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• Born: 11 February 1847
• Birthplace: Milan, Ohio
• Died: 18 October 1931 (natural causes)
• Best Known As: The man who invented the light bulb

Name at birth: Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Edison was the great genius inventor of the electrical age. His hundreds of inventions made him a giant public figure in American and around the world at the turn of the 20th century. Among Edison's most famous inventions are the first practical long-lasting light bulb and the phonograph; he also helped refine and develop other inventions like motion picture cameras, the stock ticker and the typewriter. By the end of his life Edison had registered 1093 patents and had made millions from his inventions and the businesses he built on them. He is especially known for his work with electricity, and the story of his struggles to find the right filament for the first working light bulb are legendary. Edison's labs were located in Menlo Park, New Jersey, leading to his nickname of "The Wizard of Menlo Park." Edison is also famous for being a dogged worker: he often slept no more than four hours per night and made the famous statement, "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

Edison became close friends with another inventor/businessman, Henry Ford -- the two often vacationed together and had adjoining winter homes in Fort Myers, Florida... Edison's name lives on in several modern companies including Consolidated Edison ("Con-Ed")... Edison had a public rivalry with another electrical genius, Nikola Tesla, and battled in the marketplace ("Battle of the Currents" in the press) with George Westinghouse... Louis Lumiére is another man who helped make movies a part of modern life.

• Genre: Spoken Word
• Instrument: Author

Biography

Thomas A. Edison was not a musical artist. Edison was also partly deaf, owing to an accident suffered in childhood when he attempted to hop aboard a train. But Edison deserves inclusion as part of the All Music Guide, as he invented the very medium we primarily use to transmit music -- sound recording.

In the summer of 1877, Edison was looking into ways to develop a device that would compete with the telephone just patented by his arch rival, Alexander Graham Bell. Working with ticker tape, a vibrating stylus, and the membrane from Bell's phone, Edison was looking for an alternate way to communicate over telegraph lines. Whatever he was attempting at this point didn't work out, but he later recalled that he was distracted by the musical sounds that the indented tape made as it passed through a spring, resembling the sound of speech. Edison also noted that the indentations made in the ticker tape by the wagging stylus left a trace of vibration that followed a recognizable pattern.

How Edison got from that to the phonograph is unclear. Conventional wisdom asserts that by August 13, 1877 Edison submitted a sketch of the first phonograph to machinist John Kreusi, who completed building the first model in about a month's time. The hasty Edison sketch often reproduced as the "first phonograph design" is probably not the one that Edison really used; that was likely mislaid, and a later sketch was drawn up quickly in order to protect Edison's patents.

Edison unveiled the phonograph to reporters from Scientific American in the spring of 1878, and thereafter coordinated a tour in cities across the country, where either Edison himself or his employees led demonstrations of the phonograph's capabilities in local lecture halls. Edison would later claim that for the first words spoken into the phonograph he utilized "a little piece of practical poetry: Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow." Audience members at these assemblies shouted obscenities into the phonograph, hoping to "trick" it, but it merely played back all the obscenities, recitations, cornet solos, and anything else that was thrown into its little mouthpiece. The American public was astounded!

The first phonograph, which was merely a hand-cranked, grooved cylinder mandrel covered with a thin sheet of tinfoil, was surprisingly versatile despite its simplicity -- it could be played backwards, and was capable of primitive overdubs. However it had one major drawback; the recordings it made weren't permanent. Once the tinfoil wore out, generally after about five plays, or the tinfoil sheet was removed from the mandrel, the recording made was effectively destroyed. Edison had hoped to market the phonograph as an office dictation device, but for it to be truly practical for that purpose Edison's cylinder would have to be able to play the recording many more times. After the novelty of the phonograph wore off in early 1879, Edison found no backers for further development. So he went back to the drawing board in hopes of finding a "better idea," and later in the year, invented the incandescent light.

