Thomas Alva Edison
Written in 2002 by Victoria L. Jasztal
1. Biography
"Genius is one percent inspiration
and 99 percent perspiration."
Born on February 11,
1847, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest American inventors. In a time
where people had very little knowledge about electricity, messages were sent
through letters, candles were used for lighting, and telephones had not been
invented yet.
Edison was very
interested in the world around him as a child, yet he was not a strong student.
He was schooled away from his peers at home after being in school and not
paying attention to the teacher. There have been different ideas about why he
was not attentive in class, but he often had infections in his ear. His family
had tried different schools, but his learning was still problematic. His mother
being a schoolteacher, she then decided on educating him exclusively because he
was intelligent.
Edison had many
strong characteristics. He was a child who would try different experiments just
because of his curiosity. He also enjoyed reading. When he was nine, his mother
gave him a book with science experiments and he set up his own laboratory to
test those experiments.
His first job then
came when he was twelve. He sold mainly newspapers and books to passengers
onboard a train of the Grand Trunk Railway. Many different situations occurred
while he was working on the train, one possibly affecting his hearing and the
other situation being where he saved a child’s life. His hearing was possibly affected
when the train conductor grabbed him by the ears one day to keep him from
falling, and he rescued a boy who had been playing out on the train tracks.
Thomas Edison then had offers to become a telegraph operator because the boy’s
father was very grateful that Edison saved his son’s life and worked in that
field.
While working as a
telegraph operator, Edison would continually study electricity. He would sketch
pictures in his notebooks and one day even sketched his plans for a lightbulb. He then came up with several inventions and
desired for each of his inventions to strongly affect the lives of the general
public. He then was led to build his own laboratory, or “invention factory”, in
Menlo Park, New Jersey. Later he built a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey,
which mainly still stands today.
While working in his
laboratories, he came up with his own inventions as well as improving the
inventions of others. He came up with several different inventions, which led
him to his 1,093 patents. As for improving the inventions of others, Alexander
Graham Bell’s telephone had not been fully practical until Edison added a
better microphone where people would be able to communicate farther and more
clearly. Overall, he had several inventions, still strongly impacting our life
today, such as the lightbulb, which uses electricity
rather than gas to carry light.
Edison lived a very
effective life and passed away at the age of eighty-four in 1931. Of his 1,093
patents, several of those patents have made our world the way it is today. When
honoring Edison’s death, people dimmed their lights across the country to
commemorate a man who forever changed the face of the world.
2. Timeline
1847- February 11-
Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio to Samuel and Nancy Edison.
1859- Edison had his
first job as a newsboy on the train of the Grain Trunk Railway in Michigan.
1862- Edison printed
and published the first newspaper to have ever been printed on a moving train.
1862- He also saved
the life of a boy who was playing on the railroad tracks that year, who turned
out being the son of a telegrapher.
1863- In May of this
year, Edison worked as a telegraph operator on the Grand Trunk Railway at
Stratford Junction, Ontario, Canada.
1868- Edison’s first
patented invention was the Electric Vote Recorder, though the general public
did not use this invention.
1869- In October,
Edison became an electrical engineer and established a partnership with
Franklin L. Pope.
1870- He received his
first money for one of his inventions, which was the stock ticker.
1871- Edison assisted
Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter,
in making the first successful working model.
1876- Edison moved
from Newark, New Jersey to his newly constructed laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey,
the first laboratory for organized industrial research.
1877- On April 27 of
this year, Edison applied for patent on the carbon telephone transmitter, which
made communication by telephone practical.
1877- Edison invented
the phonograph on August 12 of this year.
1879- On October 21,
1879, Edison invented the first practical incandescent electric lamp.
1879- The last day of
the year, Thomas Edison gave a public demonstration of his electric lighting
system in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1882- He moved the
first commercial incandescent lamp factory from Menlo Park to Harrison, New
Jersey.
1887- He moved his
laboratory to West Orange, New Jersey, which still mainly stands today.
1891- Edison applied
for patent on the motion picture camera, which included the movement of a
continuous tape-like film.
