Thomas Alva Edison

The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) held hundreds of patents, most for electrical devices and electric light and power. Although the phonograph and incandescent lamp are best known, perhaps his greatest invention was organized research.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847; his father was a jack-of-all-trades, his mother a former teacher. Edison spent 3 months in school, then was taught by his mother. At the age of 12 he sold fruit, candy, and papers on the Grand Trunk Railroad. In 1862, using his small handpress in a baggage car, he wrote and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which was circulated to 400 railroad employees. That year he became a telegraph operator, taught by the father of a child whose life Edison had saved. Exempt from military service because of deafness, he was a tramp telegrapher until he joined Western Union Telegraph Company in Boston in 1868.

Early Inventions

Probably Edison's first invention was an automatic telegraph repeater (1864). His first patent was for an electric vote recorder. In 1869, as a partner in a New York electrical firm, he perfected the stock ticker and sold it. This money, in addition to that from his share of the partnership, provided funds for his own factory in Newark, N.J. Edison hired technicians to collaborate on inventions; he wanted an "invention factory." As many as 80 "earnest men," including chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, were on his staff. "Invention to order" became very profitable.

From 1870 to 1875 Edison invented many telegraphic improvements: transmitters; receivers; the duplex, quadruplex, and sextuplex systems; and automatic printers and tape. He worked with Christopher Sholes, "father of the typewriter," in 1871 to improve the typing machine. Edison claimed he made 12 typewriters at Newark about 1870. The Remington Company bought his interests.

In 1876 Edison's carbon telegraph transmitter for Western Union marked a real advance toward making the Bell telephone practical. (Later, Émile Berliner's transmitter was granted patent priority by the courts.) With the money Edison received from Western Union for his transmitter, he established a factory in Menlo Park, N.J. Again he pooled scientific talent, and within 6 years he had more than 300 patents. The electric pen (1877) produced stencils to make copies. (The A. B. Dick Company licensed Edison's patent and manufactured the mimeograph machine.)

The Phonograph

Edison's most original and lucrative invention, the phonograph, was patented in 1877. From a manually operated instrument making impressions on metal foil and replaying sounds, it became a motor-driven machine playing cylindrical wax records by 1887. By 1890 he had more than 80 patents on it. The Victor Company developed from his patents. (Alexander Graham Bell impressed sound tracks on cylindrical shellac records; Berliner invented disk records. Edison's later dictating machine, the Ediphone, used disks.)

Incandescent Lamp

To research incandescence, Edison and others, including J. P. Morgan, organized the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. (Later it became the General Electric Company.) Edison made the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879, and it was patented the following year. After months of testing metal filaments, Edison and his staff examined 6,000 organic fibers from around the world and decided that Japanese bamboo was best. Mass production soon made the lamps, although low-priced, profitable.

First Central Electric-Light Power Plant

Prior to Edison's central power station, each user of electricity needed a dynamo (generator), which was inconvenient and expensive. Edison opened the first commercial electric station in London in 1882; in September the Pearl Street Station in New York City marked the beginning of America's electrical age. Within 4 months the station was lighting more than 5,000 lamps for 230 customers, and the demand for lamps exceeded supply. By 1890 it supplied current to 20,000 lamps, mainly in office buildings, and to motors, fans, printing presses, and heating appliances. Many towns and cities installed central stations.

Increased use of electricity led to Edison-base sockets, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conduits, meters, and the three-wire system. Jumbo dynamos, with drum-wound armatures, could maintain 110 volts with 90 percent efficiency. The three-wire system, first installed in Sunbury, Pa., in 1883, superseded the parallel circuit, used 110 volts, and necessitated high-resistance lamp filaments (metal alloys were later used).

In 1883 Edison made a significant discovery in pure science, the Edison effect—electrons flowed from incandescent filaments. With a metal-plate insert, the lamp could serve as a valve, admitting only negative electricity. Although "etheric force" had been recognized in 1875 and the Edison effect was patented in 1883, the phenomenon was little known outside the Edison laboratory. (At this time existence of electrons was not generally accepted.) This "force" underlies radio broadcasting, long-distance telephony, sound pictures, television, electric eyes, x-rays, high-frequency surgery, and electronic musical instruments. In 1885 Edison patented a method to transmit telegraphic "aerial" signals, which worked over short distances, and later sold this "wireless" patent to Guglielmo Marconi.

