Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

Thomas Alva Edison was an inventor and businessman who developed many important devices. "The Wizard of Menlo Park" was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention. Edison is considered the most prolific inventor, holding 1,093 patents in his name. Some of these inventions were not completely original but improvements of earlier patents, and were actually works of his numerous employees. Edison was sometimes criticized for not sharing the credit, but it was understood by his experimenters that all work was the property of their employer. Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust).

Thomas Edison was born on February 11,1847 in Milan, Ohio .Thomas was their seventh child. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan.

Edison had a late start in his schooling due to childhood illness. His mind often wandered and shortly into his schooling, his teacher Alexander Crawford was overheard calling him "addled". This ended Edison's three months of formal schooling. His mother had been a school teacher in Canada and happily took over the job of schooling her son in his academics. She encouraged and taught him to read and experiment.

Edison's life in Port Huron was bittersweet. Partially deaf since adolescence, he became a telegraph operator after he saved Jimmie Mackenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Little Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he took Edison under his wing and trained him as a telegraph operator. Edison's deafness aided him as it blocked out noises and prevented Edison from hearing the telegrapher sitting next to him. One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the then impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home.

Some of his earliest inventions related to electrical telegraphy, including a stock ticker. Edison applied for his first patent, the electric vote recorder, on October 28, 1868.

Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey with the automatic repeater and other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention which first gained Edison fame was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park" after the New Jersey town where he resided. His first phonograph recorded onto tinfoil cylinders that had low sound quality and destroyed the track during replay so that one could listen only once. Edison's major innovation was the Menlo Park research lab, which was built in New Jersey. It was the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison invented most of the inventions produced there, though he primarily supervised the operation and work of his employees.

Most of Edison's patents were utility patents, with only about a dozen being design patents. Many of his inventions were not completely original, but improvements which allowed for mass production. For example, contrary to public perception, Edison did not invent the electric light bulb. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

The Menlo Park research lab was made possible by the sale of the quadruplex telegraph that Edison invented in 1874. The quadruplex telegraph could send four simultaneous telegraph signals over the same wire. When Edison asked Western Union to make an offer, he was shocked at the unexpectedly large amount that Western Union offered; the patent rights were sold for $10,000. The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success.

In 1878, Edison formed Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts. Edison made the first public demonstration of incandescent lighting on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. On January 27, 1880, he filed a patent in the United States for the electric incandescent lamp.

On September 4, 1882, Edison switched on the world's first electrical power distribution system, providing 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan, around his Pearl Street generating station. On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.

Edison holds the patent for the motion picture camera, developed at the West Orange lab. Edison established the standard of using 35 mm (then 1 and 3/8 inches) film that allowed film to emerge as a mass medium. The film included four perforations on the edge of each frame to enable the projector to advance the film properly. He built what has been called the first movie studio, the Black Maria, in New Jersey. There, he made the first copyrighted film, Fred Ott's Sneeze. In 1902, a US court rejected Edison's claim that he be granted sole rights over all aspects of movie production in the case "Edison v. American Mutoscope Company", but a syndicate of patent-holders was later formed, to properly protect the group of inventors who made motion pictures possible.

In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope, or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. In 1894, Edison experimented with synchronizing audio with film; the Kinetophone loosely synchronized a Kinetoscope image with a cylinder phonograph. This was especially important to Thomas Edison because he had been searching for a way to entertain customers that were listening to music on his phonograph.