Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman known for his work on the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, electric power distribution and early motion pictures. The merger of the Edison General Electric Company and the competitor Thomson-Houston Electric Company resulted in the formation of General Electric. Edison registered 1,093 patents in the United States.

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, but grew up in Michigan with little formal schooling. He became deaf as a child and learned through books and tinkering. Edison began working at a young age; as a railroad telegrapher, he spent much of his time inventing improvements to telegraph systems. By the age of 22, he had sold a few of his early inventions and moved to New York City to focus on engineering. He had three children with his first wife, Mary, but Edison was neglectful. She died at 29 years old. Edison had troubled relationships with his children for the rest of his life. With the help of friends, the inventor attracted investment and grew his company. By the age of 29, he owned a telegraph recorder factory in Newark with over one hundred employees.

Edison expanded, developing Menlo Park, now considered the first industrial research laboratory. Edison, known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park", drove his staff extremely hard and constantly worked himself and his associates to exhaustion. The inventor also drove up investment and publicity. He rose to international fame with the invention of the phonograph which took many years to turn into a commercial success. He later built a larger research lab in West Orange, New Jersey.

In 1878, Edison began working on an electrical lighting system which he hoped would replace the common gas lamp. Going from electrical light bulb to the modern electric grid took decades of invention, investment, and influence. Edison and his colleagues had the opportunity to get enormously wealthy as they designed and built a nation of light bulbs, generators, and electric distribution systems. Competition with Westinghouse's AC system forced Edison to yield and resulted in the creation of General Electric.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, after the family moved there in 1854. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. Samuel Edison Jr. moved to Vienna, Ontario, before fleeing to Ohio after his involvement in the Rebellion of 1837.

Edison was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, a former school teacher. He attended school for only a few months, but was an inquisitive child who learned most things by reading on his own. Inspired by a copy of A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy given to him by his mother, the young Edison tinkered and learned about electricity. His parents also owned a set of books by Thomas Paine, whose work inspired Edison's thinking throughout his life.

Edison developed hearing problems at the age of 12. Historian Paul Israel attributed the cause of his deafness to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. The young Alva, as he was known at the time, concocted elaborate fictitious stories about the cause of his deafness. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other. As an adult, he believed his hearing loss allowed him to avoid distraction and concentrate more easily on his work.

Edison began his career as a news butcher, selling newspapers, candy, and vegetables on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit. By age 13 he profited about $50 ($1,792 in 2025) weekly. He spent the money on supplies for electrical and chemical experiments. He founded the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers. The paper ran twenty-four issues and was unique in its original coverage of local news. Five hundred people subscribed to the paper, and Edison was able to hire at least two assistants. Edison was proud of his work on the train; he displayed a framed copy of the paper's first issue in his home for the rest of his life.

As a boy, Edison and a neighbor built a small telegraph line. While working on the trains he sat in with various telegraph operators to learn the skill. Edison began working as a telegrapher in a local general store before moving to Stratford Junction, Ontario, where he worked as a night telegrapher for the Grand Trunk Railway. While on the job, he studied qualitative analysis, conducted chemical experiments, and slept. This negligence led to the near collision of two trains, after which he resigned.

From 1863 to 1869, Edison held a succession of night-shift telegraphy positions across Ontario, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Massachusetts. As a Western Union employee, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. In Cincinnati, he lived with Ezra Gilliland. They formed a friendship which lasted 25 years. He joined the National Telegraph Union and wrote for their magazine. He earned a reputation among the other young, male telegraph operators for being bright and trying new things, but on several occasions his tinkering interfered with his work.

In Boston, from 1867 to 1869, Edison made some money from inventing a stock ticker for local customers, but he lost it when he tried to expand the venture to New York. His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, U.S. patent 90,646, which was granted on June 1, 1869.

Edison moved to New York City in 1869. Among his early mentors was Franklin Leonard Pope a fellow telegrapher. He allowed the impoverished young Edison to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey, home while Edison was employed by Samuel Laws at the Gold Indicator Company. Pope and Edison founded their own company in October 1869, working as electrical engineers. Edison attracted wealthy and connected investors. With the money, they hired fifty employees within a few months and opened a larger shop in Newark, New Jersey. The company rented out telegraph lines. To win business, they manufactured machines to record telegraphs and typewriters capable of printing directly to the wire. Edison strictly regulated his employees' productivity while endlessly experimenting.

To support his work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor, Edison enrolled in a chemistry course at the Cooper Union. It was his only enrollment in courses at an institution of higher learning. At the factory, Edison and Batchelor collaborated fervently; their notebooks jointly signed "E&B" contain near-constant experimentation with improvements to the telegraph.

