Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the seventh and youngest child of Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliott. The family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, when he was seven. Scarlet fever and ear infections left him nearly deaf by early adolescence. He received almost no formal schooling — his mother, a former teacher, educated him at home. At age 12 he began selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railway line, setting up a printing press in the baggage car to publish his own four-page newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald — the first newspaper printed on a moving train. He learned telegraphy, the dominant communications technology of the mid-nineteenth century, from a station master in Port Huron and became an itinerant telegrapher across the Midwest and South between 1863 and 1868. In Boston in 1868, he patented his first invention: an electric vote recorder. He moved to New York City in 1869, broke, and quickly demonstrated his genius for both invention and self-promotion by improving the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company's stock ticker. The company paid him $40,000 — an enormous sum — for the improved design. With that , he established an industrial research facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, the first institution of its kind: a factory for invention, staffed by machinists, chemists, and mathematicians working under his direction on a structured commercial basis. In 1877 he invented the phonograph, the first device capable of recording and reproducing sound. The demonstration of the phonograph in the offices of Scientific American in November 1877 caused a sensation; within weeks Edison was celebrated as the Wizard of Menlo Park. He turned next to the problem of electric lighting. After 14 months of systematic testing — more than 3,000 combinations of materials for a practical filament — Edison demonstrated a working, long-lasting incandescent light bulb on 21 October 1879, using a carbonized cotton thread filament in a high-vacuum glass globe. The achievement was only half the work: Edison then designed and built the entire electrical infrastructure to make the bulb useful. He developed generators, distribution cables, junction boxes, meters, and switches, and on 4 September 1882, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York energized the Pearl Street Station, lighting 882 bulbs in 25 buildings in lower Manhattan — the world's first permanent investor-owned electric utility. He opened a larger laboratory complex at West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887. There he developed the kinetoscope, an early motion picture viewer (1891), and improved the phonograph with a wax cylinder recording. His work on an improved storage battery for electric vehicles occupied more than a decade of effort. The War of Currents — the commercial conflict over whether direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC) would become the power grid standard — became public and increasingly bitter in the late 1880s. Edison championed DC; his former employee Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse backed AC. The higher efficiency of AC for long-distance transmission ultimately prevailed, though Edison's DC systems held on in Manhattan until 2007. He was married twice: to Mary Stilwell in 1871, who died in 1884, and to Mina Miller in 1886. He died at his estate Glenmont in West Orange, New Jersey, on 18 October 1931, aged 84. The lights of Times Square were dimmed in tribute.

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