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Thomas
Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio;
the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. When Edison was
seven his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison lived here until
he struck out on his own at the age of sixteen. Edison had very little
formal education as a child, attending school only for a few months. He
was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always
a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own. This
belief in self-improvement remained throughout his life.
Edison began working at an early
age, as most boys did at the time. At thirteen he took a job as a newsboy,
selling newspapers and candy on the local railroad that ran through Port
Huron to Detroit. He seems to have spent much of his free time reading
scientific, and technical books, and also had the opportunity at this time
to learn how to operate a telegraph. By the time he was sixteen, Edison
was proficient enough to work as a telegrapher full time.
The development of the telegraph
was the first step in the communication revolution, and the telegraph industry
expanded rapidly in the second half of the 19th century. This rapid growth
gave Edison and others like him a chance to travel, see the country, and
gain experience. Edison worked in a number of cities throughout the United
States before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his
profession from telegrapher to inventor. He received his first patent on
an electric vote recorder, a device intended for use by elected bodies
such as Congress to speed the voting process. This invention was a commercial
failure. Edison resolved that in the future he would only invent things
that he was certain the public would want.
Edison moved to New York City in
1869. He continued to work on inventions related to the telegraph, and
developed his first successful invention, an improved stock
ticker called the "Universal Stock Printer". For this and some related
inventions Edison was paid $40,000. This gave Edison the money he needed
to set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark,
New Jersey in 1871. During the next five years, Edison worked in Newark
inventing and manufacturing devices that greatly improved the speed and
efficiency of the telegraph. He also found to time to get married to Mary
Stilwell and start a family.
In 1876 Edison sold all his Newark
manufacturing concerns and moved his family and staff of assistants to
the small village of Menlo Park, twenty-five miles southwest of New York
City. Edison established a new facility containing all the equipment necessary
to work on any invention. This research and development laboratory was
the first of its kind anywhere; the model for later, modern facilities
such as Bell Laboratories, this is sometimes considered to be Edison's
greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the world.
 The
first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was the tin foil
phonograph. The first machine that could record and reproduce sound created
a sensation and brought Edison international fame. Edison toured the country
with the tin foil phonograph, and was invited to the White House to demonstrate
it to President Rutherford B. Hayes in April 1878.
Edison next undertook
his greatest challenge, the development of a practical incandescent, electric
light. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and a number of people
had worked on, and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to
that time, nothing had been developed that was remotely practical for home
use. Edison's eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent
electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all
the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe,
and economical. After one and a half years of work, success was achieved
when an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned
for thirteen and a half hours. The first public demonstration of the Edison's
incandescent lighting system was in December 1879, when the Menlo Park
laboratory complex was electrically lighted. Edison spent the next several
years creating the electric industry. In September 1882, the first commercial
power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, went into operation
providing light and power to customers in a one square mile area; the electric
age had begun.
 The
success of his electric light brought Edison to new heights of fame and
wealth, as electricity spread around the world. Edison's various electric
companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought together to
form Edison General Electric. Despite the use of Edison in the company
title however, Edison never controlled this company. The tremendous amount
of capital needed to develop the incandescent lighting industry had necessitated
the involvement of investment bankers such as J.P. Morgan. When Edison
General Electric merged with its leading competitor Thompson-Houston in
1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the company became simply General
Electric.
This period of success was marred
by the death of Edison's wife Mary in 1884. Edison's involvement in the
business end of the electric industry had caused Edison to spend less time
in Menlo Park. After Mary's death, Edison was there even less, living instead
in New York City with his three children. A year later, while vacationing
at a friends house in New England, Edison met Mina Miller and fell in love.
The couple was married in February 1886 and moved to West Orange, New Jersey
where Edison had purchased an estate, Glenmont, for his bride. Thomas Edison
lived here with Mina until his death.
When Edison moved to West Orange,
he was doing experimental work in makeshift facilities in his electric
lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage,
however, Edison decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange itself,
less than a mile from his home. Edison possessed the both the resources
and experience by this time to build, "the best equipped and largest laboratory
extant and the facilities superior to any other for rapid and cheap development
of an invention ". The new laboratory complex consisting of five buildings
opened in November 1887. A three story main laboratory building contained
a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large
library. Four smaller one story buildings built perpendicular to the main
building contained a physics lab, chemistry lab, metallurgy lab, pattern
shop, and chemical storage. The large size of the laboratory not only allowed
Edison to work on any sort of project, but also allowed him to work on
as many as ten or twenty projects at once. Facilities were added to the
laboratory or modified to meet Edison's changing needs as he continued
to work in this complex until his death in 1931. Over the years, factories
to manufacture Edison inventions were built around the laboratory. The
entire laboratory and factory complex eventually covered more than twenty
acres and employed 10,000 people at its peak during World War One (1914-1918).
After opening the new laboratory,
Edison began to work on the phonograph again, having set the project aside
to develop the electric light in the late 1870s. By the 1890s, Edison began
to manufacture phonographs for both home, and business use. Like the electric
light, Edison developed everything needed to have a phonograph work, including
records to play, equipment to record the records, and equipment to manufacture
the records and the machines. In the process of making the phonograph practical,
Edison created the recording industry. The development and improvement
of the phonograph was an ongoing project, continuing almost until Edison's
death.
Next
page > Edison
and the motion picture industry and Thomas Edison's final years.
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