Mcgraw Hill Reading and Unit 5 Week Thomas Edison Inventor

Detailed Biography

Thomas Edison did non invent the modern world. He was, notwithstanding, present at the creation, a pregnant figure in the organization and growth of America'southward national markets, communications and ability systems, and entertainment industries. I hundred and fifty years after his nascency—and 66 years after his death—his proper name stands for inventive creativity, and his electric lamp is the symbol of a bright idea, dear by cartoonists and advertisers. His list of 1,093 U.S. Patents remains unchallenged past whatever other inventor. It is a tribute to his talents as an inventor, man of affairs, and promoter that many people call up that nosotros owe our way of life to his ideas.

What made Edison and then extraordinarily successful? He was by any reckoning a vivid inventor, but there were many other fine, clever contemporary inventors, now mostly forgotten: Elisha Gray and George Phelps in telegraphy; Emile Berliner in telephony and sound recording; Edward Weston in electrical instrumentation; Elihu Thomson, Frank Sprague, and Nikola Tesla in electrical power and lighting. Edison outshone them all in the breadth of his accomplishments and the public renown he garnered. He broadened the notion of invention to include far more only embodying an idea in a working antiquity. His vision encompassed what the twentieth century would telephone call innovation—invention, research, development, and commercialization. Moreover, he combined a biggy inventiveness with a canny sense of the emerging influence of the popular press, and therein lies the key to his historical stature.

We can meet the foundation for his success in his youth and early career. Later in life he (and others) would spin stories of mischief and misadventure, merely the evidence points to a curious boy in an intellectually stimulating environment. The towns of his childhood—Milan, Ohio (pop. 1,500), where he was built-in on February 11, 1847; and Port Huron, Michigan (iii,000), where the family unit moved in 1854—although small, were local centers of commerce and industry, and Edison absorbed the culture of artisans and workshops. His mother Nancy had apparently taught school at some point, and his father Samuel, a political firebrand and freethinker, had a library that Edison was encouraged to read. He attended school briefly for two periods in Port Huron, but was largely taught at home past his mother. "My female parent taught me how to read practiced books quickly and correctly," he later said, "and as this opened up a groovy earth in literature, I have e'er been very thankful for this early training." At the aforementioned fourth dimension he was learning the entrepreneurial ways of his father, whose many careers included land speculation, shingle making, and truck farming. The aforementioned entrepreneurial attributes ascribed to his father were later applied to Edison: "a lively disposition always looking on the bright side of things" and "full of most sanguine speculation as to any project he takes in his head."

Known as Al in his youth, his get-go work was helping in the family garden. But as "hoeing corn in a hot sun is unattractive," he found other piece of work when the opportunity arose. In belatedly 1859 the Chiliad Torso Railroad was extended through Port Huron to Detroit, and Edison found employment as a "processed butcher," selling sweets, newspapers, and magazines. In that position he soon showed an entrepreneurial flair. He employed boys to sell vegetables and magazines in Port Huron and wrote, printed, and sold a paper on the train. The Civil War was raging, and when the battle of Shiloh was reported in the Detroit Costless Press, Edison talked the editor into giving him actress copies on credit and then had the headlines telegraphed ahead to the train's scheduled stops. The crowds were and then large and the demand for the papers and so great that he steadily increased the cost at each station, selling all the papers at a handsome profit. Information technology is clear that young Al had already learned valuable lessons almost the power of the telegraph and the press.

Edison continued his education while working on the train. He read in the Detroit Public Library during his daily layover, performed chemistry experiments in a luggage car, and learned the rudiments of telegraphy. When he was xv he rescued the toddler son of telegraph operator James MacKenzie from the path of a rolling freight car, and MacKenzie rewarded him past giving him lessons. Later practicing intensively all summer, Edison took a part-time telegraph job in Port Huron.

Within a year Edison had embarked on a iv-year stint as an itinerant telegrapher, a path followed by many aggressive, technically oriented immature men. During those years he avant-garde to the front end rank of telegraphers, becoming an expert receiver known for his clear, rapid handwriting. He joined the elite printing-wire operators, the men who handled the lengthy, of import news dispatches. He associated with journalists and editors, frequenting their offices and joining their conversations into the early morning time. Some of his fellow operators later became paper reporters, and a few of them would help push Edison into the public eye.

