thomas edison light bulb experiments

More than 150 years ago, inventors began working on a bright idea that would have a dramatic impact on how we use energy in our homes and offices. This invention changed the way we design buildings, increased the length of the average workday and jumpstarted new businesses. It also led to new energy breakthroughs -- from power plants and electric transmission lines to home appliances and electric motors.

Like all great inventions, the light bulb can’t be credited to one inventor. It was a series of small improvements on the ideas of previous inventors that have led to the light bulbs we use in our homes today.

Incandescent Bulbs Light the Way

Long before Thomas Edison patented -- first in 1879 and then a year later in 1880 -- and began commercializing his incandescent light bulb, British inventors were demonstrating that electric light was possible with the arc lamp. In 1835, the first constant electric light was demonstrated, and for the next 40 years, scientists around the world worked on the incandescent lamp, tinkering with the filament (the part of the bulb that produces light when heated by an electrical current) and the bulb’s atmosphere (whether air is vacuumed out of the bulb or it is filled with an inert gas to prevent the filament from oxidizing and burning out). These early bulbs had extremely short lifespans, were too expensive to produce or used too much energy.

When Edison and his researchers at Menlo Park came onto the lighting scene, they focused on improving the filament -- first testing carbon, then platinum, before finally returning to a carbon filament. By October 1879, Edison’s team had produced a light bulb with a carbonized filament of uncoated cotton thread that could last for 14.5 hours. They continued to experiment with the filament until settling on one made from bamboo that gave Edison’s lamps a lifetime of up to 1,200 hours -- this filament became the standard for the Edison bulb for the next 10 years. Edison also made other improvements to the light bulb, including creating a better vacuum pump to fully remove the air from the bulb and developing the Edison screw (what is now the standard socket fittings for light bulbs).

(Historical footnote: One can’t talk about the history of the light bulb without mentioning William Sawyer and Albon Man, who received a U.S. patent for the incandescent lamp, and Joseph Swan, who patented his light bulb in England. There was debate on whether Edison’s light bulb patents infringed on these other inventors’ patents. Eventually Edison’s U.S. lighting company merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company -- the company making incandescent bulbs under the Sawyer-Man patent -- to form General Electric, and Edison’s English lighting company merged with Joseph Swan’s company to form Ediswan in England.)

What makes Edison’s contribution to electric lighting so extraordinary is that he didn’t stop with improving the bulb -- he developed a whole suite of inventions that made the use of light bulbs practical. Edison modeled his lighting technology on the existing gas lighting system. In 1882 with the Holborn Viaduct in London, he demonstrated that electricity could be distributed from a centrally located generator through a series of wires and tubes (also called conduits). Simultaneously, he focused on improving the generation of electricity, developing the first commercial power utility called the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan. And to track how much electricity each customer was using, Edison developed the first electric meter.

While Edison was working on the whole lighting system, other inventors were continuing to make small advances, improving the filament manufacturing process and the efficiency of the bulb. The next big change in the incandescent bulb came with the invention of the tungsten filament by European inventors in 1904. These new tungsten filament bulbs lasted longer and had a brighter light compared to the carbon filament bulbs. In 1913, Irving Langmuir figured out that placing an inert gas like nitrogen inside the bulb doubled its efficiency. Scientists continued to make improvements over the next 40 years that reduced the cost and increased the efficiency of the incandescent bulb. But by the 1950s, researchers still had only figured out how to convert about 10 percent of the energy the incandescent bulb used into light and began to focus their energy on other lighting solutions.

Energy Shortages Lead to Fluorescent Breakthroughs

In the 19th century, two Germans -- glassblower Heinrich Geissler and physician Julius Plücker -- discovered that they could produce light by removing almost all of the air from a long glass tube and passing an electrical current through it, an invention that became known as the Geissler tube. A type of discharge lamp, these lights didn’t gain popularity until the early 20th century when researchers began looking for a way to improve lighting efficiency. Discharge lamps became the basis of many lighting technologies, including neon lights, low-pressure sodium lamps (the type used in outdoor lighting such as streetlamps) and fluorescent lights .

Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla experimented with fluorescent lamps in the 1890s, but neither ever commercially produced them. Instead, it was Peter Cooper Hewitt’s breakthrough in the early 1900s that became one of the precursors to the fluorescent lamp. Hewitt created a blue-green light by passing an electric current through mercury vapor and incorporating a ballast (a device connected to the light bulb that regulates the flow of current through the tube). While the Cooper Hewitt lamps were more efficient than incandescent bulbs, they had few suitable uses because of the color of the light.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, European researchers were doing experiments with neon tubes coated with phosphors (a material that absorbs ultraviolet light and converts the invisible light into useful white light). These findings sparked fluorescent lamp research programs in the U.S., and by the mid and late 1930s, American lighting companies were demonstrating fluorescent lights to the U.S. Navy and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These lights lasted longer and were about three times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. The need for energy-efficient lighting American war plants led to the rapid adoption of fluorescents, and by 1951, more light in the U.S. was being produced by linear fluorescent lamps .

It was another energy shortage -- the 1973 oil crisis -- that caused lighting engineers to develop a fluorescent bulb that could be used in residential applications. In 1974, researchers at Sylvania started investigating how they could miniaturize the ballast and tuck it into the lamp. While they developed a patent for their bulb, they couldn’t find a way to produce it feasibly. Two years later in 1976, Edward Hammer at General Electric figured out how to bend the fluorescent tube into a spiral shape, creating the first compact fluorescent light (CFL). Like Sylvania, General Electric shelved this design because the new machinery needed to mass-produce these lights was too expensive.

Early CFLs hit the market in the mid-1980s at retail prices of $25-35, but prices could vary widely by region because of the different promotions carried out by utility companies. Consumers pointed to the high price as their number one obstacle in purchasing CFLs. There were other problems -- many CFLs of 1990 were big and bulky, they didn’t fit well into fixtures, and they had low light output and inconsistent performance. Since the 1990s, improvements in CFL performance, price, efficiency (they use about 75 percent less energy than incandescents) and lifetime (they last about 10 times longer) have made them a viable option for both renters and homeowners. Nearly 30 years after CFLs were first introduced on the market, an ENERGY STAR® CFL costs as little as $1.74 per bulb when purchased in a four-pack.

LEDs: The Future is Here

One of the fastest developing lighting technologies today is the light-emitting diode (or LED). A type of solid-state lighting, LEDs use a semiconductor to convert electricity into light, are often small in area (less than 1 square millimeter) and emit light in a specific direction, reducing the need for reflectors and diffusers that can trap light.

They are also the most efficient lights on the market. Also called luminous efficacy , a light bulb’s efficiency is a measure of emitted light (lumens) divided by power it draws (watts). A bulb that is 100 percent efficient at converting energy into light would have an efficacy of 683 lm/W. To put this in context, a 60- to 100-watt incandescent bulb has an efficacy of 15 lm/W, an equivalent CFL has an efficacy of 73 lm/W, and current LED-based replacement bulbs on the market range from 70-120 lm/W with an average efficacy of 85 lm/W.

