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THOMAS ALVA EDISON (1847-1931)

Detailed Biography

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. His mother, Nancy, was a former schoolteacher. His father, Sam, was from a Tory family that emigrated to Nova Scotia from New Jersey during the Revolutionary War. Later, Sam became a revolutionary himself, and had to flee Canada for Ohio after an unsuccessful revolt in the 1830s. The family moved to Port Huron, Michigan in 1854, where Sam Edison found work as a lumberman.

Throughout his childhood, "Al" had poor health but an active mind. He loved to read, and by the time he was twelve had digested Shakespeare, Dickens, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (In his teens, Edison reportedly read every book in the recently founded Detroit Free Library.) He was especially keen on chemistry and machinery; and from age ten onward, he spent his entire allowance on supplies for the chemistry lab he built in his basement.

Formal education suited young Edison less. After a schoolteacher declared the boy unteachable, his outraged mother took over his education. Edison always attributed his success to his mother's unswerving faith in him: "When she came out as my strong defender, when the school teacher called me 'addled,' I determined then that I would be worthy of her and show her that her confidence was not misplaced."

At age twelve (1859), Edison took his first job, operating a newstand on the Grand Trunk Railroad, which ran from Port Huron to Detroit. Not content merely to sell the newspaper, Edison installed a printing press in a baggage car and began publishing on the train. He also installed a chemistry lab, although a fire (which Edison always denied starting) forced him to break off his experiments. Around the same time, possibly due to being pulled up onto a train by his ears, Edison became almost totally deaf --- although he said this made it forever easier for him to concentrate. (He supposedly refused corrective surgery so as to maintain his comparative freedom from distraction.)

In 1862, Edison saved a young child from being run over by a boxcar. The child's father rewarded the hero by teaching him to use a railroad telegraph. Edison soon built his own telegraph from scrap metal; after honing his skills, he spent the next five years traveling around Canada and the US, working as a telegraph operator and doing scientific experiments in his free time. (Edison's first invention was supposedly a device that automatically transmitted his hourly telegraph reports, while he slept: predictably, his employers, far from being thrilled, nearly fired him for his efforts.) In January of 1869, having wound up working for Western Union in Boston, Edison resigned from his job and moved to New York, determined to become a full-time independent inventor.

On June 1st of that year, Edison was granted his first patent (#90,646), for an electric voting machine. The machine was reliable and efficient, and was the model for those used later throughout the country. But at the time, politicians distrusted it; and their disapproval meant that Edison made no sales. This disappointment convinced Edison never again to invent what would not sell. And indeed, his next invention fared much better: when he sold the rights to an improved stock market tickertape machine to the Gold Indicator Company (1869), they paid him up front $40,000 --- the equivalent of about $700,000 today.

Along with Franklin T. Pope, the friend who had introduced him to the Gold Indicator Company, Edison formed an electrical engineering firm. From late 1869 to 1876, working mostly in Newark, New Jersey, they specialized in improvements to the telegraph. Alone and with Pope, Edison eventually earned about 200 patents for telegraph systems and devices. These included "duplex" (patents 1875-), "quadruplex" (patents 1878-) and "sextuplex" (patents 1879-) systems, which could send and receive, respectively, one, two and three different messages at the same time.

In those years, Edison also married Mary Stilwell (December 25, 1871), and had his first two children, whom he nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash" --- a telling sign of the way in which Edison, who averaged over 100 hours a week in the lab throughout his career, let his career overshadow his family life. (There is a legend that Edison proposed to Mary in Morse code; and there is certainly an entry in his journal about a month after his marriage that reads, "My wife Dearly Beloved cannot invent worth a Damn!")

In 1876, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison founded his famous "invention factory." This was itself a novel concept: a single site where products were taken from conception through development to manufacture and shipping. A demanding employer, Edison led research teams in dozens of different projects at any given time. "The Wizard of Menlo Park," as he was soon known, was a confirmed workaholic; but he was not an absolute perfectionist, in that he appreciated failures not just philosophically, but practically: "That's one more way it won't work, so we're closer to a solution." Later, Albert Einstein, the greatest theoretical scientist of the modern era, would define "genius" as "1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration." Edison's definition was even more down to earth: "hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense."

At Menlo Park, Edison's various improvements to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone led him to his second most-famous invention, the phonograph (1877). In an attempt to adapt the telephone's diaphragm to use in a "speaking telegraph," Edison coated a cylinder with tinfoil, against which a needle pressed. Sound vibrations from the telegraph's transmitter diaphragm would cause the needle to etch a distinct line into the foil as the cylinder revolved. Almost on a whim, Edison spoke the words, "Mary had a little lamb," into the machine's mouthpiece. When the needle was run along the groove a second time, even Edison himself was amazed when, through the diaphragm connected to the cylinder, the machine echoed his words. Although the "Speaking Phonograph" was in part a happy accident, it was always Edison's favorite invention. At first, however, it caused only a brief sensation, and would not be marketed for ten years.

Meanwhile, Edison moved on to his greatest project: a workable electric light system that would replace candles and gaslight forever, at home and in public. In 1878, Edison created his prototype incandescent light bulb: a thin strip of paper, attached to wires, enclosed in a vacuum inside a glass bulb. When electricity flowed into the paper "filament," it heated up, and glowed. The only problem was that the paper burnt out very quickly. So Edison and his researchers tested over 6,000 materials gathered from all over the world, until they found the optimal filament material: carbonized cotton thread (1897). (Edison was long convinced that the best material would be bamboo --- supposedly after watching his broken fishing rod glow in the campfire on an expedition to Wyoming to observe a solar eclipse.)

