Thomas Alva Edison after spending 5 continuous days and nights perfecting the phonograph, listening through a primitive headphone. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1880
Thomas Alva Edison (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1883
Thomas Edison in 1883, with the incandescent lamps that he invented. (Photo by Boyer)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1888
Thomas Edison speaking through a perfected phonograph. Original Publication: Illustrated London News - published 1888 (Photo by Rischgitz)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1888
Thomas Edison with his invention, the first phonograph. (Photo by Time Life Pictures)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1890
Thomas Edison (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1890
Thomas Edison (Photo by George Rinhart)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1895
Thomas A. Edison stands next to his American Barker electric car. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1900
Thomas Alva Edison (Photo by Vintage Images)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1901
Thomas Alva Edison
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1901
Thomas Alva Edison
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1904
Thomas Alva Edison (Photo by Falk)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1906
West Orange, New Jersey, USA
Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931) with an Edison Standard Phonograph, at his lab in West Orange, New Jersey, 1906. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1906
Menlo Park, New Jersey, United States
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) standing in his laboratory, Menlo Park, New Jersey. Beakers and jars line the shelves. (Photo by Museum of the City of New York)
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1907
Thomas Edison dictates to his graphophone, a dictating machine based on the phonograph. Edison had originally marketed the phonograph as a dictating machine for business.
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1920
West Orange, New Jersey, USA
Thomas Edison in his laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey.
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1921
West Orange, New Jersey, USA
Edison Spends Part Of 74th Birthday In His Laboratory. Thomas A. Edison, the "Electrical Wizard" photographed in his laboratory at Orange, New Jersey, on his 74th birthday, February 11th, 1921.
Gallery of Thomas Edison
1930
Thomas Alva Edison
Gallery of Thomas Edison
Henry Ford (1863-1949), founder of Ford Motor Company, Thomas Edison (1847-1931), inventor of the incandescent light and the phonograph, and Harvey Firestone (1868-1938), founder of Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, sit outdoors.
Thomas Alva Edison after spending 5 continuous days and nights perfecting the phonograph, listening through a primitive headphone. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) standing in his laboratory, Menlo Park, New Jersey. Beakers and jars line the shelves. (Photo by Museum of the City of New York)
Thomas Edison dictates to his graphophone, a dictating machine based on the phonograph. Edison had originally marketed the phonograph as a dictating machine for business.
Edison Spends Part Of 74th Birthday In His Laboratory. Thomas A. Edison, the "Electrical Wizard" photographed in his laboratory at Orange, New Jersey, on his 74th birthday, February 11th, 1921.
Henry Ford (1863-1949), founder of Ford Motor Company, Thomas Edison (1847-1931), inventor of the incandescent light and the phonograph, and Harvey Firestone (1868-1938), founder of Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, sit outdoors.
Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. 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. It was his intelligence, ideas, hard work, and perseverance that made him the front-runner in America’s first technological revolution. Edison is reported to have set the stage for the modern electric world.
Background
Ethnicity:
Thomas Edison's father, Samuel Edison, was of Dutch ancestry and his mother, Nancy Elliot, was of English descent.
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio, the United States, to Samuel and Nancy Edison. His father was Canadian but had fled Ontario after taking part in a rebellion against the province's British-appointed governor. In Ohio, Samuel Edison established himself in a lucrative shingle business, and he and his wife, Nancy, a former teacher, added three more children to the four they had brought with them from Canada. Thomas was the youngest of them. When he was seven years old, the family relocated to Port Huron, Michigan, where his father ran another prosperous business, this one dealing in grain and lumber.
Education
Edison began his formal schooling in Port Huron, but he was a sickly child and did poorly. Not long after the family's arrival in Port Huron, he came down with scarlet fever (a severe contagious bacterial disease), which likely led to a loss of hearing that worsened with age. His first teachers were frustrated by what seemed to be his lack of ability and ridiculed him as a daydreamer and possibly even developmentally disabled. 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. She exposed him to books at a far higher level than anyone of his age. Thanks to his mother's teachings, Edison's horizons of knowledge were not limited just to science, but also in such subject as philosophy, English, and history. 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. In addition to selling newspapers, he set up a small laboratory and conducted chemical experiments in one of the baggage cars of the train. Unfortunately, one experiment went wrong and resulted in the car catching fire. This temporarily ended his pursuits.
A good deed of saving the life of an infant from a near-tragic incident changed his life forever. The indebted dad of the child trained him as a telegraph operator. He found his first job at Stratford Junction, Ontario. He traveled all through the Midwest, working for various companies, before finding a job with the Associated Press bureau news wire. However, he was soon fired due to conducting experiments during working hours.
Over the next five years, Edison held a number of telegraph-operator jobs throughout the Midwest, but he continued to read extensively. He was particularly devoted to Experimental Researches in Electricity and Magnetism, a multivolume book from British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday's work in the 1830s in electromagnetism (the study of electricity and magnetism) was crucial to the development of electricity, but reading about Faraday's methodology was also crucial to Edison for another reason: Edison disliked math, and much of the scientific experimentation of the era had urged its mastery. Faraday believed otherwise, and Edison decided to pursue a career as an inventor, despite his lack of formal education.
Edison settled in Boston in 1867, taking a job at a Western Union Telegraph Company office. By then he was testing different ways to improve the telegraph machine, which led to other experiments in electronic communication. He moved to New York, where he began his career as an inventor. One of his earliest inventions was a stock ticker. Impressed by the working of the machine, the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company offered him $40,000 for the rights. He received the first patent of his career for an electrographic vote recorder in 1869.
