to the stock ticker to the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company for $40,000. [10] Then, he used the money to set up the Newark Telegraph Works in Newark, New Jersey. [11] That same year, an investor put up enough money for Edison to open a second shop, the American Telegraph Works. Between the two companies, Edison employed more than 160 men.

Edison soon outgrew the facility in Newark, and in December 1875 moved his operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey. He had a two-story laboratory built to his specifications, which housed a machine shop on the ground floor and a chemical laboratory on the second floor. Edison opened the laboratory in the spring of 1876 with a staff of five: two experimenters and three machinists. [12] The Menlo Park lab was quickly dubbed “the invention factory” by reporters, [13] and it was one of the first research and development laboratories. [14] Edison’s system was to come up with ideas and assign teams of researchers to work on projects, whom he referred to as “muckers.” [15] By having multiple teams engaged in developing marketable products, it was possible for the lab to be more productive than a lone inventor could ever have been. [16]

To keep Menlo Park running, Edison needed money. His method of raising money was to pursue only the inventions that were both “practical and profitable.” [17] In the summer of 1877, Edison came up with an idea for a machine that would record and play back sound messages. His prototype used a stylus that vibrated from the pressure of sound waves and carved small grooves on a piece of tin foil wrapped around a cylinder. The foil cylinder was later replaced by wax cylinders. [18] The phonograph became a commercial success and put Edison in the public spotlight, earning him the epithet “Wizard of Menlo Park.”

By early 1878, the laboratory staff had increased to 25, and by the 1880s expanded to a maximum of 50 to 60 employees. Edison added a separate machine shop and several other buildings to the Menlo Park site, and even provided a boardinghouse for some of his employees. [19] For a short time, Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was employed by Edison as an electrical engineer. [20] Both men were dedicated workaholics, but a rift developed between them after Edison supposedly promised Tesla fifty-thousand dollars if he could increase the efficiency of Edison’s electric dynamo. After Tesla succeeded, Edison claimed it had been a joke but counteroffered a raise in pay. Tesla, believing he had been cheated, resigned. [21]

In 1878, Edison began work on developing a longer-burning filament for electric light bulbs. Existing bulbs burned out within just a few hours; Edison realized that in order for the bulbs to be commercially viable they needed to last much longer. He did not invent the light bulb, however—the credit for that goes to English scientist Humphry Davy, who, in the early 1800s, had connected batteries to charcoal sticks and generated an arc of electricity to produce incandescent lighting. [22] On October 14, 1878, Edison filed a patent application for “Improvement in Electric Lights,” but he continued to refine the bulb and submitted another patent application on November 4, 1879.

Eventually, after Edison and his muckers tested thousands of materials for the light bulb filament, including carbonized cardboard and platinum, Edison discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament would last more than a thousand hours before it burned out. [23] Edison made further improvements, such as evacuating the air from the glass bulb and designing the screw base for the light bulb, which is still in use today.

Figure 2. Edison’s patent for the Electric-Lamp. Note the coiled filament inside the bulb. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, “Drawing for an Electric Lamp,” National Archives Catalog, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/595450 .

Edison began to manufacture and market his bulbs, but delivering electricity to run them was still problematic. But instead of just fabricating pieces of the electric puzzle, it was Edison’s intention to create a whole system, from electrical generation and distribution to the end products for home and business use. [24] In December 1880, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company with the purpose of constructing electrical generating stations. In 1881, he purchased a large building in Manhattan and obtained permission from the city to dig up the streets in order to lay nearly fourteen miles of electrical conduits. [25] Edison’s Pearl Street Power Station opened in 1882, and it used coal to power an electrical generator. This central power company delivered direct current (DC) electricity to his customers.

In a DC system, electrical current flows in one direction and is relatively low voltage. But while Edison’s DC distribution system was successful, it had several major drawbacks: the voltage could only be sent over short distances before it dropped too low to be useful, and the voltage could not be changed easily for varying electrical loads, which meant that each electrical device needed its own power lines. A competing power system, one favored by Edison’s ex-employee Tesla, was alternating current (AC), which allowed electricity to be sent over many miles of wire without loss and used a system of transformers to change voltages so that lighting and motors could be operated from the same power lines.