In 1962 while working for General Electric, Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first visible-spectrum LED in the form of red diodes. Pale yellow and green diodes were invented next. As companies continued to improve red diodes and their manufacturing, they began appeari

What are the key facts?

Like all great inventions, the light bulb can’t be credited to one inventor.

It was a series of small improvements on the ideas of previous inventors that have led to the light bulbs we use in our homes today.

Learn more about the history of the incandescent light bulb .

Explore the history of fluorescent lights , from the Geissler tube to CFLs.

Read about the advancements in LED lights .

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is credited with inventions such as the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He held over 1,000 patents for his inventions.

(1847-1931)

Who Was Thomas Edison?

Thomas Edison was an American inventor who is considered one of America's leading businessmen and innovators. Edison rose from humble beginnings to work as an inventor of major technology, including the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb. He is credited today for helping to build America's economy during the Industrial Revolution .

Early Life and Education

Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. His father was an exiled political activist from Canada, while his mother was an accomplished school teacher and a major influence in Edison’s early life. An early bout with scarlet fever as well as ear infections left Edison with hearing difficulties in both ears as a child and nearly deaf as an adult.

Edison would later recount, with variations on the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident in which his ears were injured. But others have tended to discount this as the sole cause of his hearing loss.

In 1854, Edison’s family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he attended public school for a total of 12 weeks. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction, he was deemed "difficult" by his teacher.

His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home. At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects. In this wide-open curriculum Edison developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him throughout his life.

At age 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Exploiting his access to the news bulletins teletyped to the station office each day, Edison began publishing his own small newspaper, called the Grand Trunk Herald .

The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity.

Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car. During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire.

The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route.

Edison the Telegrapher

While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. After Edison saved a three-year-old from being run over by an errant train , the child’s grateful father rewarded him by teaching him to operate a telegraph . By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator.

For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War . In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.

In 1866, at age 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, working for The Associated Press. The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation.

Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap. However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.

In 1868, Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take control of his future.

Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company . At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature.

However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly. They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S THOMAS EDISON FACT CARD

In 1871 Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses. During their 13-year marriage, they had three children, Marion, Thomas and William, who himself became an inventor.

In 1884, Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior.

Thomas Edison: Inventions

In 1869, at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions.

The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed, they paid him $40,000 for the rights. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.

By the early 1870s, Edison had acquired a reputation as a first-rate inventor. In 1870, he set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, and employed several machinists.

As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed products for the highest bidder. Often that was Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, but just as often, it was one of Western Union's rivals.

Quadruplex Telegraph

In one such instance, Edison devised for Western Union the quadruplex telegraph, capable of transmitting two signals in two different directions on the same wire, but railroad tycoon Jay Gould snatched the invention from Western Union, paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds and stock, and generating years of litigation.

In 1876, Edison moved his expanding operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent industrial research facility incorporating machine shops and laboratories.

That same year, Western Union encouraged him to develop a communication device to compete with Alexander Graham Bell 's telephone. He never did.

In December 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph . His innovation relied upon tin-coated cylinders with two needles: one for recording sound, and another for playback.

His first words spoken into the phonograph's mouthpiece were, "Mary had a little lamb." Though not commercially viable for another decade, the phonograph brought him worldwide fame, especially when the device was used by the U.S. Army to bring music to the troops overseas during World War I .

While Edison was not the inventor of the first light bulb, he came up with the technology that helped bring it to the masses. Edison was driven to perfect a commercially practical, efficient incandescent light bulb following English inventor Humphry Davy’s invention of the first early electric arc lamp in the early 1800s.

Over the decades following Davy’s creation, scientists such as Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans had worked to perfect electric light bulbs or tubes using a vacuum but were unsuccessful in their attempts.

After buying Woodward and Evans' patent and making improvements in his design, Edison was granted a patent for his own improved light bulb in 1879. He began to manufacture and market it for widespread use. In January 1880, Edison set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power and light the cities of the world.

That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became General Electric .

In 1881, he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed. In 1882, the Pearl Street generating station provided 110 volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.

Later Inventions & Business

In 1887, 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 1890s, 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.

Motion Picture

On April 23, 1896, Edison became the first person to project a motion picture, holding the world's first motion picture screening at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City.

His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. K. L. Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device. Soon, Edison's West Orange laboratory was creating Edison Films. Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in 1903.

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 1912. The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.

During World War I, the U.S. government asked Edison to head the Naval Consulting Board, which examined inventions submitted for military use. 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 1920s, 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 1,093 U.S. patents and filed an additional 500 to 600 that were unsuccessful or abandoned.

He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, 1868, at the age of 21. His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

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 1885 and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. alternating currents, which Tesla championed. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power.

Elephant Killing

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 1903 electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island.

Edison died on October 18, 1931, from complications of diabetes in his home, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey. 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. Though he was a publicity seeker, he didn’t socialize well and often neglected his family.

But by the time he died, Edison was one of the most well-known and respected Americans in the world. He had been at the forefront of America’s first technological revolution and set the stage for the modern electric world.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Thomas Alva Edison
• Birth Year: 1847
• Birth date: February 11, 1847
• Birth State: Ohio
• Birth City: Milan
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Thomas Edison is credited with inventions such as the first practical incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He held over 1,000 patents for his inventions.
• Technology and Engineering
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• The Cooper Union
• Interesting Facts
• Thomas Edison was considered too difficult as a child so his mother homeschooled him.
• Edison became the first to project a motion picture in 1896, at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City.
• Edison had a bitter rivalry with Nikola Tesla.
• During his lifetime, Edison received 1,093 U.S. patents.
• Death Year: 1931
• Death date: October 18, 1931
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: West Orange
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Thomas Edison Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/inventors/thomas-edison
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 13, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
• Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
• I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
• I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
• Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.
• To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
• Hell, there ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something.
• I always invent to obtain money to go on inventing.
• The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them.
• We know nothing; we have to creep by the light of experiments, never knowing the day or the hour that we shall find what we are after.
• Everything, anything is possible; the world is a vast storehouse of undiscovered energy.
• The recurrence of a phenomenon like Edison is not very likely... He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.” (Nikola Tesla)

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How Edison Invented the Light Bulb

• from Thomas Edison

Lexile Levels

If cartoonists want to show that someone has a “bright idea,” they often draw a light bulb over the person’s head. This simple graphic image is more than a sign of enlightenment. It’s also a tribute to the genius of Thomas Alva Edison. 

Edison didn’t “invent” electricity. Nor did he create the first electric lighting. But he did find a way to put electric lighting in homes and offices on a grand scale.

