Thomas Alva Edison (photo below) is an American inventor who has registered a record 1093 patents. He also created the first industrial research laboratory.
Thomas Alva Edison - who is this?
Beginning his career in 1863 as a teenager on the telegraph, when a primitive battery was practically the only source of electricity, he worked until his death in 1931 to approach the age of electricity. From his laboratories and workshops came a phonograph, a carbon microphone capsule, incandescent lamps, a revolutionary generator of unprecedented efficiency, the first commercial lighting and power supply system, an experimental electrified railway, basic elements of film equipment and many other inventions.
Short biography of young years
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Mylen, Ohio, to Samuel Edison and Nancy Eliot. His parents fled to the United States from Canada after his father's participation in the Mackenzie rebellion in 1837. When the boy turned 7, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Thomas Alva Edison, the youngest of seven children, lived here until he startedindependent life. At school, he studied very little, only a few months. He was taught reading, writing and arithmetic by his teacher mother. He was always a very inquisitive child and was drawn to knowledge himself.
Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood reading a lot, and the books "School of Natural Philosophy" by R. Parker and "Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and the Arts" became his sources of inspiration. The desire for self-improvement stayed with him throughout his life.
Alva started working at an early age, like most children of that time. At 13, he took a job as a newspaper and candy salesman on a local railroad linking Port Huron with Detroit. He devoted most of his free time to reading scientific and technical books, and also took the opportunity to learn how to operate the telegraph. By the age of 16, Edison was already experienced enough to work as a full-time telegraph operator.
First Invention
The development of the telegraph was the first step in the communications revolution, and it grew at a tremendous pace in the second half of the 19th century. This gave Edison and his colleagues the opportunity to travel, see the country and gain experience. Alva worked in a number of cities throughout the United States before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his profession as a telegraph operator to an inventor. He patented the Electric Voting Recorder, a device designed for use in elected bodies such as Congress, to speed up the process. The invention became a commercial failure. Edison decided that in the future he would invent only things that he was completely sure of the public demand.
Thomas Alva Edison: biography of the inventor
In 1869 he moved to New York, where he continued to work on improvements to the telegraph and created his first successful device - the stock exchange machine "Universal Stock Printer". Thomas Alva Edison, whose inventions brought him $40,000, had the necessary funds in 1871 to open his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey. Over the next five years, he invented and made devices that greatly increased the speed and efficiency of the telegraph. Edison also found time to marry Mary Stilwell and start a family.
In 1876, he sold his entire Newark operation and moved his wife, children, and employees to the small village of Menlo Park, 40 kilometers southwest of New York. Edison built a new facility that contained everything needed for inventive work. This research laboratory was the first of its kind and became a model for later institutions such as Bell Laboratories. It is said that she was his greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the world.
First phonograph
The first great invention in Menlo Park was the steel phonograph. The first machine that could record and reproduce sound made a splash and brought Edison worldwide fame. With her, he toured the country and in April 1878 was invited toWhite House to demonstrate the phonograph to President Rutherford Hayes.
Electric light
Edison's next great venture was the development of a practical incandescent light bulb. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and several people were already working on it, even developing some forms of it. But until that time, nothing was created that could be practical for home use.
Edison's merit is the invention of not only the incandescent lamp, but also the power supply system, which had everything necessary to be practical, safe and economical. After a year and a half, he achieved success when an incandescent lamp using charred filament shone for 13.5 hours.
The first public demonstration of the lighting system took place in December 1879, when the entire laboratory complex in Menlo Park was equipped with it. The next few years the inventor devoted to the creation of the electric power industry. In September 1882, the first commercial power plant, located on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, began operating, providing electricity and light to customers in an area of one square mile. Thus began the era of electricity.
Edison General Electric
The success of electric lighting propelled the inventor to fame and fortune as the new technology quickly spread around the world. The electrical companies continued to grow until they merged to form Edison General Electric in 1889. Despiteto use the name of the inventor in the name of the corporation, he did not control it. The huge amounts of capital required to develop the lighting industry required the involvement of investment banks such as J. P. Morgan. When Edison General Electric merged with its main competitor Thompson-Houston in 1892, the inventor's name was dropped from her name.
Widowhood and second marriage
Thomas Alva Edison, whose personal life was overshadowed by the death of his wife Mary in 1884, began to devote less time to Menlo Park. And because of his involvement in the business, he began to visit there even less. Instead, he and his three children-Marion Estel, Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., and William Leslie-lived in New York. A year later, while vacationing at a friend's house in New England, Edison met twenty-year-old Mina Miller and fell in love with her. The marriage took place in February 1886, and the couple moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where the groom bought the Glenmont estate for his bride. The couple lived here until their deaths.
West Orange Laboratory
After moving in, Thomas Alva Edison experimented in a makeshift workshop at a light bulb factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage, he decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange, a mile from his home. By that time, he had sufficient resources and experience to build the most equipped and largest laboratory, surpassing all others, for the rapid and inexpensive development of inventions.