In 1886, William Stanley Jr. (1858–1916) had successfully electrified Great Barrington, Massachusetts, using alternating current. While others, including Tesla and George Westinghouse (1846–1914), believed that an AC distribution system was safe, Edison felt strongly that it was dangerous because of the high voltages it used and its tendency to spark. Indeed, several deaths, including the ghastly public spectacle of the electrocution of lineman John Feeks, had already taken place. [26]

By now Edison had invested a great deal of cash in his own DC system, which served only one square mile of customers, and he was fighting to keep his system financially solvent. [27] He appealed to public emotion about the safety of his DC system, but the differences of opinion between proponents of DC and AC devolved into a bitter rivalry that became known as the “War of the Currents.” It was a losing battle for Edison: in 1891 the Electrical World magazine reported that there were just over 200 Edison DC power stations in use, versus nearly 1,000 operational AC power stations. When the contract for electrifying the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition was awarded to Westinghouse, who used Tesla’s AC system, it cemented the superiority of alternating current for electrical distribution systems.

Nevertheless, Edison’s business continued to grow, and in 1887 he built a larger research facility in West Orange, New Jersey, where he became increasingly involved in management. Construction on the new laboratory began in May and the facility was occupied by the new year. Unlike the informal research facility of Edison’s younger days, this new laboratory employed university-trained scientists and utilized large-scale teamwork in its research methods. [28] Although Edison made no claims for himself about being a “pure scientist,” he nevertheless read professional literature, even as he disdained the career of a pure scientist. [29]

During his time at his West Orange lab, Edison continued to refine his phonograph and, after seeing the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), came to believe that motion could be captured on film. On July 31, 1891, Edison filed a patent for his motion picture camera. Never one to do half measures, Edison built a motion picture studio at the West Orange research park, called the Black Maria, in 1893. [30]

Figure 3. Interior of Thomas. A. Edison Laboratories, Building No. 2, West Orange, New Jersey. Apparatus on the table was used to make a steel master for the mass production of phonograph records. Photo: Jet Lowe, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HAER NJ,7-ORAW,4-A.

Some of the early films created at the studio were shown in Kinetoscopes, which were wooden boxes that housed rollers and spools for a single film. The first Kinetoscope parlor opened on April 14, 1894, in New York, where viewers could pay to watch the movies. The first commercial motion picture intended for a large audience was projected at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City on April 23, 1896.

During the 1890s, Edison began experimenting with something completely different: he built an iron ore separating plant in Ogden, New Jersey, that crushed rocks and used an electromagnet to separate the iron ore from the rock. [31] After several expensive upgrades to the plant, and the discovery of high-grade iron ore deposits in the Great Lakes area, Edison realized the unprofitability of this venture. But while the iron had never been a moneymaker, his company had sold crushed rock to cement companies. Thus, Edison followed the money trail and in 1899 he organized the Edison Portland Cement Company, which opened in 1901. [32]

Next, Edison turned his attention back to a project that he had been interested in for years: a storage battery. [33] In 1901, he formed the Edison Storage Battery Company and began working on a storage battery for electric cars. An “E” type of alkaline storage battery was produced in 1903, but there were problems with the batteries leaking and they did not recharge properly. In 1909, a new “A” type of nickel-iron alkaline battery was manufactured, [34] and in 1910, two electric cars with Edison batteries climbed Mt. Washington in New Hampshire on a promotional tour. [35]

In 1915, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels (1862–1948) appointed Edison as president of the newly formed Naval Consulting Board. The board comprised civilian experts who would review technology-related suggestions submitted by the public for possible military application. [36] Edison petitioned the government to establish a permanent research laboratory, but resigned from the naval board in January 1921. [37] Eventually the lab was constructed and the Naval Research Laboratory began operations on July 2, 1923. [38]

