Thomas Edison
Thomas
Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, a small town in
Ohio where his father had settled, Samuel Edison, six years earlier. His
father had to leave hastily Canada as a result of a rebellion against
the English in which he took part and ended in failure. Marginalized by the railroad, activity in Milan was gradually
decreasing, and the crisis affected the Edison family, who had to move
back to a more prosperous place when his son Thomas had already reached
the age of seven years.The new home was Port Huron in Michigan, where the future inventor first attended school. That
was one very brief experience: it lasted only three months, after which
he was expelled from the classroom, claiming his teacher absolute lack
of interest and clumsiness but obvious, behaviors these that was not
alien partial deafness He contracted in the aftermath of an attack of scarlet fever. His
mother, Nancy Elliot, who had worked as a teacher before marrying,
assumed hereinafter the education of young baby of the family, a task
that played with no little talent, as it managed to inspire in him that
boundless curiosity that would feature the highlight of his career throughout his life
Thomas Alva Edison
Within the ten years the small Thomas set up his first laboratory in the basement of his parents' house and taught himself the rudiments of chemistry and electricity. But at twelve, Edison also realized that he could exploit not only their creativity but also his keen practical sense. So, without forgetting his passion for experiments, he found that was in his hand to win cash money materializing some of their good occurrences.
His first initiative was selling newspapers and candy on the train that made the trip from Port Huron to Detroit. He had broken the Civil War and the travelers were hungry for news. Edison convinced the telegraph of the railroad to expose bulletin boards in the stations brief headlines about the development of the struggle, not to mention add foot full details appeared in newspapers; those newspapers sold Edison himself on the train and it goes without saying that detracted from the hands.
At the same time, constantly he is buying scientific journals, books and appliances, and came to convert the baggage car of the convoy in a new laboratory. He learned to telegraphing and after getting low price and used a printing press, began publishing a newspaper on your own, the Weekly Herald. One night, while he was working on his experiments, some phosphorus spilled caused a fire in the car. The train driver and the conductor managed to put out the fire and then thrown through the windows useful printing, bottles and pots thousand thronging the van. All the laboratory and even the inventor himself went to the track. Thus ended the first business of Thomas Alva Edison.
The young Edison was only sixteen when he decided to leave home to their parents. The population living found it too small. Not lacking initiative, he launched in search of new horizons. Luckily, perfectly mastered the telegraph office, and civil war had left many vacancies, so that was where it was, it would be easy to find work.
During the next five years Edison led a wandering life, from town to town, with occasional jobs. He was staying in squalid pensions and invested everything he earned on the purchase of books and equipment to experience, totally disregarding their personal appearance. Michigan to Ohio, then to Indianapolis, then Cincinnati, Memphis and a few months later, having gone through Tennessee.
His next job was in Boston, as a telegrapher on the night shift. He arrived there in 1868, and shortly after his twenty years could be the work of British scientist Michael Faraday Experimental Researches in Electricity, whose reading influenced him positively. Until then, there was only deserved reputation for having some magical gift that allowed him to easily fix any faulty device. Now, Faraday gave him the method to channel all his inventive genius. He became more orderly and disciplined, and has since acquired the habit of carry a notebook, always ready to jot down any idea or fact which claim his attention.
Convinced that his career goal was the invention, Edison left the job occupied and decided to become independent inventor, recording its first patent in 1868. It was an electric meter of votes that gave the Congress, but members of the chamber they described the apparatus superfluous. American inventor never forgot this lesson: an invention, above all, it should be necessary.
Within the ten years the small Thomas set up his first laboratory in the basement of his parents' house and taught himself the rudiments of chemistry and electricity. But at twelve, Edison also realized that he could exploit not only their creativity but also his keen practical sense. So, without forgetting his passion for experiments, he found that was in his hand to win cash money materializing some of their good occurrences.
His first initiative was selling newspapers and candy on the train that made the trip from Port Huron to Detroit. He had broken the Civil War and the travelers were hungry for news. Edison convinced the telegraph of the railroad to expose bulletin boards in the stations brief headlines about the development of the struggle, not to mention add foot full details appeared in newspapers; those newspapers sold Edison himself on the train and it goes without saying that detracted from the hands.
At the same time, constantly he is buying scientific journals, books and appliances, and came to convert the baggage car of the convoy in a new laboratory. He learned to telegraphing and after getting low price and used a printing press, began publishing a newspaper on your own, the Weekly Herald. One night, while he was working on his experiments, some phosphorus spilled caused a fire in the car. The train driver and the conductor managed to put out the fire and then thrown through the windows useful printing, bottles and pots thousand thronging the van. All the laboratory and even the inventor himself went to the track. Thus ended the first business of Thomas Alva Edison.