Edison worked in many of the larger cities of the Midwest, centers of technical every bit well as commercial and political composure. He read technical and scientific literature ranging from telegraph trade periodicals to Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity, and he moved in an temper heady with inventive progress, where new devices and ideas were discussed and tried. Similar all operators, Edison had to maintain his instruments and the batteries that powered the lines. He studied them and thought most ways to improve them, experimenting with discarded instruments. He purchased a small lathe and some other tools. By the time he headed abode in 1867, he was thoroughly familiar with the land of the science and art of telegraphy and had begun to learn the craft of invention.

A bulletin from an operator friend induced Edison to travel to Boston in early 1868, where he took a job with Western Union. In Boston he saw for the get-go fourth dimension the complete telegraph community: not merely expert operators, just leading inventors, major manufacturing shops with skilled experimental mechanics, important industry officials, and capitalists looking for promising inventors and inventions. Edison spent a twelvemonth in the Western Union function. During that time, inspired by the activity and potential of his surroundings, he worked on more than than half a dozen telegraph devices. He found financial backers and mechanics able to assistance him realize his ideas. He acquired working space in the shop of Charles Williams, a leading telegraph manufacturer who also provided laboratory facilities to the prominent electrical inventor Moses Farmer. Edison practical for two successful patents that year—a vote recorder the country legislature would not purchase, and a printing telegraph that was used in a stock quotation service. On January thirty, 1869, five days subsequently signing the patent application for the latter, Edison resigned his operator's post to "devote his time to bringing out his inventions."

In gild to test one of these inventions, a "double transmitter" for sending two simultaneous telegraph letters on a single wire, Edison traveled to New York Metropolis in the spring of 1869. In that location he institute the movers and shakers of the telegraph industry. Western Union was headquartered in Manhattan, and the lawyers, bankers, and inventors at the middle of the business were collected there. Edison immediately savage in with Franklin Pope, a prominent telegraph engineer, with whom he formed a partnership. They formed three successful businesses based on a series of printing telegraphs which placed them at the heart of a struggle to control the engineering for the distribution of financial information. Over the course of ix months Edison proved himself sufficiently to the principals of that struggle—Western Union and the Gilt and Stock Telegraph Company—that the latter contracted with him not only for a new press telegraph merely also for a facsimile system.

With coin from the facsimile contract, Edison and mechanic William Unger opened a modest telegraph manufacturing shop in Newark, New Jersey. From that time on, Edison was never without a shop, a signature of his inventive style. When he had first arrived in New York he had written to his Boston capitalist, "What delays me hither is awaiting the alteration of my instruments which on business relationship of the piling upward of jobs at the musical instrument makers have been delayed." He would not expect once more if he could help it.

Some other key element of Edison's piece of work was his propensity for working on several projects at one time. In the fall of 1870, in addition to his press and facsimile telegraphs, he began work on automatic telegraphy, a high-speed arrangement using punched newspaper record with mechanical transmitters and receivers, intended to compete with the standard manually keyed Morse telegraphy of Western Union. He never devoted his attending to a single project; later, during the most intensive work on electrical lighting, which was itself a series of related issues, he developed a new phone receiver and a method of ore separation. One result of his multidirected activeness was a constant cantankerous-fertilization of ideas and insights. Edison tried methods and devices from one artery of research in others. Ofttimes these imported concepts came from months or years earlier; some had worked in other contexts, some had non. Information technology was this manner of working and thinking that contributed largely to Edison's ability to find solutions where others establish none.

During the starting time half of the 1870s, Edison established himself as the foremost telegraph inventor in America. Several companies competed for command of his piece of work. In October 1870, backed by the group of wealthy financiers who formed the Automatic Telegraph Company, Edison established the American Telegraph Works, a large shop equipped with new machine tools and highly skilled mechanics. The following May he became the "consulting Electrician and Mechanician" for Gold and Stock. In the fall of 1873, later a trip to England to promote his automated system there, he sold a British syndicate the rights to that system. Under an oral arrangement with Western Wedlock President William Orton, he developed multiple telegraphy systems in 1873 and 1874. As 1875 opened he became embroiled in an attempt by the financier Jay Gould to build a competing network to Western Union's, an clan that led to years of litigation. A year after successfully developing a quadruplex (four-bulletin) telegraph in 1874, he agreed to a contract with Western Union that assigned all his work in multiple telegraphy to the visitor. Past 1875, the nation'due south chief credit reporting agency, R. G. Dun & Co., reflected the telegraph manufacture consensus when it called him a "genius in this line."