In 1927, Edison, now 80 years old, joined forces with Henry Ford (1863–1947) and Harvey Firestone (1868–1938) to form the Edison Botanic Research Corporation in Fort Meyers, Florida. The company’s goal was to find a domestic source of rubber so that America would not be dependent on foreign sources in case of another war. More than 17,000 plants were tested before goldenrod was selected as the most viable source for rubber. [39]

Edison married twice and had six children, although his heavy work schedule left little time for family. [40] In 1871, he met Mary Stilwell (1855–1884), who was working at the News Reporting Company, a short-lived business venture of Edison’s. He proposed  and they were married on Christmas Day. [41] They had three children: Marion (1873), Thomas (1876), and William (1878). Mary’s health declined and she died in 1884.

In 1885, while on a trip to New Hampshire with a group of friends, Edison met and proposed to Mina Miller (1865–1947). They married on February 24, 1886, and also had three children: Madeleine (1888), Charles (1890), and Theodore (1898).

Edison’s research spanned a wide range of electrical improvements and inventions, including small electrical appliances for home use, such as a coffeemaker and iron. He received 1,093 patents and won awards that included the French Légion d’Honneur in 1881 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1928. [42] He died on October 18, 1931, at his home in Glenmont, New Jersey.

Further Reading:

DeGraff, Leonard. Edison and the Rise of Innovation . New York: Sterling Signature, 2013.

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World . New York: Random House, 2004.

Freeberg, Ernest. The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America . New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

Morris, Edmund. Edison . New York: Random House, 2019.

Munson, Richard. Tesla: Inventor of the Modern . New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.

Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, http://edison.rutgers.edu/.

Stross, Randall. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World . New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

[1] . Frank Parker Stockbridge, “Rubber from Weeds, My New Goal,” Popular Science Monthly 3, no. 6 (December 1927): 9–11.

[2] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “The Boyhood Years,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/educationinventor.htm#5 .

[3] . Thomas Alva Edison, letter to the pupils of the grammar schools of New Jersey, April 30, 1912, http://edison.rutgers.edu/yearofinno/Oct13/TAE%20to%20Pupils%20of%20Grammar%20School%20of%20NJ_1912-4-30.pdf.

[4] . Rutgers, “The Boyhood Years”; Leonard DeGraff, Edison and the Rise of Innovation (New York: Sterling Signature, 2013), xxi.

[5] . Edison, letter to the pupils.

[6] . DeGraff, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , xxii–xxiii; Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Learning to Do Business: Early Entrepreneurship,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/educationinventor.htm#5 .

[7] . Rutgers, “The Boyhood Years.”

[8] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 3.

[9] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Stock Ticker,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/ticker.htm .

[10] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Edison’s Autobiographical Notes,” https://edison.rutgers.edu/yearofinno/TAEBdocs/V1App1_A.pdf , 643.

[11] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Newark, N.J., 1870–1875,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/educationinventor.htm#5.

[12] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Building the Lab,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/inventionfactory.htm.

[13] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 22.

[14] . “Edison and His Era: ‘Muckers’ and the Invention Process,” Thomas Edison National Historical Park, last updated February 26, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/edison-and-his-era.htm .

[15] . Thomas Edison National Historical Park, “The Gifted Men Who Worked for Edison,” National Park Service, last updated February 26, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/the-gifted-men-who-worked-for-edison.htm.

[16] . “Edison and His Era: ‘Muckers’ and the Invention Process.”

[17] . Edmund Morris, Edison (New York: Random House, 2019), 7.

[18] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Tinfoil Phonograph,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/tinfoil.htm.

[19] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Expanding the Laboratory,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/inventionfactory.htm.

[20] . Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 208.

[21] . Munson, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern , 53–54.

[22] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 48; Freeberg, The Age of Edison , 15–17.

[23] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Electric Lamp,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/lamp.htm.

[24] . Thomas P. Hughes, “The Electrification of America: The System Builders,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (January 1979): 124.

[25] . Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2004), 4, 80.

[26] . Freeburg, The Age of Edison , 181.

