Thomas Alva Edison (photo later in the article) is an American inventor who has registered a record 1,093 patents. He also created the first industrial research laboratory.
Thomas Alva Edison - Who Is It?
Having started his career in 1863 as a teenager by telegraph, when the primitive battery was almost the only source of electricity, until his death in 1931 he dealt with the approach of the electricity era. 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, the basic elements of cinema equipment and many other inventions.
Brief biography of young years
Thomas Alva Edison was born 02/11/1847 in Meilen, Ohio, in the family of Samuel Edison and Nancy Eliot. Parents fled to the United States from Canada after his father participated in the Mackenzie uprising in 1837. When the boy was 7, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Thomas Alva Edison, the youngest of seven children, lived here until at the age of sixteen he began an independent life. He studied very little at school, only a few months. Reading, writing and arithmetic were taught by his mother teacher. He was always a very inquisitive child and was attracted to knowledge himself.
Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood reading a lot, and the sources of his inspiration were the books School of Natural Philosophy by R. Parker and Cooper Union for the Promotion of Science and the Arts. The desire for self-improvement remained with him throughout his life.
Alva began working at an early age, like most children of that time. At 13, he got a job selling newspapers and chocolates on the local railway 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 work by telegraph. By the age of 16, Edison was already experienced enough to work as a telegraph operator full time.
First invention
The development of the telegraph was the first step in the communication revolution, and in the second half of the 19th century it grew at a tremendous pace. This gave Edison and his colleagues the opportunity to travel, see the country and gain experience. Alva worked in a number of cities across the United States before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his telegraph profession to an inventor. He patented an electric ballot recorder - a device designed for use in elected bodies such as Congress to expedite this process. The invention has become a commercial failure. Edison decided that in the future he would come up with only things in the public demand of which he would be completely sure.
Thomas Alva Edison: Inventor Biography
In 1869, he moved to New York, where he continued to work on improving the telegraph and created his first successful device - the Universal Stock Printer exchange machine. Thomas Alva Edison, whose inventions brought him 40 thousand dollars, in 1871 had the necessary funds to open his first small laboratory and production facilities in Newark, New Jersey. Over the next five years, he invented and made devices that significantly increased the speed and efficiency of the telegraph. Edison also took the time to marry Mary Stillwell and start a family.
In 1876, he sold all his production in Newark and moved his wife, children and employees to the small village of Menlo Park, 40 km southwest of New York. Edison built a new facility containing 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. They say that she was his greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the world.
First phonograph
The first great invention in Menlo Park was the staniole phonograph. The first machine that could record and play sound made a splash and brought Edison worldwide fame. He toured the country with her and in April 1878 he was invited to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph to President Rutherford Hayes.
Electric light
Edison's next great venture was the development of a practical incandescent lamp. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and several people have already worked on it, even having developed some of its forms. But until that time, nothing had been created that could be practical for home use.
Edison's merit is the invention of not only an incandescent lamp, but also an electricity supply system that had everything necessary to be practical, safe and economical. After one and a half years of work, he achieved success when an incandescent lamp in which a charred thread was used shone for 13.5 hours.
The first public demonstration of the lighting system took place in December 1879, when it equipped the entire complex of laboratories in Menlo Park. 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 supplying electricity and light to customers on an area of one square mile. Thus began the era of electricity.
Edison general electric
The success of electric lighting led the inventor to fame and fortune, as new technology quickly spread throughout the world. Electric companies continued to develop until in 1889 they merged into the Edison General Electric. Despite using the name of the inventor in the name of the corporation, he did not control it. The huge amounts of capital needed to develop the lighting industry required the involvement of investment banks such as JP Morgan. When Edison General Electric merged with its main rival Thompson-Houston in 1892, the name of the inventor was excluded from her name.
Widowhood and second marriage
Thomas Alva Edison, whose personal life in 1884 was overshadowed by the death of his wife Mary, did not devote much time to Menlo Park. And because of his participation in business, he began to be there even less. Instead, he and his three children — Marion Estelle, Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., and William Leslie — lived in New York. A year later, while relaxing in a New England friends house, Edison met twenty-year-old Mina Miller and fell in love with her. The wedding took place in February 1886, and the couple moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where the groom bought Glenmont estate for his bride. Spouses lived here until their death.
Laboratory in West Orange
After moving, Thomas Alva Edison experimented in a makeshift workshop at an electric lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage, he decided to build a new laboratory in his West Orange, a mile from his home. By that time, he had sufficient resources and experience to build the most equipped and largest laboratory, superior to all others, for quick and inexpensive development of inventions.
