In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse Thomas Jefferson , author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U. In , Connecticut-born gun manufacturer Samuel Colt received a U. Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the Wilbur and Orville Wright were American inventors and pioneers of aviation.
In the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight; they surpassed their own milestone two years later when they built and flew the first fully practical Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Thomas Edison. Edison's Phonograph. Thomas Paine. Advice from the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson. Although it failed to live up to automotive expectations, the Edison battery proved to be a profitable invention and paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.
In , scientists at Stanford University created a high-performance, low-cost version of the nickel-iron battery Edison developed more than a century ago. The prototype battery developed by the researchers could someday be used to help power electric vehicles -- much as Edison originally envisioned.
Edison was a huge enthusiast of clean energy technologies -- even designing prototypes for small-scale wind-powered electricity generation. The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity. Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car.
During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire. The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route.
While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator. For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.
The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation.
Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap. However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.
In , Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute.
Edison realized he needed to take control of his future. Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company.
At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature. However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly. They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators.
In Edison married year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses. During their year marriage, they had three children, Marion, Thomas and William, who himself became an inventor. In , Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior.
In , at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions. 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. By the New Year, individual light bulbs had given way to a network of illumination around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light. The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles.
Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon. But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers.
She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good. One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution.
She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory. Like tech C. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.
How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away.
He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal. He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding.
His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr. Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on.
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