The young Edison was only sixteen when he decided to leave home to their parents. The population living found it too small. Not lacking initiative, he launched in search of new horizons. Luckily, perfectly mastered the telegraph office, and civil war had left many vacancies, so that was where it was, it would be easy to find work.
During the next five years Edison led a wandering life, from town to town, with occasional jobs. He was staying in squalid pensions and invested everything he earned on the purchase of books and equipment to experience, totally disregarding their personal appearance. Michigan to Ohio, then to Indianapolis, then Cincinnati, Memphis and a few months later, having gone through Tennessee.
His next job was in Boston, as a telegrapher on the night shift. He arrived there in 1868, and shortly after his twenty years could be the work of British scientist Michael Faraday Experimental Researches in Electricity, whose reading influenced him positively. Until then, there was only deserved reputation for having some magical gift that allowed him to easily fix any faulty device. Now, Faraday gave him the method to channel all his inventive genius. He became more orderly and disciplined, and has since acquired the habit of carry a notebook, always ready to jot down any idea or fact which claim his attention.
Convinced that his career goal was the invention, Edison left the job occupied and decided to become independent inventor, recording its first patent in 1868. It was an electric meter of votes that gave the Congress, but members of the chamber they described the apparatus superfluous. American inventor never forgot this lesson: an invention, above all, it should be necessary.
Edison in 1878
Without real in his pocket, Edison arrived in New York in 1869. A friend provided shelter in the basement of the Gold Indicator Co., transmitted by telegraph office to subscribers quotations Nymex. Soon after his arrival, the transmitting device malfunctioned, causing no small stir, and he volunteered to fix it, to accomplish this with amazing ease. In return, he was entrusted with the technical maintenance of all services of the company.
But was not interested in sedentary jobs, he took the first opportunity that presented itself to work again on their own. Very soon he received a commission from the Western Union, the largest telegraph company then. It urged him to build an effective printer listed securities traded. His response to this challenge was his first great invention: the Edison Universal Stock Printer. He was offered $ 40,000 by the apparatus, an amount that allowed him to finally settle down. He married in 1871 with Mary Stilwell, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, and installed a small shop but well equipped in Newark, New York, where he continued to experiment in the telegraph for new improvements and applications. His greatest contribution in this field was the quadruple system, allowing transmit four telegraph messages simultaneously by the same line, two in one direction and two in another.
Menlo Park laboratory
Soon Edison was raised to build a true research center, a 'factory inventions "as he called it, with laboratory, library, workshops and housing for him and his collaborators, in order to perform no matter what research, while they are practical, whether by commission or by pure self-interest. Economic resources did not lack and proportions of his projects demanded. He looked for a quiet outside New York until he found a farm inhabited in the village of Menlo Park place. It was the place chosen to build its new headquarters, the first research laboratory in the world, where would go inventions that would change the habits of much of the planet's inhabitants.
He settled there in 1876 (then twenty-eight), and immediately set to work. The search for a satisfactory telephone transmitter claimed his attention. Invented by Alexander G. Bell, although theoretically well conceived, he generated a current so weak that no use for general applications. He knew that the graphite particles, as maintained more or less tight, influenced on the electrical resistance, and applied this property to create a device that amplified considerably softer sounds: the carbon granules microphone, which he patented in 1876.
Without real in his pocket, Edison arrived in New York in 1869. A friend provided shelter in the basement of the Gold Indicator Co., transmitted by telegraph office to subscribers quotations Nymex. Soon after his arrival, the transmitting device malfunctioned, causing no small stir, and he volunteered to fix it, to accomplish this with amazing ease. In return, he was entrusted with the technical maintenance of all services of the company.
But was not interested in sedentary jobs, he took the first opportunity that presented itself to work again on their own. Very soon he received a commission from the Western Union, the largest telegraph company then. It urged him to build an effective printer listed securities traded. His response to this challenge was his first great invention: the Edison Universal Stock Printer. He was offered $ 40,000 by the apparatus, an amount that allowed him to finally settle down. He married in 1871 with Mary Stilwell, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, and installed a small shop but well equipped in Newark, New York, where he continued to experiment in the telegraph for new improvements and applications. His greatest contribution in this field was the quadruple system, allowing transmit four telegraph messages simultaneously by the same line, two in one direction and two in another.
