Thomas Alva Edison: biography and photos

Thomas Alva Edison (pictured below in the article) is an American inventor who registered a record 1093 patents. He also created the first industrial research laboratory.

Thomas Alva Edison - who is this?

Beginning his career in 1863 as a teenager on a telegraph, when almost the only source of electricity was a primitive battery, until his death in 1931 he was engaged in the approach of an electricity era. From his laboratories and workshops came out a phonograph, a coal capsule of a microphone, incandescent lamps, a revolutionary generator of unprecedented efficiency, the first commercial lighting and power supply system, an experimental electrified railway, the main elements of cinematographic equipment and many other inventions.

Short biography of young years

Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11.02.1847 in Mailen, Ohio, in the family of Samuel Edison and Nancy Eliot. Parents fled to the US from Canada after the father's participation in the Mackenzie uprising in 1837. When the boy turned 7, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Thomas Alva Edison, the youngest of seven children, lived here until, at the age of sixteen, he began an independent life. At school he studied very little, only a few months. Reading, writing and arithmetic was taught by his mother-teacher. He was always a very inquisitive child and was drawn to knowledge himself.

Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood reading a lot, and the sources of his inspiration were the books School of Natural Philosophy by R. Parker and Cooper Union for the Promotion of Science and Arts. The desire for self-improvement remained with him throughout his life.

Alva started working at an early age, like most children of that time. At 13 he got a job as a seller of newspapers and sweets on the local railway linking Port Huron to Detroit. Most of his free time he devoted to reading scientific and technical books, and also took the opportunity to learn how to work on a telegraph. By the age of 16, Edison was already experienced enough to work full time as a telegraph operator.

First invention

The development of the telegraph was the first step in the communication revolution, and in the second half of the 19th century it grew at a tremendous rate. This gave Edison and his colleagues the opportunity to travel, see the country and gain experience. Alva worked in a number of cities throughout the United States, before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his profession of telegraphist to the inventor. He patented an electric voting recorder - a device intended for use in elective bodies, such as Congress, to expedite this procedure. The invention became a commercial failure. Edison decided that in the future he would come up with only things in the public demand of which he would be fully confident.

Thomas Alva Edison: biography of the inventor

In 1869, he moved to New York, where he continued work on improvements in the telegraph and created his first successful device - the stock exchange "Universal Stock Printer". Thomas Alva Edison, whose inventions brought him $ 40,000, in 1871 had the necessary funds to open his first small laboratory and production facilities in Newark, New Jersey. Over the next five years, he invented and made devices that greatly improved the speed and efficiency of the telegraph. Edison also took the time to marry Mary Stilwell and start a family.

In 1876, he sold all his production in Newark and transported his wife, children and employees to the small village of Menlo Park, 40 km to the southwest of New York. Edison built a new object that contained everything necessary for inventive work. This research laboratory was the first of its kind and became a model for later institutions such as Bell Laboratories. It is said that she was his greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the world.

First phonograph

The first great invention in Menlo Park was the Stanial Phonograph. The first machine, which could record and reproduce the sound, produced a furor and brought Edison worldwide fame. With it, he toured the country and in April 1878 was invited to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph to President Rutherford Hayes.

Electric light

The next great enterprise of Edison was the development of a practical incandescent lamp. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and several people already worked on it, even having developed some of its forms. But until this time nothing was created that could be practical for home use.

The merit of Edison is the invention not only of the incandescent lamp, but also of the power supply system, which had everything necessary to be practical, safe and economical. After one and a half years of work, he achieved success when the incandescent lamp, in which a charred thread was used, shone for 13.5 hours.

The first public demonstration of the lighting system took place in December 1879, when it was equipped with the whole complex of laboratories in Menlo Park. The next few years, the inventor devoted to the creation of electricity. In September 1882, the first commercial power plant was launched, located on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, which provided electricity and light to customers in an area of one square mile. Thus began the era of electricity.

Edison General Electric

The success of electric lighting led the inventor to fame and fortune, as the new technology quickly spread throughout the world. Electric companies continued to evolve until in 1889 they merged into Edison General Electric. Despite using the name of the inventor in the name of the corporation, he did not control it. The huge amount of capital necessary for the development of the lighting industry required the attraction of investment banks, such as JP Morgan. When in 1892 Edison General Electric merged with its main competitor Thompson-Houston, the name of the inventor was excluded from her name.

Widow and second marriage

Thomas Alva Edison, whose private life in 1884 was marred by the death of his wife Mary, began to devote less time to Menlo Park. And because of his participation in business, he began to visit there even less. Instead, he and his three children - Marion Estelle, Thomas Alva Edison Jr. and William Leslie - lived in New York. A year later, resting at a house of friends in New England, Edison met twenty-year-old Mina Miller and fell in love with her. The wedding took place in February 1886, and the couple moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where the groom bought the Glenmont estate for his bride. The couple lived here until their death.

Laboratory in West Orange

After moving Thomas Alva Edison was engaged in experiments in an improvised workshop at an electric lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage, he decided to build a new laboratory in his own town in West Orange, a mile from his house. By that time, he had the resources and experience to build the most equipped and large laboratory, superior to all others, for fast and inexpensive development of inventions.