In 1878, Edison joined a scientific expedition to Wyoming. The scientists were going to watch a total eclipse of the Sun. Edison also wanted to use his newly invented tasimeter. It would measure the heat from the Sun’s corona during the eclipse. During the journey, Edison became inspired by talks with fellow scientists. He said that he would invent a safe, inexpensive electric light. It would replace the dirty, dangerous kerosene and gas lamps that lit most homes and offices. But Edison wanted more than an electric light. He also wanted to create a system to send electricity to individual buildings, so the lights would be useful.

After Edison came up with an idea, he spent whatever it took to make it work. Thanks to his reputation, he was able to get financial support for his projects. A group of wealthy businessmen formed the Edison Electric Light Company. They gave Edison an advance of $30,000 for expenses.

▲  Many scientists made discoveries about electricity. They showed that it flows from object to object. They showed that some objects conduct it better than others. They also showed that lightning is a form of electricity. In 1800, Italian Alessandro Volta (shown seated in the picture above) made an electric battery. Shortly after, Hans Christian Oersted of Denmark showed that wires carrying electric currents acted like magnets. In 1831, Englishman Michael Faraday showed that magnetism could produce electricity. Faraday’s work was the basis of Edison’s work with electricity.

• Before Edison
• After Edison

Some outdoor areas in the early 1870s were using a type of electric lighting known as arc lighting. But it had two problems: it was too bright for indoor use, and the current flowed in one direct line. If one light went out, all the lights went out.

Edison’s solution was to connect lights in a parallel circuit by subdividing the electric current. If one light failed, the others would still work.

Edison quickly discovered he needed two things. To use electricity to produce a glow that would burn for a long time, he needed a filament (thread) that would glow without burning up. He also needed a container that had almost no air in it. In other words, he needed a vacuum tube. In 1865, Hermann Sprengel had designed the first effective vacuum pump. But it was still rare in the U.S. Edison put one of his assistants, Francis Upton, to work on the pump problem.

▲  In his search for the right filament, Edison used his standard method: trial and error. For a while, he worked only with platinum. These experiments were unsuccessful. The platinum was also expensive. Edison returned to his old standby, carbon. There was plenty of carbon at the Menlo Park lab because it was used to make telephone transmitters. Edison’s assistant Charles Batchelor experimented with carbonizing many substances: celluloid, cedar, coconut hair, fishing line, and cotton soaked in boiling tar. Eventually, he tried scorching simple cotton thread. On October 22, 1879, Edison and his assistants took turns watching in teams as a bulb with the carbonized thread burned for about 13½ hours. The team had succeeded! They had invented a working electric light bulb.

“I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom.”

—edison .

Although the carbonized cotton thread worked, Edison was not convinced it was the best material. So he kept on experimenting. In the summer of 1880, he settled on carbonized bamboo fiber as the filament of choice.

▲   After Edison decided to use the carbonized bamboo fiber filament, his backers were relieved. Their money had been well spent. Now they wanted to reap their rewards. For over two years, Edison oversaw the building of an electric power station. It was located on Pearl Street near New York City’s financial district. On September 4, 1882, a switch was pulled. Then the first 85 customers of the Edison Electric Illuminating Co. of New York lit their new electric lamps.

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What material is used for the filaments of incandescent light bulbs today? 

Today’s filaments are made of tungsten, which is a very strong metal. They were developed around 1910.

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The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor.

Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house.

Not all these inventions worked or made money. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be; his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed; and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone. His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household—plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families.

Edison’s detractors insist that his greatest invention was his own fame, cultivated at the expense of collaborators and competitors alike. His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. The real nature of his genius is clarified in “ Edison ” (Random House), a new biography by Edmund Morris, a writer who famously struggled with just how inventive a biographer should be. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan. Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life.

Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. People had been making wires incandesce since 1761, and plenty of other inventors had demonstrated and even patented various versions of incandescent lights by 1878, when Edison turned his attention to the problem of illumination. Edison’s gift, here and elsewhere, was not so much inventing as what he called perfecting—finding ways to make things better or cheaper or both. Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

Born in 1847 in Ohio and raised in Michigan, Edison had been experimenting since childhood, when he built a chemistry laboratory in his family’s basement. That early endeavor only ever earned him the ire of his mother, who fretted about explosions, so, at thirteen, the young entrepreneur started selling snacks to passengers travelling on the local railroad line from Port Huron to Detroit. He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. In 1862, 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.

One day, Edison saw a stationmaster’s young son playing on the tracks and pulled the boy to safety before an oncoming train crushed him; as a reward, the father taught Edison Morse code and showed him how to operate the telegraph machines. This came in handy that summer, when Edison’s lab caused a fire and the conductor kicked him off the train. 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 1869: 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.

That failure cured Edison of any interest in invention for invention’s sake: from then on, he cultivated a taste for the practical and the profitable. 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. Edison’s first lucrative products were a stock-ticker device and a quadruplex telegraph, capable of sending four messages at once. 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 1875, 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. Workshops are at least as old as Hephaestus, but Edison’s was the world’s first research-and-development facility—a model that would later be adopted by governments, universities, and rival corporations. Menlo Park, as it came to be known, was arguably Edison’s most significant invention, since it facilitated so many others, by allowing for the division of problems into discrete chemical, electrical, and physical components, which teams of workers could solve through theory and then experimentation before moving directly into production.

Menlo Park also included a three-story house for Edison’s family. In 1871, 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. It is likely thanks to them that the first audio recording ever made, in November of 1877, features Papa Edison reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

The phonograph came about because Edison had been experimenting with telephones, trying to improve on Alexander Graham Bell’s transmitter to achieve better sound quality across longer distances. 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. To everyone’s surprise, the design worked: when he added a second needle to retrace the marks in the paper, the vibrating diaphragm reproduced Edison’s voice.

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. With this infusion of cash, Edison was able to hire dozens of new “muckers,” as the men who worked with him would eventually become known. (The endearment may have taken hold during his ill-fated mining days: “muck” is a term for ore, which his men tried, and failed, to remove from mines more efficiently.)

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. Arc lights, which buzzed like welders’ torches in a few cities around the world, were, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare.” What Edison and his muckers did was figure out a way to regulate incandescent light, making the bulbs burn longer and more reliably, and at a more bearable brightness. 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 1879. (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. Gawkers came every night to see the apricot smudges of light through the windows of Edison’s house and along the streets, marvelling at how the bulbs stayed lit through wind and rain, shining steadily and silently, and could be turned on and off with ease. 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.

Edison’s patent attorney worried about the publicity, especially when the likes of George Westinghouse and Edward Weston came calling. But, by February, 1880, Edison had executed Patent No. 223,898, for the electric lamp, and No. 369,280, for a system of electrical distribution. 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. While supervising the construction of the plant, Edison moved his family to Gramercy Park; then, in August, 1884, Mary died suddenly, officially from “congestion of the brain,” though possibly of a morphine overdose. 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. She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory. This new complex improved on the already astounding pace of invention at Menlo Park and greatly expanded Edison’s manufacturing capacity. “I will have the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant,” he bragged in a letter, “and the facilities incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention.” He wanted to be able to “build anything from a ladys watch to a Locomotive,” and employees were soon working, in separate teams, on alkaline batteries, sound recordings, fluoroscopes for medical radiography, a device that measured infrared radiation, motion-picture cameras and projectors and the pictures themselves, and anything else that Edison thought he could market.