Menlo Park laboratory
Soon Edison was raised to build a true research center, a 'factory inventions "as he called it, with laboratory, library, workshops and housing for him and his collaborators, in order to perform no matter what research, while they are practical, whether by commission or by pure self-interest. Economic resources did not lack and proportions of his projects demanded. He looked for a quiet outside New York until he found a farm inhabited in the village of Menlo Park place. It was the place chosen to build its new headquarters, the first research laboratory in the world, where would go inventions that would change the habits of much of the planet's inhabitants.
He settled there in 1876 (then twenty-eight), and immediately set to work. The search for a satisfactory telephone transmitter claimed his attention. Invented by Alexander G. Bell, although theoretically well conceived, he generated a current so weak that no use for general applications. He knew that the graphite particles, as maintained more or less tight, influenced on the electrical resistance, and applied this property to create a device that amplified considerably softer sounds: the carbon granules microphone, which he patented in 1876.
Edison with his dictaphone, one of theapplications derived Phonograph
Edison was usual for a job to take him to another, and the previous case was no exception. While trying to perfect the telephone Bell noted a fact that hastened to describe in his notebook: "I just made an experience with a diaphragm having a blunt tip resting on wax paper that moves quickly. The vibrations of the human voice are printed cleanly, and no one that I can pick up and play any audible sound automatically when I get to work on it "doubt. Freed therefore the phone, it was time to deal with the matter. A cylinder, a diaphragm, a needle and other useful minor enough to build it in less than a year the phonograph, the most original of his inventions, a device that gathered under one principle recording and sound reproduction.
Edison himself was surprised by the simplicity of his invention, but soon forgot about it and went on to address the problem of electric lighting, the solution seemed more interesting. "I will provide light so cheap 'said Edison in 1879 that not only the rich can ignite your spark plugs." The answer was in the filament lamp. It was known that certain materials could become incandescent when a private air balloon they applied electric current. It only remained to find the right filament. That is, a metallic conductor that could be heated to incandescence without melting, keeping in this state as long as possible.
Before Edison, many other researchers worked in this direction, but when he did not haggle joined effort. He worked with filaments of the different species: platinum, which dismissed expensive, coal, soot and other materials, and even sent its employees to Japan, South America and Sumatra to collect different varieties of vegetable fibers before choosing the material who judged more convenient. The first of his lamps was ready on 21 October 1879. It was a light bulb carbonized bamboo filament, which exceeded forty hours of uninterrupted operation. The news of fact made plummet shares of gas lighting companies.
Edison was usual for a job to take him to another, and the previous case was no exception. While trying to perfect the telephone Bell noted a fact that hastened to describe in his notebook: "I just made an experience with a diaphragm having a blunt tip resting on wax paper that moves quickly. The vibrations of the human voice are printed cleanly, and no one that I can pick up and play any audible sound automatically when I get to work on it "doubt. Freed therefore the phone, it was time to deal with the matter. A cylinder, a diaphragm, a needle and other useful minor enough to build it in less than a year the phonograph, the most original of his inventions, a device that gathered under one principle recording and sound reproduction.
Edison himself was surprised by the simplicity of his invention, but soon forgot about it and went on to address the problem of electric lighting, the solution seemed more interesting. "I will provide light so cheap 'said Edison in 1879 that not only the rich can ignite your spark plugs." The answer was in the filament lamp. It was known that certain materials could become incandescent when a private air balloon they applied electric current. It only remained to find the right filament. That is, a metallic conductor that could be heated to incandescence without melting, keeping in this state as long as possible.
Before Edison, many other researchers worked in this direction, but when he did not haggle joined effort. He worked with filaments of the different species: platinum, which dismissed expensive, coal, soot and other materials, and even sent its employees to Japan, South America and Sumatra to collect different varieties of vegetable fibers before choosing the material who judged more convenient. The first of his lamps was ready on 21 October 1879. It was a light bulb carbonized bamboo filament, which exceeded forty hours of uninterrupted operation. The news of fact made plummet shares of gas lighting companies.
With the invention gave celebrity (c. 1918)
In subsequent years, Edison took on improving his light bulb, and it was this activity that led him to the one of his discoveries belonging to a strictly scientific area. It happened in 1883, while trying to figure out why your blackened filament lamp using. In the course of such investigations, the prolific inventor witnessed the manifestation of a curious phenomenon: the lamp emitted a bluish glow when it was subject to certain conditions and vacuum was applied certain voltages. Edison found that such light emission was caused by the inexplicable presence of an electric current is established between the two rods that held the lamp filament, and used this phenomenon, which received its name, to design an electric meter whose patent registered in 1886.
In fact, Edison could have given here the passage of electrical engineering to electronics. He did not know, however gauge the importance of the discovery Her method, closest to the "trial and error" that scientific deduction, prevented it. We had to wait for the British engineer John A. Fleming, a technologist of solid scientific training, took the step in 1897 when he managed, after discrete changes, transform the electric meter Edison in the vacuum valve, the first of a long series electrical devices that gave rise to a new technological era.
