edison light bulb experiment

How Thomas Edison Tricked the Press Into Believing He’d Invented the Light Bulb

A year before he developed a working bulb, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” created the illusion that his prototype burned for more than a few minutes at a time

Tara Isabella Burton

Author,  Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From da Vinci to the Kardashians

In the autumn of 1878, Thomas Alva Edison had a problem. He hadn’t invented the light bulb —yet. Or, to put it more precisely, he had invented a light bulb, but he couldn’t keep it lit for more than a few minutes at a time. He still hadn’t figured out how to regulate the temperature of the light bulb ’s internal filament, meaning the incandescent bulb would immediately overheat, and the filament would promptly melt down.

Unfortunately, Edison was running out of time. All over North America and Europe, inventors like him were working on—and patenting—their own electric projects. Sooner or later, somebody would wind up harnessing electricity. The English chemist Joseph Swan, Edison knew, was hard at work on a rival light bulb. Two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, had already patented an inefficient design four years before.

But that fall, Edison had an even more pressing deadline to face: The journalists were coming. In September, he’d assured the popular press that his latest invention, the incandescent light bulb, was complete. “I have it now,” he told the New York Sun , boasting that “everybody will wonder why they have never thought of it, it is so simple.”

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He’d already made his sales pitch: “When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public” (which would, he promised the Sun , be in just “a few weeks”), America would undergo another scientific revolution. “Illumination by carbureted hydrogen gas”—the inefficient, expensive and often dangerous gas lamps common on American streets and in American homes—would be “discarded.” In its place, electricity would rise to the fore.

Electricity, to the Gilded Age mind, wasn’t just a technology. Rather, it was a mysterious, thrilling, invisible, quasi-magical force that had become synonymous with scientific discovery and the whole arc of human progress. It was, as one guidebook put it , that “subtle and vivifying current,” the source not just of light but of life itself. “Comply with electricity’s conditions,” another writer marveled , “then but turn a key, and the servant of all life will be present in light and power.”

If electricity was magic, then Edison was its chief magician, at least according to the press. He was the “ Wizard of Menlo Park ,” a reference to his New Jersey laboratory , as well the “Napoleon of Science,” the “Genius of Menlo Park” and the “New Jersey Columbus.” He was almost certainly America’s greatest inventor . But he was also one of the country’s canniest self-promoters, forging close personal relationships with journalists who could be trusted to write adoring, if not always strictly accurate, copy.

Just one year prior, Edison had invented the phonograph to great fanfare. Restless, he’d at once promised reporters that he would “produce something at least as good as the phonograph every year,” Scribner’s Monthly wrote. The papers—their circulation boosted by scores of fans clamoring to find out what their favorite wizard would be up to next—had bolstered that narrative.

The time for the promised demonstration drew closer. Already, rumors of the impending revelation had caused something of a financial crisis in London, as gas shares plummeted in anticipation of Edison’s latest success. One of the inventor’s associates, George Gouraud, urged him to form a British-based electricity company as soon as possible, the better to capitalize upon the “universal free advertising” the Sun , the New York Herald , and other papers had given him, “such as cannot be bought for money under any circumstances.”

Edison’s invention may not have been ready yet, but Edison certainly was. The inventor, as ever, had a plan. In November , he informed journalists that they would each receive a brief, private demonstration of the new light bulb’s capacities at his Menlo Park laboratory. They could marvel at what Edison had achieved before he swiftly ushered them away, ensuring they’d be out of the room long before the bulb burned out. Edison’s reputation as a cunning genius would remain intact.

The plan worked. The press, credulous as ever, rhapsodized about the light: “clear, cold and beautiful.” In contrast to the famously harsh electric arc lights, the most common available electric light at the time, “there was nothing irritating to the eye.” Instead, the newspapers marveled , “you could trace the veins in your hands and the spots and lines upon your fingernails by its brightness.” The press pronounced the invention “perfect.” Edison, for his part, kept the charade up nicely, telling another visiting journalist that the bulb on display would burn “forever, almost.”

In the end, of course, Edison worked out the kinks of what would become one of the 19th century’s most emblematic inventions. On New Year’s Eve in 1879—a little over a year after the press demonstration—Edison hosted another, larger public display, this time with a bulb that didn’t burn out. (The secret was carbon filament, as Edison had discovered in October of that year.)

By then, Edison’s displays and his claims of ever more awe-inspiring intellectual glory had become regular fixtures of the news cycle. As one exasperated newspaperman groaned , “There is no reason why [Edison] should not for the next 20 years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty.” The inventor’s gamble, blending genuine technological innovation with a couple of white lies and a cozy relationship with the press, had paid off. He had harnessed not only electricity but also another invisible power: celebrity.

Edison understood that success in the Gilded Age was a matter of hard work and carefully managing public expectations. Sure, he had come up with the phonograph, but when asked by some guests which historical figure’s voice he’d most like to hear, he shocked them by naming onetime French political upstart Napoleon. As he explained to his audience, who had apparently expected him to name Jesus Christ, “I like a hustler.”

Excerpted from Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton . Published by PublicAffairs. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved .

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Tara Isabella Burton | | READ MORE

Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at American Purpose , a columnist at Religion News Service and the former staff religion reporter at Vox . She has written on religion and secularism for National Geographic ,   the  Washington Post ,   the  New York Times and more, and she holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb—but here’s what he did do

With more than a thousand patents to his name, the legendary inventor's innovations helped define the modern world.

A container of leaked chemicals. A fire in a train car. As a young man, the list of reasons Thomas Alva Edison had been fired from his various jobs seemed as long as the eventual list of the patents he held.

Though the future inventor had revolutionary ideas that would change the course of the industries that hired and fired him, the young man had, in the words of his 1931 obituary in the New York Times , “achieved a reputation as the [telegraph] operator who couldn’t keep a job.”

As it turned out, Edison would become most famous for his legendary ability to apply himself—and his oft-repeated tenet that genius is “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” He would go on to invent devices that defined the modern world—and perfect other groundbreaking innovations. His improvements on the lightbulb, for example, finally made it feasible for people everywhere to light their homes with electricity.

Here’s how the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park” achieved such an outsized reputation—and why he is still known as one of the greatest inventors of all time.

A curious young man

Born in Ohio in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan, where he received only brief formal schooling. His mother, a former schoolteacher, taught him at home from age seven on, and he read widely. His childhood adventures included ambitious chemistry experiments in his parents’ basement, marked with what his biographer characterized as “near explosions and near disasters.”

Edison’s curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit led him to a job at the age of 12 as a “news butcher”—a peddler employed by railroads to hawk snacks, newspapers, and other goods to train passengers. Not content to sell the news, he also decided to print it, founding and publishing the first newspaper ever produced and printed on a moving train, the Grand Trunk Herald . He also performed chemistry experiments on the train.

By the age of 15, due to his unique ability to get fired for planning experiments and inventions in his head while on the job, Edison became an itinerant Western Union telegrapher before moving to New York to start his own workshop. The telegraph would ultimately inspire many of his first patented inventions. In 1874, at the age of 27, he invented the quadriplex telegraph , which allowed telegraphers to send four messages simultaneously, increasing the industry’s efficiency without requiring the construction of new telegraph lines.

Becoming the Wizard of Menlo Park

In the meantime, Edison had married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, and together they moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. The rural area was the perfect site for a new kind of laboratory that reflected its owner’s inventive, entrepreneurial spirit: a research and development facility where Edison and his “muckers,” as he called them, could build anything their imagination conjured.

Edison continued to improve on the telegraph, and as he worked on a machine that could record telegraphic messages, he wondered if it could record sound, too. He created a machine that translated the vibrations produced by speech into indentations on a piece of paper.

In 1877, now 30, Edison spoke the first two lines of “Mary had a little lamb” into the device and played it back using a hand crank. He had just invented what he called the Edison Speaking Phonograph. The same year, Edison developed an improved microphone transmitter, helping refine the telephone.

The incandescent light bulb

Edison’s phonograph was groundbreaking, but it was primarily seen as a novelty. He had moved on to another world-changing concept: the incandescent light bulb.