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Like tech C.E.O.s today, Edison attracted an enormous following, both because his inventions fundamentally altered the texture of daily life and because he nurtured a media scrum that fawned over every inch of his laboratory and fixated on every minute of his day. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. A recent book by Jeff Guinn, “ The Vagabonds ” (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the publicity-seeking road trips that Edison took with Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford every summer from 1914 to 1924, driving a caravan of cars around the country, promoting themselves as much as the automobiles. Edison’s life had already been thoroughly documented for the public: the first authorized biography, two full volumes’ worth, appeared in 1910. All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.

How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away. In the earliest years after his death, those biographies expanded on Edison’s personality, revealing the complexities of his family life and his work habits. He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal. He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding. His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr., he sued in order to stop him from selling snake oil under the family name.

Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on. Then, a dozen years ago, Randall Stross, who has written extensively about Silicon Valley, published “ The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World .” Despite its admiring subtitle, Stross’s book sought to reveal the man behind the curtain—in his view, a humbug whose bigotry and bad business sense were salvaged only by the creativity, savvy, and cowardice of his munchkins, who toiled away on invention after invention for which their wizard took credit.

That kind of correction was surely inevitable, given Edison’s status and the culture’s increasing skepticism about great men and their ostensible genius. Although Stross’s book was not the first to consider Edison’s faults—Wyn Wachhorst probed his self-promotion in “ Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth ,” from 1981, and Paul Israel catalogued his belief in racial stereotypes and phrenological theories in “ Edison: A Life of Invention ,” from 1998—Stross portrays Edison as a patent-hungry P. T. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Edison’s hype was not for its own sake; it was to raise capital, which he rarely held on to for long, partly because he never was much of a businessman, and partly because he only wanted more of it in order to keep working. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. And he didn’t hide the borrowing: like Santa’s elves, the muckers were always a part of the mythology.

So, too, was the drudgery. Edison not only rhymed “perspiration” with “inspiration”—he also talked endlessly about his experiments and trials, emphasizing just how much work went into every discovery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. “I never had an idea in my life,” he once said. “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.”

In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another. In Merton’s terms, “multiples” are more common than “singletons,” which is to say that discovery and invention are rarely the product of only one person. The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies.

Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his. It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs. Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. Stross makes much of that failure in his biography, but consumer markets are hardly the only, and rarely the best, measure of genius—a point made clear, and painfully so, by Edison’s preference for and optimism about electric cars. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

The delight of Edmund Morris’s “Edison” is that, instead of arguing with earlier writers or debating the terms of genius, it focusses on the phenomenological impact of Edison’s work. He tries to return readers to the technological revolutions of the past, to capture how magical this wizard’s work really felt. He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. And he makes plain the cosmological significance of Edison’s phonograph—how, against all understandings of human impermanence, it allowed the dead to go on speaking forever. “Here now were echoes made hard,” Morris writes, “resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them.”

Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. And “Edison” does it doubly, because it is the last book that Morris finished before his death, earlier this year, at age seventy-eight. Morris’s first book, “ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt ,” won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize after it was published, in 1979, but it was his second book that really caused a stir. The success of Morris’s Roosevelt biography was shortly followed by the election of Ronald Reagan, and, after the Inauguration, the new Administration courted him to be the President’s official scribe.

Morris spent fourteen years working on a book that he ultimately published under the confused title of “ Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan .” Devoured by the public, scorned by the academy, debated by the Boswells of the world, the book featured a fictional narrator, who claimed to have known the fortieth President since they were teen-agers. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material. It was easy to assume that the invented voice belonged to Morris himself, since the “I” of the book expresses frustration about holding off on a planned trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt in order to write about Dutch Reagan. But many of the details contradicted those of Morris’s own life. When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an artist of the court adding himself to the portrait, as Diego Velázquez did in “ Las Meninas .” Morris’s transgressions lay first in making things up and second in failing to disclose what he was doing. His critics found those actions disqualifying in a biography; his champions found “Dutch” formally innovative. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging.

There is a faint echo of that formal tomfoolery in “Edison,” which begins with the inventor’s death and then takes a turn for the Benjamin Button. Morris moves backward through the decades of Edison’s life; like Merlin, this wizard ages in reverse. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in 1920 and runs until 1929, Part 2 goes from 1910 to 1919, and so on. The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.

Reverse chronologies might work well in fictions like Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” where they are serving grander themes of the fragility of memory and the failures of fidelity, but they are an unsatisfying solution to the problem of how to structure a biography. Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy. Tracing someone’s intellectual interests across a lifetime can be more meaningful than dragging the subject and the reader ever onward through calendrical time. But a backward biography, while certainly an invention, is, as Edison might have pointed out, neither practical nor profitable.

Even if you make your peace with this reverse narration—which, to be honest, I did, partly because Edison feels so much like a time traveller—“Edison” is still a frustrating book. It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life. If anything, Morris offers the same strange apologia for “Edison” that he did for “Dutch.” “Nobody around him understood him,” Morris said of Reagan. “Every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, ‘You know, I could never really figure him out.’ ” In the same vein, Morris once compared Edison to electricity itself, an invisible force seen only when it acts on the world around it. “What he was in person is harder, maybe impossible to say,” Morris concluded, “because he put so much of himself into his work.”

And yet figuring people out is the fundamental task of the biographer. Every person is elusive in one way or another, sometimes even unto herself, but it is possible to confront those inner mysteries in a biography without resorting to fabrications or gimmicks. It’s a lesson Morris could have learned from Edison: sometimes, what’s called for isn’t invention but perfection. ♦

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When Edison Turned Night into Day

By: Christopher Klein

Updated: May 31, 2023 | Original: December 17, 2014

As the remaining hours of 1879 dwindled to a precious few, a Pennsylvania Railroad special steamed into a remote New Jersey hamlet. Scores of men dressed in elegant evening wear and women wrapped in short fur jackets and silk gowns stepped off the nighttime train eager to set foot in the future. Although dressed for New Year’s Eve celebrations, these revelers felt content to let others ring in a new decade while they witnessed the launch of a new epoch in human history.

The sleepy village of Menlo Park boasted only a dozen scattered houses, but it promised a luminous New Year’s Eve spectacle unrivaled even by cosmopolitan Manhattan, 20 miles to the north. As soon as the train passengers disembarked and shuffled up the snow-sprinkled stairs, they cast their gazes skyward in wonder. Although storm clouds blotted out the twinkling stars, the heavens still sparkled, though not from familiar pyrotechnics, but from something foreign to their 19th-century eyes: a series of gleaming incandescent light bulbs that bathed Christie Street in an artificial radiance.