1894- The first
commercial showing of motion pictures took place, which used Edison’s invention
of the motion picture camera.
1913- Edison
introduced the kinetoscope for talking motion
pictures.
1914- Parts of Thomas
Edison’s great plant in West Orange, New Jersey, was destroyed by fire.
1914- He then
invented the telescribe, which combined the telephone
and the dictating phonograph, allowing the recording of both sides of telephone
messages.
1931- Thomas Alva
Edison passed away in West Orange, New Jersey at the age of eighty-four.
3. Noted Inventions
From ThomasEdison.com
and http://www.tomedison.org/invent.html
1868- Electrical Vote
Recorder- Politicians did not accept Edison’s first invention much because it
was way ahead of its time.
1869- The First
Printing Telegraphs
1877- Phonograph-
This was by far the invention Edison enjoyed most.
1879- Incandescent
Lamp- This was the first commercially practical electric lamp.
1891- Motion Picture Camera-
This is definitely an invention we appreciate, yet talking motion pictures were
not invented until 1912.
1891- Electric
Railway Improvements- Edison made a number of improvements in this year, which
overall made electric railways better for transportation purposes.
1905- Dictating
Machine- This machine let the dictator hear repetitions and make paper scale
corrections.
1907- Universal
Electric Motor- This invention made it possible for dictating machines to be
operated on lighting circuits.
1912- Kinetoscope- The kinetoscope was
also known as the “talking motion picture” and definitely one the inventions we
appreciate now.
1914- Telescribe- The telescribe
combined the telephone and dictating phonograph, permitting the recording of both sides of a phone
conversation.
1917-1918- During
these years, he worked on experiments to improve our country during World War
I, such as locating the positions of guns through sound ranging and detecting
submarines by sound from other moving vessels.
To see all of
Edison’s patents, go here: http://www.tomedison.org/patent.html
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/EDISON_PATENT.html
for info in categories below
4. Phonograph
Thomas Edison’s
phonograph was invented in 1877 and accepted in 1878. The phonograph included a
cardboard cylinder wrapped in tinfoil on a threaded axel. There was a mouthpiece
and a diaphragm connected to a piece that recorded the sound waves on the
tinfoil. To play back the recording, a reproducer would replace the mouthpiece.
The first test for this invention was when Thomas Edison recorded “Mary Had A
Little Lamb” into the mouthpiece, which startled Edison and his work partner
when his voice was played back immediately. His partner at work then tested the
phonograph by recording a message in another language, which proved that the
phonograph could record any message! The phonograph had the ability to record
between 2-4 minutes of audio. Also important, Alexander Graham Bell improved
the phonograph by making the messages clearer.
(http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/EDISON_PHONO.html)
5. Incandescent
Electric Lamp
Definitely an
important invention was Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent electric
lamp. Before this invention, people looked to natural gas and oil lamps to
produce light! Gas companies had become so important in the United States
because there was no competition that provided an alternative way to produce
light.
Thomas Edison was
determined to find the alternative because he was so interested in electricity
and producing light. Natural gas was very expensive. Thomas Edison formed a
natural light company in 1878 and received money for his research. Many people
worked in this company, including a man named Francis Upton because Edison was
far from an expert in understanding theories and mathematics, which were the
keys to the discovery of the first incandescent electric lamp.
The team worked very
hard to invent the first incandescent electric lamp. The team came up with
three thousand different theories and worked with over six thousand different
types of materials. The lamp would consist of a filament (fine heated thread)
in a glass bulb in a vacuum. After trying so many different materials and using
so many different theories, the team got down to just two different materials
for their possible thread.
Eventually Thomas
Edison and the team used a carbonized cotton thread. Working with the
carbonized cotton thread produced the “Edison Effect”, the only truly
scientific method ever behind Edison’s works. The “Edison Effect” was caused by
the flow of electricity from a heated filament across the vacuum to a metal
wire.