Creating the Modern Research Laboratory

The vast West Orange, N.J., factory, which Edison directed from 1887 to 1931, was the world's most complete research laboratory, an antecedent of modern research and development laboratories, with teams of workers systematically investigating problems. Various inventions included a method to make plate glass, a magnetic ore separator, compressing dies, composition brick, a cement process, an all-concrete house, an electric locomotive (patented 1893), a fluoroscope, a nickel-iron battery, and motion pictures. Edison refused to patent the fluoroscope, so that doctors could use it freely; but he patented the first fluorescent lamp in 1896.

The Edison battery, finally perfected in 1910, was a superior storage battery with an alkaline electrolyte. After 8000 trials Edison remarked, "Well, at least we know 8000 things that don't work." In 1902 he improved the copper oxide battery, which resembled modern dry cells.

Edison's motion picture camera, the kinetograph, could photograph action on 50-foot strips of film, 16 images per foot. A young assistant, in order to make the first Edison movies, in 1893 built a small laboratory called the "Black Maria,"—a shed, painted black inside and out, that revolved on a base to follow the sun and kept the actors illuminated. The kinetoscope projector of 1893 showed the films. The first commercial movie theater, a peepshow, opened in New York in 1884. A coin put into a slot activated the kinetoscope inside the box. Acquiring and improving the projector of Thomas Armat in 1895, Edison marketed it as the Vitascope.

Movie Production

The Edison Company produced over 1,700 movies. Synchronizing movies with the phonograph in 1904, Edison laid the basis for talking pictures. In 1908 his cinemaphone appeared, adjusting film speed to phonograph speed. In 1913 his kinetophone projected talking pictures: the phonograph, behind the screen, was synchronized by ropes and pulleys with the projector. Edison produced several "talkies."

Meanwhile, among other inventions, the universal motor, which used alternating or direct current, appeared in 1907; and the electric safety lantern, patented in 1914, greatly reduced casualties among miners. That year Edison invented the telescribe, which combined features of the telephone and dictating phonograph.

Work for the Government

During World War I Edison headed the U.S. Navy Consulting Board and contributed 45 inventions, including substitutes for previously imported chemicals (especially carbolic acid, or phenol), defensive instruments against U-boats, a ship-telephone system, an underwater searchlight, smoke screen machines, antitorpedo nets, turbine projectile heads, collision mats, navigating equipment, and methods of aiming and firing naval guns. After the war he established the Naval Research Laboratory, the only American institution for organized weapons research until World War II.

Synthetic Rubber

With Henry Ford and the Firestone Company, Edison organized the Edison Botanic Research Company in 1927 to discover or develop a domestic source of rubber. Some 17,000 different botanical specimens were examined over 4 years—an indication of Edison's tenaciousness. By crossbreeding goldenrod, he developed a strain yielding 12 percent latex, and in 1930 he received his last patent, for this process.

The Man Himself

To raise money, Edison dramatized himself by careless dress, clowning for reporters, and playing the role of homespun sage with aphorisms like "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" and "Discovery is not invention." He scoffed at formal education, thought 4 hours' sleep a night enough, and often worked 40 or 50 hours straight. As a world symbol of Yankee ingenuity, he looked and acted the part. George Bernard Shaw, briefly an Edison employee in 1879, put an Edisontype hero into his novel The Irrational Knot: free-souled, sensitive, cheerful, and profane.

Edison had more than 10,000 books at home and masses of printed materials at the laboratory. When launching a new project, he wished to avoid others' mistakes and to know everything about a subject. Some 25,000 notebooks contained his research records, ideas, hunches, and mistakes. Supposedly, his great shortcoming was lack of interest in anything not utilitarian; yet he loved to read Shakespeare and Thomas Paine.

Edison died in West Orange, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1931. The laboratory buildings and equipment associated with his career are preserved in Greenfield Village, Detroit, Mich., thanks to Henry Ford's interest and friendship.

