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Thomas Edison
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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 ... 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."
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Mary and Thomas Edison's first child was Marion Estelle, born on February 18, 1872. As a child, her nickname was "Dot," a reference to the Morse code used to send messages on telegraphs. Between her mother's death and her father's remarriage, 12-year-old Marion spent a great deal of time with her father. He even sent her out to buy his cigars. She claims to have seen Edison propose marriage to Mina Miller using Morse code.
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One of the outstanding geniuses in the history of technology, Thomas Edison earned patents for more than a thousand inventions, including the incandescent electric lamp, the phonograph, the carbon telephone transmitter, and the motion-picture projector. In addition, he created the world's first industrial research laboratory. In September 1878, after having viewed an exhibition of a series of eight glaring 500-candlepower arc lights, Edison boldly announced he would invent a safe, mild, and inexpensive electric light that would replace the gaslight in millions of homes; ... he would accomplish this by an entirely different method of current distribution from that used for arc lights. To back the lamp effort, some of New York's leading financial figures joined with Edison in October 1878 to form the Edison Electric Light Company, the predecessor of today's General Electric Company. On October 21,1879, Edison demonstrated the carbon-filament lamp, supplied with current by his special high-voltage dynamos. The pilot light-and-power station at Menlo Park glowed with a circuit of 30 lamps, each of which could be turned on or off without affecting the rest.
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Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention which first gained him fame was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey, where he lived. His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder and had poor sound quality. The tinfoil recordings could only be replayed a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter.
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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.
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Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896) (born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and the former Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871). His family was of Dutch origin.[1] His mind often wandered and his teacher the Reverend Engle was overheard calling him "addled." This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. His mother had been a school teacher in Canada and happily took over the job of schooling her son. She encouraged and taught him to read and experiment. He recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint."[2] Many of his lessons came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy.
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Thomas Edison