Thomas Alva Edison’s Biography
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio; the seventh and last
child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. When Edison was seven his family moved to Port Huron,
Michigan. Edison lived here until he struck out on his own at the age of sixteen. Edison had
very little formal education as a c hild, attending school only for a few months. He was
taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child
and taught himself much by reading on his own. This belief in self -improvement remained
throughout his life.
Edison began working at an early age, as most boys did at the time. At thirteen he took a
job as a newsboy, selling newspapers and candy on the local railroad that ran through Port
Huron to Detroit. He seems to have spent much of his free time reading scient ific, and
technical books, and also had the opportunity at this time to learn how to operate a
telegraph. By the time he was sixteen, Edison was proficient enough to work as a
telegrapher full time.
The development of the telegraph was the first step in the communication revolution, and
the telegraph industry expanded rapidly in the second half of the 19th century. This rapid
growth gave Edison and others like him a chance to trave l, see the country, and gain
experience. Edison worked in a number of cities throughout the United States before arriving
in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his profession from telegrapher to inventor.
He received his first patent on an electri c vote recorder, a device intended for use by elected
bodies such as Congress to speed the voting process. This invention was a commercial
failure. Edison resolved that in the future he would only invent things that he was certain the
public would want.
Edison moved to New York City in 1869. He continued to work on inventions related to the
telegraph, and developed his first successful invention, an improved stock ticker called the
"Universal Stock Printer". For this and some related inventions Edison was paid $40,000.
This gave Edison the money he needed to set up his first small laboratory and
manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey in 1871. During the next five years , Edison
worked in Newark inventing and manufacturing devices that greatly improved the speed and
efficiency of the telegraph. He also found to time to get married to Mary Stilwell and start a
family.
In 1876 Edison sold all his Newark manufacturing concer ns and moved his family and staff
of assistants to the small village of Menlo Park, twenty -five miles southwest of New York
City. Edison established a new facility containing all the equipment necessary to work on any
invention. This research and developme nt laboratory was the first of its kind anywhere; the
model for later, modern facilities such as Bell Laboratories, this is sometimes considered to
be Edison's greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the
world.
The first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was
the tin foil phonograph. The first machine that could record and
reproduce sound created a sensation and brought Edison
international fame. Edison toured the country with the tin foil
phonograph, and was invited to the White Hou se to demonstrate it
to President Rutherford B. Hayes in April 1878.
Edison next undertook his greatest challenge, the development of a practical incandescent,
electric light. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and a number of people had worked
on, and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been
developed that was remotely practical for home use. Edison's eventual achievement was
inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting sys tem that
contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and
economical. After one and a half years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent
lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours. The
first public demonstration of the Edison's incandescent lighting system was in December
1879, when the Menlo Park laboratory complex was electrically lighted. Edison spent the
next several years creating the electric industry. In Sep tember 1882, the first commercial
power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, went into operation providing
light and power to customers in a one square mile area; the electric age
had begun.
The success of his electric light brought Edison to new heights of fame
and wealth, as electricity spread around the world. Edison's various
electric companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought
together to form Edison General Electric. Despite the use of Edison in the
company title howev er, Edison never controlled this company. The
tremendous amount of capital needed to develop the incandescent
lighting industry had necessitated the involvement of investment bankers
such as J.P. Morgan. When Edison General Electric merged with its
leading competitor Thompson -Houston in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the
company became simply General Electric.
This period of success was marred by the death of Edison's wife Mary in 1884. Edison's
involvement in the business end of the electric i ndustry had caused Edison to spend less
time in Menlo Park. After Mary's death, Edison was there even less, living instead in New
York City with his three children. A year later, while vacationing at a friends house in New
England, Edison met Mina Miller a nd fell in love. The couple was married in February 1886
and moved to West Orange, New Jersey where Edison had purchased an estate, Glenmont,
for his bride. Thomas Edison lived here with Mina until his death.
When Edison moved to West Orange, he was doing experimental work in makeshift facilities
in his electric lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage,
however, Edison decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange itself, less than a mile
from his home. Edison possesse d the both the resources and experience by this time to
build, "the best equipped and largest laboratory extant and the facilities superior to any
other for rapid and cheap development of an invention ". The new laboratory complex
consisting of five buildi ngs opened in November 1887. A three story main laboratory building
contained a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large
library. Four smaller one story buildings built perpendicular to the main building contained a
physics lab, chemistry lab, metallurgy lab, pattern shop, and chemical storage. The large
size of the laboratory not only allowed Edison to work on any sort of project, but also
allowed him to work on as many as ten or twenty projects at once. Facilities were added to
the laboratory or modified to meet Edison's changing needs as he continued to work in this
complex until his death in 1931. Over the years, factories to manufacture Edison inventions
were built around the laboratory. The entire laboratory and factory c omplex eventually
covered more than twenty acres and employed 10,000 people at its peak during World War
One (1914-1918).
After opening the new laboratory, Edison began to work on the phonograph again, having
set the project aside to develop the electric l ight in the late 1870s. By the 1890s, Edison
began to manufacture phonographs for both home, and business use. Like the electric light,
Edison developed everything needed to have a phonograph work, including records to play,
equipment to record the records , and equipment to manufacture the records and the
machines. In the process of making the phonograph practical, Edison created the recording
industry. The development and improvement of the phonograph was an ongoing project,
continuing almost until Edison' s death