The trail blazed by the little globes of fire sitting atop slender wooden lampposts stretching toward the night sky led the frosty crowds to a two-story clapboard building enveloped in a warm glow. Upstairs in his laboratory, Thomas Edison dazzled all the guests crowded inside his “invention factory” with the first public demonstration of his latest marvel—the first practical incandescent light bulb.

Already hailed as the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his invention of the phonograph and his telegraph and telephone innovations, Edison now stood ready to revolutionize daily life for the majority of Americans who still relied upon tallow candles, kerosene and even whale oil for illumination and for additional millions dependent on noxious gaslights, which blackened walls and furniture, reeked of sulfur and ammonia and had the potential to explode.

Edison was hardly the first to develop the incandescent light, which was first patented in England in 1841 by Frederick de Moleyns. In the ensuing four decades, however, numerous inventors failed to produce a safe, bright and affordable bulb that could stay lit for more than a few minutes at a time. Edison threw himself into the challenge of developing a commercially viable incandescent light in 1878, and investors in the Edison Electric Light Company provided him with the necessary seed money. The 31-year-old inventor sought to develop not only a working bulb, but an entire lighting system powered by a generator.

Edison bragged that he would have a viable bulb ready in just months, but he soon found himself stymied like the inventors who came before him. Inside the laboratory on his 34-acre research-and-development campus at Menlo Park, the “Wizard” and his 20- to 30-person team of young assistants succeeded in creating a vacuum with no more than a 1-millionth part of air that allowed a platinum filament to light without catching fire, but Edison consigned it to the “cemetery of inventions” because the metal was too costly. Turning to cheaper carbon filaments, Edison tested raw silk, cork and even the beard hair of two of his employees with little success. The big breakthrough finally came in October 1879 when a high-resistance, carbon filament burned continuously for more than 13 hours.

On December 21, 1879, a full-page article in the New York Herald announced “the great inventor’s triumph in electric illumination” in producing a light “like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn.” Although the newspaper announced that Edison would stage his first public exhibition of his electric light on New Year’s Eve, work at Menlo Park came to a standstill over the next 10 days as a ceaseless flow of overanxious pilgrims descended upon the laboratory to take a sneak peek.

When Edison finally opened his doors to the public on December 31, a human wave surged into the laboratory, ablaze with 25 brilliant electric lights that glistened off the hundreds of glass bottles lining the shelves on the walls as well as the pipes on the out-of-tune organ that America’s most famous inventor occasionally played with his soot-stained hands. Hundreds huddled around Edison as he explained in plain language and a homespun manner how a 2-inch-long, horseshoe-shaped thread of carbonized cardboard could glow for hours on end inside a pear-shaped vacuum bulb when an electric current ran through it. He even showed how a bulb still burned for hours even after submerged in water. The awestruck audience also noticed that the incandescent bulbs didn’t flicker like gaslights and emitted softer light than harsh electric arc lamps.

The crowd who had invaded Edison’s inner sanctum tried the inventor’s patience, but he shook hands and answered questions even from his skeptics who came to grill him. The laboratory staff, though, spent as much time futilely guarding their fragile equipment from the visitors conducting their own impromptu experiments as they did demonstrating the vacuum pump and the baking of carbon filaments. Edison’s assistants repeatedly turned down requests to buy the bulbs, but eight were stolen anyway by guests who left with a piece of history.

Not only did a new decade dawn in Menlo Park when the clock struck midnight, so did the electric age. The only disappointed visitors to Edison’s laboratory on New Year’s Eve may have been the crestfallen representatives of the Brooklyn Gaslight Company who realized with everyone else that they had just seen the light of the future. Just the rumors of Edison’s breakthrough had sent gas company stocks plummeting by 15 percent over the past month, and that was just the beginning. The fortunes were reversed for the stockholders of the Edison Electric Light Company, whose original $100 shares now sold for $4,500, according to the Boston Globe.

On January 27, 1880, Edison received the patent for his electric light. Three decades later when asked to reflect upon which of his inventions was his greatest, he scrawled across the bottom of a letter: “Incandescent Electric Lighting and Power System.”

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7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison

Despite popular belief, the inventor wasn’t the “Wiz” of everything

Erica R. Hendry

Almost everyone can name the man that invented the light bulb.

Thomas Edison was one of the most successful innovators in American history. He was the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” a larger-than-life hero who seemed almost magical for the way he snatched ideas from thin air.

But the man also stumbled, sometimes tremendously. In response to a question about his missteps, Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, explores the inventor’s prolific career in his new book, Edison and the Rise of Innovation . The author offers new documents, photographs and insight into Edison’s evolution as an inventor, not to forget those creations that never saw wild success.

“One of the things that makes Edison stand out as an innovator was he was very good at reducing the risk of innovation—he’s not an inventor that depends on just one thing,” DeGraaf says. “He knows that if one idea or one product doesn’t do well he has others…that can make up for it.”

Chances are you haven’t heard of Edison’s botched ideas, several of which are highlighted here, because the Ohio native refused to dwell on them. DeGraaf says, “Edison’s not a guy that looks back. Even for his biggest failures he didn’t spend a lot of time wringing his hands and saying ‘Oh my God, we spent a fortune on that.’ He said, ‘we had fun spending it.’”

The automatic vote recorder  

Edison, who made an early name for himself improving the telegraph, moved to Boston in 1868 to expand his network and find investors. By night, he worked the wires, taking press reports from New York for Western Union. By day, he experimented with new technologies—one of which was his first patented invention, an electrographic vote recorder.

The device allowed officials voting on a bill to cast their decision to a central recorder that calculated the tally automatically. Edison dreamed the invention would “save several hours of public time every day in the session.” He later reflected, “I thought my fortune was made.”

But when he took the vote recorder to Washington, Edison was met with a different reaction. “Political leaders said, ‘Forget it,’” DeGraaf says. There was almost no interest in Edison’s device because politicians feared it hurt the vote trading and maneuvering that happens in the legislative process (much in the way some feared bringing cameras to hearings , via CSPAN, would lead to more grandstanding instead of negotiating).

It was an early lesson. From that point on, DeGraaf says, “He vowed he would not invent a technology that didn’t have an apparent market; that he wasn’t just going to invent things for the sake of inventing them but…to be able to sell them. I have to suspect that even Edison, as young and inexperienced innovator at that point, would have had to understand that if he can’t sell his invention, he can’t make money.”

Electric pen

As railroads and other companies expanded in the late 19th century, there was a huge demand for tools administrative employees could use to complete tasks—including making multiple copies of handwritten documents—quicker.

Enter the electric pen. Powered by a small electric motor and battery, the pen relied on a handheld needle that moved up and down as an employee wrote. Instead of pushing out ink, though, the pen punched tiny holes through the paper’s surface; the idea was employees could create a stencil of their documents on wax paper and make copies by rolling ink over it, “printing” the words onto blank pieces of paper underneath.

Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in 1875, hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic. Edison charged agents $20 a pen; the agents sold them for $30.

The first problems with the invention were purely cosmetic: the electric pen was noisy, and much heavier than those employees had used in the past. But even after Edison improved the sound and weight, problems persisted. The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar. “It was messy,” says DeGraaf.

By 1877, Edison was involved in the telephone and thinking about what would eventually become the phonograph; he abandoned the project, assigning the rights to Western Electric Manufacturing Co. Edison received pen royalties into the early 1880s.

Even though the electric pen wasn’t a home run for Edison, it paved the way for other innovators. Albert B. Dick purchased one of the pen’s patented technologies to create the mimeograph, a stencil copier that spread quickly from schools to offices to churches, DeGraaf says. And while it’s hard to trace for sure, the electric pen is also often considered the predecessor of the modern tattoo needle.

The tinfoil phonograph

Edison debuted one of his most successful inventions, the phonograph, in 1888. “I’ve made some machines, but this is my baby and I expect it to grow up to be a big feller and support me in my old age,” he once quipped. But getting a perfected machine to market was a journey that took nearly a decade—and plenty of trial and error.

Edison’s entrée into sound recording in the 1870s was in some ways an accident. According to DeGraaf, Edison was handling the thin diaphragm the early telephone used to convert words into electromagnetic waves and wondered if reversing the process would allow him to play the words back. It worked. At first, Edison modeled the invention on spools of paper tape or grooved paper discs, but eventually moved on to a tinfoil disc. He developed a hand-cranked machine called the tinfoil phonograph; as he spoke into the machine and cranked the handle, metal points traced grooves into the disc. When he returned the disc to the starting point and cranked the handle again, his voice rang back from the machine. (The machine even worked on Edison’s first test: the children’s rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”)

Reporters and scientists were blown away by the invention; DeGraaf argues it helped make Edison a household name. He took the device to demonstrations up and down the East Coast—even making a midnight visit to President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House—and eventually organized exhibitions across the country.

Edison imagined music boxes, talking clocks and dolls, speech education tools and talking books for the blind. But without a clear marketing strategy, the device did not have a target purpose or audience. As the man who ran the exhibition tour told Edison, “interest [was soon] exhausted.” Only two small groups were invested in it, those who could afford to indulge in the novelty and scientists interested in the technology behind it.

The machine also took skill and patience. The tinfoil sheet was delicate and easily damaged, which meant it could only be used once or twice and couldn’t be stored for a long period of time.

When Edison revisited the machine 10 years later, he was more involved in both the marketing and the medium—which he eventually changed to a wax cylinder— and his invention took off.

The Talking Doll

When he opened a lab in West Orange, New Jersey, in late 1887, Edison decided he wanted to turn out new inventions quickly and hand them over to factories to be manufactured and sold; what he earned from those sales would be put back into the lab.

“He didn’t want to do complicated things, he wanted to do projects he could turn out in a short time and [that would] turn a quick profit,” DeGraaf says.

Among the first of these attempts was the talking doll. (If you’ve ever owned a talking doll—and who didn’t love the pull-string Woody from  Toy Story —you ought to thank Edison.) Edison crafted a smaller version of his phonograph and put it inside dolls he imported from Germany. He hoped to have the doll ready for Christmas 1888, but production issues kept the toys from hitting the market until March 1890.

Almost immediately, the toys began coming back.

Consumers complained they were too fragile and broke easily in the hands of young girls; even the slightest bump down the stairs could cause the mechanism to come loose. Some reported that the toy’s voice grew fainter after only an hour of use. Beyond that, the dolls didn’t exactly sound like sweet companions—their voice was “just ghastly,” DeGraaf says.

Edison reacted quickly—by April, less than a month after they were first shipped to consumers, the dolls were off the market. The swift move was one of the strongest indications of Edison’s attitude toward failure and how he operated when faced with it, DeGraaf says.

Ore mills and separators

For years, Edison corresponded with miners throughout the United States. The deposits of ore along the East Coast, Ohio and Pennsylvania were littered with nonferrous rock that had to be removed before the ore was smelted, DeGraaf explains. In 1890, Edison envisioned an ore separator with powerful electromagnets that could parse the fine ore particles from rocks, depositing them into two different bins.

But he wasn’t alone: at the same time, there were more than 20 small-scale ore separators being tested on Eastern iron beds. To give himself a competitive advantage, Edison constructed several large-scale plants he believed could process up to 5,000 tons of ore a day, DeGraaf says. After opening and closing a few small experimental plants, he constructed a plant near Ogdensburg, New Jersey, which gave him access to 19,000 acres of minerals.

Edison managed the plant in Ogdensburg—a change of pace for the inventor. The endeavor presented issues from the very beginning. The giant crushing rolls—5-foot by 6-foot tools Edison hoped would crush rocks up to six tons—that were crucial to the plant’s operations were all but useless when they debuted in 1894. As Edison redesigned them, his employees discovered the plant’s elevators had deteriorated, which meant he would have to rebuild an entirely new elevator system. Edison could never quite get the lab to full capacity. He rejiggered machines a dozen times over at all steps in the process, from crushing to separating and drying. The work came with a hefty price tag, with which Edison nor his investors could cover. Ore milling was a failed experiment Edison took a decade to let go—an uncharacteristically long time for the quick-stepping innovator.

The Edison Home Service Club

Before there was Netflix or Redbox, there was the Edison Home Service Club.

In the 1900s, Edison’s National Phonograph Co. rolled out a number of less expensive machines so people could bring entertainment—mostly music—into their homes. His and the other major phonograph companies, including Victor and Columbia, manufactured the machines as well as the records they played.

Edison believed his records were superior, DeGraaf says, and thought giving buyers access to more of his catalog was the only way to prove it. He rolled out the club in 1922, sending subscribers 20 records in the mail each month.  After two days, they selected the records they wanted to order and sent the samples on to the next subscriber.

The service worked well in small clusters of buyers, many of them in New Jersey. Edison refused to let celebrities endorse his product or do much of any widespread advertising; Victoria and Columbia both had much more effective mass circulation advertising campaigns that stretched across the country, something that was “way beyond Edison’s ability,” DeGraaf says. “The company just didn’t have the money to implement [something like that] on a national scale.”

Up until this point, most markets were local or regional. “They’re not operating on a national basis and the success is contingent on very close personal relationships between the customer and the business person,” DeGraaf says—which is exactly what Edison tried to achieve with the club and other plans for the phonograph, including a sub-dealer plan that placed the records and devices in stores, ice cream parlors and barbershops for demonstrations, then tasked the owners with sending Edison the names of potential buyers.

The key to mass marketing is lowering the cost of a product and recovering profits by selling more of it—but “ that was a radical idea in the 1880s and 1890s and there were some manufacturers”—Edison among them— “that just didn’t believe you’d be able to succeed that way,” DeGraaf says.

