Thomas Alva Edison is undoubtedly the most influential American from the 20th century. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1847 (Hart 222-225). When he first began school, “Edison’s teacher thought he was addled” (Allaby and Gjertsen 13), and his mother soon pulled him out. As a homeschooled child, Edison became an avid entrepreneur at a young age (Allaby and Gjertsen 14-23). He sold newspapers on a train as well as candy and fruit to supplement his earnings. When Edison found an empty train car, he used his savings to purchase a printing press and publish his own newsheet from there. The paper’s current articles were a hit with the passengers and Edison sold hundreds of copies. Thomas also used the empty train car to conduct experiments, one of which resulted in a chemical fire that got him kicked off of the train. His curiosity also led him to build a working telegraph in his home so he could analyze how it functioned. By the age of sixteen, Edison was already working as a telegraph operator and would continue to do so at a variety of different places for the next five years. Edison was working in Boston at the time that he decided to focus on his inventions and used his salesmanship skills to get several investors to fund his inventions ("Thomas Edison and Menlo Park"). A year later, he patented his electric vote recorder, which allowed a button to be pressed to record a vote, and a stock ticker that received and displayed numerous pieces of current stock information (Hart 222-225). When the master ticker tape machine at the New York Gold Indicator Company, where Edison was at the time, broke down, he fixed it and was offered a job. Soon after, he set up his own engineering business and was hired to manage all of Western Union’s equipment ("Thomas Edison and Menlo Park"). Impressed by Edison, his boss offered to buy all of his inventions for forty-thousand dollars (Hart 222-225). The young inventor immediately invested the money in an empty factory located in Newark. This factory promptly became the home of his first workshop. Some of the first people hired to help in this workshop were Swiss clock-maker, John Kreusi and English chief mechanical assistant, Charles Batchelor. In 1871, Edison fell in love with one of his employees, Mary Stilwell. They married later that year and soon had three kids, Marion Estelle, Thomas Alva Jr., and William Leslie. When Alexander Graham Bell created the first telephone in 1876, Western Union hired Thomas Edison to put the simple device into practical use. The next major event in Edison’s life came when he purchased thirty-four acres of land in a tiny town called Menlo Park. This land became the first research and development facility in the world ("Thomas Edison and Menlo Park"). Among his major achievements at Menlo Park, Edison improved the telephone and created the phonograph. The latter invention drew swarms of people to Menlo Park and prompted Edison to be nicknamed, The Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison had 1,093 patents by the time his career was over, the most ever by a single person (“Edison, Thomas Alva”). Edison did not rest after inventing the phonograph. Within a few years he had perfected the incandescent light bulb and was mass producing it. He also lit an entire street in New York City and laid the groundwork for a large electricity distribution system for the city. The Wizard of Menlo Park also founded the Edison Electric Company which later became GE (Allaby and Gjertsen 14-23). After his wife’s death in 1884, he met and married Mina Miller and they had three children. Three years later, Edison moved all of his operations to a bigger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey to accommodate his growing research projects. Thomas Edison spent most of the rest of his life living in that lab until his death in 1931 ("Thomas Edison and Menlo Park"). Thomas Edison revolutionized the
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Very few people know that GE, a company that had an estimated net worth of $350 billion by the end of the 1990s, was created by a merger between Thomson-Houston Company and Edison’s own, Edison General Electric Company. Edison served as the director of the company until 1894. GE became hugely successful and still is today
Very few people know that GE, a company that had an estimated net worth of $350 billion by the end of the 1990s, was created by a merger between Thomson-Houston Company and Edison’s own, Edison General Electric Company. Edison served as the director of the company until 1894. GE became hugely successful and still is today