Thomas Edison
(born February 11, 1847,
Milan
,
Ohio
, U.S.?died October 18, 1931,
West Orange
, New Jersey) was an American
inventor
who, singly or jointly, held a world-record 1,093
patents
. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial research
laboratory
.
Edison
was the quintessential American
inventor
in the era of Yankee ingenuity. He began his career in 1863, in the adolescence of the
telegraph
industry, when virtually the only source of electricity was primitive
batteries
putting out a low-voltage
current
. Before he died, in 1931, he had played a critical role in introducing the modern age of
electricity
. From his laboratories and workshops emanated the
phonograph
, the carbon-button transmitter for the
telephone
speaker and
microphone
, the
incandescent lamp
, a revolutionary generator of unprecedented
efficiency
, the first commercial electric light and
power
system, an experimental electric
railroad
, and key elements of
motion-picture apparatus
, as well as a host of other inventions.
Edison was the seventh and last child?the fourth surviving?of Samuel Edison, Jr., and Nancy Elliot Edison. At an early age he developed
hearing
problems, which have been variously attributed but were most likely due to a familial tendency to
mastoiditis
. Whatever the cause, Edison’s
deafness
strongly influenced his behaviour and career, providing the motivation for many of his inventions.
Early years
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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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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Edison moved to
New York City
, where he initially went into partnership with Frank L. Pope, a noted electrical expert, to produce the Edison Universal Stock Printer and other printing telegraphs. Between 1870 and 1875 he worked out of
Newark
,
New Jersey
, and was involved in a variety of partnerships and complex transactions in the fiercely competitive and
convoluted
telegraph industry, which was dominated by the
Western Union Telegraph Company
. As an independent
entrepreneur
he was available to the highest bidder and played both sides against the middle. During this period he worked on improving an automatic telegraph system for Western Union’s rivals. The automatic telegraph, which recorded messages by means of a
chemical reaction
engendered by the electrical transmissions, proved of limited commercial success, but the work advanced Edison’s knowledge of
chemistry
and laid the basis for his development of the electric pen and
mimeograph
, both important devices in the early office
machine
industry, and indirectly led to the discovery of the
phonograph
. Under the
aegis
of Western Union he devised the quadruplex, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire, but railroad baron and
Wall Street
financier
Jay Gould
, Western Union’s bitter rival, snatched the quadruplex from the telegraph company’s grasp in December 1874 by paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds, and stock, one of the larger payments for any invention up to that time. Years of litigation followed.