“Mass marketing today is so ubiquitous and successful we assume it’s just common sense, but it’s a commercial behavior that had to be adopted and understood,” says DeGraaf.

Home Projecting Kinetoscope

After early success with the motion picture camera, Edison introduced a motion picture projector for non-commercial use in 1912, with the idea they could serve as important educational tools for churches, schools and civic organizations, and in the home.

The machines were just too expensive, though, and he struggled to create a catalog of films that appealed to customers. Of the 2,500 machines shipped out to dealers, only 500 were sold, DeGraaf says.

Some of the kinetoscope’s issues mirrored the problems Edison encountered in other failed projects. “Edison is a very good hardware guy, but he does have problems with software,” DeGraaf says. The cylinder player that powered the tinfoil phonograph worked beautifully, for instance, but it was the disc that caused Edison problems; with home theater, the films themselves, not the players, were faulty.

Edison experimented with producing motion pictures, expanding his catalog to include one- and two–reel movies from documentaries to comedies and dramas. In 1911, he made $200,000 to $230,000 a year—between $5.1 and $5.8 million in today’s dollars— from his business. But by 1915, people favored long feature films over educational films and shorts. “For whatever reason Edison was not delivering that,” says DeGraaf. “Some dealers told him point blank, you’re not releasing films that people want to see and that’s a problem.”

“That’s part of the problem with understanding Edison—you have to look at what he does and what other people are saying around him, because he doesn’t spend a lot of time writing about what he’s doing—he’s so busy doing it,” DeGraaf explains. “I think he has impatience with that sort of navel gazing.”

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Erica R. Hendry is the innovations reporter/producer for Smithsonian.com

December 9, 2021

Spark Creativity with Thomas Edison’s Napping Technique

Waking yourself from the twilight state just before sleep may help you to solve a challenging problem, a study shows

By Bret Stetka

Thomas Edison naps under a tree in 1921, while U.S. President Warren Harding ( seated, right ) reads a newspaper.

Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

T homas Edison was famously opposed to sleeping. In an 1889 interview published in Scientific American , the ever energetic inventor of the lightbulb claimed he never slept more than four hours a night. Sleep was, he thought, a waste of time.

Yet Edison may have relied on slumber to spur his creativity. The inventor is said to have napped while holding a ball in each hand, presuming that, as he fell asleep, the orbs would fall to the floor and wake him. This way he could remember the sorts of thoughts that come to us as we are nodding off, which we often do not recall.

Sleep researchers now suggest that Edison might have been on to something. A study published in 2022 in Science Advances reports that we have a brief period of creativity and insight in the semilucid state that occurs just as we begin to drift into sleep, a sleep phase called N1, or nonrapid-eye-movement sleep stage 1. The findings imply that if we can harness that liminal haze between sleep and wakefulness—known as a hypnagogic state—we might recall our bright ideas more easily.

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Inspired by Edison, Delphine Oudiette of Northwestern University and her colleagues presented 103 participants with mathematical problems that had a hidden rule that allowed them to be solved much faster. The 16 people who cracked the clue right away were then excluded from the study. The rest were given a 20-minute break period and asked to relax in a reclined position while holding a drinking glass in their right hand. If it fell, they were then asked to report what they had been thinking prior to letting go.

Throughout the break, subjects underwent polysomnography, a technology that monitors brain, eye and muscle activity to assess a person's state of wakefulness. This helped the researchers determine whether subjects were awake, in N1 or in N2—the next, slightly deeper phase of sleep.

Resting in his laboratory in New Jersey, Edison took brief breaks from work. But the inventor did not want to spend much time asleep. Credit: Ford Foundation

After the break, the study subjects were presented with the math problems again. Those who had dozed into N1 were nearly three times more likely to crack the hidden rule than others who had stayed awake throughout the experiment—and nearly six times more likely to do so than people who had slipped into N2. This “eureka moment,” as the authors call it, did not occur immediately. Rather it happened after many subsequent attempts to solve the math problem, which is consistent with previous research on insight and sleep.

It's less clear that Edison's technique of dropping objects to ward off deeper sleep works. Of the 63 subjects who dropped the glass as they drowsed, 26 did so after they had already passed through N1 sleep. Still, the findings suggest that we do have a creative window just before falling asleep.

Oudiette says that, like Edison, her personal experience with sleep inspired the study. “I've always had a lot of hypnagogic experiences, dreamlike experiences that have fascinated me for a long time,” she says. “I was quite surprised that almost no scientists have studied this period in the past two decades.”

A study published in 2018 found that a brief period of “awake quiescence,” or quiet resting, increased the odds of discovering the same mathematical rule used in Oudiette's experiment. And psychologist Penny Lewis of Cardiff University in Wales suggests that rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep—the phase in which our eyes dart back and forth and most dreams occur—and non-REM sleep work together to encourage problem-solving.

Yet for the most part, Oudiette is not aware of any other research specifically looking at the influence of sleep onset on creativity. She does, however, point to plenty of historical examples of this phenomenon.

“Alexander the Great and [Albert] Einstein potentially used Edison's technique, or so the legend goes,” Oudiette says. “And some of the dreams that have inspired great discoveries could be hypnagogic experiences rather than night dreams. One famous example is the chemist August Kekulé finding the ring structure of benzene after seeing a snake biting its own tail in a ‘half-sleep’ period when he was up working late.” Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí also used a variation of Edison's method: he held a key over a metal plate as he went to sleep, which clanged to wake him when he dropped it, supposedly inspiring his artistic imagery.

“This study gives us simultaneous insight into consciousness and creativity,” says Adam Haar Horowitz of the M.I.T. Media Lab, who has devised technology to interact with hypnagogic states but did not collaborate with Oudiette's team. “Importantly,” he adds, “it's the kind of study that you can go ahead and try at home yourself. Grab a metal object, lie down, focus hard on a creative problem, and see what sort of eureka moments you can encounter.”

For University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who also was not involved with the project, the study does not necessarily prove that just anyone will be able to mine their creativity during this early phase of somnolence. As he points out, “residing in the ‘sweet zone’ might have also simply refreshed the study participants, making it easier for them to solve the problem later.” But Schooler acknowledges there may be something very solid in the study's findings. “The new results suggest there is a creative sleep sweet spot during which individuals are asleep enough to access otherwise inaccessible elements but not so far gone the material is lost,” he says.

Despite its reputation as the brain's period of “shutting off,” sleep is, neurologically speaking, an incredibly active process. Brain cells fire by the billions, help to reactivate and store memories, and, it seems, allow us to conjure our mental creations.

Oudiette hopes not only to confirm her findings in future research but also to determine whether focusing on the hypnagogic state can help people address real-world tasks and problems by harnessing the creative potential of that liminal period between sleep and wakefulness. Additionally, she and her colleagues have considered the potential of brain-computer interfaces to precisely identify brain-wave patterns associated with sleep onset, allowing the precise identification of when people should be woken up during their moments of putative insight.