Exploiting this new invention kept Edison quite busy for a longtime, and a period of some five years passed where there were no new developments in regard to the phonograph. But in 1884, Alexander Graham Bell's nephew, Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter began to work in secret on an improved phonograph, which used wax cylinders in place of the tinfoil. The cylinders could be removed from the phonograph without being damaged and held their recordings intact for a hundred plays or more. Bell and Tainter apprised Edison of their discoveries and offered to pool their patents with his to expedite exploitation of the new phonograph. But an angry Edison would hear nothing of it, and early in 1888 he and his top engineers conducted several sleepless days and nights of investigation into improving Edison's "favorite invention." A battery was added to power the motor and other improvements were made. Beginning in the summer of 1888, Edison sent his men to Europe on a quest to collect testimonial recordings of the most distinguished figures from abroad. Handel's music was recorded at the Crystal Palace in London, as were the voices of Queen Victoria and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The piano playing of composer Johannes Brahms was recorded in Berlin. Edison also collected testimonials from men in the State Department in Washington, D.C., who were using the phonograph on an experimental basis to transcribe Senate hearings on a scandal involving the New York Port Authority.

All of these achievements helped greatly to enhance the prestige of the lowly phonograph, but the business side of the operation still moved at a snail's pace. Jesse Lippincott, a wealthy financier known to Edison, secured Bell and Tainter's patents in 1888, and afterward a stubborn Edison finally relented to go in with Lippincott. In the spring of 1889, The North American Phonograph Company was established, and the American recording industry was finally born, nearly twelve years after the device had first appeared in Edison's lab!

In 1890, you couldn't just go out to one of Edison's North American branch offices and buy a phonograph, unless you were a corporate executive seeking one for use in dictation. Very early phonographs intended for public entertainment were coin operated and initially set up in dancehalls and drinking establishments as an amusement. Damage to equipment and frequent service calls proved costly, and as a result Cincinnati-based Edison jobber James Andem devised the idea of installing the machines in an arcade that would be manned by a full-time staff. The first such arcade opened in Cleveland in September 1890, and proved quite profitable. Most other regional Edison offices followed suit in short order.

Although Edison didn't know it, the elements that led to his fall from dominance in the recording industry were already underway from the very start of his involvement in it. In 1889 or 1890, inventor Emile Berliner began to develop a flat-disc type record. Ironically his first recorded selection would be "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," demonstrating that Berliner's taste in "practical poetry" was similar to Edison's own! Berliner's flat disc record was five inches in diameter (the same size as today's compact disc), played for just under two minutes, and made its modest bow in the Washington, D.C., area in 1895.

At this time Edison began to experience trouble from breakaway regional divisions, most potently from the Maryland-Delaware-Washington, D.C., subsidiary, which declared itself independent and renamed itself The Columbia Phonograph Company in 1896. Edison sued Columbia, but somehow the company managed to survive. This set up a domino effect within North American that caused it to collapse by 1898. The arcade business was falling off anyway, and Edison was forced to shift his focus to marketing phonographs for home use. He could not do so cheaply, and Edison refused to compromise in terms of both the quality of his phonographs and their cost. So it was easy to undercut his business, and infringers were legion. One by one Edison took them to court, and he usually won.

But try as he might, Edison could not win an infringement suit against manufacturers of flat disc records. Berliner's invention was received with indifference in America upon its first launch, as it was little more than a toy and put out such poor sound. But in Europe, where there was practically no phonograph industry and, most significantly, Edison himself had no interests, the flat disc format was a runaway success. Flat disc records didn't sound as good as cylinders, but they were easier to store and the machines that played them were much cheaper than Edison's. By 1901, both Victor and Columbia were establishing the flat disc business in the United States, and over time, the sound of the records would improve.

Edison finally began to market a cheap Edison portable player, the "Little Gem" around 1909. He also introduced a cylinder that played for four minutes, longer than the average flat disc record of the time.

Finally, in 1912, Edison introduced "Diamond Discs," his own answer to the flat disc phenomenon. These records were "vertical cut," meaning that the grooves wagged toward and away from you, like on a cylinder, rather than from right to left, as in standard "lateral cut" recordings. The records were also injection molded, rather than "pressed" like other records. The grooves were molded into a thin Bakelite surface that was spread over a thick blank made from a mixture of china clay and wood flour. This use of Bakelite may have been the very first time plastics were utilized in American industry, and certainly it was the first time plastic was used in the production of records. Before, Edison had depended on his employees to make the selection as what to record and by whom. But now Edison himself personally listened to and approved all of his Diamond Discs. It was a pet project, to say the least. As in the case of his cylinder boxes, all Edison Diamond Discs bore his likeness and signature.

