Thomas Edison

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Edison kept his own deafness a mystery, inventing elaborate false stories about how he lost his hearing. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other. To enjoy a piano or a music player, he clamped his teeth into the wood and let the sound waves travel through his skull into his bones. He came to believe this loss was a gift. It blocked out distraction and let him concentrate. From that strange, silent vantage point came the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and an early electric light bulb, devices that reshaped the modern industrialized world. He registered 1,093 US patents over a lifetime that ran from the 11th of February 1847 to the 18th of October 1931. But how did a boy who attended school for only a few months become known as the Wizard of Menlo Park? Who actually invented the machines that carry his name? And why did a man so synonymous with electric light wage open war against the very current that powers the world today?

• 2. The Self-Taught Boy

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  Nancy Matthews Elliott, a former school teacher, taught her son reading, writing, and arithmetic at home in Port Huron, Michigan, after the family moved there in 1854. The young Edison attended formal school for only a few months. He was a curious child who learned most of what he knew by reading on his own. A book his mother gave him, A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, set him tinkering with electricity. His parents also kept a set of books by Thomas Paine, whose ideas would shape his thinking for the rest of his life.

  By age 13, Edison was turning a profit of fifty dollars a week as a news butcher, selling newspapers, candy, and vegetables on the trains that ran from Port Huron to Detroit. Most of that money went straight into equipment for electrical and chemical experiments. He founded a paper called the Grand Trunk Herald, which gathered five hundred subscribers and let him hire at least two assistants. The paper ran only twenty-four issues. He was so proud of it that he hung a frame holding the first issue in his home until the day he died.

  At age 15, in 1862, Edison pulled a child from the path of a runaway train. The grateful father trained him as a telegraph operator in thanks. He soon took a night job as a telegrapher for the Grand Trunk Railway at Stratford Junction, Ontario. There he studied chemistry and conducted experiments on the job, and once negligently slept through his shift. Two trains nearly collided as a result, and Edison resigned. His next chapter would turn that telegraph key into the foundation of a fortune.

• 3. From Telegraph Key To Laboratory

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  From 1863 to 1869, Edison worked night-shift telegraphy jobs across Ontario, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Massachusetts. As an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press news wire. In Cincinnati he lived with Ezra Gilliland, a friendship that lasted twenty-five years. He earned a reputation among the young male operators as bright and willing to try new things, though his tinkering sometimes interfered with the work.

  In Boston, between 1867 and 1869, Edison earned some money inventing a stock ticker for local customers but lost it trying to expand to New York. His first patent, granted on the 1st of June 1869, was for an electric vote recorder. A fellow telegrapher named Franklin Leonard Pope let the impoverished young man live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey, home. Pope and Edison founded their own company in October 1869, hiring fifty employees within months and opening a larger shop in Newark.

  In 1874, Edison received thirty thousand dollars for inventing the first telegraph that could send four messages at once down a single wire. He had enrolled briefly in a chemistry course at The Cooper Union to support his work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor. It appears to have been his only enrollment at any institution of higher learning. With the proceeds of that quadruplex telegraph, he built something new in 1876, a place where invention itself could be manufactured.

• 4. The Invention Factory

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  Menlo Park, New Jersey, became the first industrial laboratory built to create knowledge and then control how it was applied. Edison drove his staff hard, often working eighteen hours a day Monday through Friday and adding hours on Saturday and Sunday. One employee described the work as reaching the limits of human exhaustion. As the leader, Edison took credit for inventions made in large part by those working under him.

  Edison wanted the lab stocked with almost every conceivable material. By 1887 it held eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, plus hair from humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, and camels. The inventory ran on to shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, and all manner of ores. In just over a decade the laboratory grew to occupy two city blocks.

  The phonograph, completed in 1877, first brought Edison wide notice. His machine recorded sound onto tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. The recordings played back only a few times and sounded crude, yet they made him a celebrity. The effect seemed almost magical to the public, and the press crowned him the Wizard of Menlo Park. As he aged he came to resent being called a genius. He preferred to say invention was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

  Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Sciences, called Edison the most ingenious inventor in this country or in any other. Edison demonstrated the phonograph before that academy in April 1878. Yet he did little to develop it until Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter produced a rival device using wax-coated cardboard cylinders in the 1880s. That competition would soon poison one of his closest friendships.

• 5. The Light And The Grid

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  In 1878, Edison set out to build a system of electrical illumination that could compete with gas and oil lighting on a commercial scale. The hard part was a durable, low-resistance incandescent lamp. Earlier inventors had built bulbs, but they burned out fast or demanded too much current. Edison tried a filament of cardboard carbonized with compressed lampblack, then experimented with hemp, palmetto, and other canes before settling on bamboo.

  On the 4th of November 1879, Edison filed for U.S. patent 223,898, granted on the 27th of January 1880, for a lamp using a coiled carbon filament connected to platinum contact wires. Several months after the grant, he and Batchelor discovered a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1,200 hours. That high-resistance filament led Edison to choose the 110-volt standard still used in the United States. He formed the Edison Electric Light Company with financiers including J. P. Morgan, Spencer Trask, and members of the Vanderbilt family.

