He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. In , after the Battle of Shiloh, he bought a thousand copies, knowing he would sell them all, and marked up the price more and more the farther he got down the line.
While still in his teens, he bought a portable letterpress and started printing his own newspaper aboard the moving train, filling two sides of a broadsheet with local sundries. Its circulation rose to four hundred a week, and Edison took over much of the baggage car. He built a small chemistry laboratory there, too. Forced out of newspapering, Edison spent the next few years as a telegrapher for Western Union and other companies, taking jobs wherever he could find them—Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky.
He had time to experiment on the side, and he patented his first invention in an electric vote recorder that eliminated the need for roll call by instantly tallying votes.
It worked so well that no legislative body wanted it, because it left no time for lobbying amid the yeas and nays. Although legislators did not want their votes counted faster, everyone else wanted everything else to move as quickly as possible. Financial companies, for instance, wanted their stock information immediately, and communication companies wanted to speed up their telegram service.
Armed with those inventions, he found financial support for his telegraphy research, and used money from Western Union to buy an abandoned building in New Jersey to serve as a workshop. In , having outgrown that site, he bought thirty acres not far from Newark and began converting the property into what he liked to call his Invention Factory.
It was organized around a two-story laboratory, with chemistry experiments on the top floor and a machine shop below. In , when he was twenty-four, he married a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Stilwell, who had taken refuge in his office during a rainstorm.
They had three children, two of whom Edison nicknamed Dot and Dash. He first had in mind a kind of answering machine that would transcribe the contents of a call, but he quickly realized that it might be possible to record the voice itself. To test the idea, Edison spoke into a diaphragm with a needle attached; as he spoke, the needle vibrated against a piece of paraffin paper, carving into it the ups and downs of the sound waves. So novel was the talking machine that many people refused to believe in its existence—understandably, since, up to that point in history, sound had been entirely ephemeral.
But once they heard it with their own ears they all wanted one, and scores of new investors opened their pockets to help Edison meet the demand. This was the team that banished the darkness, or at least made it subject to a switch. By the eighteen-seventies, plenty of homes were lit with indoor gas lamps, but they produced terrible fumes and covered everything in soot. The filament was the trickiest part, and he and his team tried hundreds of materials before settling on carbon, which they got to burn for fourteen and a half hours in the fall of A year later, when they tried carbonized bamboo, it burned for more than a thousand hours.
By the New Year, individual light bulbs had given way to a network of illumination around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light. The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles.
Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon. But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers.
She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good. One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution.
In , Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the primary research laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent most of his time there, supervising the development of lighting technology and power systems.
He also perfected the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery. Over the next few decades, Edison found his role as inventor transitioning to one as industrialist and business manager. The laboratory in West Orange was too large and complex for any one man to completely manage, and Edison found he was not as successful in his new role as he was in his former one.
Edison also found that much of the future development and perfection of his inventions was being conducted by university-trained mathematicians and scientists. He worked best in intimate, unstructured environments with a handful of assistants and was outspoken about his disdain for academia and corporate operations.
During the s, Edison built a magnetic iron-ore processing plant in northern New Jersey that proved to be a commercial failure. Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for producing cement. Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W.
Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device. Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car.
Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.
During World War I, the U. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. By the end of the s, Edison was in his 80s.
He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber. During his lifetime, Edison received 1, U. He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, , at the age of His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.
Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time. The two parted ways in and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power.
One of the unusual - and cruel - methods Edison used to convince people of the dangers of alternating current was through public demonstrations where animals were electrocuted. One of the most infamous of these shows was the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island. He was 84 years old. Many communities and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical power to commemorate his passing.
Edison's career was the quintessential rags-to-riches success story that made him a folk hero in America. An uninhibited egoist, he could be a tyrant to employees and ruthless to competitors. But by the time he died, Edison was one of the most well-known and respected Americans in the world.
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Still life of the first electric light bulb, invented by Thomas Alva Edison in and patented on January 27, By Jennifer Latson. Related Stories. Apple Pay Starts Today.
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