Electric light bulbs had been around since the early 19th century, but they were delicate and short-lived due to their filaments—the part that produces light. One early form of electric light, the carbon arc light, relied on the vapor of battery-heated carbon rods to produce light. But they had to be lit by hand, and the bulbs flickered, hissed, and burned out easily. Other designs were too expensive and impractical to be widely used.

Edison’s, by contrast, were cheap, practical, and long-lasting. In 1879, after years of obsessively improving on the concept of light bulbs, he demonstrated a bulb that could last a record-breaking 14.5 hours.

“My light is at last a perfect one,” Edison bragged to a New York Times   reporter that year. When people heard about the bulb, they flocked to Menlo Park, and hundreds of them viewed the laboratory—now brilliant with electric light—in a public demonstration on December 31, 1879.

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“[Scientists’] opinion as well as the opinion unanimously expressed by the non-scientific was that Edison had in reality produced the light of the future,” reported the New York Herald .

In turn, a Black inventor named Lewis Latimer refined Edison’s improvement, making lightbulb filaments more durable and working to efficiently manufacture them. Meanwhile, Edison established an electric utility and worked toward innovations that would make electric light even more accessible.

Waging ‘Current War’

Edison’s inventions led to worldwide fame—and a cutthroat competition over electrical currents. Edison’s systems relied on direct current (DC)—which could only deliver electricity to a large number of buildings in a dense area. However, Edison’s competitors—including Nikola Tesla, a Serbian American inventor, and entrepreneur George Westinghouse—used alternating current (AC) systems, which were cheaper and could deliver electricity to customers over longer distances.

As AC systems spread, Edison used the press to wage war against Westinghouse and Tesla, attributing electricity-related deaths to AC and participating in an advertising campaign that showed the deadly potential of alternating current. The competition heightened when Edison funded public experiments that involved killing animals with AC. But its gruesome peak occurred when Edison, desperate to ensure his technology prevailed, secretly financed the invention and construction of the first electric chair—ensuring it ran on AC.

Despite the shock of his anti-AC campaign, Edison ultimately lost the current war due to the realities of pricing and his dwindling influence in the electric utility he had formed.

Edison’s later life

In 1884, tragedy struck when Mary died of a possible morphine overdose. Two years later, the 39-year-old Edison married 20-year-old Mina Miller. While wintering in Fort Myers, Florida, the couple met a man who would become one of Edison’s scientific collaborators later in life: Automobile pioneer and Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford.

During World War I, both Ford and Edison worried about the United States’ reliance on the United Kingdom for rubber, which was critical to the war effort. Together with Henry Firestone, who made his fortune selling rubber tires, the duo founded a research corporation and a lab to investigate potential U.S. native sources that could produce rubber. Though Edison thought goldenrod might be a substitute, the project never revealed a viable source for U.S.-made rubber.

Edison continued to make a name for himself through his seemingly endless energy for innovation and experimentation, which stretched from motion pictures—he opened the world’s first production studio, known as the Black Maria , in 1893—to talking dolls . He claimed to sleep just four hours a night, said he didn’t believe in exercise, and reportedly subsisted on a diet of milk and cigars for years. Eventually, he succumbed to complications of diabetes in 1931 at age 84.

Thomas Edison’s legacy

Remembered as the “wizard of Menlo Park,” Edison can be seen today in the myriad fields he influenced. From motion pictures to fluoroscopy to batteries, there’s seemingly no corner of technological innovation he didn’t touch—and during his lifetime, he gained 1,093 patents in his name in the U.S. alone.

During his life, he was criticized for what some felt was a slipshod approach to innovation. But Edison’s ceaseless energy for invention, and his willingness to try anything and everything along the way, gained him the reputation of one of the greatest minds in American history.

“Every incandescent light is his remembrancer,” wrote the New York Times   after his death. “Every powerhouse is his monument. Wherever there is a phonograph or radio, wherever there is a moving picture, mute or speaking, EDISON lives.”

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How Edison Invented the Light Bulb — And Lots of Myths About Himself

T he electric light wasn’t Thomas Edison’s first invention, nor was he the first to create an alternative to gaslight. Electric lights already existed on a streetlight scale when, on this day in 1879, Edison tested the one he’s famous for. Though he didn’t come up with the whole concept, his light bulb was the first that proved practical, and affordable, for home illumination. The trick had been choosing a filament that would be durable but inexpensive, and the team at Edison’s “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, tested more than 6,000 possible materials before finding one that fit the bill: carbonized bamboo.

Edison bragged about the filament’s efficacy and economy to a New York Times reporter who toured the factory just after his successful test run:

“As there is no oxygen to burn,” said Mr. Edison, “you can readily see that this piece of carbon will last an ordinary life-time. It has the property of resisting the heat of the current of electricity, while at the same time it becomes incandescent, and gives out one of the most brilliant lights which the world has ever seen. The cost of preparing one of these little horse-shoes of carbon is about 1 cent, and the entire lamp will cost not more than 25 cents.”

While Edison considered the invention his “crowning triumph,” it joined the long list of contributions that made him a record-holder for sheer number of U.S. patents — 1,093 — until the 21st century. His creations included the movie camera and the microphone, the phonograph and the mimeograph, the stock ticker and even the “ stencil-pen ,” a precursor to the tattoo gun.

And although his accomplishments spoke for themselves, Edison was equally prolific, and ambitious, in inventing myths to boost his reputation as a larger-than-life innovator, as a 1979 TIME profile notes. As a result, his inventions weren’t just scientific discoveries, but also prevarications. For one thing, he often claimed to be entirely self-taught, having never attended a day of school.

“Untrue,” says TIME. “He had at least three years of formal education as a child — a stint that was not unusually short in the rural Ohio and Michigan of his youth. As a budding inventor, he also attended classes in chemistry at New York City’s Cooper Union after realizing that his self-taught knowledge of that science was inadequate.”

He also boasted of never needing more than three hours of sleep a night. That’s a half-truth, although the full story may be even more impressive: He managed to piece together a full night’s rest by napping artfully throughout the day. Per TIME:

When the Ford Motor Co. archives were opened in 1951, researchers found many pictures of Henry Ford and his pal Edison in laboratories, at meetings and on outings. In some of these photos, Ford seemed attentive and alert, but Edison could be seen asleep — on a bench, in a chair, on the grass. His secret weapon was the catnap, and he elevated it to an art. Recalled one of his associates: ‘His genius for sleep equaled his genius for invention. He could go to sleep any where, any time, on anything.’

Read TIME’s piece on the 100th birthday of the light bulb, here in the archives : The Quintessential Innovator

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Edison Light Bulb

Edison Light Bulb, 1879

Thomas Edison used this carbon-filament bulb in the first public demonstration of his most famous invention—the light bulb, the first practical electric incandescent lamp. The light bulb creates light when electrical current passes through the metal filament wire, heating it to a high temperature until it glows. The hot filament is protected from air by a glass bulb that is filled with inert gas. The demonstration took place at Edison’s Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory on New Year's Eve, 1879.

As the quintessential American inventor-hero, Edison personified the ideal of the hardworking self-made man. He received a record 1,093 patents and became a skilled entrepreneur. Though occasionally unsuccessful, Edison and his team developed many practical devices in his “invention factory,” and fostered faith in technological progress.

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Lighting a Revolution

Electricity hall.

The exhibition features:

• a bulb from a public demonstration of Edison's light in Menlo Park during Christmas week, 1879
• early electrical appliances for the home; some which caught on, such as electric fans, and some which did not, namely the electric marshmallow toaster.

Online Exhibition

Explore the process of invention and compare Thomas Edison's well-known work on the electric light bulb a century ago with several modern lighting inventions.  Visit the Lighting a Revolution website .

Entrance to Lighting a Revolution

Display in Lighting a Revolution

More than 150 years ago, inventors began working on a bright idea that would have a dramatic impact on how we use energy in our homes and offices. This invention changed the way we design buildings, increased the length of the average workday and jumpstarted new businesses. It also led to new energy breakthroughs -- from power plants and electric transmission lines to home appliances and electric motors.

Like all great inventions, the light bulb can’t be credited to one inventor. It was a series of small improvements on the ideas of previous inventors that have led to the light bulbs we use in our homes today.

