In , 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. 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 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. 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.
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 , 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. In , 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. 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. 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No. 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.
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.
One of his first undertakings was the development of his favorite creation, the phonograph. The pressure of his work in connection with the perfection and installation of electric lighting systems throughout the country had made it impossible for him to concentrate on the phonograph, but now he went to work in earnest to see that the instrument fulfilled the high destiny he had held out for it from its beginning ten years earlier.
At the same time, Edison interested himself in an entirely different field, one that was as new to the world as it was to him. That field was the motion picture. Eadweard Muybridge and others had done some experimental work, but had only hinted of motion pictures. Muybridge, for example, by the employment of multiple cameras strung along a racetrack, had taken successive shots of a trotting horse, but he offered no method whereby the pictures could be viewed in motion.
The Motion Picture Camera. Thus, we find that on Oct. He applied for a patent on the motion picture camera on July 31, Several men developed machines for projecting motion pictures. When he added sound, he called it the kinetophone, which he introduced commercially in , or 13 years before Hollywood adopted that means of improving motion picture entertainment.
Within a few months he developed the fluoroscope, which invention he did not patent, choosing to leave it to the public domain because of its universal need in medicine and surgery. On May 16, , he applied for a patent on the first fluorescent electric light, an invention that stemmed directly from his experimentation with the X-ray. At the turn of the century, Edison propelled himself into one of the greatest sagas of science — his search for the acidless battery.
Others scoffed at his theory that somewhere in nature there existed the elements for a battery which would not destroy itself by corrosive action, but Edison was not to be denied. After 10 years exhaustive experimentation he produced the alkaline storage battery, which today is employed in hundreds of industrial applications, such as providing power for mine haulage and inter- and intra-plant transportation, and in railway train lighting.
No field of scientific endeavor seemed foreign to his talents. When, in , a shortage of carbolic acid developed because World War I had cut off European supplies, Edison quickly devised a method of making domestic carbolic acid and was producing a ton a day within a month. New problems were heaped on Edison by the approaching entry of the United States into the war and the destruction by fire of his giant West Orange manufacturing plant. Almost before the embers died, new buildings began to rise from the ruins.
America at that time was almost entirely dependent upon foreign sources for fundamental coal-tar derivatives vital to many manufacturing processes. These derivatives were to become increasingly essential for the production of explosives, so Edison established plants for their manufacture. His work is recognized as having laid the groundwork for the most important development of the coal-tar chemical industry in the nation today.
A colossal bronze head of the inventor, honoring him as the founder of the Naval Research Laboratories, was unveiled December 3, , on the mall at the Anacostia, Maryland, Laboratories.
Edison arranged for leading scientists to serve with him on the consulting board and also made available to the government the facilities of his laboratory. Among the many inventions and ideas turned over to the Navy were devices and methods for detecting submarines by sound from moving vessels and for detecting enemy planes, for locating gun positions by range sounding, improved torpedoes, a high-speed signalling shutter for searchlights, and underwater searchlights.
These and many other devices and formulas of prime importance came out of the Edison laboratory. With the end of the war, Edison, although he had passed the 70 mark, thought only in terms of scientific and industrial progress.
There would be time enough to think of taking it easy when he reached , he said. Honors Come to Edison. A great many honors and awards had been bestowed upon Edison by persons, societies, and countries throughout the world. To him, such things were nice to have but were not to be sought after. He could never get over being embarrassed when some new medal came his way. But one of his greatest honors was yet to come.
On Oct. A year later, on Oct. In ceremonies participated in by Herbert Hoover, then-president of the United States, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, and other world figures, Edison re-enacted the making of the first practical incandescent lamp. Time was running out for Edison, even though his keen mind and energies refused to admit it.
Creative thought and hard work still constituted his creed, and at the age of 80 he was launched on another great experiment. From goldenrod grown in his experimental gardens at Fort Myers, Fla.
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 s. By the s, 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. While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear", this was to become motion pictures.
Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in , and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure, built on the laboratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system, developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures.
Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work. There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together.
The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. Throughout the decade Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills.
To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric. Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested.
This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.
Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity, and steam. Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job. Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery.
By the time Edison introduced his new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railway cars and signals, maritime buoys, and miners lamps.
Unlike iron ore mining, the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.
By , Thomas Edison had built a vast industrial operation in West Orange. Numerous factories had been built through the years around the original laboratory, and the staff of the entire complex had grown into the thousands.
To better manage operations, Edison brought all the companies he had started to make his inventions together into one corporation, Thomas A. Edison Incorporated, with Edison as president and chairman.
Edison was sixty-four by this time and his role with his company and in life began to change. Edison left more of the daily operations of both the laboratory and the factories to others. The laboratory itself did less original experimental work and instead worked more on refining existing Edison products such as the phonograph. Although Edison continued to file for and receive patents for new inventions, the days of developing new products that changed lives and created industries were behind him.
In the , Edison was asked to head the Naval Consulting Board. With the United States inching closer towards the involvement in World War One, the Naval Consulting Board was an attempt to organize the talents of the leading scientists and inventors in the United States for the benefit of the American armed forces. Edison favored preparedness, and accepted the appointment. The Board did not make a notable contribution to the final allied victory, but did serve as a precedent for future successful cooperation between scientists, inventors and the United States military.
During the war, at age seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island Sound in a borrowed navy vessel experimenting on techniques for detecting submarines. Edison's role in life began to change from inventor and industrialist to cultural icon, a symbol of American ingenuity, and a real life Horatio Alger story. In , in recognition of a lifetime of achievement, the United States Congress voted Edison a special Medal of Honor.
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