[27] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 90.

[28] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 75, 78–79.

[29] . Morris, Edison , 7, 46.

[30] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 129–30.

[31] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Ore Milling,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/ore.htm .

[32] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Cement,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/cement.htm ; Jonnes, Empires of Light , 347–50.

[33] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Storage Battery,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/battery.htm .

[34] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 352; Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “A Brief Chronology of Edison’s Life,” http://edison.rutgers.edu/brfchron.htm .

[35] . “A Brief Chronology of Edison’s Life.”

[36] . “Thomas Edison’s Vision,” U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, https://www.nrl.navy.mil/about-nrl/history/edison/.

[37] . “A Brief Chronology of Edison’s Life.”

[38] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 200–03.

[39] . New York Botanical Garden, International Plant Science Center, Mertz Library, “Personal Papers, Thomas Alva Edison (1880–1964),” https://sciweb.nybg.org/science2/libr/finding_guide/edison2.asp.html ; Stockbridge, “Rubber from Weeds, My New Goal.”

[40] . Jonnes, Empires of Light , 353.

[41] . DeGraaf, Edison and the Rise of Innovation , 11.

[42] . Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, “Later Years,” last updated October 28, 2016, http://edison.rutgers.edu/biogrphy.htm ; Jonnes, Empires of Light , 96; “Historical Highlights: Thomas Edison’s Congressional Gold Medal,” History, Art, and Archives, United States House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/36558 .

History of Applied Science & Technology Copyright © 2017 by Karen Garvin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Gilded Age: Technology & Invention

January 10, 2024

Posted by: Heather Thomas

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On September 4, 1882, famed inventor Thomas Edison flipped the switch that illuminated The Times Building with electricity in New York City for the first time. The next day, the New York Times reported that, “Mr. Edison had at last perfected his incandescent light.” Edison’s practical electric light bulb was just one of the many groundbreaking inventions that came about during a period of sweeping change in America known as the Gilded Age.

“ What devices, machinery and inventions have been given the world by industrious genius in the last few years .” — The Grenada Sentinel (Grenada, MS), September 14, 1889 .

Spanning roughly 1870-1900, the Gilded Age was a time of rapid industrialization in the United States. The country was transforming from an agrarian society of farmers and small producers to an industrial economy based in large urban cities. At the same time, there was a burst of innovation in the fields of engineering, science and technology, which brought about some of the modern era’s most innovative inventions. Here is a look at some of those inventions through historical newspapers.

The Gramophone

German American inventor Emile Berliner (1851-1929) patented the gramophone in 1887, a technology for recording and playing back sound. While Berliner wasn’t the first–Thomas Edison had figured it out with his 1877 invention of the phonograph –it was a first attempt at a technology capable of turning soundwave energy into a real object that could be turned back into sound.

Berliner used the basic principles of Edison’s technology but made improvements that enhanced the overall quality and efficiency of early sound recording. His process relied on lateral incisions created by a needle vibrating from side to side. The evenly deep lateral grooves it created kept the needle from jumping, but also reproduced sound with a greater range.

The Telephone

In 1876, Elisha Gray (1835-1901) and Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) had independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. The men rushed their prototype telephones to the U.S. Patent Office within hours of each other–Bell patented his first and later won a legal dispute with Gray.

Bell’s success with the telephone came after years of attempts to improve the telegraph. He finally achieved transmitting sound over a wire and on March 7, 1876, obtained a patent for a device he called the “Improvement in Telegraphy”—now known as the first telephone. Though he had tested the technology with a colleague in Boston on March 10, 1876, Bell’s first public demonstration of his telephone took place a few months later on June 25, 1876, at the Philadelphia World’s Fair, the Centennial Exposition .

Linotype Machine

In 1884, German American inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-1899) invented mechanized movable type with his linotype machine, an invention that caused the greatest information explosion since Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press . Before Mergenthaler’s invention, newspaper print was set by hand, a process that was long, tedious, expensive and generally limited papers to no more than 10 pages in length. The linotype machine was controlled by a keyboard similar in concept to the computer keyboards of today. A linotype operator could produce 4-7 lines of print a minute with Mergenthaler’s 90-character keyboard. Newspapers doubled and tripled in size which provided more information to the average American.