Incandescent Bulbs Light the Way

Long before Thomas Edison patented -- first in 1879 and then a year later in 1880 -- and began commercializing his incandescent light bulb, British inventors were demonstrating that electric light was possible with the arc lamp. In 1835, the first constant electric light was demonstrated, and for the next 40 years, scientists around the world worked on the incandescent lamp, tinkering with the filament (the part of the bulb that produces light when heated by an electrical current) and the bulb’s atmosphere (whether air is vacuumed out of the bulb or it is filled with an inert gas to prevent the filament from oxidizing and burning out). These early bulbs had extremely short lifespans, were too expensive to produce or used too much energy.

When Edison and his researchers at Menlo Park came onto the lighting scene, they focused on improving the filament -- first testing carbon, then platinum, before finally returning to a carbon filament. By October 1879, Edison’s team had produced a light bulb with a carbonized filament of uncoated cotton thread that could last for 14.5 hours. They continued to experiment with the filament until settling on one made from bamboo that gave Edison’s lamps a lifetime of up to 1,200 hours -- this filament became the standard for the Edison bulb for the next 10 years. Edison also made other improvements to the light bulb, including creating a better vacuum pump to fully remove the air from the bulb and developing the Edison screw (what is now the standard socket fittings for light bulbs).

(Historical footnote: One can’t talk about the history of the light bulb without mentioning William Sawyer and Albon Man, who received a U.S. patent for the incandescent lamp, and Joseph Swan, who patented his light bulb in England. There was debate on whether Edison’s light bulb patents infringed on these other inventors’ patents. Eventually Edison’s U.S. lighting company merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company -- the company making incandescent bulbs under the Sawyer-Man patent -- to form General Electric, and Edison’s English lighting company merged with Joseph Swan’s company to form Ediswan in England.)

What makes Edison’s contribution to electric lighting so extraordinary is that he didn’t stop with improving the bulb -- he developed a whole suite of inventions that made the use of light bulbs practical. Edison modeled his lighting technology on the existing gas lighting system. In 1882 with the Holborn Viaduct in London, he demonstrated that electricity could be distributed from a centrally located generator through a series of wires and tubes (also called conduits). Simultaneously, he focused on improving the generation of electricity, developing the first commercial power utility called the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan. And to track how much electricity each customer was using, Edison developed the first electric meter.

While Edison was working on the whole lighting system, other inventors were continuing to make small advances, improving the filament manufacturing process and the efficiency of the bulb. The next big change in the incandescent bulb came with the invention of the tungsten filament by European inventors in 1904. These new tungsten filament bulbs lasted longer and had a brighter light compared to the carbon filament bulbs. In 1913, Irving Langmuir figured out that placing an inert gas like nitrogen inside the bulb doubled its efficiency. Scientists continued to make improvements over the next 40 years that reduced the cost and increased the efficiency of the incandescent bulb. But by the 1950s, researchers still had only figured out how to convert about 10 percent of the energy the incandescent bulb used into light and began to focus their energy on other lighting solutions.

Energy Shortages Lead to Fluorescent Breakthroughs

In the 19th century, two Germans -- glassblower Heinrich Geissler and physician Julius Plücker -- discovered that they could produce light by removing almost all of the air from a long glass tube and passing an electrical current through it, an invention that became known as the Geissler tube. A type of discharge lamp, these lights didn’t gain popularity until the early 20th century when researchers began looking for a way to improve lighting efficiency. Discharge lamps became the basis of many lighting technologies, including neon lights, low-pressure sodium lamps (the type used in outdoor lighting such as streetlamps) and fluorescent lights .

Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla experimented with fluorescent lamps in the 1890s, but neither ever commercially produced them. Instead, it was Peter Cooper Hewitt’s breakthrough in the early 1900s that became one of the precursors to the fluorescent lamp. Hewitt created a blue-green light by passing an electric current through mercury vapor and incorporating a ballast (a device connected to the light bulb that regulates the flow of current through the tube). While the Cooper Hewitt lamps were more efficient than incandescent bulbs, they had few suitable uses because of the color of the light.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, European researchers were doing experiments with neon tubes coated with phosphors (a material that absorbs ultraviolet light and converts the invisible light into useful white light). These findings sparked fluorescent lamp research programs in the U.S., and by the mid and late 1930s, American lighting companies were demonstrating fluorescent lights to the U.S. Navy and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These lights lasted longer and were about three times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. The need for energy-efficient lighting American war plants led to the rapid adoption of fluorescents, and by 1951, more light in the U.S. was being produced by linear fluorescent lamps .

It was another energy shortage -- the 1973 oil crisis -- that caused lighting engineers to develop a fluorescent bulb that could be used in residential applications. In 1974, researchers at Sylvania started investigating how they could miniaturize the ballast and tuck it into the lamp. While they developed a patent for their bulb, they couldn’t find a way to produce it feasibly. Two years later in 1976, Edward Hammer at General Electric figured out how to bend the fluorescent tube into a spiral shape, creating the first compact fluorescent light (CFL). Like Sylvania, General Electric shelved this design because the new machinery needed to mass-produce these lights was too expensive.

Early CFLs hit the market in the mid-1980s at retail prices of $25-35, but prices could vary widely by region because of the different promotions carried out by utility companies. Consumers pointed to the high price as their number one obstacle in purchasing CFLs. There were other problems -- many CFLs of 1990 were big and bulky, they didn’t fit well into fixtures, and they had low light output and inconsistent performance. Since the 1990s, improvements in CFL performance, price, efficiency (they use about 75 percent less energy than incandescents) and lifetime (they last about 10 times longer) have made them a viable option for both renters and homeowners. Nearly 30 years after CFLs were first introduced on the market, an ENERGY STAR® CFL costs as little as $1.74 per bulb when purchased in a four-pack.

LEDs: The Future is Here

One of the fastest developing lighting technologies today is the light-emitting diode (or LED). A type of solid-state lighting, LEDs use a semiconductor to convert electricity into light, are often small in area (less than 1 square millimeter) and emit light in a specific direction, reducing the need for reflectors and diffusers that can trap light.

They are also the most efficient lights on the market. Also called luminous efficacy , a light bulb’s efficiency is a measure of emitted light (lumens) divided by power it draws (watts). A bulb that is 100 percent efficient at converting energy into light would have an efficacy of 683 lm/W. To put this in context, a 60- to 100-watt incandescent bulb has an efficacy of 15 lm/W, an equivalent CFL has an efficacy of 73 lm/W, and current LED-based replacement bulbs on the market range from 70-120 lm/W with an average efficacy of 85 lm/W.

In 1962 while working for General Electric, Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first visible-spectrum LED in the form of red diodes. Pale yellow and green diodes were invented next. As companies continued to improve red diodes and their manufacturing, they began appeari

What are the key facts?

Like all great inventions, the light bulb can’t be credited to one inventor.

It was a series of small improvements on the ideas of previous inventors that have led to the light bulbs we use in our homes today.

Learn more about the history of the incandescent light bulb .

Explore the history of fluorescent lights , from the Geissler tube to CFLs.

Read about the advancements in LED lights .

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Thomas Edison

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 17, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor and savvy businessman who acquired a record number of 1,093 patents (singly or jointly) and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, the alkaline battery and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. He also created the world’s first industrial research laboratory. Known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” for the New Jersey town where he did some of his best-known work, Edison had become one of the most famous men in the world by the time he was in his 30s. In addition to his talent for invention, Edison was also a successful manufacturer who was highly skilled at marketing his inventions—and himself—to the public.

Thomas Edison’s Early Life

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the seventh and last child born to Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliott Edison, and would be one of four to survive to adulthood. At age 12, he developed hearing loss—he was reportedly deaf in one ear, and nearly deaf in the other—which was variously attributed to scarlet fever, mastoiditis or a blow to the head.

Thomas Edison received little formal education, and left school in 1859 to begin working on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, where his family then lived. By selling food and newspapers to train passengers, he was able to net about $50 profit each week, a substantial income at the time—especially for a 13-year-old.

Did you know? By the time he died at age 84 on October 18, 1931, Thomas Edison had amassed a record 1,093 patents: 389 for electric light and power, 195 for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for storage batteries and 34 for the telephone.

During the Civil War , Edison learned the emerging technology of telegraphy, and traveled around the country working as a telegrapher. But with the development of auditory signals for the telegraph, he was soon at a disadvantage as a telegrapher.