Edison really tried to reach out to the public through the Diamond Discs, to the point of giving away copies of ten of his favorite records with every machine sold. However, the public wasn't crazy about the fact that you couldn't play Edison records on other types of phonographs. While the sound on Diamond Discs was noticeably superior to that of the lateral records made by Victor and Columbia, it was also much quieter, and once the record got a little worn and the needle started playing that china clay and wood flour blank, they didn't sound that good! Alas, Edison records were heavy enough to kill a small animal if dropped on one, and their thickness made them difficult to store, just like cylinders. Diamond Discs didn't bear paper labels until about 1920, and the label information was simply etched into the black surface of the record, making it difficult to distinguish one Diamond Disc from another.

Ultimately it was Edison's micro-management of the recorded repertoire on Diamond Discs that ultimately sealed their fate. He insisted on hiring artists based on their talent and clear enunciation of lyrics, rather than their reputation with the public. With a few very significant exceptions, such as in the case of Edison records made by Sophie Tucker, Serge Rachmaninov, and Polk Miller's Old South Quartette, relatively few of the performers who recorded for Edison were known other than from the records they made. His own musical tastes were those of a man born before the civil war, and these were most decidedly out of step with a record buying public with a growing interest in ragtime, and later jazz, which Edison himself couldn't stand. Likewise he didn't care much for many of the "name" artists he recorded, referring to Rachmaninov as a "pounder."

The Edison Recording firm continued to struggle, producing Diamond Discs, cylinders, and machines, through practically the whole of the 1920s. Edison did eventually relinquish his control of what the company recorded on Diamond Disc, and the Edison Company from about 1920 forward recorded a fair amount of good jazz by artists, such as the California Ramblers and bandleader Dave Kaplan. Edison also issued the first bona fide commercial country record in 1924 when his in house tenor of longstanding Vernon Dalhart recorded "The Wreck of the Old 97." However, the Edison Company was now well behind its competition technologically. In the mid-'20s, Edison experimented with a 33 rpm long-playing format on Diamond Discs that was a complete and utter disaster. Edison didn't start issuing electrically recorded items until 1926, and finally began to issue lateral cut records in 1927, when the company was on its last legs. The Thomas A. Edison record company closed its doors on March 29, 1929 and not a moment too soon. The following day the stock market crashed, and with it the fortunes of his healthiest competitors were wiped out. Edison died less than two years later, though his signature continued to appear on Ediphone dictation records supplied for office use well into the 1970s. The dictation division of Edison had been sold off, but the new owner was permitted to keep the trademark.

For someone who enjoyed such a long association with recordings, and had such a decisive impact on the industry, relatively few records exist of Edison himself. A cylinder of a "Letter," made in fall of 1888, lay unnoticed in the Edison National Historic Site until discovered by researcher Jerry Fabris in the 1990s; it is the earliest known record of Edison speaking. Another discovery is an undated cylinder known as "Thomas A. Edison Tells a Joke." Edison did make one commercially issued recording, "Lest We Not Forget," a speech on the First World War released by his own company in 1919. He is heard briefly on "Christmas Greetings From the Gang at Orange," a promotional Christmas record made as a giveaway by the Edison Company in 1920. The most famous sound byte of Edison, of him reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb," comes not from a record, but from the audio track of an experimental sound film newsreel made during the celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the invention of the phonograph. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

• Born: Feb 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio
• Died: Oct 18, 1931
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: ??s
• Career Highlights: Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory
• First Major Screen Credit: Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (1897)

