Thomas Edison
In 1862, a fifteen-year-old Thomas Edison stood on the tracks near Port Huron, Michigan. He watched a runaway train approach three children who could not move fast enough to escape. Edison grabbed the smallest child and pulled him to safety just before the wheels crushed the spot where they had been standing. The grateful father offered to teach the boy how to operate a telegraph machine as payment for saving his life.
This single act launched a career that would reshape the modern world. Edison grew up in Milan, Ohio, but moved with his family to Port Huron in 1854. His mother Nancy taught him reading and arithmetic at home after he attended school for only a few months. He read A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and began tinkering with electricity on his own. By age twelve, he developed hearing problems attributed to scarlet fever and recurring middle-ear infections. He became completely deaf in one ear and barely heard out of the other.
Edison later claimed his deafness helped him concentrate better by blocking out distractions. He listened to music by clamping his teeth into wooden furniture to feel vibrations travel through his skull. This physical connection allowed him to experience sound without relying on his damaged ears. He worked as a news butcher selling newspapers and candy on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit. At thirteen, he earned fifty dollars a week, which he spent mostly on buying equipment for electrical experiments.
In 1876, Edison established a laboratory facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The building sat within Raritan Township and was funded by money from the sale of his quadruplex telegraph system. He hired employees who worked eighteen hours per day from Monday through Friday plus additional time on weekends. One worker described the environment as reaching the limits of human exhaustion.
Edison demanded that his staff carry out his directions while conducting research. His name appears on 1,093 patents, though many inventions were made largely by those working under him. He litigated frequently and employed several patent lawyers to challenge intellectual property rights of contemporaries. The lab expanded to occupy two city blocks within just over a decade.
He stocked the facility with almost every conceivable material available at the time. By 1887, the inventory included eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every size of needle, hair from humans and horses, shark teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell, ostrich feathers, peacock tails, jet, amber, rubber, and all ores. Edison strictly regulated employee work and efficiency while trying many experiments himself. He shut down public and reporter access to the laboratory to control his image.
In December 1877, Edison demonstrated an invention that recorded sound onto tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. The device played back the recording when the cylinder rotated backward against a stylus. Public reaction was so intense that people called it magical. Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Sciences, described Edison as the most ingenious inventor in any country.
Despite early success, Edison did little to develop the phonograph until competitors like Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Tainter produced wax-coated cardboard cylinders in the 1880s. In 1887, he founded the Edison Phonograph Company to compete with them. Jesse Lippincott offered simultaneous deals to Edison, Gilliland, and Bell to form a monopoly but obfuscated their roles through Edison's personal attorney.
When Edison discovered the scheme, he became infuriated and the venture ran out of money before getting a product to market. After five years of litigation, Edison assumed total control of the company. The principal technical issue remained getting the recording material durable enough for prolonged use without wearing out the needle. By 1900, the phonograph sold for ten dollars and buyers could select from three thousand different musical records.
On the 4th of November 1879, Edison filed for U.S. patent 223,898 for an electric lamp using a carbon filament coiled and connected to platina contact wires. He tested many materials including hemp, palmetto, and grasses before settling on bamboo as the best filament. This carbonized bamboo filament lasted over twelve hundred hours after several months of experimentation.
Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company with financiers like J.P. Morgan and Spencer Trask. On the 4th of September 1882, his sixty-kilowatt cogeneration steam-powered generating station at Pearl Street in New York City switched on. It provided one hundred ten volts direct current to nine hundred forty-six customers. Subscriptions quickly grew to five hundred eight customers with ten thousand one hundred sixty-four lamps.
Alternating current systems developed by Westinghouse offered advantages for long-distance transmission. Edison expressed views that alternating current was unworkable and dangerous. George Westinghouse installed his first AC systems in 1886 while Edison struck out personally against him stating that Westinghouse would kill a customer within six months. Public furor over deaths caused by high voltage lines turned into a media frenzy against alternating current.