To address this problem, Edison began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness (including a printer that would convert electrical telegraph signals to letters). In early 1869, he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time.

Edison in Menlo Park

From 1870 to 1875, Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey, where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company (then the industry leader) and its rivals. Edison’s mother died in 1871, and that same year he married 16-year-old Mary Stillwell.

Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late 1875, but one year later—with the help of his father—Edison was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark.

With the success of his Menlo Park “invention factory,” some historians credit Edison as the inventor of the research and development (R&D) lab, a collaborative, team-based model later copied by AT&T at Bell Labs , the DuPont Experimental Station , the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and other R&D centers.

In 1877, Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity.

That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced. The device made an immediate splash, though it took years before it could be produced and sold commercially.

Edison and the Light Bulb

In 1878, Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight—a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of prominent financial backers like J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family, Edison set up the Edison Electric Light Company and began research and development.

He made a breakthrough in October 1879 with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of 1880 hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb. In 1881, he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family (which by now included three children) to New York.

Though Edison’s early incandescent lighting systems had their problems, they were used in such acclaimed events as the Paris Lighting Exhibition in 1881 and the Crystal Palace in London in 1882.

Competitors soon emerged, notably Nikola Tesla, a proponent of alternating or AC current (as opposed to Edison’s direct or DC current). By 1889, AC current would come to dominate the field, and the Edison General Electric Co. merged with another company in 1892 to become General Electric .

Later Years and Inventions

Edison’s wife, Mary, died in August 1884, and in February 1886 he remarried Mirna Miller; they would have three children together. He built a large estate called Glenmont and a research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking.

Spurred on by others’ work on improving the phonograph, he began working toward producing a commercial model. He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K.L. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in 1891.

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.

In 1912, automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T . The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs.

Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions (including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator), Edison continued working into his 80s. His rise from poor, uneducated railroad worker to one of the most famous men in the world made him a folk hero.

More than any other individual, he was credited with building the framework for modern technology and society in the age of electricity. His Glenmont estate—where he died in 1931—and West Orange laboratory are now open to the public as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park .

Thomas Edison’s Greatest Invention. The Atlantic . Life of Thomas Alva Edison. Library of Congress . 7 Epic Fails Brought to You by the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison. Smithsonian Magazine .

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Thomas Edison

Thomas 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.

(1847-1931)

Who Was Thomas Edison?

Early life and education.

Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. His father was an exiled political activist from Canada, while his mother was an accomplished school teacher and a major influence in Edison’s early life. An early bout with scarlet fever as well as ear infections left Edison with hearing difficulties in both ears as a child and nearly deaf as an adult.

Edison would later recount, with variations on the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident in which his ears were injured. But others have tended to discount this as the sole cause of his hearing loss.

In 1854, Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where 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. 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 .

The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity.

Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car. During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire.

The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route.

Edison the Telegrapher

While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. After Edison saved a three-year-old from being run over by an errant train , the child’s grateful father rewarded him by teaching him to operate a telegraph . By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator.

For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War . In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.

In 1866, at age 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, working for The Associated Press. The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation.

Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap. However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.

In 1868, Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take control of his future.

Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company . At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature.

However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly. They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators.

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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.

In 1884, Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior.

Thomas Edison: Inventions

In 1869, at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions.

The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed, they paid him $40,000 for the rights. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.

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.

As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed products for the highest bidder. Often that was Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, but just as often, it was one of Western Union's rivals.

Quadruplex Telegraph

In one such instance, Edison devised for Western Union the quadruplex telegraph, capable of transmitting two signals in two different directions on the same wire, but railroad tycoon Jay Gould snatched the invention from Western Union, paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds and stock, and generating years of litigation.

In 1876, Edison moved his expanding operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent industrial research facility incorporating machine shops and laboratories.

That same year, Western Union encouraged him to develop a communication device to compete with Alexander Graham Bell 's telephone. He never did.

In December 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph . His innovation relied upon tin-coated cylinders with two needles: one for recording sound, and another for playback.

His first words spoken into the phonograph's mouthpiece were, "Mary had a little lamb." Though not commercially viable for another decade, the phonograph brought him worldwide fame, especially when the device was used by the U.S. Army to bring music to the troops overseas during World War I .

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 light bulb following English inventor Humphry Davy’s invention of the first early electric arc lamp in the early 1800s.

Over the decades following Davy’s creation, scientists such as Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans had worked to perfect electric light bulbs or tubes using a vacuum but were unsuccessful in their attempts.

After buying Woodward and Evans' patent and making improvements in his design, Edison was granted a patent for his own improved light bulb in 1879. 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 light the cities of the world.

That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became General Electric .

In 1881, he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed. In 1882, the Pearl Street generating station provided 110 volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.

Later Inventions & Business

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 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 was 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.

Motion Picture

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.

As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in 1912. The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.

During World War I, the U.S. government asked Edison to head the Naval Consulting Board, which examined inventions submitted for military use. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques.

However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill."

By the end of the 1920s, Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber.

During his lifetime, Edison received 1,093 U.S. patents and filed an additional 500 to 600 that were unsuccessful or abandoned.

He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, 1868, at the age of 21. His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time.

The two parted ways in 1885 and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. alternating currents, which Tesla championed. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power.

Elephant Killing

One of the unusual - and cruel - methods Edison used to convince people of the dangers of alternating current was through public demonstrations where animals were electrocuted.

One of the most infamous of these shows was the 1903 electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island.

Edison died on October 18, 1931, from complications of diabetes in his home, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey. He was 84 years old.

Many communities and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical power to commemorate his passing.

Edison's career was the quintessential rags-to-riches success story that made him a folk hero in America.

An uninhibited egoist, he could be a tyrant to employees and ruthless to competitors. Though he was a publicity seeker, he didn’t socialize well and often neglected his family.

But by the time he died, Edison was one of the most well-known and respected Americans in the world. He had been at the forefront of America’s first technological revolution and set the stage for the modern electric world.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Thomas Alva Edison
• Birth Year: 1847
• Birth date: February 11, 1847
• Birth State: Ohio
• Birth City: Milan
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Thomas 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.
• Technology and Engineering
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• The Cooper Union
• Interesting Facts
• Thomas Edison was considered too difficult as a child so his mother homeschooled him.
• Edison became the first to project a motion picture in 1896, at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City.
• Edison had a bitter rivalry with Nikola Tesla.
• During his lifetime, Edison received 1,093 U.S. patents.
• Death Year: 1931
• Death date: October 18, 1931
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: West Orange
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Thomas Edison Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/inventors/thomas-edison
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 13, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
• Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
• I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
• I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
• Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.
• To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
• Hell, there ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something.
• I always invent to obtain money to go on inventing.
• The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them.
• We know nothing; we have to creep by the light of experiments, never knowing the day or the hour that we shall find what we are after.
• Everything, anything is possible; the world is a vast storehouse of undiscovered energy.
• The recurrence of a phenomenon like Edison is not very likely... He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.” (Nikola Tesla)

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The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor.

Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house.

Not all these inventions worked or made money. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be; his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed; and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone. His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household—plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families.

Edison’s detractors insist that his greatest invention was his own fame, cultivated at the expense of collaborators and competitors alike. His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. The real nature of his genius is clarified in “ Edison ” (Random House), a new biography by Edmund Morris, a writer who famously struggled with just how inventive a biographer should be. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan. Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life.

Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. People had been making wires incandesce since 1761, and plenty of other inventors had demonstrated and even patented various versions of incandescent lights by 1878, when Edison turned his attention to the problem of illumination. Edison’s gift, here and elsewhere, was not so much inventing as what he called perfecting—finding ways to make things better or cheaper or both. Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

Born in 1847 in Ohio and raised in Michigan, Edison had been experimenting since childhood, when he built a chemistry laboratory in his family’s basement. That early endeavor only ever earned him the ire of his mother, who fretted about explosions, so, at thirteen, the young entrepreneur started selling snacks to passengers travelling on the local railroad line from Port Huron to Detroit. He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. In 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh, he bought a thousand copies, knowing he would sell them all, and marked up the price more and more the farther he got down the line. While still in his teens, he bought a portable letterpress and started printing his own newspaper aboard the moving train, filling two sides of a broadsheet with local sundries. Its circulation rose to four hundred a week, and Edison took over much of the baggage car. He built a small chemistry laboratory there, too.