The success of the linotype machine coincided with the beginnings of the Progressive Movement in America. Social critics (referred to at the time as “muckrakers”), like Upton Sinclair and Ida M. Tarbell , were now able to get their in-depth exposés on corruption and poverty printed in newspapers and periodicals across the country, helping to better inform the American people of social issues. In addition, the increased quality of the newspapers led to higher circulation, which made newspapers and the publishers that ran them more powerful over the shaping of public opinion.

In 1874, the New York gun manufacturing company Remington and Sons marketed the first practical typewriter –with capital letters only–from an 1868 patent. Thomas Edison was granted a patent for an electric typewriter in 1872, but it was not commercially viable until the 1920s. The typewriter quickly changed office work in America and provided opportunities for women to enter the workforce.

Remington’s typewriter was among the more than 8,000 inventions exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, along with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.

Kodak Camera

American inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman (1854-1932) brought photography out of the studio and into the hands of everyday people with his revolutionary Kodak Camera, patented in 1888.

Prior to Eastman’s invention, photographs required the use of large, expensive cameras loaded with fragile glass plates that could only be developed by professional photographers. The Kodak Camera, priced at $25, was a handheld box that took one hundred pictures, allowing people to easily aim the camera and push the shutter button, then crank the film to the next frame. But when the roll was done, the entire camera had to be returned to Eastman’s firm in Rochester, New York for processing. Customers received prints, negatives, a new roll of film and their camera back.

The Kodak was advertised with the slogan, “ You press the button, we do the rest .”

On November 8, 1895, at the University of Würzburg, Germany, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) accidently discovered new and unknown rays while testing electric discharges in glass vacuum tubes. His tubes were covered in heavy black paper, but an incandescent green light still escaped and projected onto a nearby fluorescent screen. He found that the mysterious light would pass through most substances, but leave shadows of solid objects. He called them “X” to underscore that he did not know the nature of what the rays were.

Röntgen soon discovered that X-rays would pass through human tissue as well, rendering the bones and tissue visible. News of his discovery quickly spread, and within a year, facilities in Europe and the U.S. were using X-rays in surgeries and to locate bullets from gunshot wounds, bone fractures, kidney stones and swallowed objects. The technology replaced Alexander Graham Bell’s telephonic needle probe, which he had developed in an effort to locate the bullet in President James Garfield after Garfield had been shot in 1881. Bell’s device could only detect metal objects by sound and, therefore, was limited to locating such objects as bullets for removal. The discovery of X-rays made Röntgen famous. He was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 among his many honors.

Of course there were many other Gilded Age inventions that we didn’t cover in this post– barbed wire , the automobile, the fountain pen, stock ticker, electric elevator, and motion pictures among them–so tell us what you know about the ones we missed by sharing in the comments!

Discover more:

• Search  Chronicling America * to find coverage of Gilded Age inventions in historical newspapers!
• Headlines & Heroes blog post: The Linotype: The Machine That Revolutionized Moveable Type
• Use these guides about Gilded Age technology and invention topics to find more newspaper coverage in Chronicling America: Thomas Edison: Topics in Chronicling America Early Cinema: Topics in Chronicling America Early Electric Cars in America (1891-1922): Topics in Chronicling America Bicycle Craze: Topics in Chronicling America Nikola Tesla: Topics in Chronicling America Invention of the Telephone: Topics in Chronicling America Philadelphia’s World Fair: Topics in Chronicling America
• LC Blog Inside Adams post: The Typewriter — “that almost sentient mechanism”
• Free LC Digital Collection: Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry

* The  Chronicling America  historic newspapers online collection is a product of the  National Digital Newspaper Program  and jointly sponsored by the Library and the  National Endowment for the Humanities .

