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Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.
- 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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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 · Learn about the life and achievements of Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor and businessman who created the phonograph, the light bulb, the motion picture camera and more. Explore his early years, his research laboratory, his patents and his legacy.
Apr 2, 2014 · Learn about the life and achievements of Thomas Edison, one of America's leading inventors and businessmen. From his early years as a telegrapher to his development of the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph, discover how he built America's economy and culture with his innovations.
Learn about the life and achievements of Thomas Alva Edison, one of the most famous and prolific inventors of all time. Explore his early years, telegraph work, and his contributions to the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera.
Learn about the life and achievements of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, electric light, and many other devices. Explore his early years, his famous Menlo Park laboratory, his electric empire, and his later inventions.
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Learn about the life and achievements of Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, motion picture, electric light bulb and many other devices. Discover his humble beginnings, his passion for self-education, his business ventures and his contributions to science and industry.