Biography

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the world's great inventors, and it is a small wonder that he was hailed as the Wizard of Menlo Park by his contemporaries. Edison was responsible for creating the stock ticker, the first copy machines, the incandescent light bulb, the carbon transmitter/microphone (which made Alexander Bell's telephone viable), and the phonograph. He also oversaw the development of the first devices for filming and exhibiting motion pictures. His movies had their genesis in his enormous West Orange, NJ, laboratory when he came up with the idea of recording moving pictures much in the way that his phonograph recorded live sounds. The invention, called the Edison Kinetophongraph or Kinetophone, was actually developed by Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson in 1889. Dickson based his design on the European Zoetrope, a hand-turned cylinder covered with photographic images on glass plates. The first kinetophonograph used strips of celluloid film invented by John Carbutt, but later employed Eastman's innovative 35 mm celluloid film stock, which came on long rolls. Synchronized with a phonograph, the invention projected pictures. This invention later inspired Edison to assign Dickson to create the first electrically operated Kinetograph camera; with it, in late 1890, he made the first film, Monkeyshines, a brief antic that featured Edison employee Fred Ott. Though Dickson envisioned that these motion pictures would be projected upon a large screen, Edison wanted to promote an individualized viewing system and assigned Dickson to engineer the Kinetoscope. It became a popular attraction, and soon entire parlors, called nickelodeons, became all the rage. There, viewers would pay a nickel and stand before a cabinet to watch an exciting film that lasted 60-90 seconds. The first nickelodeon opened in New York in the spring of 1894. To make these films, Edison and Dickson created the world's first movie studio, Black Maria.

Dickson eventually left Edison to found his own film company -- which eventually became Biograph -- and to perfect his Mutograph camera and projector. Dickson became Edison's first real competitor when Edison failed to patent his movie-making inventions and refused to develop a large-screen projection devise, believing it would never make money. Edison's tune abruptly changed when he learned that, in 1894, France's Lumière Brothers had stolen his ideas and those of others to develop their Cinematographe, a camera and projection device. The following year, they showed the first public films, which caught on like wild fire. Always the capitalist, Edison immediately initiated a lawsuit to insure that he was given total credit for the film invention. The suit lasted many years, but in 1909, he succeeded in helping launch the Motion Picture Patents Company to regulate the number of independent producers in the burgeoning film industry.

In 1895, eager to catch up to the Lumières, Edison teamed up with Thomas Armat, the man behind the Vitascope system, and, in the spring of 1896, they exhibited the first big-screen film in New York. Edison's company kept producing films at his Black Maria studio through 1907, before moving his filmmaking operation to an enormous, all-glass studio in the Bronx, New York. In 1917, the monopoly created by the Motion Picture Patents Company was destroyed. Shortly thereafter, Edison retired from making films. He died in 1931. In 1940, MGM created a pair of biopics to pay tribute to the great inventor: Young Tom Edison, starring Mickey Rooney, and Edison, The Man, featuring Spencer Tracy in the title role. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Thomas Alva Edison

Library of Congress

[b. Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847, d. West Orange, New Jersey, October 18, 1931]

Edison was the most prolific inventor of all time, receiving 1093 patents in the United States alone and laying the groundwork for many technological innovations of the 20th century. His major inventions include the phonograph, introducing the idea of recording sound, and an incandescent lamp that had a carbon filament sealed in a glass globe containing a partial vacuum. Edison also planned the first electricity distribution system--with dynamos, insulated underground cables, meters for measuring consumption, outlets, and switches--to carry electricity to houses. In addition, Edison patented the first machine to produce motion pictures. Yet another major invention, the nickel-alkaline storage battery with lithium, came in 1908. Edison also discovered that heat causes an electric current to flow between his lamp's filament and a separate electrode inside the lamp--the Edison effect.

Edison, Thomas A.

An American inventor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He patented more than a thousand devices, including the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb.

• Edison originated the proverb “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” • Edison was called the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” after his home town in New Jersey.

(1847–1931), prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and industrialist

A pioneer in team industrial research, Edison made significant innovations in communications technologies (telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and motion pictures) and in electric lighting and electric power systems.

Edison's laboratories in New Jersey and his worldwide acclaim as a successful inventor reinforced an aura of American industrial progress through research that fostered application of systemized research to military technology in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1915, naval secretary Josephus Daniels enlisted Edison to organize and chair a Naval Consulting Board to provide technical counsel to the navy. Edison lent his name to board activities, personally engaged in sonic research for detection of submarines, and vigorously promoted creation of a Naval Research Laboratory. His group was outflanked, however, by the National Academy of Science, representing younger, academically oriented scientists. They created a presidentially appointed National Research Council, led by the politically astute George Ellery Hale, which attained a power and influence that eclipsed the Edison group and ultimately led in World War II to establishment of Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development. Nevertheless, some of the Edison's companies were organized into the General Electric Company, which became a major defense contractor.