Follow Chronicling America on Twitter  @ChronAmLOC

Click here to subscribe  to  Headlines & Heroes –it’s free!

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THIS IS REALLY USFULL THANK YOU

THIS IS REALLY USFULL.

This helped with my project! Thanks for including the dates and details. :)

(the photographs are useful too!)

amazing for essay

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Thomas Edison — Thomas Edison Biography

Thomas Edison Biography

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• Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison, being one of the most creative inventors of all time, was considered a true gem in the world of inventions. He also spent a significant part of his life giving contributions to the world of designs that had an incredible influence on modern life. The creation of the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the workings of telegraph and the telephone, were some of his astonishing inventions. Thomas Alva Edison was also a successful businessman and innovator who managed to change the lifestyle of people through his essential innovations and improvements in a wide range of fields.

Table of Contents

About thomas alva edison, education, career and achievements, the invention of the light bulb, the phonograph.

• Edison’s Contribution in the Field of Electricity

Thomas Alva Edison was the phenomenal American inventor who holds the world-record of 1093 patents. Also, he created the world’s first industrial research laboratory. Edison was born on 11th February 1847, in Milan, Ohio – U.S.

Edison’s patents and numerous inventions contributed significantly to mass communications and telecommunications. Stock ticker, phonograph, the practical electric light bulb , motion picture camera, mechanical vote recorder and a battery for the electric car were some of his notable inventions.

He sold newspapers to passengers traveling along the Grand Trunk Railroad line during his early years. This led him to start his own newspaper named as the ‘Grand Trunk Herald’. The access to up-to-date information in this newspaper became quite a hit between the masses. Also, it was the first of the many more to come business ventures by Edison.

• Thomas Alva Edison always had a thrust of knowledge within him, and due to that, at an early age, he started reading a wide range of books and different subjects. 
• Edison’s higher education did not include any university or attending college; instead, he was primarily self-taught. 
• The absence of a well-defined curriculum led him to develop the skill of self-education and independent learning, which remained with him all his life.
• He began his career as an inventor when he moved to New York. 
• He devoted the decade of the 1870s to conducting experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, electric lighting, and other developing inventions. 
• His first round of fame was brought by the design of the phonograph in 1877, which took his status to greater heights. 
• He formed Edison Electric Light Company in 1878 in New York City.
• Achievement:
• He was felicitated with several awards and medals for his generous contribution to humankind. 
• Some of them include the Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. Navy and Congressional Gold Medal by the U.S. Also, he was decorated with the  “Officer of the Legion of Honour”  by France. 
• He was welcomed into the New Jersey Hall of Fame and Entrepreneur Walk of Fame.

The greatest challenge faced by Thomas Alva Edison was to develop a practical luminous, electric light. He accomplished this using lower current electricity , an improved vacuum inside the globe and a small carbonized filament which is a stitched thread that burned for thirteen and a half hours. He was successful in producing a reliable, long-lasting source of light.

Did Edison really invent the light bulb?

The tinfoil Phonograph was Thomas Edison’s first greatest invention in 1877. It was the first machine to record and play a person’s voice. Edison recited the rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a tin cylinder that captured the recording.

He also recommended other uses for the phonograph, such as letter writing and dictation, record music boxes, etc. Edison’s device phonograph played using cylinders rather than discs. It consisted of two needles, one for recording and one for playback.

Edison’s contribution in the field of electricity

A system of conductors , meters, current switches, etc. was designed by Edison as he knew that his light bulb invention would be ineffective without a proper method to deliver electricity. Edison improved the designs of generators, which led him to invent more efficient power output generators than the existing ones at that time. Hence, this was marked as the beginning of the electric age.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Name some of the incredible inventions of thomas alva edison..

Thomas Alva Edison is famous for his incredible inventions like the light bulb, phonograph and motion picture cameras.

How did Thomas Alva Edison invent the lightbulb?

Edison invented the light bulb by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament packed inside a glass vacuum bulb.

What is a filament?

A filament is a metallic thin wire or thread inside a bulb that lights up when electricity is passed through it.

What is a phonograph?