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. He then relocated to Newark, New Jersey, where he set up a small laboratory and employed a machinist. 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.
He expanded his operation and moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey. The one invention that brought him his first round of fame and catapulted his status to greater heights was the phonograph, invented in 1877. The device assisted in recording sound but had loopholes due to which he continued to work on it until the next decade when the Perfected Phonograph was finally made available. The financial gain from selling the quadruplex telegraph to Western Union not only helped him achieve his first monetary success but assisted him in setting up the laboratory of Menlo Park for achieving greater technological advancements and innovation.
Moving further, he worked on the electric bulb, which had been the object of the study of various inventors earlier. He is credited with inventing the first commercially practical incandescent light, devoid of all the flaws that the earlier invented bulbs possessed. 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 the light bulb following English inventor Humphry Davy’s invention of the first early electric arc lamp in the early 1800s.
In 1878, he formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City. The following year, he demonstrated his incandescent light bulb for the first time. The first commercial application of the bulb was in Columbia, the new streamer of Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company. 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 lights the cities of the world.
In 1880, after attaining the patent for the light bulb, he founded the Edison Illuminating Company, with a motive of delivering electricity to provide power and light the cities of the world. The company’s first investor-owned electric utility was set up at Pearl Street Station. The unit was involved with generating 110 volts direct current to 59 customers. In 1883, Roselle, New Jersey, witnessed the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires. By 1887, there were about 121 power stations established by the United States that delivered electricity to customers. The other inventions that he worked upon during this time were fluoroscopy, the two-way telegraph, kinetoscope, and so on.
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 an 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 were 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.
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.
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. The first designed self-starter battery was for Model T for Henry Ford, a friend, and admirer. The invention was a grand success and was extensively used until decades later by the automobile industry.
He was made the head of the Naval Consulting Board during World War I. A profound advocator of non-violence, he indulged in projects that basically designed defensive weapons, such as submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons. His last patent, which was his 1093rd United States patent, was an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.
Thomas Edison did not identify with any particular religion. In fact, he disdained organized religion, although he did believe in God. Edison was a freethinker and skeptic who didn't try to hide his disdain for traditional religion or traditional religious beliefs. He was not an atheist, though some have called him that because his criticisms of traditional theism have much in common with the criticisms generally offered by atheists. It would be more accurate to call him a Deist of some sort.
Politics
Edison was a Republican. He was an advocate for monetary reform in the United States. He was opposed to the gold standard and debt-based money.
Views
Thomas Edison was a vegetarian. Edison was also a huge enthusiast of clean energy technologies - even designing prototypes for small-scale wind-powered electricity generation. In his later years, Edison often committed a social faux pas by making racist and anti-Semitic comments before the press.
Quotations:
"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."
"I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it."
"If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
"I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it."
Membership
Edison was made the honorable member of several important institutions including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
,
Sweden
National Academy of Sciences
,
United States
Personality
Edison has been characterized as a workaholic and often worked more than 100 hours a week. He was also known to collect very unusual items and was always on the lookout for things that would have some unique property. For example, he compressed some nuts from the rain forest to make phonograph needles and he used Japanese bamboo for a lightbulb filament.
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.
Thomas Edison’s favorite holiday was the 4th of July; and he made his own fireworks to celebrate the day with some really loud boomers. Edison had a tattoo on his forearm, a quincunx, like the face of the number "five" on a dice cube. Regular bathing was not a big deal for Edison, and he often went several days without it.
Physical Characteristics:
At an early age, Edison 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 behavior and career, providing the motivation for many of his inventions.
Quotes from others about the person
"He felt there was a central processing core of life that went on and on. That was his conclusion. We talked of it many times together... Call it religion or what you like, Mr. Edison believed that the universe was alive and that it was responsive to man's deep necessity. It was an intelligent and hopeful religion if there ever was one. Mr. Edison went away expecting light, not darkness." - Henry Ford
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor." - Nikola Tesla
Interests
reading
Philosophers & Thinkers
Michael Faraday
Politicians
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Writers
Thomas Paine, William Shakespeare
Artists
Mary Pickford, Clara Bow
Connections
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. His marriage, though based in love, was often difficult. Edison spent most of his time working in the lab, even sleeping there.
In 1884, Edison's wife died, and for a short while, his work suffered. The thirty-nine-year-old inventor married nineteen-year-old Mina Miller in 1886, and her support of his work allowed him to return full-time to his research. The couple would have three children. By the time of his second marriage, he had moved back to New Jersey.
Thomas Edison: The Great American Inventor
This brilliant inventor opened many doors to modern technology when he instituted his groundbreaking research laboratory in New Jersey. Here, he brought together scientists whose teamwork foreshadowed modern research methods.
1987
Tesla vs Edison: The Life-Long Feud that Electrified the World
Nikola Tesla today is largely unknown and overlooked among the great scientists of the modern era. While Thomas Edison, the most famous inventor in American history, gets all the glory for discovering the light bulb. But it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Tesla, who made the breakthrough in alternating current electricity.
2016
Thomas Edison
Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America is a captivating narrative that chronicles America’s most formidable inventor and contributor to modern technology.
Thomas Alva Edison
A biography of the inventive genius who developed the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture.
1990
Thomas Alva Edison: Wizard of Menlo Park
The biographical profile of Thomas Edison, regarded as the inventor of the "method of invention" as much as he is for being "the most prodigious inventor of his era, indeed of all time," as Time Magazine reported in 1999.