[See also Consultants; World War II: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

• Reese V. Jenkins, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Edison, 1989–.
• Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, 1998

The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) held hundreds of patents, most for electrical devices and electric light and power. Although the phonograph and incandescent lamp are best known, perhaps his greatest invention was organized research.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847; his father was a jack-of-all-trades, his mother a former teacher. Edison spent 3 months in school, then was taught by his mother. At the age of 12 he sold fruit, candy, and papers on the Grand Trunk Railroad. In 1862, using his small handpress in a baggage car, he wrote and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which was circulated to 400 railroad employees. That year he became a telegraph operator, taught by the father of a child whose life Edison had saved. Exempt from military service because of deafness, he was a tramp telegrapher until he joined Western Union Telegraph Company in Boston in 1868.

Early Inventions

Probably Edison's first invention was an automatic telegraph repeater (1864). His first patent was for an electric vote recorder. In 1869, as a partner in a New York electrical firm, he perfected the stock ticker and sold it. This money, in addition to that from his share of the partnership, provided funds for his own factory in Newark, N.J. Edison hired technicians to collaborate on inventions; he wanted an "invention factory." As many as 80 "earnest men," including chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, were on his staff. "Invention to order" became very profitable.

From 1870 to 1875 Edison invented many telegraphic improvements: transmitters; receivers; the duplex, quadruplex, and sextuplex systems; and automatic printers and tape. He worked with Christopher Sholes, "father of the typewriter," in 1871 to improve the typing machine. Edison claimed he made 12 typewriters at Newark about 1870. The Remington Company bought his interests.

In 1876 Edison's carbon telegraph transmitter for Western Union marked a real advance toward making the Bell telephone practical. (Later, Émile Berliner's transmitter was granted patent priority by the courts.) With the money Edison received from Western Union for his transmitter, he established a factory in Menlo Park, N.J. Again he pooled scientific talent, and within 6 years he had more than 300 patents. The electric pen (1877) produced stencils to make copies. (The A. B. Dick Company licensed Edison's patent and manufactured the mimeograph machine.)

The Phonograph

Edison's most original and lucrative invention, the phonograph, was patented in 1877. From a manually operated instrument making impressions on metal foil and replaying sounds, it became a motor-driven machine playing cylindrical wax records by 1887. By 1890 he had more than 80 patents on it. The Victor Company developed from his patents. (Alexander Graham Bell impressed sound tracks on cylindrical shellac records; Berliner invented disk records. Edison's later dictating machine, the Ediphone, used disks.)

Incandescent Lamp

To research incandescence, Edison and others, including J. P. Morgan, organized the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. (Later it became the General Electric Company.) Edison made the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879, and it was patented the following year. After months of testing metal filaments, Edison and his staff examined 6,000 organic fibers from around the world and decided that Japanese bamboo was best. Mass production soon made the lamps, although low-priced, profitable.

First Central Electric-Light Power Plant

Prior to Edison's central power station, each user of electricity needed a dynamo (generator), which was inconvenient and expensive. Edison opened the first commercial electric station in London in 1882; in September the Pearl Street Station in New York City marked the beginning of America's electrical age. Within 4 months the station was lighting more than 5,000 lamps for 230 customers, and the demand for lamps exceeded supply. By 1890 it supplied current to 20,000 lamps, mainly in office buildings, and to motors, fans, printing presses, and heating appliances. Many towns and cities installed central stations.

Increased use of electricity led to Edison-base sockets, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conduits, meters, and the three-wire system. Jumbo dynamos, with drum-wound armatures, could maintain 110 volts with 90 percent efficiency. The three-wire system, first installed in Sunbury, Pa., in 1883, superseded the parallel circuit, used 110 volts, and necessitated high-resistance lamp filaments (metal alloys were later used).