One day, Edison saw a stationmaster’s young son playing on the tracks and pulled the boy to safety before an oncoming train crushed him; as a reward, the father taught Edison Morse code and showed him how to operate the telegraph machines. This came in handy that summer, when Edison’s lab caused a fire and the conductor kicked him off the train. Forced out of newspapering, Edison spent the next few years as a telegrapher for Western Union and other companies, taking jobs wherever he could find them—Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky. He had time to experiment on the side, and he patented his first invention in 1869: an electric vote recorder that eliminated the need for roll call by instantly tallying votes. It worked so well that no legislative body wanted it, because it left no time for lobbying amid the yeas and nays.

That failure cured Edison of any interest in invention for invention’s sake: from then on, he cultivated a taste for the practical and the profitable. Although legislators did not want their votes counted faster, everyone else wanted everything else to move as quickly as possible. Financial companies, for instance, wanted their stock information immediately, and communication companies wanted to speed up their telegram service. Edison’s first lucrative products were a stock-ticker device and a quadruplex telegraph, capable of sending four messages at once. Armed with those inventions, he found financial support for his telegraphy research, and used money from Western Union to buy an abandoned building in New Jersey to serve as a workshop.

In 1875, having outgrown that site, he bought thirty acres not far from Newark and began converting the property into what he liked to call his Invention Factory. It was organized around a two-story laboratory, with chemistry experiments on the top floor and a machine shop below. Workshops are at least as old as Hephaestus, but Edison’s was the world’s first research-and-development facility—a model that would later be adopted by governments, universities, and rival corporations. Menlo Park, as it came to be known, was arguably Edison’s most significant invention, since it facilitated so many others, by allowing for the division of problems into discrete chemical, electrical, and physical components, which teams of workers could solve through theory and then experimentation before moving directly into production.

Menlo Park also included a three-story house for Edison’s family. In 1871, when he was twenty-four, he married a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Stilwell, who had taken refuge in his office during a rainstorm. They had three children, two of whom Edison nicknamed Dot and Dash. It is likely thanks to them that the first audio recording ever made, in November of 1877, features Papa Edison reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

The phonograph came about because Edison had been experimenting with telephones, trying to improve on Alexander Graham Bell’s transmitter to achieve better sound quality across longer distances. He first had in mind a kind of answering machine that would transcribe the contents of a call, but he quickly realized that it might be possible to record the voice itself. To test the idea, Edison spoke into a diaphragm with a needle attached; as he spoke, the needle vibrated against a piece of paraffin paper, carving into it the ups and downs of the sound waves. To everyone’s surprise, the design worked: when he added a second needle to retrace the marks in the paper, the vibrating diaphragm reproduced Edison’s voice.

So novel was the talking machine that many people refused to believe in its existence—understandably, since, up to that point in history, sound had been entirely ephemeral. But once they heard it with their own ears they all wanted one, and scores of new investors opened their pockets to help Edison meet the demand. With this infusion of cash, Edison was able to hire dozens of new “muckers,” as the men who worked with him would eventually become known. (The endearment may have taken hold during his ill-fated mining days: “muck” is a term for ore, which his men tried, and failed, to remove from mines more efficiently.)

This was the team that banished the darkness, or at least made it subject to a switch. By the eighteen-seventies, plenty of homes were lit with indoor gas lamps, but they produced terrible fumes and covered everything in soot. Arc lights, which buzzed like welders’ torches in a few cities around the world, were, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare.” What Edison and his muckers did was figure out a way to regulate incandescent light, making the bulbs burn longer and more reliably, and at a more bearable brightness. The filament was the trickiest part, and he and his team tried hundreds of materials before settling on carbon, which they got to burn for fourteen and a half hours in the fall of 1879. (A year later, when they tried carbonized bamboo, it burned for more than a thousand hours.)

By the New Year, individual light bulbs had given way to a network of illumination around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light. Gawkers came every night to see the apricot smudges of light through the windows of Edison’s house and along the streets, marvelling at how the bulbs stayed lit through wind and rain, shining steadily and silently, and could be turned on and off with ease. The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles. Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon.

Edison’s patent attorney worried about the publicity, especially when the likes of George Westinghouse and Edward Weston came calling. But, by February, 1880, Edison had executed Patent No. 223,898, for the electric lamp, and No. 369,280, for a system of electrical distribution. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers. While supervising the construction of the plant, Edison moved his family to Gramercy Park; then, in August, 1884, Mary died suddenly, officially from “congestion of the brain,” though possibly of a morphine overdose. She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good.

One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution. She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory. This new complex improved on the already astounding pace of invention at Menlo Park and greatly expanded Edison’s manufacturing capacity. “I will have the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant,” he bragged in a letter, “and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention.” He wanted to be able to “build anything from a ladys watch to a Locomotive,” and employees were soon working, in separate teams, on alkaline batteries, sound recordings, fluoroscopes for medical radiography, a device that measured infrared radiation, motion-picture cameras and projectors and the pictures themselves, and anything else that Edison thought he could market.

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Like tech C.E.O.s today, Edison attracted an enormous following, both because his inventions fundamentally altered the texture of daily life and because he nurtured a media scrum that fawned over every inch of his laboratory and fixated on every minute of his day. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. A recent book by Jeff Guinn, “ The Vagabonds ” (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the publicity-seeking road trips that Edison took with Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford every summer from 1914 to 1924, driving a caravan of cars around the country, promoting themselves as much as the automobiles. Edison’s life had already been thoroughly documented for the public: the first authorized biography, two full volumes’ worth, appeared in 1910. All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.

How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away. In the earliest years after his death, those biographies expanded on Edison’s personality, revealing the complexities of his family life and his work habits. He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal. He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding. His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr., he sued in order to stop him from selling snake oil under the family name.

Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on. Then, a dozen years ago, Randall Stross, who has written extensively about Silicon Valley, published “ The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World .” Despite its admiring subtitle, Stross’s book sought to reveal the man behind the curtain—in his view, a humbug whose bigotry and bad business sense were salvaged only by the creativity, savvy, and cowardice of his munchkins, who toiled away on invention after invention for which their wizard took credit.

That kind of correction was surely inevitable, given Edison’s status and the culture’s increasing skepticism about great men and their ostensible genius. Although Stross’s book was not the first to consider Edison’s faults—Wyn Wachhorst probed his self-promotion in “ Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth ,” from 1981, and Paul Israel catalogued his belief in racial stereotypes and phrenological theories in “ Edison: A Life of Invention ,” from 1998—Stross portrays Edison as a patent-hungry P. T. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Edison’s hype was not for its own sake; it was to raise capital, which he rarely held on to for long, partly because he never was much of a businessman, and partly because he only wanted more of it in order to keep working. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. And he didn’t hide the borrowing: like Santa’s elves, the muckers were always a part of the mythology.

So, too, was the drudgery. Edison not only rhymed “perspiration” with “inspiration”—he also talked endlessly about his experiments and trials, emphasizing just how much work went into every discovery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. “I never had an idea in my life,” he once said. “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.”

In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another. In Merton’s terms, “multiples” are more common than “singletons,” which is to say that discovery and invention are rarely the product of only one person. The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies.

Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his. It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs. Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. Stross makes much of that failure in his biography, but consumer markets are hardly the only, and rarely the best, measure of genius—a point made clear, and painfully so, by Edison’s preference for and optimism about electric cars. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

The delight of Edmund Morris’s “Edison” is that, instead of arguing with earlier writers or debating the terms of genius, it focusses on the phenomenological impact of Edison’s work. He tries to return readers to the technological revolutions of the past, to capture how magical this wizard’s work really felt. He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. And he makes plain the cosmological significance of Edison’s phonograph—how, against all understandings of human impermanence, it allowed the dead to go on speaking forever. “Here now were echoes made hard,” Morris writes, “resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them.”

Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. And “Edison” does it doubly, because it is the last book that Morris finished before his death, earlier this year, at age seventy-eight. Morris’s first book, “ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt ,” won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize after it was published, in 1979, but it was his second book that really caused a stir. The success of Morris’s Roosevelt biography was shortly followed by the election of Ronald Reagan, and, after the Inauguration, the new Administration courted him to be the President’s official scribe.

