With the development of auditory signals for the telegraph, Edison was at a disadvantage, and he began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness including a printer that would convert the electrical signals to letters. In early , he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time.
From to , Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey , where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company then the industry leader and its rivals. Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late , but with the help of his father was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark.
In , Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity. That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced.
In , Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight—a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of prominent financial backers like J. He made a breakthrough in October with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb.
In , he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family which by now included three children to New York. He built a large estate and research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking.
He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by In the interim, he had had success developing an alkaline storage battery, which he originally worked on as a power source for the phonograph but later supplied for submarines and electric vehicles.
In , automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T. The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs. Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator , Edison continued working into his 80s.
View Iframe URL. There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor.
Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in , he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days.
There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. Not all these inventions worked or made money. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be; his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed; and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes.
But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone. His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household—plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families.
His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan.
Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life. Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. People had been making wires incandesce since , and plenty of other inventors had demonstrated and even patented various versions of incandescent lights by , when Edison turned his attention to the problem of illumination.
Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification. That early endeavor only ever earned him the ire of his mother, who fretted about explosions, so, at thirteen, the young entrepreneur started selling snacks to passengers travelling on the local railroad line from Port Huron to Detroit. He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. 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. Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not invent the light bulb; it had been around for a number of years.
The electric lights at the time, however, were unreliable, expensive, and short-lived. Over twenty distinct efforts by other inventors the world over were already underway when Edison entered the light bulb invention race.
By creating a vacuum inside the bulb, finding the right filament to use, and running lower voltage through the bulb, Edison was able to achieve a light bulb that lasted for many hours. This was a substantial improvement, and one that led with more improvements, to making the light bulb practical and economical. Of course, Edison also later invented the entire electric utility system so he could power all those light bulbs, motors and other appliances that soon followed.
Viewed with a microscope, these first motion pictures were rather crude, and hard to focus. Working with W.
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