Thomas Alva Edison

American inventor

• Born: February 11, 1847
• Birthplace: Milan, Ohio
• Died: October 18, 1931
• Place of death: West Orange, New Jersey

Edison was perhaps the greatest inventor in world history. His incandescent electric lights transformed electrical technology; his myriad other inventions included a stock ticker, duplex and quadraplex telegraphs, the phonograph, a telephone transmitter, the motion-picture camera, and the storage battery. He symbolized the ingenious, prolific, heroic, and professional American inventor in an age of invention, innovation, and industrialization.

Early Life

Thomas Alva Edison grew up in the midwestern industrial heartland of the United States during his country’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial nation. The seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy (née Elliot) Edison, he was reared in Port Huron, Michigan, near Detroit. He found formal schooling disagreeable, so his mother, a former teacher, tutored young Tom at home. Gifted with a natural inquisitiveness, a love of science and experimentation, and access to the Detroit Free Library, he largely educated himself.

As a teenager, Edison worked, first selling newspapers and candy on the train between Port Huron and Detroit and later as a telegraph operator in the Midwest. In both jobs he managed to find time to perform various chemical and electrical experiments and to continue his lifetime reading habit. By 1868, he had moved to Boston, where he came under the intellectual influence so strong in that city at the time. There his reading of Michael Faraday’s work on electricity, with its heavy emphasis on experimentation and conceptualization of physical models, strengthened his own strong preference for applied science with its testing of hypotheses, its pragmatic approach to problems, and its interest in practical application. Inventing for profit became a goal for Edison as he directed his genius toward the industrial and economic climate of post-Civil War America.

Seeking fame and fortune, Edison moved New York City in 1869, having neither a job nor money. A combination of luck and acumen at the Law’s Gold Indicator Company resulted in his appointment as plant superintendent. Edison’s working in Wall Street during an age of enterprise provided him with the basis for his first commercially successful invention, an improved stock ticker. His additional improvements of stock ticker technology brought Edison forty thousand dollars for his patent rights, a princely sum in 1870. With a small fortune and some fame, Edison turned to electrical technology, an arena that consumed much of his life’s work.

Life’s Work

Like so many of his fellow pioneers in the world of electrical invention, Edison was well versed in telegraphy. His many years as a first-rate telegraph operator, his familiarity with electrical devices and experiments, and his vision of an industrial and urban America directed his various endeavors. In the period from 1872 to 1874, he turned his attention to duplex and quadruplex telegraphy, the process of sending two or four simultaneous signals, respectively, over a single wire. His commercial success with these two processes led him to improvements with the telephone, itself a special type of telegraph.

In 1876, Edison sought and found a more efficient transmitter for the telephone. His carbon button device in the mouthpiece provided a stronger signal that would travel farther on transmission lines. With this success, he demonstrated his legendary ability to improve existing inventions. In this same year, he moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and established a research and development laboratory complete with support personnel and several workshops. Edison realized the central role of systematic inquiry for new enterprises, and Menlo Park became the prototype for the industrial research laboratories that have been so important for innovation in a technological society.

The phonograph was another Edison invention with its origins in telegraphy. The embossed paper tape that recorded the dots and dashes of telegraph messages gave off a musical sound when Edison moved the tape quickly through a repeater mechanism. From this stimulus he devised a tin-foil-covered cylinder that would record vibrations of sound entered through a recording diaphragm. A quickly conceived idea became a patented reality in 1877, although the phonograph required substantial modification before it became a commercial success. Edison’s ability to invent a “talking machine” enhanced his reputation as a genius. His most prolific years of work on the phonograph came in the period 1887–90, when he developed the wax-coated flat record and separate recording and playback components.

Success with the early phonograph led Edison to another challenge in the world of electricity: an incandescent electric lighting system. From 1878 to 1882, he and his Menlo Park staff devoted much of their time to the invention and innovation of a system that would subdivide the electric arc light. In this task, Edison was an entrepreneur as well as a pioneer developer of a new technology. He used the full resources of the Menlo Park laboratory and workshops to attack the problems of incandescent lighting and to seek commercially successful solutions to those problems, which required many painstaking hours of research and development; he relied on the best talent in Menlo Park, the scientific method of inquiry, and the systematic empirical approach to problem solving.

When Edison began his quest to provide a workable lighting system, he built on an awareness of arc lighting developments and on the achievements of other inventors seeking an incandescent system. He realized that he needed a high resistance lamp filament that would burn for several hours; an efficient generator; a distribution network with wires, switches, meters, and fuses; and a central power station. A heavy reliance on a skilled and knowledgeable staff provided the successful lighting elements: a carbonized cotton filament, the “long legged Mary Ann” generator, and the prototype Pearl Street central station. He set his sights on the marketplace, used the familiar terminology and methods of gas illumination in his system, and displayed his entrepreneurial talents by promoting his own system, a promotion helped greatly by his reputation as an inventive genius (a reputation which Edison made no attempt to dispel). So successful was he in this enterprise that to generations of Americans, Thomas Edison was the inventor of the electric light.