Orton and Marshall Lefferts, the president of Gold and Stock, were particularly important to Edison during these years. Not merely did their companies provide crucial support for his inventive work, just both men served as mentors to the young inventor. Lefferts taught him important lessons well-nigh the patent organisation and the part of patents equally a business organisation tool. Edison'southward style of patenting to "embrace the field" was learned from Lefferts, who followed that policy as president of Gold and Stock. Lefferts introduced Edison to Lemuel Serrell, a leading patent attorney with whom Edison worked for a decade and from whom he learned the importance of keeping "a full record" of "all new inventions." Lefferts was too responsible for Edison'due south introduction to the automated telegraph investors. Orton maintained a fondness for Edison beyond respect for his inventive talent. Even afterward having his feathers ruffled by Edison's dalliance with Jay Gould (when he declared that the inventor had "a vacuum where his conscience ought to be"), he remained Edison'south champion against the considerable jealousy of Western Matrimony'due south firm electricians. Lefferts died in 1876, and when Orton died in 1878 Edison declared "If I become to love a homo he dies correct away. Lefferts went start, and now Orton's gone, too."

Something of Edison'south character shows in the relation of his laboratory piece of work and his two marriages. A brief business organization venture at the end of 1871 was the occasion of his meeting Mary Stilwell, a 16-twelvemonth-old employee he married ii months afterward on Christmas Mean solar day. By early February he was distressed enough to record in a laboratory notebook, "Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!!" and (on Valentine's Day, no less) "My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can't Invent." These laboratory notebook entries are his only recorded statements regarding Mary until her expiry twelve years subsequently, unless ane counts doodles where "Stilwell" becomes "Stillsick," which might be construed every bit comments on her increasingly delicate health. By all accounts he was devoted to Mary; the cause of his early distress is illuminated by the very different style in which his 2nd wife's name appears in his notebooks. Mina Miller was the well-educated daughter of a cultured family, and on their honeymoon in 1886 she signed a number of notebook entries as a witness. In the following months she recorded results of lamp tests in his laboratory. Although she didn't develop annihilation new, she could apparently "invent worth a Damn." This did not foreclose Edison from spending the same long hours away from her and the children as he had in his starting time wedlock. Nevertheless, he reassured her, "Y'all & the children and the Laboratory is all my life I have nada else."

At the end of 1875, as a result of a lawsuit brought by a Newark landlord, Edison purchased country in rural Menlo Park, New Jersey, where in the ensuing months his father supervised the construction of a building that embodied the lessons Edison had learned about invention. One crucial lesson was the importance of an experimental laboratory, something Edison had come to capeesh after his 1873 trip to England. At that place he had first seen the sensitive, precise products of the European scientific musical instrument-makers and had also encountered problems (notably the cocky-induction and capacitance of undersea cables and the difficulty of recording the rapid signals of automatic telegraphy) that required systematic enquiry in electricity and chemical science. On his return from that trip he prepare upwards a laboratory in his automobile shop, where he had "every conceivable variety of Electrical Apparatus, and whatsoever quantity of Chemicals for experimentation." The top floor of the Menlo Park building was a yard version of that starting time laboratory. The first floor was an every bit superb car shop, stocked with fine precision car tools, for although the automatic system had finally failed to supplant the Morse and the American Telegraph Works had closed, Edison had kept most of the machinery. Edison's early shops also yielded a core of expert machinists and experimenters who joined Edison at Menlo Park, among them Charles Batchelor, John Kruesi, John and Fred Ott, Charles Wurth, and James Adams. Together, the shop, laboratory, and staff constituted an unparalleled facility for invention, where the twenty-9-yr-former Edison, with i hundred U.South. Patents already to his credit, planned to turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every half dozen months or so."

Most of the first year's work at Menlo Park focused on various systems of multiple telegraphy for Western Wedlock. In January 1877 Edison proposed to President Orton that the company support the auto shop with a weekly stipend of $100; in March they signed an agreement that gave Western Spousal relationship the rights to all of Edison'southward telegraph inventions in render for $100 a calendar week in laboratory expenses. In the meantime, at Western Union's asking, Edison and his staff had turned their attention to the telephone—the speaking telegraph—which Alexander Graham Bell had unveiled the previous June. Bong'south invention, though it transmitted the phonation clearly, was too weak to employ practically in the electrically noisy urban surroundings, nor could it send a signal whatever distance. Edison took a different arroyo to the problem of capturing the voice; "Bell," he said, "got ahead of me by striking a principle of piece of cake awarding whereas I have been plodding along in the correct principle but harder of application." As the multiple telegraph research tailed off, Edison'southward telephone research intensified, culminating in the spring of 1878 in ane of his most enduring products, a transmitter that was used for well-nigh a century.