Morris spent fourteen years working on a book that he ultimately published under the confused title of “ Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan .” Devoured by the public, scorned by the academy, debated by the Boswells of the world, the book featured a fictional narrator, who claimed to have known the fortieth President since they were teen-agers. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material. It was easy to assume that the invented voice belonged to Morris himself, since the “I” of the book expresses frustration about holding off on a planned trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt in order to write about Dutch Reagan. But many of the details contradicted those of Morris’s own life. When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an artist of the court adding himself to the portrait, as Diego Velázquez did in “ Las Meninas .” Morris’s transgressions lay first in making things up and second in failing to disclose what he was doing. His critics found those actions disqualifying in a biography; his champions found “Dutch” formally innovative. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging.

There is a faint echo of that formal tomfoolery in “Edison,” which begins with the inventor’s death and then takes a turn for the Benjamin Button. Morris moves backward through the decades of Edison’s life; like Merlin, this wizard ages in reverse. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in 1920 and runs until 1929, Part 2 goes from 1910 to 1919, and so on. The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.

Reverse chronologies might work well in fictions like Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” where they are serving grander themes of the fragility of memory and the failures of fidelity, but they are an unsatisfying solution to the problem of how to structure a biography. Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy. Tracing someone’s intellectual interests across a lifetime can be more meaningful than dragging the subject and the reader ever onward through calendrical time. But a backward biography, while certainly an invention, is, as Edison might have pointed out, neither practical nor profitable.

Even if you make your peace with this reverse narration—which, to be honest, I did, partly because Edison feels so much like a time traveller—“Edison” is still a frustrating book. It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life. If anything, Morris offers the same strange apologia for “Edison” that he did for “Dutch.” “Nobody around him understood him,” Morris said of Reagan. “Every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, ‘You know, I could never really figure him out.’ ” In the same vein, Morris once compared Edison to electricity itself, an invisible force seen only when it acts on the world around it. “What he was in person is harder, maybe impossible to say,” Morris concluded, “because he put so much of himself into his work.”

And yet figuring people out is the fundamental task of the biographer. Every person is elusive in one way or another, sometimes even unto herself, but it is possible to confront those inner mysteries in a biography without resorting to fabrications or gimmicks. It’s a lesson Morris could have learned from Edison: sometimes, what’s called for isn’t invention but perfection. ♦

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Edison’s Light Bulb

By Janice VanCleave

Thomas Edison had seen great changes in the world in his lifetime, and he was responsible for many of them.

When he was born in 1847 there was no electricity in homes.

In 1878 he formed the Edison Light Company, with the financial support of some of New York’s richest businessmen, to research the electric lamp (a device that gives off light; commonly called an electric light bulb). Edison did not yet have a lamp or an electric system, and his investors became impatient waiting for his invention to be created.

Edison’s electric lamp was missing the right material for the filament .

The filament is the fine thread in a lamp that gets hot and gives off light. He needed a material that would get hot when a small amount of electricity (electric energy) moves through it.

The filament material also had to be readily available so his lamps would not be too expensive.

Edison tested the fibers from thousands of plants collected from different parts of the world. He tried other materials, and thought of using tungsten (a metal that has the highest melting point of all metals), which is used in bulbs today, but at that time he did not have the tools to made a thin thread from this metal. Edison finally burned a piece of cardboard producing a thin hair-like piece of carbon. With this as the filament the lamp burned for one hundred and seventy hours.

The emission of light due to the high temperature of an object is called incandescence. Edison’s lamp was not the first electric lamp, nor the first incandescent lamp but it was what Edison had promised–a lamp that was practical and cheap. Edison’s first commercial lamps were installed on the steamship Columbia and later in a New York City factory. With this invention the age of electricity began.

Before Edison started work on his lamp, he knew that the type of electric circuit (path of an electric current) used at that time, called a series circuit (acircuit with only one path for the electric current), was not very practical. Lamps in a series are connected one after the other so that the same electricity that flows thro

ugh the first lamp goes into the second lamp, and so on. Edison’s first great idea for electric lighting was that lamps be connected in a parallel circuit (circuit in which the electric current divides and follows two or more paths). The path of the electricity in this type of circuit allowed electricity to flow through different branches and lamps on one branch could be turned off without affecting lamps on the other branches.

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Thomas Edison and Light Bulb

The story of the invention of light bulb exemplifies the importance of perseverance in science. For those of you who are not aware of the story, Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb and he did it so after failing thousands of times. When he was asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”, he simply said “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps”. It would take an extremely uninterested mind not to ask why did the invention take so many attempts and what is the science behind workings of a light bulb?

As described in a previous essay, light bulb works on the concept of Joule heating . A typical light bulb has positive and negative terminals that are connected to a filament enclosed by a medium of inert gases. When current passes through the filament, due to Joule heating the filament is heated to very high temperature and as result visible light is released. But what took 1,000 unsuccessful attempts in making such a simple device? A filament needs to be heated to temperatures of the order of thousands, for it to release visible light. From the Joule heating, we know that the amount heat energy released while passing current is proportional to the amount of current passed, resistance and time for which the current is passed. So ideally the filament should have high resistance and should be able to remain at high temperature for long time. The challenge was in finding the right material for the filament.

Tungsten was chosen because it has high melting point and can conduct electricity . To increase the resistance, a thin tungsten wire is taken and coiled and these coiled wire is further super-coiled to accommodate a very long wire (of around few hundreds of centimeters) within few inches space provided for filament in a typical light bulb. This tungsten filament is vulnerable to react with oxygen in the air and change its chemical form. To avoid this, a covering is used to enclose the filament and all the air is pumped out of the covering (called as bulb). But this results in another complication.

The chapter on thermal physics learnt during our Physics tuition classes explains this complication. When a material is heated in vacuum, due to the absence of any atoms in the space the tendency of the material to undergo evaporation is high. Thus a tungsten filament heated in a vacuum like bulb will not last long. To prolong the life of filament and avoid its evaporation, inert gas is pumped into the bulb. Due to the presence these gas molecules, the evaporation rate is reduced and also since these molecules are inert, any reaction that degrades the quality of the filament is averted. It is now not a wonder to see why it took Edison 1,000 attempts to make it.

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Did Thomas Edison test 1600 materials for the filament of his light bulb?

From this webpage :

In 1879, after testing more that 1600 materials for the right filament, including coconut fiber, fishing line, and even hairs from a friend's beard, Edison and his workers finally figured out what to use for the filament--carbonized bamboo.

I'm a little surprised it took Edison that many tries to get it right. 1600 different materials is quite a lot. Did Edison go through about 1600 tests? Are there any first-hand accounts that prove it?

(Note: the page does say that Edison took detailed notes (40,000 pages, apparently), so I would think he would have a detailed chronology and record of the tests there.)

• thomas-edison

• 9 Note that he had about 40 people working for him at that time, that would be 40 materials per person (also note that material here denotes configuration, that could mean 40 times copper in different lengths, thicknesses etc.) –  PlasmaHH Commented Nov 19, 2014 at 13:08
• 3 There are indeed first hand account, but unfortunately they are not all searchable. See The Thomas A. Edison Papers . The book "The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: Electrifying New York and Abroad, April 1881-March 1883" (page 235) writes that : "He noted in September 1881 that 1,600 to 1,700 raw fibers were needed to produce 1,000 finished lamps." But it is no entirely clear whether this is referring to the –  iantresman Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 23:32

2 Answers 2

Someone has investigated the authenticity of the anecdote that this number is often a part of.

Another source that notes that Edison did test 1,600 materials is a 1910 biography titled, Edison, his Life and Inventions by a Frank Lewis Dyer, "General Counsel for The Edison Laboratory And Allied Interests". The foreword notes that much of the information in the book has been compiled based on Edison's own written and oral statements as well as contributions from his associates. As Edison died only in 1931, this book was actually written during his lifetime. From page 605: The "try everything" spirit of Edison's method is well illustrated in this early period by a series of about sixteen hundred resistance tests of various ores, minerals, earths, etc., occupying over fifty pages of one of the note-books relating to the metallic filament for his lamps.

So, a contemporary employee/associate of Edison confirms that 1600 various materials were tested for his light bulb and this is based on a notebook used to record the experiments at the time.