Edison installed the first reliable, durable electric lights in his own labs, and he later established the first electrical utility company and public power station, which lighted Manhattan's financial district (1882). Partly because Edison's DC-current system had a maximum range of only three miles, competitors soon sprung up --- including George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, whose superior AC-current-based system even Edison's recently reorganized General Electric Co. was forced to license (1896). (And after 1910, a superior filament material was created by William D. Coolidge: ductile tungsten, still used for that purpose.)

Meanwhile, Edison's wife Mary had died, and he had married Mina Miller (1886) and moved his home bases to a mansion and a laboratory complex in West Orange, New Jersey (1887). At the new research complex, which was ten times the size of the Menlo Park labs (and is now a National Monument), Edison personally directed over 5,000 researchers.

His first project there was to redesign his phonograph, upon which others had already improved. Appropriating some of their ideas, including the wax cylinder, and adding some refinements of his own, Edison and his licensees marketed the phonograph first as a dictation machine for businesses (1888); then, in miniature form, inside "talking" dolls (1889); and later, as musical home entertainment systems (1896). These commercial efforts were, by and large, failures, because Edison recordings would not play on competitors' machines, and later due to the predominance of radio. However, Edison and his researchers never stopped improving the home phonograph, with major new features added in 1901 (mass produced cylinders), 1911 (disc format) and 1929 (first portable player, first LPs), and new patents running into the 1920s.

In 1888, Edison attended a demonstration of Eadweard Muybridge's "zoopraxiscope," which was a view-box that presented a quick series of still photographs that seemed, cartoon-animation-style, to move. Edison declined Muybridge's offer to collaborate, and set out to invent his own machine that "would do for the eye, what the phonograph did for the ear." It was actually his associate, William Dickson, working at Edison's direction, who invented the celluloid-strip motion picture camera and projector (1889).

The images were still viewed inside the device, through a peephole. Though they could only be used by one person at a time, "Kinetoscopes" featuring movies filmed at Edison's "Black Maria" film studio --- the first was entitled "The Sneeze" --- spread from New York to other major US cities by 1894. However, Edison and Dickson quarrelled, and Edison went on to make improvements, including the external-view projector ("Vitascope," 1896) and synchronized sound ("Kinetophone," 1913), on his own or with others. Edison teams paved the way for the newsreel, filming the Spanish-American War in Cuba (1898) and the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York, at which President McKinley was assassinated (1901).

By 1911, Edison had consolidated his interests into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Regrettably, he now spent as much time fighting patent battles in court as he did meeting challenges in the lab. Through the 1920s, Edison made his major engineering advances in his capacity as head of the Naval Consulting Board during World War I. But here too, Edison felt that his ideas did not get their due.

Edison's swan song was the fiftieth anniversary of his invention of the electric light bulb (1929), when his friend Henry Ford opened a museum in Edison's honor in Greenfield Village, Michigan. The guests at the Opening included President Hoover, Marie Curie, George Eastman, and Orville Wright. Edison was forced to leave the celebration early due to failing health; and his health remained poor throughout the next two years. He finally fell into a coma, and died in West Orange, at the age of 84, on October 18, 1931.

In total, Edison accumulated 1,093 US patents, with at least one per year from 1868 to 1931. By comparison, only a handful of inventors, including Edwin H. Land and Jerome H. Lemelson, have earned over 500. Edison inventions not mentioned above include: the printing telegraph (a precursor of the telex), the electric "stencil pen" (a precursor of the photocopier), a magnetic mineral ore-milling process, an electrical torpedo, a synthetic rubber, and improved alkaline batteries, cement mixers, and microphones.

It must be said that Edison's career would have been less stellar if not for his research teams, and that Edison used other inventors' ideas --- acknowledged or not --- much more freely than he shared his own. For example, Edison's quadruplex telegraph was anticipated by Bell employee Granville T. Woods' "multiplex" system; the so-called "Edison Effect," the observed emission of electrons from a hot filament, was actually discovered by an Edison engineer named William J. Hammer (1883); the carbon filament light bulb was originally invented by one of "Edison's Pioneers," Lewis Latimer; the wax cylinder phonograph was first patented by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter (1886), whose offer of a joint venture Edison spurned; the disc "gramophone" was first patented by Emile Berliner (1887); the film camera was invented by Edison's colleague William Dickson; and without George Eastman's cinematic film, "Edison's" movie camera might have remained a curiosity. In fact, Edison lost more patent lawsuits than he won.

But Samuel Morse did not invent the telegraph, nor Henry Ford the automobile. Like these men, Edison was a great improver, implementer, and entrepreneur --- as well as an inspired inventor. Although it may be argued to what degree Edison achieved his lofty goal "to do everything within my power to free the people from drudgery, and create the largest measure of happiness and prosperity," there is no doubt that his inventions transformed the everyday lives of people all over the world.

By the volume, variety and spectacularity of his inventions, Edison more than any other person made it seem like no miracle was beyond the reach of modern American technology. As an inspiration to aspiring engineers and inventors, then as now, Edison is peerless. Indeed, above all others, as his Congressional Medal of Honor declared: "He illuminated the path of progress by his inventions."

*The first two images above are from the Library of Congress Archives.

Other biographies of Edison can be found on-line at:

http://learning.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edbiohm.html

http://www.minot.k12.nd.us/mps/edison/edison/edison.html

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