The first time the incandescent lamp was
tested, the lighting lasted for thirteen hours before the filament snapped. The
team’s experiment was definitely working by now, yet they needed to supply the
lighting power for a longer time somehow. It turns out that in 1880, Edison
bought two buildings to house a central lighting station. Three years of work
with the two buildings then let the system of lighting be used.
The first system had several limitations,
however. The place the two buildings would bring the lighting to had to be only
a few miles from the buildings. Otherwise, it would not work. Other researchers
improved on this part of the invention, though, later on supplying the lighting
to many more homes and buildings.
6. Motion Pictures
Whenever we watch movies, the person we
should think of is Thomas Alva Edison. Before motion pictures were created,
people would sketch pictures and maybe even sometimes make what we know as
“flip books”. Yet as time went on, photographers thought
about taking a series of pictures in order and then playing the pictures back
in sequence.
Thomas Edison met up with a man named Eadweard Muybridge who was
interested in making motion pictures without sound. To do this, Muybridge set up 700 cameras in sequence to photograph a
trotting horse. The only thing is that all the work Muybridge
did accounted for only one minute of film! Edison then met up with this man to
see what he would think about adding sound to his motion pictures. Edison
thought about the phonograph he had invented and if he could possibly record
sounds on the phonograph to include in the motion pictures.
Muybridge was not really interested because he thought the
recorded sound would not be loud enough for an entire audience of people to
hear. Edison was not discouraged at all and then felt encouraged to rather make
his own machine. Edison installed a cylinder similar to what he put in his
phonograph inside a camera and coated it with a sensitive material. A cylinder
then turned slightly each time a picture was taken.
The photos then were viewed in a viewer that
would show motion. The kinetoscope was not accepted
as a patent until 1897. Around this time George Eastman invented the ordinary
camera for an ordinary person to take photographs, which interested Edison
because he ordered some of this film cut into long strips. Thomas Edison then
recorded his co-worker sneezing and even recorded the sneeze on his phonograph.
He then made several short films, yet the
first film with a plot was called “The Great Train Robbery”, which consisted of
eight scenes.
“I firmly believe that the machine age will
favorably affect the lives of the workers. It is impossible, however, to
promote cast what electricity and invention will make of the world a hundred
years hence…”
Project 1900
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, life was
extremely different from the way it is in the present. This is probably
something you have noticed because you have been learning about Thomas Alva
Edison, a man who forever changed the way we live our lives. Instead of using
electricity the way it is used today, people rarely knew what electricity was.
People looked to natural gas and oil lamps to produce light. The electric
railroad was not as impressive as it is now because Edison had not made
improvements on the railroad until the early 1890s. Photography was not
something every person had access to, and even with the improvements made in
photography around the turn of the century, it was also something rarely known
about. The motion picture camera was still being developed. If it not been for
Edison’s curiosity and interest in electricity, would we be using electricity
as extensively as we are today?
The link( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/1900house/)
The house (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/1900house/house/index.html
)
Go to the link I am
providing here. The link is called “The 1900 House” and shows in present
time how life was in the year 1900. Over four hundred families applied to live
in a house that incorporated different aspects of that time period. The one
family that was chosen to live in that house struggled with resources and found
different ways to spend available time.
To read more about
what had been removed from the house to adapt it to the time period, click on
the section about the house. Click on the links for the different rooms, which
include the front parlor, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. After reading and
discovering about life in the early 1900s, answer the questions below.
v
What are some of the
ways the 1900s family spent their time, considering electricity was not what it
is now?
v What was one of the greatest inventions of the time that
all family members alike enjoyed? What made that item practical?
v
What were the
properties of the coal-fired range?
v
With electricity of
importance in the kitchen now, how have kitchens changed?
v
Most families did not
have refrigeration at the start of the twentieth century because it was
considered a luxury. How did people in that time store their food?
v What were a few items you could order from mail order
companies?
v
What are some things
you may find in a bedroom now that you could not find at the turn of the
century?
v
How difficult do you
think it was without lighting in different areas of the house?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/edison/sfeature/songs/charlestonfoxtrot.ram