Edison grew the company to a few hundred employees, and in 1874, received $30,000 ($853,676 in 2025) for the quadruplex telegraph, the first device that could simultaneously transmit four messages over a single wire. Until then, Edison had struggled to meet his financial obligations and had narrowly avoided foreclosure on multiple occasions. With the money, Edison invested in the Port Huron street railway, which was owned by his brother William Pitt. He expanded his own business, and he hired his young nephew and father.

In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison established the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. Built in 1876, in Raritan Township (now named Edison Township in his honor) the construction was funded by the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

Edison's name is registered on 1,093 patents in the United States— during his adult life, he averaged a patent once every 10–12 days. As the leader of his laboratory, Edison was credited for inventions made in large part by those working under him. He worked extreme hours and expected those around him to follow suit. This often meant 18 hours per day Monday through Friday and additional work on Saturday and Sunday. One employee described the work as "the limits of human exhaustion." Edison employed several patent lawyers and challenged the intellectual property rights of many contemporaries.

For Edison, big business came with big publicity. He shut down public and reporter access to the laboratory at Menlo Park and tailored his image via interviews. In just over a decade, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material".

In 1876, Edison set out to improve telephones by developing a carbon microphone. Western Union, seeking to compete with Alexander Graham Bell, financed Edison experiments. Edison believed that the weakness in Bell's telephone was the microphone designed by Emile Berliner. Edison iterated many different designs and tested which gave the best sound while ensuring it was loud enough for his deaf ears. His chosen design used two metal plates separated by carbon granules, which varied in electrical resistance in response to the pressure of sound waves. After testing 150 materials, Edison determined that parchment and tinfoil were best suited for constructing the diaphragm, while a specially coated rubber served as the semiconductor.

David Edward Hughes also published a paper on the physics of loose-contact carbon microphones in 1878. He was credited for discovering the semiconductor effect. This angered Edison and caused public controversy, particularly because Hughes acknowledged that he was advised by one of Edison's colleagues.

In 1878, Edison began working on a system of electrical illumination that he could deploy in a large-scale commercial utility, something he hoped could compete with gas and oil-based lighting. Many incandescent lamps had been devised by inventors prior to Edison, but these early bulbs all had flaws that made them difficult to use on a large scale commercially. Such flaws included an extremely short life and the requirement of high electric current for operation. Edison first tried using a filament made of cardboard, carbonized with compressed lampblack, but this burnt out too quickly to provide lasting light. He then experimented with different grasses and canes such as hemp and palmetto before settling on bamboo as the best filament.

He addressed lighting as a system. Edison undertook experimental research involving viewing a mechanical electric generator, planning power distribution, and grand public statements to promote his work. He formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with J.P. Morgan & Co., members of the Vanderbilt family, and other wealthy and connected investors he met through Grosvenor Lowrey.

Edison continued trying to improve this design and on November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires". The patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament, including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways". It was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and Batchelor discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1,200 hours. This high-resistance filament led Edison to select the 110V power source standard in the United States today; this was a much higher voltage than what competitors were using. Many of his employees assisted in carrying out experiments on filaments, manufacturing the glass for the bulbs, and establishing vacuums for the filament to incandesce within. The vacuum was important for extending the life of the bulb by preventing reactions between the filament and gasses in the bulb.

To prove out the distribution and scale of the system, Edison's workers strung light around Menlo Park with wires powering them. By February 1880, spectators were coming to see the "Village of Light". Edison began a parallel construction business to build these systems for small towns around the country in 1883.

Edison hired Francis Robbins Upton, a former student of Hermann von Helmholtz, in 1878. Upton received 5% of the company profits and eventually became the general manager after leading much of the research into electric lighting. He wrote some of Edison's speeches and assisted with hiring decisions. John Ott also worked for Edison; he made many of the mechanical improvements Edison suggested and conducted experiments in Edison's lab. Both men agreed to give Edison credit for most of the patents, but Ott was solely credited for some of the patents on which he worked. Ott's testimony was important for holding up Edison's patent claims. John's brother, Fred, also worked for Edison as an experimental assistant for fifty-seven years.

Starting in the late 1870s, Edison became interested in and involved with mining. High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast, resulting in high costs as ore was usually shipped from the Midwest. He tried to change this by mining low-grade ore and beach sand. Several others had attempted to improve the refining process by using magnets to separate iron from other metals, but none had been able to do so profitably.

The Edison Ore Milling Company began in 1880 with separating iron out of beach sand. Edison made promises to deliver hundreds of tons of ore a month to several customers, but after three years the operation was shut down and only one customer had received their ore. William Kennedy Dickson and John Birkinbine helped lead the venture. Batchelor and Insull provided some of the capital with Edison taking the majority share financed from his own pocket.

