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Library of Congress LC-DIG-cwpbh-04044
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Thomas A. Edison
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EDISON, Thomas Alva
(1847–1931), American inventor, whose development
of a practical electric light bulb, electric generating system,
sound-recording device, and motion picture projector had profound
effects on the shaping of modern society.
Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847. He attended
school for only three months, in Port Huron, Mich. When he was 12
years old he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway,
devoting his spare time mainly to experimentation with printing
presses and with electrical and mechanical apparatus. In 1862 he
published a weekly, known as the Grand Trunk Herald, printing
it in a freight car that also served as his laboratory. For saving
the life of a station official’s child, he was rewarded
by being taught telegraphy. While working as a telegraph operator,
he made his first important invention, a telegraphic repeating instrument
that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second
line without the presence of an operator.
Edison next secured employment in Boston and devoted all his
spare time there to research. He invented a vote recorder that,
although possessing many merits, was not sufficiently practical
to warrant its adoption. He also devised and partly completed a
stock-quotation printer. Later, while employed by the Gold and Stock Telegraph
Co. of New York City he greatly improved their apparatus and service.
By the sale of telegraphic appliances, Edison earned $40,000,
and with this money he established his own laboratory in 1876. Afterward
he devised an automatic telegraph system that made possible a greater
speed and range of transmission. Edison’s crowning achievement
in telegraphy was his invention of machines that made possible simultaneous
transmission of several messages on one line and thus greatly increased
the usefulness of existing telegraph lines. Important in the development
of the telephone, which had recently been invented by the American
physicist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was Edison’s
invention of the carbon telephone transmitter.
In 1877 Edison announced his invention of a phonograph by
which sound could be recorded mechanically on a tinfoil cylinder.
Two years later he exhibited publicly his incandescent electric
light bulb, his most important invention and the one requiring the
most careful research and experimentation to perfect. This new light
was a remarkable success; Edison promptly occupied himself with
the improvement of the bulbs and of the dynamos for generating the
necessary electric current. In 1882 he developed and installed the
world’s first large central electric-power station, located
in New York City. His use of direct current, however, later lost
out to the alternating-current system developed by the American
inventors Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.
In 1887 Edison moved his laboratory from Menlo Park, N.J.,
to West Orange, N.J., where he constructed a large laboratory for
experimentation and research. (His home and laboratory were established
as the Edison National Historic Site in 1955.) In 1888 he invented
the kinetoscope, the first machine to produce motion pictures by
a rapid succession of individual views. Among his later noteworthy
inventions was the Edison storage battery (an alkaline, nickel-iron
storage battery), the result of many thousands of experiments. The battery
was extremely rugged and had a high electrical capacity per unit
of weight. He also developed a phonograph in which the sound was
impressed on a disk instead of a cylinder. This phonograph had a diamond
needle and other improved features. By synchronizing his phonograph
and kinetoscope, he produced, in 1913, the first talking moving
pictures. His other discoveries include the electric pen, the mimeograph,
the microtasimeter (used for the detection of minute changes in
temperature), and a wireless telegraphic method for communicating
with moving trains. At the outbreak of World War I, Edison designed, built,
and operated plants for the manufacture of benzene, carbolic acid,
and aniline derivatives. In 1915 he was appointed president of the
U.S. Navy Consulting Board and in that capacity made many valuable discoveries.
His later work consisted mainly of improving and perfecting previous
inventions. Altogether, Edison patented more than 1000 inventions.
He was a technologist rather than a scientist, adding little to original
scientific knowledge. In 1883, however, he did observe the flow
of electrons from a heated filament—the so-called Edison
effect—whose profound implications for modern electronics
were not understood until several years later.
In 1878 Edison was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor
of France and in 1889 was made Commander of the Legion of Honor.
In 1892 he was awarded the Albert Medal of the Society of Arts of
Great Britain and in 1928 received the Congressional Gold Medal “for
development and application of inventions that have revolutionized
civilization in the last century.” Edison died in West
Orange on Oct. 18, 1931.