  Francis Robbins Upton, a former student of Hermann von Helmholtz, joined Edison in 1878 and received five percent of company profits, eventually becoming general manager. John Ott made many of the mechanical improvements Edison suggested, and his brother Fred worked as an experimental assistant for fifty-seven years. Henry Villard, president of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, was so impressed by an 1879 demonstration that he had Edison install lighting aboard the steamship Columbia, the first commercial use of the incandescent bulb.

  On the 4th of September 1882, Edison switched on his Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, a 600-kilowatt steam-powered plant feeding 110 volts of direct current to 946 customers. The light was so steady and so like gas that few noticed the change. Subscriptions grew to 508 customers and 10,164 lamps. To reduce the enormous amount of copper wire the grid demanded, Edison invented the three-prong wire system. But a rival current was already spreading through the streets.

• 6. The War Of The Currents

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  George Westinghouse installed his first alternating current systems in 1886, and Edison struck back at his chief rival in personal terms. Just as certain as death, he said, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. Alternating current could travel long distances over thin, cheap wires and then step down its voltage for homes and small businesses. Edison's direct current could not reach customers more than a mile from the plant, leaving small towns and rural areas unserved.

  By the end of 1887, Westinghouse had built sixty-eight AC power stations against Edison's 121 DC stations, and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts, had built twenty-two more. The primary reason for Edison's resistance was practical. His company had built its design on low-voltage DC, and switching the standard after installing over a hundred systems was, in his mind, out of the question.

  A series of deaths in the spring of 1888 from pole-mounted high-voltage AC lines turned the public against the technology. Edison seized the moment, joining self-styled crusader Harold P. Brown to publicly electrocute animals with AC and to push legislation limiting it. The campaign helped develop the electric chair, engineered so the first one would be powered by a Westinghouse generator in an effort to brand AC as the deadlier current.

  Edison was already losing control of his own company. The 1889 merger that formed Edison General Electric stripped him of majority control. In 1892, Villard and J. P. Morgan engineered a merger with the Thomson-Houston Company. Morgan judged Thomson-Houston the more valuable firm, ousted Villard, and put its board in charge of the new General Electric. Publicly Edison noted his stock had gained value, but privately he was bitter that his patents had passed to the competition. He served as a figurehead director before selling his shares and turning to iron.

• 7. Iron, Cement, And Rubber

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  High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast, and Edison set out in 1880 to extract iron from low-grade ore and beach sand using magnets. The Edison Ore Milling Company promised hundreds of tons a month, but after three years only one customer had received any ore. He pressed on, building a centralized operation in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, where rollers and crushers pulverized five-ton boulders. He bought the largest steam shovel in America, and an array of 480 electromagnets pulled iron from the crushed fines. By 1893, with a severe recession and falling iron prices, Edison was near insolvency and took a loan from his father-in-law.

  Waste sand from that failed venture became the seed of a new one. In 1899, Edison founded the Edison Portland Cement Company. He designed horizontal kilns 150 feet long that baked cement at a lower temperature for longer, saving coal and labor. He later licensed the system and collected royalties into the 1920s. He even commissioned a mold to cast a whole three-story house from cement in a single pour, building employee housing, though demand never followed.

  Rubber became his last great chemical hunt. In 1915, the United States consumed seventy-five percent of the world's rubber while producing almost none. Edison, Ford, and Firestone funded a laboratory with seventy-five thousand dollars to find a native source. After testing seventeen thousand plant samples, Edison settled on goldenrod. Near the end of 1929 he announced that Leavenworth's goldenrod could be bred to yield twelve percent latex. He chose it by weighing latex content, extraction difficulty, and growth speed against every rejected plant.

• 8. Moving Pictures And Final Years

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  William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, an employee at the mine who was also a photographer, joined Edison in 1888 to build a camera meant to do for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear. Edison handled the electromechanical parts while Dickson led the optical and film work. A prototype using 19-millimeter film produced the first successful public tests on the 20th of May 1891. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson, though Edison was granted the patent for the camera, the Kinetograph, in 1897.

  Edison's film studio made nearly 1,200 productions, most of them short films of acrobats, parades, and fire calls. Titles included Fred Ott's Sneeze, The Kiss, The Great Train Robbery, an early Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the first Frankenstein film of 1910. Edwin S. Porter ran the creative side until Edison fired him in 1914. To protect his copyrights, Edison deposited prints on long strips of photographic paper with the copyright office, and many of those paper prints outlasted the original films. In 1908 he formed the Motion Picture Patents Company, a conglomerate of nine studios known as the Edison Trust.

  Edison said his favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation, and his favorite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. He thought talkies had spoiled everything. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act, he said. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf.

  Henry Ford lived a few hundred feet from Edison at their winter retreats in Fort Myers, and the two remained friends until the end. From 1914 to 1924 they took annual motor camping trips with Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs, a moving advertisement trailed by reporters. In 1926, at age 79, Edison handed the presidency of his company to his son Charles. Active to the last, he sat at the throttle of the first electric multiple-unit train to leave Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken in September 1930, driving it the first mile himself. Edison died on the 18th of October 1931 at his West Orange home, Glenmont. His last breath is kept in a test tube at the Henry Ford museum near Detroit, sealed there by Charles as a tribute to his father's love of chemistry and his friendship with Ford.