IOW, the claim is true.

• 1 Frank Dyer's book is freely available on Gutenberg . –  user7920 Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 21:27
• 1 I'll accept this answer because it specifically addresses the claim, even though Dave's answer is extremely well researched. –  HDE 226868 Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 16:34

Form Thomas Edison's May 14th, 1904 article in Scientific American Supplement No. 1480, page 23711 :

I soon ascertained why and started a man off for Japan on a bamboo hunt. Before I got through I had tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and had ransacked the world for the most suitable bamboo. The use of bamboo was maintained for many years...

The same passage also appears in the 1904 Electrical World and Engineer volume 43, page 432 .

So at least you have a clear 111 year old statement from a first hand witness, Edison himself, that he did test more than 1,600 materials.

A really great resource to address your question is " The life and inventions of Thomas Alva Edision " 1894 by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson and Antonia Dickson.

This book has extreme details including many photographs and even a microscopic photograph of the worldwide hunt for fibers. As summarized on page 226:

no fewer than 80 varieties of bamboo and 3,000 kinds of vegetable fibre were tested

If you see the photographs in this book and read the quotes from Mr. Racilton who went to Ceylon and India to find fibers for Edison, I think you will be convinced.

• This is helpful, but it only establishes Edison's investigations into bamboo. The claim involves over 1600 unrelated materials. –  HDE 226868 Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 20:44
• 1 Nobody is claiming he tested 1600 "unrelated" materials. The assertion quoted in your question is open to many of the materials being highly related, different species of bamboo, the same bamboo processed in different ways, etc. Here he is stating he tested 6,000 plant samples, not necessarily bamboo. –  DavePhD Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 20:51
• Fishing line and beard hair are not plant samples. I mistyped above ("bamboo" should have been "plants"). –  HDE 226868 Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 20:52
• At that time, fishing line probably was plant material. Beard hair is not plant material. So at least 1 of the 1600 is claimed not to be plant material. 1599 could have been plant material. –  DavePhD Commented Mar 27, 2015 at 20:55
• 1 @HDE226868 I added another source of information to the answer. –  DavePhD Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 15:58

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Case Files: Thomas A. Edison

Introduction.

What was Thomas Alva Edison's most important contribution to the history of science? Improvements to the lightbulb? The phonograph? In fact, Edison's most significant contribution was his "method of invention”. Nicknamed "The Wizard of Menlo Park”, Edison was not particularly wizardly. Rather, he was a savvy businessman who understood the value of iterative invention. His influence on the science and technology of the twentieth century is immeasurable.

But just who was Thomas Alva Edison? How did his inventive genius contribute to the "well-being, comfort, and pleasure of the human race”? And how did Edison's determination and quest for knowledge factor into his success?

A Studious Youth

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847, the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Samuel was a militant freethinker who had been banished from Canada; Nancy was a former teacher. Thomas received most of his education from his mother and the books in his father's library. His later commercial acumen was most likely inspired by his father's many diverse business ventures.

At the age of 13, when his problems with gradual hearing loss began, Edison started working as a traveling candy salesman on the new railroad system in the Midwest. Capitalizing on all learning opportunities around him, he ran his chemical experiments during train trips and began to study the burgeoning field of telegraphy. Within five years, he had become an expert telegrapher and part of a wandering group moving between Midwestern cities. All the while, Edison studied the technical aspects of telegraphy in his own workshop.

Full-Time Inventor

Encouraged to move to Boston in 1868, Edison began working there for Western Union, arriving in the midst of the telegraphic expansion. There, he saw the array of new developments and inventions, met financial supporters, and set up his new workshop. In the financial industry at that time, rapid, accurate, and documented communications were the foremost need. Taking advantage of this, in 1869, Edison filed his first patent application covering a printing telegraph and left Western Union to work full-time as an inventor.

His next stop was New York. During the 1870s, Edison lived to invent and his pace was frantic. He formed numerous partnerships, continually improving and expanding automatic telegraph equipment, maintaining investment support, and enduring litigation. In 1871, Edison married a 16-year-old employee, Mary Stilwell, and during the next eight years three children—Marion, Thomas Alva, and William—were born.

Edison built his first experimental laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. This laboratory was designed to be staffed by scientists engaged in basic research rather than immediate commercial products. Such an approach to the creation and development of inventions was a novel concept in the United States; it was an original model for scientific endeavor that continues to this day, supporting the comment of Alfred North Whitehead that "the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention”.

Switch of Genius

Towards the end of the 1870s, Edison's inventive genius switched from telegraphs to telephones. Western Union hired him to devise an improvement on the telephone recently invented by Alexander Graham Bell; the strength, and thus, the range of the sound signal needed to be increased. Edison chose to solve the problem by improving the transmitter; he adapted a characteristic of carbon: its high electrical sensitivity—the same characteristic that had doomed its use in an earlier invention. Eventually Bell Telephone Company adopted this transmitter design and it served in handsets for the next one hundred years.

In the beginning, the telephone was viewed as a replacement for the telegraph, and again, as with his printing telegraph, Edison set out to build a device that would create a permanent copy of a spoken telephone message. Edison's solution was a machine that recorded the vibrations of the spoken message received and then replayed the vibration patterns slow enough that the telegraph operator could transcribe it. Of course this new "talking machine" was the phonograph, but, apart from a private demonstration, there was no immediate commercial capitalization of this amazing invention. 10 years later, commercial production of the improved phonograph began, the recording industry was launched, and Edison's fame was sealed.

Lighting System

Edison closed the 1870s with a further world-changing achievement; the mission to replace gas lighting systems with a safer, easier electric version suited Edison's unique ability to combine existing fragmentary knowledge into a practical, operating whole. The construction of the electric power and lighting system, begun in 1878, was a huge undertaking in every way: concept, imagination, manpower, financial funding, research, manufacture, and marketing. These, together with painstaking research, required the production of every element in the process from the electricity generators, through the entire distribution system, to the final light bulb and switch. The resulting system went live at the Pearl Street plant in New York City on September 4, 1882.

In 1880, while experimenting with light bulb filaments, Edison's team discovered and patented the "etheric (or Edison) effect" in which electricity was detected passing through the vacuum from the heated filament to a metal plate. While not recognizing the importance of this phenomenon at the time, Edison was later able to direct the patented rights to Guglielmo Marconi for use in his wireless telegraphy discoveries.

Setback and Ambition

In 1884, Edison's wife Mary, who had been ailing for some time, died in the twelfth year of their marriage. Her death caused a cutback in Thomas Edison's work, but with his 1886 marriage to Mina Miller, his ambition was renewed. He closed the Menlo Park laboratory, replacing it with a larger, improved version in West Orange, New Jersey. Research and development on electric lighting continued for the next few years, but was marked by the conflict between the adoption of Edison's DC (direct current) electrical current and Tesla's AC (alternating current) systems for power distribution system. The AC system reduced power loss and improved transmission distance since the power voltage could be stepped up at the source to improve transmission and then stepped back down to usable levels at the delivery destination. Eventually, despite Edison's pro-DC efforts, the AC system was adopted universally.

Soon after, in 1892, Edison merged his various electric companies into the General Electric Company and moved on to a variety of other interests, primarily the possibilities of the sound recording machine he had made many years earlier. Building on the work of Bell and Tainter, Edison built improved wax cylinders and electrically-driven phonographs, more expensive than the hand-cranked versions but providing better sound quality. For the phonograph's commercial success, Edison was now competing with the Victor Talking Machine Company's disc phonograph. In this new era of scientific discoveries, moving into the field of entertainment, Victor won; Edison's venture finally closed in 1929.

Interesting Pursuits

Edison was in at the beginning of the motion picture industry when he provided the germ of the idea for the camera and kinetoscope viewer and supported his researcher, W.K.L. Dickson, in his experiments. Although they patented 75 simple motion pictures in 1894, it was left to others to advance this new industry.

Other interests that Edison pursued at this time (some more successful than others) included: a venture to separate iron and gold ore, devising x-ray equipment, manufacturing cement, and building electric storage batteries. The latter two were successful with his cement processing patents being licensed by other companies and the batteries finding use in electric vehicles, leading to the formation of an international manufacturing company.