Newthe complex of five buildings was opened in November 1887. The three-story main building housed a power plant, mechanical workshops, warehouses, experiment rooms, and a large library. Four smaller buildings, built perpendicular to the main one, housed the physics, chemistry, and metallurgical laboratories, a sample making shop, and a chemical storage facility. The large size of the complex allowed Edison to work on not one, but ten or twenty projects at once. Buildings were added or rebuilt to meet the changing needs of the inventor until his death in 1931. Over the years, factories were built around the laboratory to produce Edison's creations. The entire complex eventually covered over 8 hectares, and 10,000 people worked there during World War I.
Recording industry
After the opening of the new laboratory, Thomas Alva Edison continued to work on the phonograph, but then shelved it in order to work on electric lighting in the late 1870s. By 1890, he was producing phonographs for domestic and commercial use. As with electric light, he developed everything necessary for their operation, including devices for reproducing and recording sound, as well as equipment for their release. In doing so, Edison created an entire recording industry. The development and improvement of the phonograph went on continuously and continued almost until the death of the inventor.
Cinema
At the same time, Edison started creatinga device capable of doing to the eyes what the phonograph is to the ears. They became cinema. The inventor demonstrated it in 1891, and two years later commercial production of "movies" began in a tiny film studio built in a laboratory known as Black Mary.
As in the case of electric lighting and the phonograph, a complete system for making and displaying motion pictures had been developed before. Initially, Edison's work in the cinema was innovative and original. However, many people became interested in this new industry and wanted to improve upon the inventor's early cinematic work. Therefore, many have contributed to the rapid development of cinema. In the late 1890s, a new industry was already flourishing, and by 1918 it had become so competitive that Edison pulled out of the business altogether.
Iron Ore Failure
The success of phonographs and motion pictures in the 1890s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. For ten years, he worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines in northwest New Jersey on methods for extracting iron ore to satisfy the insatiable demand of Pennsylvania steel mills. To finance this work, Edison sold all of his shares in General Electric.
Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, he failed to make the process commercially viable and lost all the money he invested. This would mean financial ruin if Edison did not continue to develop the phonograph and the cinema at the same time. Whateverwas, the inventor entered the new century still financially secure and ready to throw down a new challenge.
Alkaline battery
Edison's new challenge was to develop a battery for use in electric vehicles. The inventor was very fond of cars, and throughout his life he was the owner of many types of them, working on different energy sources. Edison believed that electricity was the best fuel for them, but the capacity of conventional lead-acid batteries was not enough for this. In 1899 he began work on the alkaline battery. This project proved to be the most difficult and took ten years. By the time the new alkaline batteries were ready, gasoline cars had improved so much that electric cars were being used less often, mostly as delivery vehicles in cities. Alkaline batteries, however, have proven useful for illuminating railroad cars and cabins, sea buoys, and mining lanterns. Unlike iron ore, the significant investment paid off, and the battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product.
Thomas A. Edison Inc
By 1911, Thomas Alva Edison had developed extensive industrial activity in West Orange. Numerous factories were built around the laboratory, and the staff of the complex grew to several thousand people. In order to better manage the work, Edison gathered all the companies he founded into one corporation, Thomas A. Edison Inc., of which he himself became president and chairman. He was 64 andhis role in the company and in life began to change. Edison delegated much of his daily work to others. The laboratory itself was engaged in less original experiments and improved existing products. Although Edison continued to file and receive patents for new inventions, the days of creating new things that change lives and create new industries are over.
Working for defense
In 1915, Edison was asked to head the Naval Advisory Committee. The US was nearing involvement in World War I, and the creation of the committee was an attempt to organize the talents of the nation's leading scientists and inventors for the benefit of the US military. Edison accepted the appointment. The council did not make a tangible contribution to the final victory, but served as a precedent for future successful cooperation between scientists, inventors, and the US military. During the war, at the age of seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island on a Navy ship, experimenting with methods to detect submarines.
Golden Anniversary
Thomas Alva Edison went from being an inventor and industrialist to becoming a cultural icon, a symbol of American enterprise. In 1928, in recognition of his achievements, the US Congress awarded him a Special Medal of Honor. In 1929, the country celebrated the golden jubilee of electric lighting. The celebration culminated in a banquet in honor of Edison given by Henry Ford at Greenfield Village, the Museum of New American History (which had a complete re-creation of the Menlo Park laboratory). Honoring attended by President Herbert Hoover and manyleading American scientists and inventors.
Replacement for rubber
The last experiments in Edison's life were made at the request of his good friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone in the late 1920s. They wanted to find an alternative source of rubber for use in car tires. Until then, tires were made from natural rubber, which comes from a rubber tree that does not grow in the United States. Raw rubber was imported and became more and more expensive. With his characteristic vigor and thoroughness, Edison tested thousands of different plants to find suitable substitutes, and eventually found that goldenrod could serve as a substitute for rubber. Work on this project continued until the death of the inventor.
Recent years
During the last two years of Edison's life, his he alth deteriorated significantly. He spent a lot of time away from the lab, instead working from home in Glenmont. Trips to the family villa in Fort Myers, Florida were getting longer. Edison was in his eighties and was suffering from a range of ailments. In August 1931 he became very ill. Edison's he alth steadily worsened, and at 3:21 am on October 18, 1931, the great inventor passed away.
He has a city in New Jersey named after him, two colleges and many schools.