Further Reading

A good biography of Edison, filled with human interest, is Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (1959). Biographies emphasizing his inventions include William Adams Simonds, Edison: His Life, His Work, His Genius (1934), and H. Gordon Garbedian, Thomas Alva Edison: Builder of Civilization (1947). There is more emphasis on industry in John Winthrop Hammond, Men and Volts: The Story of General Electric, edited by Arthur Pound (1941). See also Charles Singer and others, eds., A History of Technology, vol.5: The Late Nineteenth Century (1958). □

EDISON, THOMAS ALVA 1847-1931

Inventor

Life and Legend

The story of Thomas Edison's youth was retold many times around the beginning of the twentieth century and was embroidered with anecdotes that lent a Horatio Alger quality to his biography. His background and many inventions made Edison the best-known scientific figure of the 1900s, a figure of near mythic proportions in a decade fascinated with new technologies. Edison worked as a youth on a train where he set up a chemistry laboratory and printing press on which he published a weekly paper for travelers. He was said to have been taught telegraphy as a reward for saving the life of a telegraph operator's son (the story was only partly true). After working for more than a decade as a telegraph boy, he launched his career as an inventor at the age of twenty-eight with a series of innovations that transformed telegraphy: first the duplex telegraph, which could transmit two messages simultaneously, one in each direction, and then the multiplex, which transmitted four messages, two in each direction. He sold the multiplex to Western Union in 1876 and with the proceeds established a "factory for inventions" at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

The Phonograph

Fame came the following year, 1877, with the invention—by pure chance—of the phonograph. Edison had just devised a "repeater," a rotating disk on which telegraph signals could be recorded and saved. He then wanted to extend the process to create a similar repeating mechanism for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. When the machine produced semi-human noises, it occurred to him to shout "Halloo!" into its diaphragm while the apparatus was recording on a cylinder covered with tinfoil. When the machine repeated the word, he was astounded. The phonograph caused a sensation in part because it was so simple: it was completely mechanical, with no electrical components. News of the invention spread rapidly. Edison demonstrated it in January 1878 at the Royal Institution in London and later to President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House. It made him a public figure instantly and created the legend of the "Wizard of Menlo Park," even though the machine was not immediately commercialized. Edison at first envisioned the phonograph as a dictaphone, with business applications only; he thought those who wanted to record music were silly.

The Light Bulb

Edison put the phonograph aside for a while and plunged into the development of an incandescent light. Streets and large halls were already illuminated electrically with arc lamps that produced a brilliant light when the current passed between two electrodes. But arc lamps could not be used domestically. The problem of finding a manageable household light bulb involved searching for a material to serve as a filament that would light without burning up or melting. Edison first saw that a filament could be prevented from burning by enclosing it in a glass bulb from which the air had been evacuated (thus creating a vacuum inside the bulb). Since he was building generators at the same time and trying to conceive of how a lighting system might work, it occurred to him that several hundred low-resistance light bulbs would require huge generators while high-resistance bulbs would require less current and operate more efficiently. This conceptual breakthrough permitted Edison to develop an efficient electrical system that could distribute current from a central station and at considerable distances—an impossibility under the prevailing illumination systems of high current and low resistance, which lost power over all but the shortest distances. Edison then needed only to find a filament that would glow a long time without burning out. He found the substance by trial and error, experimenting with dozens of different substances before finally narrowing the list down to carbonized paper or cotton thread. Finally, on 22 October 1879, his famous bulb no. 9 stayed lit for fifteen hours. On 1 November he applied for a patent on a light bulb with a carbon filament.

A New Year's Eve to Remember

Edison immediately set out to electrify the entire town of Menlo Park. Passengers on the New York-Philadelphia train were astonished to see the town lit up at night, and on New Year's Eve 1879 three thousand persons came on special trains to view the spectacle. Stock shares in the Edison Electric Company soared.

Expansion and Diversification

In the 1890s and 1900s Edison was primarily occupied with designing and building electrical systems for the companies using his system. In 1887 Edison built a laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, claiming it was a unique facility even though Bell had set up a similar industrial laboratory for the expanding telephone industry in 1881. Indeed because of the nature of electricity, every electrical inventor had a laboratory. Edison's Orange facility dwarfed them all, however, both in size and number of employees. There he worked out a whole series of commercial phonographs throughout the 1890s, in 1896 introducing the first model designed to play prerecorded cylinders.