In 1907, now a 60-year-old father of six with increasing hearing problems, Edison announced his decision to leave behind commercial development and devote his time to research.

His retirement plans were partially successful. He did spend more time traveling the country, vacationing at his winter retreat in the village of Fort Myers, Florida, and accepting the many honors given him. However, he also found time to work on the manufacture of storage batteries, his most profitable venture of all. In addition, he accepted appointment to head the Naval Consulting Board which was formed in 1915, two years before the United States entered World War I, remaining in that position until 1921.

A Fitting Tribute

Edison's companions on his travels were an illustrious group: President Harding, Henry Ford, George Firestone, and naturalists Luther Burbank and John Burroughs. Calling their group the Nature Club and driving in automobiles, they undertook camping trips throughout the eastern United States, enjoying the country over an eight-year period until Harding's death in 1923.

Research continued to be Edison's lifelong enthusiasm; his last patent application was filed in January, 1931—the year of his death.

Following Edison's death on October 18, 1931, President Hoover issued a statement requesting that all Americans turn off their lights for one minute at ten o'clock Eastern Standard Time as a tribute to the great man's memory. Similar interruption of generating machinery was suggested, but deemed too dangerous since so many essential services relied on electric power—a fitting demonstration of the debt owed to Thomas Edison's unique efforts.

Telephone Transmitter

The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, converted the sound waves from the human voice into electric impulses, conducted the impulses through a wire, and converted them back into the human sound at the other end of the wire. The originating transmitter contained a parchment membrane that vibrated in response to sound. A metal button attached to the membrane sent the varied movements to an electromagnet and electric current corresponding to the vibrations induced. This induced current traveled to the receiving device, and where the process was reversed, the electricity caused movement of a magnet which then caused a membrane to vibrate and emit the corresponding sounds.

Thomas Edison worked to improve a drawback in Bell's invention: the weakness of the electric signal limited the quality and distance of the message. His approach was to improve the sensitivity of sound detection at the transmitter by replacing the parchment membrane with a disc of compressed carbon set between metal plates. The electrical resistance of carbon is extremely sensitive to the minute pressure changes caused by sound waves. Edison's solution—improved later by substitution of granulated carbon and then roasting of the granules—became a basic component of telephones for almost a hundred years.

Electric Lamp

In 1847, when Thomas Edison was born in Ohio, local transportation was horse-drawn, inter-city railroads were new, and oil lamps or sometimes gaslights were used for illumination. At the end of his life in 1931, public transportation included the automobile and the airplane, and there was widespread availability of electric power. Edison's innovative approach to invention propelled the development of the electric light plus the generation and distribution system to make it work.

Edison improved upon previous designs to produce the first reliable, commercial electric light bulb. The basic design was a sealed, evacuated glass bulb containing a filament connected by wires to an outside source of electric current. By devoted effort, Edison and his team solved problems with the filament material and improved the vacuum quality, preventing the presence of oxygen that would cause the filament to burn up at the high temperature created by the electric current. The best filament material needed to have high durability for long bulb life and high electrical resistance to provide the brightest light with the least required electrical consumption.

Over a two-year period, Edison tested thousands of filament materials from the prosaic (metals) to the exotic (tropical vegetation) in a worldwide search. A coiled carbon filament is shown in his landmark invention, named the Edison Incandescent Lamp and given U. S. Patent No. 233,898 on January 27, 1880. The final result was an inexpensive, easily manufactured 16-watt lamp bulb that ran a on DC current for up to 1500 hours.

Electricity Generator

Edison built on the 1831 work of Michael Faraday to create the electricity generator used to power his lighting system.

Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, production of an electric current, by spinning a copper disc between the poles of a magnet and detecting the current that resulted in wires connected to the disc.

Edison's innovative application of Faraday's principles was a steam-driven generator that included very large bipolar magnets to improve efficiency and had slight electrical resistance compared to the resistance of the wire distribution network linked to it. It supplied direct current power.

Along with the lamps and the generator, Edison designed and built all of the ancillary equipment: underground supply cables, junction boxes, lampholders, switches, sockets, meters, etc. In effect, this complex combination established the fundamentals of large-scale electricity distribution. The Pearl Street station in Manhattan went live at 3PM on September 4, 1882, supplying 4,400 lamps in 193 buildings and continued to operate and expand for eight years.

Eventually, Edison's system was replaced due to the work of Nikola Tesla, who had first worked for Edison. He devised alternating current (AC) generators. AC current can be easily and efficiently sent over long distances with little power loss because it is "transformable." The current is generated and its voltage increased for transmission over the wire power grid and then decreased to lower, safer voltage at its destination. The AC electrical system continues to be the world standard.

Edison had always worked overlapping projects and such was the case with the phonograph. His first ideas of the phonograph came at the same time that he was working on the telephone transmitter. The phonograph was related to his previous inventions which were created in attempt to obtain a permanent copy of telegraph messages. He pondered ways of creating a permanent copy of messages sent by telephone. In fact, his February 19, 1878 patent refers to the "Phonograph or Speaking Machine."

The original tinfoil phonograph had three components:

• The speaker tube containing a diaphragm attached to a scribing stylus
• A four-inch diameter metal drum attached to a hand crank and wrapped around with a roll of tinfoil
• The listening tube, very similar to the speaking tube, containing a detecting stylus attached to a diaphragm.

In operation, spoken sound entered the speaking tube, causing the diaphragm to vibrate. The vibrations passed through the stylus and were inscribed on the tinfoil in a vertical groove (hill and dale) pattern while the drum was being rotated by hand at 60 revolutions per minute. When the stylus of the listening tube rode over the recorded indentations, the resulting vibrations passed through the detecting stylus and vibrated the listening diaphragm to reproduce the speech in the listening tube. The cylinder had a three-minute recording capacity. It was on this machine that Edison created the first recording of human voice as he recited "Mary Had A Little Lamb”. Public demonstrations cemented Edison's reputation as an outstanding inventor.

For commercial applications, the tinfoil material proved too flimsy and Edison switched his attention to his light bulb experiments. Meanwhile, other inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter worked on improving Edison's invention. The result was a change from tinfoil to wax cylinders with a floating, less destructive stylus. Edison then turned his attention back to the phonograph; the Menlo Park laboratory went to work and produced an improved wax cylinder machine in 1889.

A novel and expensive feature of this machine was the electric motor included to drive the drum. The expense limited its market to office-dictating machine uses and Edison moved on again to other research. He later had some success with reproducing phonograph recordings and with a dictating phonograph, the Ediphone.

In the 10-year period after Edison’s innovations with phonograph technology, the phonograph industry had turned to longer playing, more durable discs rather than cylinders as a recording medium, and music was now the recording content. While Edison adapted to this with new materials to improve disc recording, copying fidelity, and a spring drive motor, his product was incompatible with other systems and his endeavors were overtaken by companies such as the Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia.

Acknowledgement

In 1915, Thomas Alva Edison was awarded the Franklin Medal in Engineering for "Discoveries contributing to foundation of industries and the well-being of the human race."

The full text of the award citation reads: "In recognition of the value of his numerous basic inventions and discoveries forming the foundation of world-wide industries, signally contributing to the well-being comfort and pleasure of the human race."

The Committee on Science and the Arts report on Case File No. 2640 and 2641, dated March 3, 1915, is at right. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, of Leiden, Holland, also received a Franklin Medal that year, "in recognition of his long-continued and indefatigable labors in low-temperature research which have enriched physical science not only with a great number of new methods and ingenious devices, but also with achievements and discoveries of the first magnitude."

The Thomas Alva Edison presentation is made possible by support from The Barra Foundation and Unisys. This website is the effort of an in-house special project team at The Franklin Institute, working under the direction of Carol Parssinen, Senior Vice-President for the Center for Innovation in Science Learning, and Bo Hammer, Vice-President for The Franklin Center. Special project team members from the Educational Technology department are:  Karen Elinich, Barbara Holberg, Margaret Ennis, and Jay Treat. Special project team members from the Curatorial department are:  John Alviti and Andre Pollack. The project's  Advisory Board Members  are:  Ruth Schwartz-Cowan, Leonard Rosenfeld, Nathan Ensmenger, and Susan Yoon.

Read the Committee on Science and the Arts Report on their awarding of the Franklin Medal to Thomas Edison.

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