Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, Thomas Edison once told Harper’s Magazine. With more than a thousand patents to his name, the inventor and entrepreneur embodied the American dream and inspired generations of scientists.
Edison was born in Ohio in 1847 and grew up in Michigan, a restless precautiously intelligent boy who always wanted to know why. After saving a young child from the path of a locomotive, 15-year-old Edison was trained as a telegraph operator by the boy’s grateful father and developed a lifelong interest in electric communications. By the early 1870’s, Edison was America’s leading telegraph inventor and he was widely experimenting a transmitter that Edison stumbled on the invention that was to write his name in the history books, the tin foil phonograph. In 1879, Edison invented a carbon filament for the incandescent light bulb. More than a hundred years later, the case of Edison’s original light bulbs was rediscovered.
Tom Lamb: They are in fact the evidence at a trial that Edison brought against his competition for the construction of the light bulb on the fundamental inventions of our time.
For Edison’s light bulbs, he was using a bamboo coil covered in graphite to create a filament, the glow of the light bulb. His competition was using platinum and other metals. But what it shows is that it was extraordinarily advanced. I mean, the light bulb in its concept remained the same for over a hundred years.
Edison is a genius who had foreseen the potential commercial uses of his inventions. When the photograph was first launched for sale, his suggestions for his exploitation included letter writing and dictating, preservation of family voices, spoken books for the blind, clocks that announced the time and telephone recordings.
To utilize his light bulb technology, Edison swiftly patented an electrical distribution system. In 1882, he successful delivered light and power through unique prototype electricity grids to cities in Massachusetts and New York.
Edison had built his first dedicated laboratory in 1875 and he used his growing fame and fortune to build a state of the art research and development center in 1887. He used the facility to improve his old inventions and create new ones that was in constant conflict with financiers and money managers. So in 1892, Edison merges his electrical companies into one giant firm, General Electric. The money he made from the start enabled him to be fully self financing. He plowed millions of dollars in to a new operation in Northern New Jersey. Unfortunately, the venture was a financial failure but Edison was wealthy enough to absorb the loss. Edison’s lack of concern over his minding losses was due to his increases successes in the recording industry, in the new world of moving pictures.
In 1888, he filed a patent for a kinetoscope, a device that would reproduce movement in the same way the phonograph reproduced sound. When Eastman Kodak began supplying motion picture film stock in 1893, Edison’s vision could be realized. He joined forces with the inventors of a film projector and created films that screened around the United States. One of these was the earliest version of Frankenstein made in 1910. In deference to growing wave of concern about the potential immoral use of motion pictures, publicity for Frankenstein stressed its examination of mystic and psychological problems rather than pure sensationalism.
Even as he reached his eighties, Edison stayed active and engaged in business in science. By that time, he was one of the world’s greatest celebrities.
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