In 1883 Edison made a significant discovery in pure science, the Edison effect - electrons flowed from incandescent filaments. With a metal-plate insert, the lamp could serve as a valve, admitting only negative electricity. Although "etheric force" had been recognized in 1875 and the Edison effect was patented in 1883, the phenomenon was little known outside the Edison laboratory. (At this time existence of electrons was not generally accepted.) This "force" underlies radio broadcasting, long-distance telephony, sound pictures, television, electric eyes, x-rays, high-frequency surgery, and electronic musical instruments. In 1885 Edison patented a method to transmit telegraphic "aerial" signals, which worked over short distances, and later sold this "wireless" patent to Guglielmo Marconi.

Creating the Modern Research Laboratory

The vast West Orange, N.J., factory, which Edison directed from 1887 to 1931, was the world's most complete research laboratory, an antecedent of modern research and development laboratories, with teams of workers systematically investigating problems. Various inventions included a method to make plate glass, a magnetic ore separator, compressing dies, composition brick, a cement process, an all-concrete house, an electric locomotive (patented 1893), a fluoroscope, a nickel-iron battery, and motion pictures. Edison refused to patent the fluoroscope, so that doctors could use it freely; but he patented the first fluorescent lamp in 1896.

The Edison battery, finally perfected in 1910, was a superior storage battery with an alkaline electrolyte. After 8000 trials Edison remarked, "Well, at least we know 8000 things that don't work." In 1902 he improved the copper oxide battery, which resembled modern dry cells.

Edison's motion picture camera, the kinetograph, could photograph action on 50-foot strips of film, 16 images per foot. A young assistant, in order to make the first Edison movies, in 1893 built a small laboratory called the "Black Maria," - a shed, painted black inside and out, that revolved on a base to follow the sun and kept the actors illuminated. The kinetoscope projector of 1893 showed the films. The first commercial movie theater, a peepshow, opened in New York in 1884. A coin put into a slot activated the kinetoscope inside the box. Acquiring and improving the projector of Thomas Armat in 1895, Edison marketed it as the Vitascope.

Movie Production

The Edison Company produced over 1,700 movies. Synchronizing movies with the phonograph in 1904, Edison laid the basis for talking pictures. In 1908 his cinemaphone appeared, adjusting film speed to phonograph speed. In 1913 his kinetophone projected talking pictures: the phonograph, behind the screen, was synchronized by ropes and pulleys with the projector. Edison produced several "talkies."

Meanwhile, among other inventions, the universal motor, which used alternating or direct current, appeared in 1907; and the electric safety lantern, patented in 1914, greatly reduced casualties among miners. That year Edison invented the telescribe, which combined features of the telephone and dictating phonograph.

Work for the Government

During World War I Edison headed the U.S. Navy Consulting Board and contributed 45 inventions, including substitutes for previously imported chemicals (especially carbolic acid, or phenol), defensive instruments against U-boats, a ship-telephone system, an underwater searchlight, smoke screen machines, antitorpedo nets, turbine projectile heads, collision mats, navigating equipment, and methods of aiming and firing naval guns. After the war he established the Naval Research Laboratory, the only American institution for organized weapons research until World War II.

Synthetic Rubber

With Henry Ford and the Firestone Company, Edison organized the Edison Botanic Research Company in 1927 to discover or develop a domestic source of rubber. Some 17,000 different botanical specimens were examined over 4 years - an indication of Edison's tenaciousness. By crossbreeding goldenrod, he developed a strain yielding 12 percent latex, and in 1930 he received his last patent, for this process.

The Man Himself

To raise money, Edison dramatized himself by careless dress, clowning for reporters, and playing the role of homespun sage with aphorisms like "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" and "Discovery is not invention." He scoffed at formal education, thought 4 hours' sleep a night enough, and often worked 40 or 50 hours straight. As a world symbol of Yankee ingenuity, he looked and acted the part. George Bernard Shaw, briefly an Edison employee in 1879, put an Edisontype hero into his novel The Irrational Knot: free-souled, sensitive, cheerful, and profane.

Edison had more than 10,000 books at home and masses of printed materials at the laboratory. When launching a new project, he wished to avoid others' mistakes and to know everything about a subject. Some 25,000 notebooks contained his research records, ideas, hunches, and mistakes. Supposedly, his great shortcoming was lack of interest in anything not utilitarian; yet he loved to read Shakespeare and Thomas Paine.