A new complex of five buildings was opened in November 1887. In the three-story main building there was a power station, mechanical workshops, warehouses, premises for experiments and a large library. Four smaller buildings, built perpendicular to the main one, housed the physical, chemical and metallurgical laboratories, a sample building workshop and a chemical storage facility. The large size of the complex allowed Edison to work not on one, but on ten or twenty projects at a time. The buildings were built or rebuilt to meet the changing needs of the inventor until his death in 1931. For many years around the laboratory were built factories producing Edison's creations. The whole complex eventually occupied more than 8 hectares, and during the First World War 10,000 people worked there.

Recording Industry

After the opening of the new laboratory, Thomas Alva Edison continued work on the phonograph, but then postponed it, in order to engage in electric lighting at the end of the 1870s. By 1890, he started the production of phonographs for home and commercial use. As with electric light, he developed everything necessary for their operation, including devices for sound reproduction and recording, as well as equipment for their release. At the same time, Edison created an entire recording industry. The development and improvement of the phonograph went on continuously and continued almost until the very death of the inventor.

Cinema

At the same time, Edison began to create a device capable of making for the eyes that the phonograph is for the ears. They became cinema. The inventor demonstrated it in 1891, and in two years the industrial production of "films" started in a tiny film studio built in a laboratory known as "Black Maria".

As in the case of electric lighting and a phonograph, before that, an integral system for the creation and demonstration of motion pictures was developed. Initially, Edison's work in the cinema was innovative and original. However, many people were interested in this new industry and wanted to improve the early cinematographic works of the inventor. Therefore, many contributed to the rapid development of cinema. In the late 1890s, a new industry was already flourishing, and by 1918 it had become so competitive that Edison left the business altogether.

Failure with iron ore

The success of phonographs and movies in the 1890s helped to compensate for the greatest failure in Edison's career. For ten years he worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines in northwestern New Jersey over iron ore mining methods to satisfy the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania metallurgical plants. To finance this work, Edison sold all his shares to General Electric.

Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, he failed to make the process commercially viable, and he lost all his money. This would mean a financial collapse if Edison did not continue to develop the phonograph and the cinema at the same time. Be that as it may, the inventor entered the new century as still financially secure and ready to throw a new challenge.

Alkaline battery

A new challenge for Edison was the development of a battery for use in electric vehicles. The inventor was very fond of cars, and for all his life he was the owner of their many types, working on different sources of energy. Edison believed that electricity for them is the best fuel, but the capacity of conventional lead-acid batteries for this was not enough. In 1899, he began work on an alkaline battery. This project was the most difficult and took ten years. By the time new alkaline batteries were ready, gasoline cars had improved so much that electric cars were used less often, mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, alkaline batteries proved to be useful for lighting railway cars and cabins, sea buoys and miners' lanterns. Unlike iron ore, significant investments were repaid a hundredfold, and the battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product.

Thomas A. Edison Inc.

By 1911, Thomas Alva Edison had developed extensive industrial activities in West Orange. Around the laboratory, numerous factories were built, and the personnel of the complex grew to several thousand people. To better manage the work, Edison assembled all his established companies in one corporation Thomas A. Edison Inc., whose president and chairman he himself became. He was 64 years old, and his role in the company and in life began to change. Edison delegated most of his daily work to others. The laboratory itself was engaged in less original experiments and improved existing products. Although Edison continued to file and receive patents for new inventions, the days of creating new things that change lives and create new industries have been left behind.

Work on the defense

In 1915 Edison was asked to head the Naval Consultative Committee. The United States was approaching participation in the First World War, and the creation of the committee was an attempt to organize the talents of leading scientists and inventors in the country in the interests of the US armed forces. Edison accepted the appointment. The Council did not make a tangible contribution to the final victory, but served as a precedent for the future successful cooperation of scientists, inventors and the US armed forces. During the war, at the age of seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island on a naval ship, experimenting with methods of detecting submarines.

The Golden Jubilee

Thomas Alva Edison from the inventor and industrialist became a cultural icon, a symbol of American enterprise. In 1928, in recognition of his achievements, the US Congress awarded him with a special Medal of Honor. In 1929 the country celebrated the golden jubilee of electric lighting. The culmination of the holiday was a banquet in honor of Edison, who gave Henry Ford in Greenfield Village, a museum of new American history (it completely recreated the laboratory in Menlo Park). Celebrations were visited by President Herbert Hoover and many leading American scientists and inventors.

Replacement for rubber

The last experiments in life Edison did at the request of his good friends Henry Ford and Garvey Firestone in the late 1920's. They wanted to find an alternative source of rubber for use in car tires. Until that time, the production of tires used natural rubber, extracted from a rubber tree, which does not grow in the United States. Raw rubber was imported and became more expensive. With his inherent energy and solidity, Edison tested thousands of different plants to find a suitable replacement, and eventually found that the replacement of rubber could serve as a goldenrod. Work on this project continued until the very death of the inventor.

Last years

During the last two years of Edison's life, his health deteriorated considerably. He spent a lot of time away from the laboratory, instead working at home in Glenmont. Travel to a family villa in Fort Myers in Florida became longer. Edison passed eighty, and he suffered from a number of ailments. In August 1931 he became very ill. Edison's health was steadily deteriorating, and at 3:21 am on October 18, 1931, the great inventor passed away.

In his honor the city in the state of New Jersey, two colleges and many schools are named.