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Edison's major innovation was the establishment of an industrial research lab in 1876. It was built in Menlo Park, a part of Raritan Township (now named Edison Township in his honor) in Middlesex County, New Jersey, with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph.
- Overview
- Early years
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847.
When did Thomas Edison die?
Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, in West Orange, New Jersey.
How did Thomas Edison become famous?
Thomas Edison unveiled the phonograph—which reproduced sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus following a groove on a rotating disc—in December 1877. The public’s amazement surrounding this invention was quickly followed by universal acclaim. Edison was projected into worldwide prominence and was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park.
How did Thomas Edison change the world?
In 1854 Samuel Edison became the lighthouse keeper and carpenter on the Fort Gratiot military post near Port Huron, Michigan, where the family lived in a substantial home. Alva, as the inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for five years. He was imaginative and inquisitive, but, because much instruction was by rote and he had difficulty hearing, he was bored and was labeled a misfit. To compensate, he became an avid and omnivorous reader. Edison’s lack of formal schooling was not unusual. At the time of the Civil War the average American had attended school a total of 434 days—little more than two years’ schooling by today’s standards.
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Pop Quiz: 15 Things to Know About the Industrial Revolution
In 1859 Edison quit school and began working as a trainboy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Four years earlier, the Michigan Central had initiated the commercial application of the telegraph by using it to control the movement of its trains, and the Civil War brought a vast expansion of transportation and communication. Edison took advantage of the opportunity to learn telegraphy and in 1863 became an apprentice telegrapher.
Messages received on the initial Morse telegraph were inscribed as a series of dots and dashes on a strip of paper that was decoded and read, so Edison’s partial deafness was no handicap. Receivers were increasingly being equipped with a sounding key, however, enabling telegraphers to “read” messages by the clicks. The transformation of telegraphy to an auditory art left Edison more and more disadvantaged during his six-year career as an itinerant telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada, and New England. Amply supplied with ingenuity and insight, he devoted much of his energy toward improving the inchoate equipment and inventing devices to facilitate some of the tasks that his physical limitations made difficult. By January 1869 he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph (a device capable of transmitting two messages simultaneously on one wire) and a printer, which converted electrical signals to letters, that he abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.
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Nov 9, 2009 · Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor and businessman whose inventions include the phonograph, incandescent light bulb, motion picture camera and alkaline battery. Skip to content Shows This Day...
- A curious young man. Born in Ohio in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan, where he received only brief formal schooling.
- Becoming the Wizard of Menlo Park. In the meantime, Edison had married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, and together they moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876.
- The incandescent light bulb. Edison’s phonograph was groundbreaking, but it was primarily seen as a novelty. He had moved on to another world-changing concept: the incandescent light bulb.
- Waging ‘Current War’ Edison’s inventions led to worldwide fame—and a cutthroat competition over electrical currents. Edison’s systems relied on direct current (DC)—which could only deliver electricity to a large number of buildings in a dense area.
One of the most famous and prolific inventors of all time, Thomas Alva Edison exerted a tremendous influence on modern life, contributing inventions such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the telegraph and telephone.
Apr 2, 2014 · Thomas Edison is credited with inventions such as the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He held over 1,000 patents for his inventions.