More than a thousand inventions
In 1886, two years after the death of his wife, Edison married Mina Miller, woman of strong character, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist of Akran, Ohio, whose influence on her eccentric husband noted, as it managed to make it more sociable a person. The couple had three children, one of whom, Charles, was devoted to politics, eventually becoming governor of New Jersey.
Year marriage, Edison moved his laboratory in Menlo Park, a small seasoning, West Orange, New Jersey. He created a great technology center there, the Edison Laboratory (now a national monument), around which raised numerous workshops, which employed more than five thousand people.
In subsequent years, Edison took on improving his light bulb, and it was this activity that led him to the one of his discoveries belonging to a strictly scientific area. It happened in 1883, while trying to figure out why your blackened filament lamp using. In the course of such investigations, the prolific inventor witnessed the manifestation of a curious phenomenon: the lamp emitted a bluish glow when it was subject to certain conditions and vacuum was applied certain voltages. Edison found that such light emission was caused by the inexplicable presence of an electric current is established between the two rods that held the lamp filament, and used this phenomenon, which received its name, to design an electric meter whose patent registered in 1886.
In fact, Edison could have given here the passage of electrical engineering to electronics. He did not know, however gauge the importance of the discovery Her method, closest to the "trial and error" that scientific deduction, prevented it. We had to wait for the British engineer John A. Fleming, a technologist of solid scientific training, took the step in 1897 when he managed, after discrete changes, transform the electric meter Edison in the vacuum valve, the first of a long series electrical devices that gave rise to a new technological era.
More than a thousand inventions
In 1886, two years after the death of his wife, Edison married Mina Miller, woman of strong character, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist of Akran, Ohio, whose influence on her eccentric husband noted, as it managed to make it more sociable a person. The couple had three children, one of whom, Charles, was devoted to politics, eventually becoming governor of New Jersey.
Year marriage, Edison moved his laboratory in Menlo Park, a small seasoning, West Orange, New Jersey. He created a great technology center there, the Edison Laboratory (now a national monument), around which raised numerous workshops, which employed more than five thousand people.
One of the workshops of West Orange
The electricity continued to absorb most of the time because it dealt with all aspects of production and distribution. Not lucky, however, as he made a serious mistake by insisting on the current system when compelling reasons exist for alternating current. Edison was also interested in many other industrial sectors: cement production and chemical materials, electromagnetic separation of iron and manufacture of batteries and accumulators for cars were some of your favorite.
His last great invention was the Kinetograph, patent registered in 1891. It was a rudimentary camera film that included, however, an ingenious mechanism to ensure the intermittent movement of the film. In 1894 Edison Kinetoscope Parlor opened on Broadway, New York, where a single spectator sat in front of a peephole in a wooden cabin to see the film, which was lit from behind by an electric lamp. Although the Kinetoscope Parlor immediately aroused attention as fairground attraction, Edison never believed it was important to find a projection system for older audiences, which prevented him from giving the final the cinematograph of the Lumière brothers step.
The electricity continued to absorb most of the time because it dealt with all aspects of production and distribution. Not lucky, however, as he made a serious mistake by insisting on the current system when compelling reasons exist for alternating current. Edison was also interested in many other industrial sectors: cement production and chemical materials, electromagnetic separation of iron and manufacture of batteries and accumulators for cars were some of your favorite.
His last great invention was the Kinetograph, patent registered in 1891. It was a rudimentary camera film that included, however, an ingenious mechanism to ensure the intermittent movement of the film. In 1894 Edison Kinetoscope Parlor opened on Broadway, New York, where a single spectator sat in front of a peephole in a wooden cabin to see the film, which was lit from behind by an electric lamp. Although the Kinetoscope Parlor immediately aroused attention as fairground attraction, Edison never believed it was important to find a projection system for older audiences, which prevented him from giving the final the cinematograph of the Lumière brothers step.
The Kinetoscope Parlor
The activity of this great inventor went beyond the eighty years of age, completing the list of technological achievements to total the 1,093 patents that came to register in life. Atherosclerosis, however, he was undermining the health of this restless old, whose death occurred on October 18, 1931, in West Orange, New Jersey.
The activity of this great inventor went beyond the eighty years of age, completing the list of technological achievements to total the 1,093 patents that came to register in life. Atherosclerosis, however, he was undermining the health of this restless old, whose death occurred on October 18, 1931, in West Orange, New Jersey.
FAMOUS INVENTORS
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