Thomas
Edison
| Alexander Bell
| Eli Whitney
THOMAS
ALVA EDISON (1847-1931)
Inventor
of The Light Bulb
http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H/edison.html
Without
a doubt, the greatest inventor of the modern era has been
Thomas Edison. Many of his over one thousand inventions have
profoundly changed the lives of nearly everyone in the world.
Thomas
Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847.
In 1854, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. There,
"Al's" favorite hobbies were reading, and performing
chemistry experiments in his basement lab. But his teachers
considered young Edison a failure; and his mother soon decided
to home-school him.
Edison's
first job (1859) was operating a newstand on the railroad
that ran from Port Huron to Detroit. To make the trips more
interesting, Edison installed a printing press and chemistry
lab in a boxcar. In 1862, he learned to use a railroad telegraph.
Edison then spent many years traveling around Canada and the
US, working as a telegraph operator and doing scientific experiments
in his free time. Finally, in 1869, he decided to become a
full-time inventor.
On June 1st of that year, Edison was granted his first patent
(#90,646), for an electric voting machine. But no one wanted
to use the machine, and Edison resolved never again to invent
what would not sell. His next invention fared much better:
an improved stock market tickertape machine (1869), which
earned him an instant $40,000 [about $700,000 today]. With
his friend Franklin T. Pope, Edison formed an electrical engineering
firm, based in Newark, New Jersey. With Pope, and later alone,
Edison eventually earned about 200 patents for telegraph systems
and devices.
In 1876,
in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison founded his famous "invention
factory." "The Wizard of Menlo Park" was a
workaholic and a demanding employer, but he did not resent
failures in the lab: "That's one more way it won't work,
so we're closer to a solution." Edison's first great
Menlo Park invention was the phonograph (1877), although he
did not bring it to market for ten years. He was busy with
his greatest project: a workable electric light system that
would replace candles and gaslight forever, at home and in
public.
In 1878,
Edison created his prototype incandescent light bulb: a thin
strip of paper, attached to wires, enclosed in a vacuum inside
a glass bulb. When electricity flowed into the paper "filament,"
it heated up, and glowed. The only problem was that the paper
burnt out very quickly. After thousands of tests, an "Edison
Pioneer," Lewis H. Latimer, found the optimal filament
material: carbonized cotton thread (1897).
Edison
installed the first reliable, durable electric lights in his
own labs, and later built the first public power station,
in Manhattan's financial district (1882). However, Edison's
DC-current system had only a three-mile range, and was later
superseded by Westinghouse's and Tesla's AC-current system.
By that
time, Edison had built a new and much bigger research complex
(now a National Monument) in West Orange, New Jersey. There
his first project was to redesign his phonograph, in light
of recent improvements by others. Edison soon marketed a wax-cylinder
phonograph as a dictation machine (1888), and later, as a
musical home entertainment system (1896). These commercial
efforts were, by and large, failures, but Edison continued
to refine his favorite invention into the 1920s.
In 1889,
an associate, William Dickson, working at Edison's direction,
invented the celluloid-strip motion picture camera and projector
(1889) --- whose silent movies were viewed inside the machine,
through a peephole. Although Edison later broke with Dickson,
George Eastman and others helped Edison to establish the basis
of the motion picture industry.
After
1911, Edison was mainly dissatisfied in his work, feeling
that many of his ideas were being ignored or worse yet, stolen.
Throughout the '20s, he also had poor health. He died on October
18, 1931, at the age of 84.
In total,
Edison accumulated 1,093 US patents. Only a few inventors
have earned half as many. Edison inventions not mentioned
above include: the printing telegraph, the electric "stencil
pen," a magnetic mining process, an electrical torpedo,
a synthetic rubber, and improved alkaline batteries, cement
mixers, and microphones.
It must
be said that Edison used other inventors' ideas much more
freely than he shared his own. For example, the wax cylinder
phonograph was first patented by Chichester A. Bell and Charles
Sumner Tainter (1886), whose offer of a joint venture Edison
rejected; the disc "gramophone" was first patented
by Emile Berliner (1887); and even the so-called "Edison
Effect," the observed emission of electrons from a hot
filament, was actually discovered by an Edison engineer named
William J. Hammer (1883).
But nothing
can gainsay the tremendous effect that Edison's career as
a whole has had on our everyday lives. By the volume, variety
and spectacularity of his inventions, Edison more than any
other person made it seem like no miracle was beyond the reach
of modern American technology. As an inspiration to aspiring
engineers and inventors, then as now, Edison is peerless.
Indeed, above all others, as his Congressional Medal of Honor
certificate declared: "He illuminated the path of progress
by his inventions."
Thomas
Edison
| Alexander Bell
| Eli Whitney
|