Inventor. Born February 11, 1847
in Milan, Ohio. His father was a jack-of-all-trades, his mother
a former teacher. Edison spent three months in school, then was
taught at home 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.
Probably Edison's first invention was an automatic telegraph
repeater (circa 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, Emile 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 six 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).
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 a wax cylinder).
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,
profitablePrior 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,
Pennsylvania, 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.
The vast West Orange, New Jersey, 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.
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.
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,
anti-torpedo 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. 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.
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, slept only four hours a night, and
often worked 40 or 50 hours straight. As a world symbol of
Yankee ingenuity, he looked and acted the part. 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, New Jersey, on October 18, 1931. The
laboratory buildings and equipment associated with his career
are preserved in Greenfield Village, Detroit, Michigan, thanks
to Henry Ford's interest and friendship.
