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.
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.
As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed products for the highest bidder. Often that was Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, but just as often, it was one of Western Union's rivals. In , Edison moved his expanding operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent industrial research facility incorporating machine shops and laboratories.
That same year, Western Union encouraged him to develop a communication device to compete with Alexander Graham Bell 's telephone. He never did. Thomas Edison listening to a phonograph through a primitive headphone. In December , Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph.
His innovation relied upon tin-coated cylinders with two needles: one for recording sound, and another for playback. His first words spoken into the phonograph's mouthpiece were, "Mary had a little lamb. Army to bring music to the troops overseas during World War I.
While Edison was not the inventor of the first light bulb, he came up with the technology that helped bring it to the masses. After buying Woodward and Evans' patent and making improvements in his design, Edison was granted a patent for his own improved light bulb in He began to manufacture and market it for widespread use.
In January , Edison set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power and light the cities of the world. That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became General Electric.
In , he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed.
In , the Pearl Street generating station provided volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. In , Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the primary research laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent most of his time there, supervising the development of lighting technology and power systems.
He also perfected the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery. Over the next few decades, Edison found his role as inventor transitioning to one as industrialist and business manager. The laboratory in West Orange was too large and complex for any one man to completely manage, and Edison found he was not as successful in his new role as he was in his former one.
Edison also found that much of the future development and perfection of his inventions was being conducted by university-trained mathematicians and scientists. He worked best in intimate, unstructured environments with a handful of assistants and was outspoken about his disdain for academia and corporate operations. During the s, Edison built a magnetic iron-ore processing plant in northern New Jersey that proved to be a commercial failure.
Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for producing cement. Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device.
Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.
During World War I, the U. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
By the end of the s, Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber.
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.
0コメント