Edison died in West Orange, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1931. The laboratory buildings and equipment associated with his career are preserved in Greenfield Village, Detroit, Mich., thanks to Henry Ford's interest and friendship.

Further Reading

A good biography of Edison, filled with human interest, is Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (1959). Biographies emphasizing his inventions include William Adams Simonds, Edison: His Life, His Work, His Genius (1934), and H. Gordon Garbedian, Thomas Alva Edison: Builder of Civilization (1947). There is more emphasis on industry in John Winthrop Hammond, Men and Volts: The Story of General Electric, edited by Arthur Pound (1941). See also Charles Singer and others, eds., A History of Technology, vol.5: The Late Nineteenth Century (1958).

For more information on Thomas Alva Edison, visit Britannica.com.

(1847-1931), inventor. Thomas Edison made a lasting mark on the daily lives of Americans by what he did and on their minds by the way he did it. From his boyhood he exemplified what they liked to believe about their society and destiny. His small-town birthplace, Milan, Ohio, was bypassed by the railroad and fell into decline, his family's fortunes with it. As a boy Edison lost much of his hearing, and his formal schooling was fragmentary. Yet he surmounted those handicaps in the Horatio Alger hero's mode of pluck and luck, peddling candy and newspapers to railroad passengers, and prefigured another hero of boys' novels, Tom Swift, by setting up a small lab for electrical experiments in a baggage car. Chance thus endowed him with the makings of a surefire myth, the equivalent of Lincoln's log cabin remodeled for the new age of exuberant technology.

Electricity, which in that day chiefly meant telegraphy, had long fascinated Edison, and his frequenting of railroad stations prompted him to make telegraphy his calling, since the range of his hearing encompassed the chatter of the instruments. Journeymen telegraphers were given to wandering, and young Edison's irrepressible tinkering, together with his taste for unnerving practical jokes, hurried him along from job to job. Thus in 1868 he arrived in Boston, the de facto capital of American science and technology, where he turned full-time inventor. The electrical shop of Charles Williams, which catered to inventors, gave him, as it did Alexander Graham Bell soon after, the facilities and skilled workmen needed to put ideas into practice. But unlike Bell, Edison in 1869 saw still greater financial opportunity in New York. There and in New Jersey over the next twenty years he astonished the world with a series of epoch-making inventions unequaled by any one individual before or since, notably his quadruplex telegraph, carbon-button telephone transmitter, phonograph, electric light, and system of electrical generation and distribution. Ultimately more than a thousand patents bore his name (though not all were primarily of his creation).

As notable a concept as any was the "invention factory" he created in the pastoral setting of Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Owing something perhaps to the Williams shop, it was a pioneering, independent, self-sustaining research and development center. Staffed with brilliant technicians and trained theoretical scientists, the Menlo Park establishment was too narrowly profit-oriented to be classed with the twentieth-century research labs of corporate giants like American Telephone & Telegraph and General Electric, with their quasi-academic ambience. On the other hand, Menlo Park, unbeholden to any established industry, was not inhibited from calling whole new industries into being. Edison was hailed as "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

Edison, however, yielded to the temptation of organizing and directing some of the new enterprises. Clumsier in entrepreneurship than in invention, distracted by the demands of management, and his inventive genius ebbing with age, Edison produced no breathtakingly fundamental inventions after the 1880s (although his team did much to develop motion pictures). Still, his persona did not fade with his performance. More than half a century after his death, his image remains incandescent in the public's memory, and his work stands as a bridge between the era of the independent inventor and that of corporate, government, and academic research and development.

Bibliography:

Matthew Josephson, Edison (1959); Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (1981).

Author:

Robert V. Bruce

See also Science and Technology.

1847–1931, American inventor, b. Milan, Ohio. A genius in the practical application of scientific principles, Edison was one of the greatest and most productive inventors of his time, but his formal schooling was limited to three months in Port Huron, Mich., in 1854. For several years he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk RR, and it was during this period that he began to suffer from deafness, which was to increase throughout his life. He later worked as a telegraph operator in various cities.

Edison's first inventions were the transmitter and receiver for the automatic telegraph, the quadruplex system of transmitting four simultaneous messages, and an improved stock-ticker system. In 1877 he invented the carbon telephone transmitter (see microphone) for the Western Union Telegraph Company. His phonograph (patented 1878) was notable as the first successful instrument of its kind.