It is a form of gramophone using cylinders to record and reproduce sounds.

How many times did Thomas Alva Edison fail while inventing the light bulb?

Thomas Alva Edison made 1000 unsuccessful attempts before getting the final result.

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Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He experienced hearing loss at an early age. He was an imaginative and curious child. He did poorly in school, though, perhaps because he could not hear his teacher. His mother then educated him at home.

When Thomas was a teenager he became a telegraph operator. Telegraphy was one of the nation’s most important communication systems at the time. Thomas was good at sending and taking messages in Morse code. He loved tinkering with telegraphic instruments, and he developed several improvements for them. By early 1869 he had quit his telegraphy job to become a full-time inventor.

Although most of his life was devoted to his work, Edison’s family was also important to him. He married twice and had six children. Edison died on October 18, 1931.

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The Inventions of Thomas Edison Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
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The inventions of Thomas Edison, the brilliant American scientist, and entrepreneur, are relevant today, even though more than a century has passed since their creation. One of his most outstanding developments is an electric that was patented in the 19th century and changed the lives of people significantly. Due to this invention, a new round in science was achieved, and humanity entered a new industrial era.

Before Edison invented the electric lamp, centralized electric networks had not existed. However, with the advent of this development, people got an opportunity to illuminate large areas due to the ordered energy of the current rather than local lighting devices. Edison was the first to organize the streaming production of electric lamps and designed their basic configuration. As a result, people were able to control lighting levels and use electricity wisely.

Today, the traditional design of Edison’s lamp is used in many lighting fixtures. Although many innovations in the electricity industry have been developed since its inception, the classic design of this device does not lose popularity. Due to a simple d reliable construction, bulbs with filament are utilized in both domestic and industrial needs. In addition, the appearance of such a device gave impetus to the development of science in the field of electricity. Many new developments appeared due to Edison’s achievements, who was one of the founders of the practical application of current.

The electric lamp was one of the many inventions of the great scientist, but it was this development that glorified Edison most of all and became the subject associated with the inventor. The introduction of compressed current energy marked the transition to a new technological era. The outcome of Edison’s work may be seen in almost any home today, and the value of his contribution to science is undeniable.

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Bibliography

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The Papers of Thomas A. Edison

Thomas A. Edison edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, Theresa M. Collins, and David Hochfelder

Seeking to replicate the success of his New York electric central station throughout the United States and in Europe and Latin America, Thomas A. Edison vowed to become a "business man for a year." This bold decision began a remarkable transition period for America's greatest inventive thinker. The seventh volume of Edison's papers chronicles the profound changes in his professional and personal life, including the unexpected death of his wife. It concludes with Edison returning to the laboratory to develop new communications technology.

Related Books

Thomas A. Edison edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, David Hochfelder, Theresa M. Collins, and Brian C. Shipley

Thomas A. Edison edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, Theresa M. Collins, Alexandra R. Rimer, and Daniel J. Weeks

David C. Hoffman

Aaron Gillette

In its superabundance of detail — steely facts and figures, great plates of text riveted with nouns and graffitied with cryptic drawings (Edison was an untrained but natural draftsman) — the book has the same kind of physical impact as that which stuns you when you enter his laboratory in West Orange, N.J.

A mine of material... Scrupulously edited... No one could ask for more... A choplicking feast for future Edison biographers—well into the next century, and perhaps beyond.

What is most extraordinary about the collection isn't necessarily what it reveals about Edison's inventions... It's the insight into the process.

Those interested in America's technological culture can eagerly look forward to the appearance of each volume of the Edison Papers.

His lucidity comes through everywhere... His writing and drawing come together as a single, vigorous thought process.

A triumph of the bookmaker's art, with splendidly arranged illustrations, essential background information, and cautionary reminders of the common sources on which Edison's imagination drew.

In the pages of this volume Edison the man, his work, and his times come alive... A delight to browse through or to read carefully.