That transmitter, which was congenital around a small push button of carbon, is an exemplary instance of Edison's ability to brand good employ of an before failure. In 1873, while trying to sympathise the subtleties of cable telegraphy, he had devised and built a high-resistance rheostat made of carbon-filled glass tubes. Unfortunately, he "found that the resistance of carbon varied with every noise, jar or sound," and the rheostat was useless for cable experiments. Of course, in a telephone, such sensitivity was exactly what he needed, even if information technology took twelve months of hard work to make it a practical instrument.

In the process of his phone work, Edison surprised himself with the invention that brought him world fame—the phonograph. The phone, which was initially perceived equally an instrument to be used by telegraph companies to transmit messages betwixt operators, had the disadvantage of leaving no written tape. Speech was likewise fast to be written down, so Edison devised a way to record the vibrations of the receiving instrument, assuasive them to be played back more than slowly and the words written down. Only after writing this idea in his notebook did he and his staff realize that he had found a way to record not merely a phone message simply sound itself. The printing of their phone work kept them from developing the phonograph for five months, but in early December 1877 they demonstrated their talking machine at the offices of Scientific American in New York City. Although Edison and some backers formed a company to exploit this new marvel, he was unable to transform this early exhibition machine into a commercial product (x years later he would take it upwards over again and succeed, inaugurating the sound recording industry). The phonograph, on the other mitt, transformed Edison instantly into an international celebrity—the Magician of Menlo Park. His familiarity with the press and his rapport with journalists enabled him to maintain and manipulate that glory for the rest of his life.

Edison'south next major project, launched in the autumn of 1878, brought together everything he had learned nearly invention. The creation of an electric lite and power system, which began equally the search for a lamp that could replace gas lighting, finally required massive financial backing, numerous teams of researchers, expanded laboratory and shop facilities, the creation of large-calibration manufacturing plants, and a marketing organization. At the center of all this activeness, Edison worked feverishly to solve problems ranging from filament materials and dynamo designs to marketing strategies and hiring questionnaires. Every bit the piece of work expanded, it transformed Menlo Park. Edison hired university-trained scientific researchers like Francis Upton and Otto Moses, increased the size of the machine shop staff, and built factories. By 1881 Edison's focus shifted from inquiry and development to manufacturing, marketing, and installation, and he moved his headquarters into New York City. Although lamp manufacture and some research continued at Menlo Park, within two years Edison abandoned the original "invention mill."

At the outset, Edison'south electric lighting venture was a subject of controversy. Others had tried and failed, and the scientific and technical communities were divided over his prospects. His reputation, though, was formidable, as British scientist John Tyndall indicated in a lecture at London's Purple Institution early in 1879.

Edison has the penetration to seize the relationship of facts and principles, and the art to reduce them to novel and concrete combinations. Hence, though he has accomplished nothing new in relation to the electric light, an adverse opinion as to his ability to solve the complicated trouble . . . would be unwarranted. . . . Knowing something of the practical problem, I should certainly prefer seeing it in Mr. Edison's hands to having it in mine.

With the successful installation of his first lighting and ability plants in the early 1880s, Edison lived upwardly to his reputation every bit the "Inventor of the Age."

For several years Edison had no unmarried, key laboratory. He conducted research at his electrical manufacturing shops in New York and Harrison, New Jersey. When Mary died in 1884 he withdrew somewhat from electric light work, but subsequently his 1886 matrimony to young Mina Miller he returned to full-time inquiry. By 1887 he had decided to build a new facility near his abode in West Orange, New Jersey, several times larger than the Menlo Park laboratory had been. The new laboratory embodied everything Edison had learned about the process of invention. He wrote,

I will have the all-time equipped & largest Laboratory extant, and the facilities decidedly superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention, & working it up into commercial shape with models patterns special mechanism— In fact there is no similar institution in existence.

In its early years, the new complex served as the research and evolution middle for Edison's electric lighting companies. But Edison also saw the new laboratory as a place to invent other products. The beginning significant new product was an improved phonograph. Spurred past research done at Alexander Graham Bell'southward Volta laboratory, Edison had been working difficult on his machine for several months when the new laboratory opened in November 1887. He fully exploited his new resources, putting one squad of researchers to work developing materials for the records, some other team on the problem of duplicating recordings, another on the phonograph's mechanics, some other on the motor and battery, and another on the recording and playback devices. He likewise erected a phonograph factory next to the laboratory.