In 1879, Edison created the first commercially practical incandescent lamp (with a carbon filament). For use with it he developed a complete electrical distribution system for light and power, including generators, motors, light sockets with the Edison base, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conductors, and other devices. The crowning achievement of his work in this field was the Pearl St. plant (1881–82) in New York City, the first permanent central electric-light power plant in the world. He also built and operated (1880) an experimental electric railroad, and produced a superior storage battery of iron and nickel with an alkaline electrolyte.

Other significant inventions include the Kinetoscope, or peep-show machine. Edison later demonstrated experimentally the synchronization of motion pictures and sound, and talking pictures were based on this work. During World War I he helped to develop the manufacture in the United States of chemicals previously imported; he also served as head of the U.S. navy consulting board concerned with ship defenses against torpedoes and mines. Edison later worked on the production of rubber from American plants, notably goldenrod.

Edison held over 1,300 U.S. and foreign patents, and his workshops at Menlo Park (1876) and West Orange, N.J. (1887), were significant as forerunners of the modern industrial research laboratory in which teams of workers, rather than a lone inventor, systematically investigate a given subject. An Edison memorial tower and light was erected (1938) in Menlo Park, N.J.; Edison's laboratory and other buildings associated with his career are preserved or replicated in Greenfield Village. Some of his various companies were consolidated to form the General Electric Company (GE).

Bibliography

See the autobiographical Diary and Sundry Observations (ed. by D. D. Runes, 1948, repr. 1968); his papers, ed. by R. V. Jenkins et al. (4 vol., 1989–); biography by R. Silverberg (1967); W. Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (1981).

Thomas Alva Edison is the most successful and well-known inventor of all time, with more than a thousand patents to his name. His best-known inventions are the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, and motion pictures, but he also contributed inventions for telegraph systems.

Others also invented some of the devices we associate with Edison, but he often made them better and he got people to use them. His success began with hard work; for example, he performed thousands of experiments to find a suitable filament that would resist the intense heat that results when producing light.

Another factor that made Edison a successful inventor was a keen interest in anything mechanical. As a teenager he worked as a telegraph operator and was repeatedly fired because of his constant tampering with the equipment.

Edison's success is often attributed to his business sense, but this is open to question. His first major patent, a vote recorder for Congress, did not rouse interest--one congressman told Edison that legislators wanted to keep voting records vague. Edison then vowed to make only inventions for which there was demand. Although correct about the electric light, his efforts with electric automobiles were superseded by the internal combustion engine. His list of possible applications for his phonograph included a dictating machine for letter writing, spoken books, teaching of speech, reproduction of music, archiving of voices of famous people, music boxes and toys, speaking clocks, study of language, educational recordings, and transmission of recorded messages over the telephone. Not only is recording of music halfway down the list, but initially Edison resisted even the idea. Possibly, his partial deafness was a factor in his failure to recognize the importance of recorded music; in any case, all of his other ideas have come to pass, although nearly always using magnetic tape (or, more recently, digital and laser) technology instead of his purely mechanical method.

There are other examples of Edison's inability to foresee the uses to which his inventions might be put. He fought against projection for motion pictures, and believed that more money was to be made on peep shows than in movie houses. Consequently, although Edison showed that motion pictures were possible and made some of the early films, credit for the cinema outside of the United States is usually granted to the Lumière brothers of France, who projected motion pictures for small audiences from the first.

Where Edison's business acumen was more evident was in the development of manufacturing and distribution related to his inventions. The electric generator had been available for decades when Edison opened the first power plants in London and New York City. He correctly recognized that his light bulbs would be of no use unless electric power was available and that money was to be made not only by selling the bulbs, but also by supplying the electricity.

Edison was not much interested in science for its own sake. In 1883 he discovered the basic principle of the vacuum tube (or valve), still known as the Edison effect, but he paid no attention to something for which he failed to see a use.

Quotes:

"Discontent is the first necessity of progress."

"I start where the last man left off."

"There's a way to do better... find it."

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."

"I have not failed. I've just found 10, 000 ways that won't work."

See more famous quotes by Thomas A. Edison