A new complex of five buildings was opened in November 1887. In the three-story main building there were a power station, mechanical workshops, warehouses, facilities for experiments and a large library. Four smaller buildings, built perpendicular to the main, housed a physical, chemical and metallurgical laboratory, a workshop for creating samples and a storage facility for chemicals. The large size of the complex allowed Edison to work not on one, but on ten or twenty projects at the same time. Buildings were built or rebuilt to meet the changing needs of the inventor until his death in 1931. Over the years, Edison's creations have been erected around the lab. The whole complex eventually occupied more than 8 hectares, and during the First World War 10,000 people worked there.
Recording Industry
After the opening of the new laboratory, Thomas Alva Edison continued to work on the phonograph, but then postponed it to deal with electric lighting in the late 1870s. By 1890, he began producing phonographs for home and commercial use. As with electric light, he developed everything necessary for their work, including devices for reproducing and recording sound, as well as equipment for their release. At the same time, 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 began to create a device that can do for the eyes what the phonograph is for the ears. They became cinema. The inventor demonstrated it in 1891, and two years later the industrial production of “films” started in a tiny film studio built in a laboratory known as “Black Maria”.
As in the case of electric lighting and a phonograph, before that a holistic system for the creation and demonstration of films was developed. Initially, Edison’s cinema activities were innovative and original. However, many people became interested in this new industry and wanted to improve the inventor's early cinematic work. Therefore, many contributed to the rapid development of cinema. At the end of the 1890s, a new industry was already flourishing, and by 1918 it had become so competitive that Edison left the business altogether.
Iron ore failure
The successes of phonographs and movies in the 1890s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. For ten years, he worked in his laboratory and in old iron mines in northwestern New Jersey on iron ore mining methods to meet the insatiable demand of Pennsylvania smelters. To fund this work, Edison sold all of his General Electric shares.
Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, he was not able to make the process commercially profitable, and he lost all the money invested. This would mean a financial collapse if Edison did not continue to develop the phonograph and film at the same time. Be that as it may, the inventor entered the new century, still financially secure and ready to challenge a new one.
Alkaline battery
Edison's new challenge was the development of a battery for use in electric vehicles. The inventor was very fond of cars, and throughout his life he was the owner of many of them, working on different energy sources. Edison believed that electricity was the best fuel for them, but the capacity of ordinary lead-acid batteries was not enough. In 1899, he began work on an alkaline battery. This project turned out to be the most complex and took ten years. By the time the new alkaline batteries were ready, gasoline cars had improved so much that electric cars were less commonly used, mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, alkaline batteries have proven useful in illuminating railroad cars and cabins, sea buoys and mining lights. Unlike iron ore, significant investments were paid back handsomely, and over time, the battery 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. To better manage his 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 years old, and his role in the company and in life began to change. Edison delegated most 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 obtain patents for new inventions, the days of creating new things that change lives and create new industries were left behind.
Defense work
In 1915, Edison was asked to head the Naval Advisory Committee. The United States was nearing participation in the First World War, and the creation of the committee was an attempt to organize the talents of leading scientists and inventors in the country in the interests of the American armed forces. Edison accepted the appointment. The Council did not make a tangible contribution to the final victory, but served as a precedent for the future successful cooperation of scientists, inventors and the US armed forces. During the war, at the age of seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island on a Navy ship, experimenting with methods for detecting submarines.
Golden anniversary
Thomas Alva Edison from the inventor and industrialist became a cultural icon, a symbol of American enterprise. In 1928, in recognition of his accomplishments, the US Congress awarded him a special Medal of Honor. In 1929, the country celebrated the golden anniversary of electric lighting. The culmination of the holiday was a banquet in honor of Edison, which was given by Henry Ford in Greenfield Village, a museum of modern American history (the laboratory in Menlo Park was completely recreated in it). Celebrations were attended by President Herbert Hoover and many leading American scientists and inventors.
Replacement for rubber
Edison did the last experiments in his life at the request of his good friends Henry Ford and Garvey Firestone in the late 1920s. They wanted to find an alternative source of rubber for use in car tires. Until then, rubber was used to produce tires made from rubber wood, which does not grow in the United States. Crude rubber was imported and became more expensive. With his inherent energy and solidity, Edison tested thousands of different plants to find a suitable replacement, and ultimately found that goldenrod could serve as a replacement for rubber. Work on this project continued until the death of the inventor.
Last years
Over the last two years of Edison's life, his health has deteriorated significantly. He spent a lot of time away from the lab, working at home in Glenmont instead. Trips to the Fort Myers Florida family villa were getting longer. Edison passed eighty, and he suffered from a number of ailments. In August 1931, he became completely ill. Edison's health was steadily deteriorating, and at 3:21 am on October 18, 1931, the great inventor passed away.
A city in New Jersey, two colleges and many schools are named after him.