Rather than a complete loss, this first mining venture allowed Edison to license some of the technology to more profitable iron producers. The West Orange team continued to iterate on the technology for years and Edison purchased a mine in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania. Birkinbine wanted to use this as a demonstration mine to sell the technology to mine owners, but Edison wanted to take over the mining industry himself. Birkinbine was fired in 1890.

Edison bought several mines in the eastern states and began constructing a new centralized mining operation in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. The new process used rollers and crushers that pulverized five ton rocks. To obtain the boulders, Edison purchased the largest steam shovel in America. One novelty of Edison's system was the electrically powered seventy ton rollers which were rotated 3,500 ft (1,100 m) per minute. To protect the system, the roller's gears released at the moment the boulders were dropped in and their momentum crushed the rocks. Edison departed from contemporary, manually intensive, mining practices by prioritizing automation. This meant the rocks journeyed up, down, and across the facility on conveyor belts utilizing gravity, sieves, and additional rollers to separate ore in fines. The fines were recirculated through a magnetic gradient created by an array of 480 electromagnets to select for iron.

Customers would not accept iron with a significant phosphorus content because it ruined the Bessemer process. Edison's system removed the phosphorus with a light pneumatic system that leveraged phosphorus' lower density. Economic forces also dictated that the iron ore be mixed into briquettes for transport and handling at steel mills. Edison advanced the automation of this process and was proud of it taking two hours. The eventual goal was for no humans to touch the iron. Nevertheless, the mine was rapidly losing money.

The first labor strike against Edison occurred in the spring of 1886. It was led by D.J. O'Dare of the Edison Tube Works. Manufacturing in New York City was typically performed for nine hours a day, and Edison's employees were among the best paid in the city. However, they were not paid overtime for the additional work that was often performed. The strike sought more pay, overtime pay, and the right to unionize work. Edison and other managers were completely unwilling to negotiate unionization due to the loss of control. By the end of the year, the various manufacturing facilities in the city were closed and centralized as the Edison United Manufacturing Company opened a new factory in Schenectady, New York. The citizens of Schenectady subsidized 16% of the real estate cost to help attract Edison's business to their town.

Samuel Insull began working for Edison in 1881 as a secretary. He had previously worked at Vanity Fair. The two became friends as Insull became a trusted lieutenant. Later, when Mary was dying, Insull helped the family make arrangements. As with all of Edison's men, Insull worked hard. When Edison United Manufacturing Company opened, he was one of two managers.

By 1887, Edison felt he had outgrown Menlo Park. He put Batchelor in charge of constructing a new laboratory complex in West Orange, which when finally constructed was more than ten times the size of the old lab.

In December 1914, a fire killed one employee and destroyed thirteen buildings, causing $1.5 million in damages. The phonograph works was destroyed, but Edison was optimistic about the situation and ordered that everything be rebuilt with the newest technology. They were manufacturing records again by January. The impact of the fire was partially mitigated because the factory practiced regular fire drills.

In 1921, following the inauguration of Warren G. Harding, the American economy was entering a recession. At this point, Edison had experience leading his businesses through recessions and had seen several of his friends go bankrupt when they were unable to manage. He fired thousands of his employees including executives. By the fall, the economy recovered, and business returned; however, it was a near miss with bankruptcy.

While working on the mining project, in 1888, Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson began trying to make a camera "to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". They may have been inspired by Eadweard Muybridge. Edison focused on the electromechanical elements while Dickson led the optical and film effort. Edison was granted a patent for a motion picture camera, labeled the "Kinetograph" in 1897. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. A prototype film camera was constructed, using 19mm film with round images, and the first successful tests with it were publicly seen on May 20, 1891, in a simple viewer.

In fact, Edison was aiming for a bigger prize than a motion picture camera: he wanted a kinetophonograph to capture motion picture and record sounds with synchronized playback. In the spring of 1890, Dickson attempted the first film with sound starring himself. However, keeping the sound and video synchronized proved to be very difficult and Edison shelved commercial development of the technology.

In 1891, Edison built a Kinetoscope or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891. By 1895, Dickson was beginning to set up business for himself separate from Edison. The exact motivation for the split is unknown but likely stemmed from disagreements between the two.

In April 1896, Thomas Armat reached a deal with Edison in which Edison's company manufactured and sold the Vitascope to project films produced in Edison's film studio. It was advertised as an Edison invention to boost sales, but was in fact, the invention of Armat and C. Francis Jenkins. Edison had attempted unsuccessfully to make his own projector, but acknowledged the Vitascope was better at that time.

Edison's film studio made nearly 1,200 films from 1894 to 1911. The majority of the productions were short films showing everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls including titles such as Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1910), and the first Frankenstein film (1910). Edison was happy to have Edwin S. Porter run the creative side of the movie business. In 1903, the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island, announced they would execute Topsy the elephant. Edison Manufacturing filmed the animal's death by alternating current, producing the motion picture Electrocuting an Elephant.