Starting in 1880, Edison Ore Milling Company began separating iron from beach sand using magnets. The operation shut down after three years because only one customer received their ore despite promises to deliver hundreds of tons monthly. William Kennedy Dickson and John Birkinbine helped lead the venture while Batchelor and Insull provided capital.
Edison purchased mines in eastern states and constructed a new centralized mining operation in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. He used rollers and crushers that pulverized five-ton rocks. A seventy-ton electrically powered roller rotated at three thousand five hundred feet per minute. The system removed phosphorus with a light pneumatic system since customers rejected iron with significant phosphorus content.
Economic forces dictated that iron ore be mixed into briquettes for transport. The mine lost money rapidly and the United States entered a severe recession in 1893. Edison took a loan from his father-in-law to stay solvent. In 1901, he visited an industrial exhibition in Sudbury, Ontario, and discovered the Falconbridge ore body. His attempts to mine it failed and he abandoned the claim in 1903.
In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope peep-hole viewer installed in penny arcades where people watched short films. The first successful tests appeared publicly on the 20th of May 1891. Customers who watched the final round of the Leonard-Cushing fight saw Leonard score a knockdown. Each one-minute round cost exhibitors twenty-two dollars fifty cents.
By 1895, Dickson began setting up business separate from Edison due to disagreements between them. The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at fairs early that year. Edison's film studio made nearly twelve hundred films including titles like Fred Ott's Sneeze and The Great Train Robbery. Competing exhibitors routinely copied and exhibited each other's films.
In 1908, Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios known as the Edison Trust. Movies used live actors and bands to add sound starting in 1913. Edison fired Edwin S. Porter for unclear reasons since technical aspects were mostly solved but storytelling did not capture his interest. He said talkies had spoiled everything because they concentrated on voice rather than acting.
On the 25th of December 1871, Edison married sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell whom he met two months earlier while she worked at one of his shops. They had three children: Marion Estelle Edison nicknamed Dot, Thomas Alva Edison Jr. nicknamed Dash, and William Leslie Edison. Edison generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family.
Mary Edison died at age twenty-nine on the 9th of August 1884 from unknown causes possibly involving a brain tumor or morphine overdose. Doctors frequently prescribed morphine to women at this time to treat various conditions. Thomas Jr. became involved in snake oil products and shady enterprises producing items sold as The Latest Edison Discovery. The situation became so bad that Thomas Sr. took his son to court to stop the practices.
Edison married Mina Miller on the 24th of February 1886, in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of inventor Lewis Miller who made wealth selling wheat mowers. They had three children including Charles Edison who later served as Governor of New Jersey. Madeleine stated she had few childhood memories of her father since he was typically only home once a week during her childhood.
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Common questions
When did Thomas Edison save three children from a runaway train near Port Huron Michigan?
Thomas Edison saved the children in 1862 when he was fifteen years old. He pulled one child to safety just before the wheels crushed the spot where they had been standing.
What invention did Thomas Edison demonstrate in December 1877 that recorded sound onto tinfoil?
Edison demonstrated an invention that recorded sound onto tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder in December 1877. The device played back the recording when the cylinder rotated backward against a stylus.
On what date did Thomas Edison file for U.S. patent 223,898 for an electric lamp using a carbon filament?
Thomas Edison filed for U.S. patent 223,898 on the 4th of November 1879. He tested many materials including hemp palmetto and grasses before settling on bamboo as the best filament which lasted over twelve hundred hours.
Where did Thomas Edison establish his laboratory facility in 1876 and how much did it cost to operate?
Edison established a laboratory facility in Menlo Park New Jersey within Raritan Township in 1876. Employees worked eighteen hours per day from Monday through Friday plus additional time on weekends while the building was funded by money from the sale of his quadruplex telegraph system.
When did Thomas Edison build a Kinetoscope peep-hole viewer installed in penny arcades where people watched short films?
Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope peep-hole viewer installed in penny arcades where people watched short films starting in 1891. The first successful tests appeared publicly on the 20th of May 1891 when customers saw Leonard score a knockdown during the final round of the Leonard-Cushing fight.