Motion Pictures and X Rays

Motion pictures interested Edison as an analogue to the phonograph: a device that would store pictures as the "talking machine" stored sounds. His first models actually combined pictures and sound in a cylinder format, but he soon turned to film. The chief technical problem that Edison had to solve was how to get a filmstrip to move through a camera; having solved it by devising sprockets, he applied for patents on a machine to take pictures and another to view them in 1891. Marketing began in 1893 when he sold kinetoscope viewers to amusement parlors. To produce the films he constructed a film studio, a "revolving photographic building" covered with tar paper, nicknamed the Black Maria (1893). Soon after Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X rays in 1895, Edison went into action, learned to replicate Roentgen's experiments, and produced a device for taking X-ray pictures called the fluoroscope all within two weeks of learning of the discovery by telegraph. X rays proved difficult to control, and one of Edison's assistants, Clarence Dally, was an early casualty of radiation poisoning. Edison eventually lost out to General Electric in marketing X-ray machines.

Edison and the Automobile

Edison's first project of the new century, suggested by the growing popularity of automobiles, was the development of a storage battery in 1900. The project was a difficult one because the complexity of chemical reactions that took place in battery cells made the analysis of the different experimental substances intricate. He finally settled on a model using mainly nickel hydrate for the positive electrode and iron oxide for the negative. Used to power electric automobiles, Edison's battery went into production in 1903, but these first batteries leaked and were generally unreliable. By summer 1905 Edison claimed he had made more than ten thousand experiments on the battery and had redesigned it completely. Then in 1908 he found that adding lithium hydroxide substantially increased the life of the battery: this was an important, wholly empirical discovery, and Edison had no notion of why it worked. He also experimented with steel and concrete construction techniques for low-cost housing and built several prototypes.

Edison and Science

Edison developed virtually all of his inventions on a trial-and-error basis. But as electronics became more sophisticated and required training in mathematics, physics, and formal engineering, he was unable to keep up. During World War I the navy consulted him about possible methods of detecting submarines and he proved unable to conceptualize the problem adequately. He always proclaimed his opposition to what he mocked as "the-o-retical" science. His last great project, which he began in 1920, was the search for an indigenous plant species that could produce rubber for automobile tires. True to his ways, he examined more than fifteen thousand different plant species, all in vain. Edison died 18 October 1931.

Sources:

Robert Freidel and Paul Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987);

Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959);

André Milliard, Edison and the Business of Invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990);

Wynn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

Edison, Thomas Alva

(b. Milan, Ohio, 11 February 1847; d. West Orange, New Jersey, 18 October 1931)

technology.

Edison’s parents emigrated from Canada to Milan, Ohio, after his father joined an unsuccessful insurrection in 1837. The elder Edison prospered as a shingle manufacturer until the railroad bypassed the town, and in 1854 the family moved to Port Huron Michigan, where the father conducted a less profitable grain and lumber business.

Edison’s formal schooling was limited to about three months, followed by four years of instruction by his mother. He was an entrepreneur at age twelve, riding the trains to sell newspapers and food and to pick up odd jobs. He had an early and avid interest in chemistry and electricity, performing experiments at home and on the train. He acquired the habit of going for long periods with little sleep—an idiosyncrasy he kept throughout his life. At about age twelve Edison began to grow deaf, to the point where he could hear nothing below a shout. One result of this was to shut him further into himself and to encourage him in a vast self-directed program of reading. A bout with Newton’s Principia at age fifteen “gave me a distaste for mathematics from which I have never recovered.” He was, however, fascinated by various more elementary practical treatises.

In 1863 Edison became a telegraph operator, and this was his main source of income as he moved from city to city, ending up in Boston in 1868. His resolve to become an inventor became dominant, even though some initial attempts proved financially disastrous. He went to New York in 1869 to seek better fortune. In 1870, at age twenty-three, Edison received $40,000 for improving the stock-ticker system and used the money to set up a private fifty-man laboratory. In 1876 this laboratory was moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where his most concentrated and productive work was done. Eleven years later he moved to enlarged facilities at West Orange, New Jersey.

Edison was the epitome of the technologistinventor. He was not unlearned in science—his prodigious reading had carried him through countless semipopular works, and during the year in Boston he obtained the first two volumes of Faraday’s Experimental Researches, which he later claimed was a source of considerable inspiration to him; certainly the ability of Faraday to get along without mathematics must have been appealing. But his purposes were practical; he invented by design. He would see a gap in the economy, then invent to fill it; and at this he was very good. Examples include his work on stock tickers, multiplex telegraphy, incandescent lighting, magnetic iron-ore separation, and the storage battery. Some items were developed on very short notice to protect a patent position. Edison’s chalkdrum telegraph relay and loudspeaking telephone receiver are especially good examples of this. His method in virtually all cases was to try the hundreds or thousands of possibilities that seemed plausible. This was not done in completely haphazard fashion, since he often obtained detailed knowledge of materials before testing them; but his procedure is rightly considered close to the ultimate in “cut-and-try.”