Although Edison’s business acumen was greater than most people believed, his chief interest was not the ledger book, and he soon tired of the business of electric lighting and turned to other areas of invention. By 1892, the Edison General Electric companies became part of a larger conglomerate known simply as the General Electric Company. With his name no longer associated with the operation, Edison lost interest in electric lighting developments and sold his stock in General Electric. He now had millions of dollars to use for new inventive challenges.

By 1887, Edison had moved his laboratories to West Orange, New Jersey, in a more extensive physical plant. With this move, he could engage in the same large-scale invention and innovation as he did during the 1880s and 1890s, but with two major projects: the motion-picture camera and a magnetic ore separation process. The former was a commercial success; the latter was an economic disaster.

Although he began his work on the motion-picture camera in 1887, Edison performed most of the developmental work on it in the years from 1889 to 1891. His invention of a camera that took a series of still photographs in rapid succession resulted from mechanical insight rather than any electrical or chemical knowledge that was so important in almost all of his other inventions. That he could successfully devise a practical motion-picture camera through the strength of his mechanical ability attests his inventive talent.

From 1894 to 1899, Thomas Edison devoted his attention to another chiefly nonelectrical project: magnetic ore separation. Sensing that a market for low-grade Eastern iron ore existed if it could be extracted cheaply, he invested several years and millions of dollars in creating huge ore-crushing machines. These machines would pulverize the ore deposits, and the resulting powder would pass by electromagnets that separated the ore from the dross. Although a technical success, the process never could compete with the low-cost ores of the Mesabi range; Edison found himself deeply in debt by 1900 and finally abandoned the scheme.

At the turn of the century, Edison returned to electrical technology with his invention of a durable storage battery. From 1899 to 1909, he and his West Orange technical staff developed an alkaline-iron-nickel storage battery as an improvement over the widely used lead-acid battery. Edison envisioned this lighter, more durable battery for use in the growing automobile industry, especially in electric cars. By the time Edison had a commercially successful battery available in 1909, however, electric cars had lost favor with the public, which preferred the vehicles powered by internal combustion engines that were being promoted by men such as Henry Ford. The Edison battery proved unreliable for intermittent automobile uses, was ineffective in cold temperatures, and never replaced the lead-acid storage battery in motor car applications. Edison’s battery did find successful use in marine and railroad applications that required a durable, long-lived battery.

The storage battery was Edison’s last major invention. In 1914, a fire destroyed most of the West Orange laboratories; World War I diverted his attention as he served as chairman of the Naval Consulting Board to direct the nation’s inventive talent into the war effort. As he grew older, Edison spent the winter months at his home in Fort Myers, Florida, and established a modest laboratory there. In 1927, he began work trying to create artificial rubber but did not complete that endeavor. His fertile mind was active until his death at West Orange, New Jersey, on October 18, 1931.

Significance

With the death of Thomas Alva Edison, the United States lost a legendary and heroic inventor. The example of his life and personality—simplicity, pragmatism, hard work, and self-education, linked to inventive genius—appealed to the egalitarian spirit of Americans in an age of enterprise. Edison was a self-made man whose mental capacity, ambition, and dedication brought him success in the tradition of the American spirit of private enterprise. In an age of invention and industrialism, he stood as a symbol of the modern spirit in the United States with his contributions of electrical inventions and innovations: duplex and quadraplex telegraphy, incandescent lighting, telephone transmitter, phonograph, motion-picture camera, and storage battery. These contributions alone guarantee his place among great Americans.

Thomas Edison the heroic inventor is as much myth as reality. His strong determination to conquer a problem or task and his ability to work long hours in his laboratory are characteristic of the lone inventor, but Edison was much more complex than might be suggested by the familiar image of the simple genius at work alone. He was among the foremost professional American inventors. His success was a result in large measure of his prescience about changes in an urban, industrial America and the need for new technological systems to serve that new society.

Edison’s technique matched his vision; he excelled at improving on existing designs, assessing the commercial potential of a device. He also relied heavily on a systematic and rational approach to invention and innovation and on a highly trained staff, as his Menlo Park and West Orange laboratory complexes attest. Edison’s early use of the industrial research laboratory provided a model for American industry in the twentieth century. Further, Edison’s talent for understanding complex processes, for seeing the need for technological systems, and for focusing on practical application mark him as a highly organized professional who was a pioneer inventor-innovator and entrepreneur. Just as his image as a heroic inventor appealed to the average American of his time, so his success as a professional inventor who held nearly eleven hundred patents should appeal to students of American technological, social, and economic history.

Bibliography

Baldwin, Neil. Edison: Inventing the Century. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print.

Conot, Robert. A Streak of Luck. New York: Seaview Books, 1979. Print.

Dyer, Frank Lewis, and Thomas Commerford Martin. Edison: His Life and Inventions. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910.Print.

Israel, Paul. Edison: A Life of Invention. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. Print.

Jehl, Francis. Menlo Park Reminiscences. 3 vols. Detroit: Edison Institute, 1936. Print.

Jenkins, Reese V. “Elements of Style: Continuities in Edison’s Thinking.” In Bridge to the Future: A Centennial Celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge, edited by Margaret Latimer, Brooke Hindle, and Melvin Kranzberg. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1984. Print.

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

Josephson, Matthew. Edison: A Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Print.