Beyond its status as the resource for Edison studies, providing a near inexhaustible supply of scholarly fodder, this series... will surely become a model for such projects in the future... The sheer diversity of material offered here refreshingly transcends any exclusive restriction to Edisonia.

Book Details

Calendar of Documents List of Editorial Headnotes Preface Chronology of Thomas A. Edison, April 1883– December 1884 Editorial Policy and User's Guide Editorial Symbols List of Abbreviations 1. April– June

Calendar of Documents List of Editorial Headnotes Preface Chronology of Thomas A. Edison, April 1883– December 1884 Editorial Policy and User's Guide Editorial Symbols List of Abbreviations 1. April– June 1883 (Docs. 2418– 2476) 2. July– September 1883 (Docs. 2477– 2531) 3. October– December 1883 (Docs. 2532– 2578) 4. January– March 1884 (Docs. 2579– 2638) 5. April– June 1884 (Docs. 2639– 2691) 6. July– September 1884 (Docs. 2692– 2737) 7. October– December 1884 (Docs. 2738– 2769) Appendix 1: Edison's Autobiographical Notes Appendix 2: Edison Village Plants Appendix 3: Specifications of Dynamos Produced at the Edison Machine Works, April 1883– December 1884 Appendix 4: Edison's Patents, April 1883– December 1884 Bibliography Credits Index

Thomas A. Edison

Paul b. israel, ph.d., louis carlat, theresa m. collins, david hochfelder, additional resources.

Review in New York Times Book Review

with Hopkins Press Books

Democracy challenged

‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy

Credit... Photo illustration by Matt Chase

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By David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Great Recession.

• Published Sept. 17, 2022 Updated June 21, 2023

Listen to This Article

The United States has experienced deep political turmoil several times before over the past century. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the country’s economic system. World War II and the Cold War presented threats from global totalitarian movements. The 1960s and ’70s were marred by assassinations, riots, a losing war and a disgraced president.

These earlier periods were each more alarming in some ways than anything that has happened in the United States recently. Yet during each of those previous times of tumult, the basic dynamics of American democracy held firm. Candidates who won the most votes were able to take power and attempt to address the country’s problems.

The current period is different. As a result, the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades.

The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.

The violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress , meant to prevent the certification of President Biden’s election, was the clearest manifestation of this movement, but it has continued since then. Hundreds of elected Republican officials around the country falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for statewide offices that would oversee future elections, potentially putting them in position to overturn an election in 2024 or beyond.

“There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office,” said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.

Vote Margins by State in Presidential Elections since 1988

Senate representation by state.

Residents of less populated states like Wyoming and North Dakota, who are disproportionately white, have outsize influence.

1 voter in Wyoming

has similar representation as

1 voter in North Dakota

6 voters in Connecticut

7 voters in Alabama

18 voters in Michigan

59 voters in California

has similar

representation as

Landslides in 2020 House Elections

There were about twice as many districts where a Democratic House candidate won by at least 50 percentage points as there were districts where a Republican candidate won by as much.

Landslide (one candidate won

by at least 50 percentage points)

Barbara Lee

Calif. District 13

Jerry Nadler

N.Y. District 10

Diana DeGette

Colo. District 1

Donald Payne Jr.

N.J. District 10

Jesús García

Ill. District 4

Landslide (one candidate won by at least 50 percentage points)

Presidential Appointments of Supreme Court Justices

Supreme Court appointments

Presidential election winners

Popular vote

Electoral College

Party that nominated a justice

David H. Souter (until 2009)

Clarence Thomas

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (until 2020)

Stephen G. Breyer (until 2022)

John G. Roberts Jr.

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Sonia Sotomayor

Elena Kagan

Neil M. Gorsuch

Brett M. Kavanaugh

Amy Coney Barrett

Ketanji Brown Jackson

Supreme Court

Presidential election

nominated a justice

Souter (until 2009)

Ginsburg (until 2020)

Breyer (until 2022)

State Legislators and Election Lies

The share of Republican state legislators who have taken steps, as of May 2022, to discredit or overturn the 2020 presidential election results

Pennsylvania

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