Edison financed this venture largely on his own. Later on years of conflicts fiddling and great with financiers and managers in the electric light businesses, Edison no longer wanted to give outsiders control of his affairs. Notwithstanding, with his coin tied up in the electric industry, he establish himself unable to bring the new phonograph to marketplace, and he was forced to sell his marketing rights. Subsequently he left the electrical business organisation following the 1892 merger of his companies into General Electric, he had the personal resources to retain controlling interest in his new technologies.

In the two decades post-obit the opening of his new laboratory, Edison pursued several large projects. Through the 1890s much of his time was spent at an iron mine in northern New Bailiwick of jersey, where he used his ore-separation technology to concentrate depression-course ore into high-class briquets suitable for steel mills. Initially financing information technology with the sale of General Electrical stock, Edison kept it going with the profits from 2 new industries, his (repurchased) phonograph business and motion pictures—well-nigh $2.5 million of his ain money. When, faced with the rich ore of the immense Lake Superior fe finds, the venture failed at the century's end, Edison was characteristically sanguine. A year after someone pointed out the rocketing value of the stocks he had sold; he replied, "Well, it's all gone, merely nosotros had a hell of a good time spending information technology."

Edison founded the American motion picture manufacture in the mid 1890s when he and W. K. L. Dickson developed a camera and a peep-bear witness "kinetoscope" for viewing the films. However, Edison had little personal involvement in the business that sprang from those inventions beyond lending his name to the production company and participating in lengthy patent battles. In contrast, he was intimately involved in the audio recording industry. In 1878 he had declared the phonograph his "baby," which he expected "to grow upwards to be a big feller and back up me in my old age," and it was doing merely that. After he and his staff perfected a method of duplicating records at the turn of the century, the business mushroomed, with Edison'due south company the clear leader. He used that income to finance two other innovations: a cement manufacturing process, which introduced important industry-broad innovations although the company itself was non financially successful until the 1920s; and a storage bombardment, originally intended to power electrical automobiles simply which found wider applications for various industrial purposes and became the highly profitable mainstay of Edison's businesses within a few years.

In 1907, on his sixtieth birthday, Edison announced his intention to "give upwards the commercial cease . . . and work in my laboratory as a scientist." His health was non good, and he wanted fourth dimension to investigate some of the curious phenomena he had encountered over the years. Although he retired from the business of innovation, he continued to piece of work on the phonograph and engaged in one last inventive campaign to produce a disc phonograph and record to lucifer those produced by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which supplanted Edison as the industry leader. In 1899 he had written that "commercial reasons when it comes to the phonograph dont count with me. Its the simply invention of mine that I want to run myself." After the consolidation of his various enterprises into Thomas A. Edison, Inc., in 1911, the phonograph business was the one function of the visitor in which he was involved at the day-to-day level. He fifty-fifty—despite his most-total deafness—causeless responsibility for the choice of all the music and artists recorded for the Edison phonograph, a truly disastrous policy. The fortunes of the phonograph business declined steadily until information technology was finally abased in 1929.

The success or failure of Edison's later ventures had no result on his condition equally a living American legend. From the formation of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in 1878, every business organization he founded—and some that he licensed or bought—had his name associated with it. It was not simply Edison's ego; his name sold about anything, and information technology was often used illegally by others. In the terminal two decades of his life he became the nation's inventor-philosopher. Reporters sought his opinion on whatsoever and all subjects, from the part of inventions in the Great War and the technologies of the future to questions of diet and the beingness of God. The Secretary of the Navy appointed him head of the Naval Consulting Board in 1915 to review inventions submitted for the nation'southward defense, and Edison conducted his own defense enquiry after America's entry into the war. He received a special congressional medal and socialized with presidents. In 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of the electric lamp, Henry Ford staged a ceremony attended by President and Mrs. Hoover and circulate beyond the land. Edison's died on October 18, 1931. President Hoover asked the nation to dim its lights in his laurels.

Edison lived the 2d half of his life in the glaring light of modernistic glory, under a spotlight he welcomed and sometimes directed. Merely he earned that light. The bankers who financed his first not bad undertaking, the electric light, were buying his accomplishments as a telegraph inventor, as the man who made Bong's telephone a practical instrument, and as the creator of the marvelous phonograph. Fifty-fifty more, they were backing the work of the man almost responsible for what Alfred North Whitehead called the greatest invention of the nineteenth century—the invention of the method of invention.

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Source: https://edison.rutgers.edu/bio-long.htm

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