Edison, Thomas

Edison, Thomas (1847–1931), inventor and business entrepreneur.Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, but moved with his family to Port Huron, Michigan, at age seven. He was educated mostly at home by his mother, a former schoolteacher. At twelve, he organized a team of boys to sell sandwiches and newspapers on the train to Detroit. Learning telegraphy, he worked in various midwestern cities as a telegraph and presswire operator. This experience immersed him in this new technology and shaped his career‐long creative strategies. In the late 1860s he published articles in the leading national telegraph journal describing his new designs.

Moving to Boston in 1868 Edison launched a series of businesses based on these innovative telegraph designs. These ventures led him to New York and, in 1870, to Newark, New Jersey, where he designed and, with a shop partner, produced stock tickers and related equipment. By the mid‐1870s the already sophisticated inventor enjoyed close relations with officers of the Western Union Telegraph Company and financial leaders on Wall Street. He organized an experimental laboratory at Newark in 1875 and, with the aid of a Western Union contract, opened a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876.

During the next five years he and a small group of assistants made a series of remarkable inventions related to the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, incandescent light bulb, and an associated electric power generating system. His invention of the phonograph in 1877 attracted worldwide attention. His success in 1879 in developing a practical incandescent lighting system, supported by New York financiers, won him further public attention and stimulated an eight‐year period of intense inventive and entrepreneurial effort promoting and installing urban electric generating stations across America. Edison and his closest technical associates also started key companies for the production of electric generating equipment, electrical distribution supplies, and even indoor electrical fixtures. With the involvement of the financier J.P. Morgan, these companies merged in 1889 into Edison General Electric and in 1892 into the General Electric Company.

In 1887 Edison built a new research laboratory—ten times the size of the Menlo Park shop—in rural Orange, New Jersey. Here Edison and his numerous associates continued with electric lighting research, but, more importantly, started new projects, including improvement and commercialization of the phonograph, production of cylinder recordings, development of motion‐picture equipment, production of movie films, and installation of a massive iron‐ore concentration works in northern New Jersey. The successful phonograph and motion‐picture projects prompted construction of large‐scale production facilities surrounding the laboratory, but the failing ore‐concentration project devoured much of Edison's time (and money) during the 1890s.

After 1900 Edison continued with production and improvements associated with the phonograph and motion pictures but also initiated commercial manufacture of electric storage batteries and portland cement. (Portland cement is a hydraulic cement that can set underwater or in high humidity conditions. His company was the “Edison Portland Cement Company.”) He engaged in chemical production and research on underwater sonic detection devices during World War I and in the 1920s marketed a line of small electrical appliances. His friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone supported his last project, a search for a natural substitute for rubber. Edison married twice (his first wife died) and had a daughter and two sons in each marriage.

With 1,093 U.S. patents, Thomas Edison stands as America's most prolific inventor. His innovations contributed to the establishment of at least a half‐dozen important new industries. This pioneer in collaborative industrial research persistently carried his patented inventions and improvements into the marketplace. His laboratories in Newark, Menlo Park, and Orange, New Jersey, foreshadowed later American industrial research laboratories such as those of General Electric, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and AT&T.

Edison extended his patenting, licensing, production, and marketing efforts to Europe and Latin America (he held patents in twenty‐four countries), participating in America's emergence as a world industrial power. Prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and pioneer in industrial research, Edison helped to illuminate the night, electrify the world, lay the foundation for technical creativity in modern corporate enterprise, and, with his introduction of recorded sound and the movies, create the visual‐aural communications revolution that reshaped twentieth‐century popular culture.
See also Electrical Industry; Electricity and Electrification Film.

Bibliography

Matthew Josephson , Edison: A Biography, 1959, reprint 1992.
Wyn Wachhorst , Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth, 1981.
Robert Friedel,, Paul Israel,, and and Bernard S. Finn , Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, 1986.
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, Reese V. Jenkins et al., eds., vols. 1–4, 1989–1998.
William S. Pretzer, ed., Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience, 1989.
Andre Millard , Edison and the Business of Innovation, 1990.

Reese V. Jenkins