The “Edison effect” (emission of electrons from a hot cathode) is often cited as his sole scientific discovery. In 1883 Edison performed a series of experiments to investigate the dark shadow that formed on the inside of a light bulb. He placed a second electrode inside the bulb and found that negatively charged carbon particles were emitted from the filament. He patented the device as a possible meter and then abandoned it. John A. Fleming, a British consultant to Edison, performed some further experiments, and the matter was still in his mind twenty years later when, as a consultant to Marconi, he saw the possibility of using the rectifying properties of a two-element bulb as a radiowave detector.

One product of his practical motivation was that Edison approached certain problems with a point of view different from that of a scientist. Thus some of the latter, contemplating the possibilities of incandescent lighting in the late 1870’s, used available information—including indications that the successful lamp (as yet not invented) would have a low resistance—to prove that a system of independently controlled lights was infeasible. Edison changed the parameters by developing a high-resistance lamp and constructed a system that worked. Similarly the experts extolled the value of generators in which the internal and external resistances were equal, hence producing an efficiency of 50 percent. This was the condition for maximum energy transfer. Edison recognized that he did not need maximum energy, and that therefore he could use machines of low internal resistance to obtain much higher efficiencies. Edison may not have been unique in either of these realizations, but he was certainly the first and most successful in putting them together into a practical lighting system.

Edison’s laboratories are considered prototypes of the modern industrial research laboratories in terms of the support they gave to manufacturing operations and the training they gave to staff members. The centralization of effort around the ideas of one man, however, was much greater than in later organizations.

In 1915 a consulting board, with Edison as its president, was established to advise the U.S. Navy on the possibilities of using new scientific and technical devices in war. Tangible results were limited, but one of Edison’s early suggestions—a permanent scientific laboratory within the Navy—eventually found fruit in the establishment of the Naval Research Laboratory.

Edison was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1927.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A large body of notebooks, photographs, and other MS materials is preserved at the Edison Laboratory National Monument at West Orange, New Jersey. Other miscellaneous sources can be identified in the Josephson work cited below. Some original apparatus has been saved: in the Menlo Park laboratory building, which has been restored and moved to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan; in the West Orange laboratory, which has been preserved at its original site; and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

II. Secondary Literature. The best of the Edison biographies is M. Josephson, Edison (New York, 1959), although technical details are generally lacking. The Menlo Park years are treated in some depth in F. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences (Dearborn, Mich., 1938).

See also H. C. Passer, “Electrical Science and the Early Development of the Electrical Manufacturing Industry in the United States,” in Annals of Science, 7 (1951), 382–392.

Bernard S. Finn

Edison, Thomas Alva (1847–1931), prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and industrialist.A pioneer in team industrial research, Edison made significant innovations in communications technologies (telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and motion pictures) and in electric lighting and electric power systems.

Edison's laboratories in New Jersey and his worldwide acclaim as a successful inventor reinforced an aura of American industrial progress through research that fostered application of systemized research to military technology in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1915, naval secretary Josephus Daniels enlisted Edison to organize and chair a Naval Consulting Board to provide technical counsel to the navy. Edison lent his name to board activities, personally engaged in sonic research for detection of submarines, and vigorously promoted creation of a Naval Research Laboratory. His group was outflanked, however, by the National Academy of Science, representing younger, academically oriented scientists. They created a presidentially appointed National Research Council, led by the politically astute George Ellery Hale, which attained a power and influence that eclipsed the Edison group and ultimately led in World War II to establishment of Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development. Nevertheless, some of the Edison's companies were organized into the General Electric Company, which became a major defense contractor.
[See also Consultants; World War II: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Reese V. Jenkins, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Edison, 1989–.
Paul Israel , Edison: A Life of Invention, 1998.

Reese V. Jenkins

Edison, Thomas Alva (1847–1931) US inventor. With little formal education, Edison made many important inventions, such as the telegraph, phonograph (1877), the first commercially successful electric light (1879), and many improvements to the electricity distribution system. By the time of his death, he patented more than 1000 inventions. During World War I, he worked for the US government on anti-submarine weapons. Most of his companies merged into the General Electric Company (GEC) in 1892.

http://www.tomedison.org