“We could even teach people how to reach this creative state at will,” Oudiette envisions. “Imagine playing sounds when people are reaching the right state and other sounds when they are going too far into sleep. Such a method could teach them how to recognize the creative state and how to reach it.”

Bret Stetka was a writer based in New York City and editorial director of Medscape Neurology (a subsidiary of WebMD). His work has appeared in Wired , NPR and the Atlantic . He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2005. Stetka died in 2022.

Case Files: Thomas A. Edison

Introduction.

What was Thomas Alva Edison's most important contribution to the history of science? Improvements to the lightbulb? The phonograph? In fact, Edison's most significant contribution was his "method of invention”. Nicknamed "The Wizard of Menlo Park”, Edison was not particularly wizardly. Rather, he was a savvy businessman who understood the value of iterative invention. His influence on the science and technology of the twentieth century is immeasurable.

But just who was Thomas Alva Edison? How did his inventive genius contribute to the "well-being, comfort, and pleasure of the human race”? And how did Edison's determination and quest for knowledge factor into his success?

A Studious Youth

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847, the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Samuel was a militant freethinker who had been banished from Canada; Nancy was a former teacher. Thomas received most of his education from his mother and the books in his father's library. His later commercial acumen was most likely inspired by his father's many diverse business ventures.

At the age of 13, when his problems with gradual hearing loss began, Edison started working as a traveling candy salesman on the new railroad system in the Midwest. Capitalizing on all learning opportunities around him, he ran his chemical experiments during train trips and began to study the burgeoning field of telegraphy. Within five years, he had become an expert telegrapher and part of a wandering group moving between Midwestern cities. All the while, Edison studied the technical aspects of telegraphy in his own workshop.

Full-Time Inventor

Encouraged to move to Boston in 1868, Edison began working there for Western Union, arriving in the midst of the telegraphic expansion. There, he saw the array of new developments and inventions, met financial supporters, and set up his new workshop. In the financial industry at that time, rapid, accurate, and documented communications were the foremost need. Taking advantage of this, in 1869, Edison filed his first patent application covering a printing telegraph and left Western Union to work full-time as an inventor.

His next stop was New York. During the 1870s, Edison lived to invent and his pace was frantic. He formed numerous partnerships, continually improving and expanding automatic telegraph equipment, maintaining investment support, and enduring litigation. In 1871, Edison married a 16-year-old employee, Mary Stilwell, and during the next eight years three children—Marion, Thomas Alva, and William—were born.

Edison built his first experimental laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. This laboratory was designed to be staffed by scientists engaged in basic research rather than immediate commercial products. Such an approach to the creation and development of inventions was a novel concept in the United States; it was an original model for scientific endeavor that continues to this day, supporting the comment of Alfred North Whitehead that "the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention”.

Switch of Genius

Towards the end of the 1870s, Edison's inventive genius switched from telegraphs to telephones. Western Union hired him to devise an improvement on the telephone recently invented by Alexander Graham Bell; the strength, and thus, the range of the sound signal needed to be increased. Edison chose to solve the problem by improving the transmitter; he adapted a characteristic of carbon: its high electrical sensitivity—the same characteristic that had doomed its use in an earlier invention. Eventually Bell Telephone Company adopted this transmitter design and it served in handsets for the next one hundred years.

In the beginning, the telephone was viewed as a replacement for the telegraph, and again, as with his printing telegraph, Edison set out to build a device that would create a permanent copy of a spoken telephone message. Edison's solution was a machine that recorded the vibrations of the spoken message received and then replayed the vibration patterns slow enough that the telegraph operator could transcribe it. Of course this new "talking machine" was the phonograph, but, apart from a private demonstration, there was no immediate commercial capitalization of this amazing invention. 10 years later, commercial production of the improved phonograph began, the recording industry was launched, and Edison's fame was sealed.

Lighting System

Edison closed the 1870s with a further world-changing achievement; the mission to replace gas lighting systems with a safer, easier electric version suited Edison's unique ability to combine existing fragmentary knowledge into a practical, operating whole. The construction of the electric power and lighting system, begun in 1878, was a huge undertaking in every way: concept, imagination, manpower, financial funding, research, manufacture, and marketing. These, together with painstaking research, required the production of every element in the process from the electricity generators, through the entire distribution system, to the final light bulb and switch. The resulting system went live at the Pearl Street plant in New York City on September 4, 1882.

In 1880, while experimenting with light bulb filaments, Edison's team discovered and patented the "etheric (or Edison) effect" in which electricity was detected passing through the vacuum from the heated filament to a metal plate. While not recognizing the importance of this phenomenon at the time, Edison was later able to direct the patented rights to Guglielmo Marconi for use in his wireless telegraphy discoveries.

Setback and Ambition

In 1884, Edison's wife Mary, who had been ailing for some time, died in the twelfth year of their marriage. Her death caused a cutback in Thomas Edison's work, but with his 1886 marriage to Mina Miller, his ambition was renewed. He closed the Menlo Park laboratory, replacing it with a larger, improved version in West Orange, New Jersey. Research and development on electric lighting continued for the next few years, but was marked by the conflict between the adoption of Edison's DC (direct current) electrical current and Tesla's AC (alternating current) systems for power distribution system. The AC system reduced power loss and improved transmission distance since the power voltage could be stepped up at the source to improve transmission and then stepped back down to usable levels at the delivery destination. Eventually, despite Edison's pro-DC efforts, the AC system was adopted universally.

Soon after, in 1892, Edison merged his various electric companies into the General Electric Company and moved on to a variety of other interests, primarily the possibilities of the sound recording machine he had made many years earlier. Building on the work of Bell and Tainter, Edison built improved wax cylinders and electrically-driven phonographs, more expensive than the hand-cranked versions but providing better sound quality. For the phonograph's commercial success, Edison was now competing with the Victor Talking Machine Company's disc phonograph. In this new era of scientific discoveries, moving into the field of entertainment, Victor won; Edison's venture finally closed in 1929.

Interesting Pursuits

Edison was in at the beginning of the motion picture industry when he provided the germ of the idea for the camera and kinetoscope viewer and supported his researcher, W.K.L. Dickson, in his experiments. Although they patented 75 simple motion pictures in 1894, it was left to others to advance this new industry.

Other interests that Edison pursued at this time (some more successful than others) included: a venture to separate iron and gold ore, devising x-ray equipment, manufacturing cement, and building electric storage batteries. The latter two were successful with his cement processing patents being licensed by other companies and the batteries finding use in electric vehicles, leading to the formation of an international manufacturing company.

In 1907, now a 60-year-old father of six with increasing hearing problems, Edison announced his decision to leave behind commercial development and devote his time to research.

His retirement plans were partially successful. He did spend more time traveling the country, vacationing at his winter retreat in the village of Fort Myers, Florida, and accepting the many honors given him. However, he also found time to work on the manufacture of storage batteries, his most profitable venture of all. In addition, he accepted appointment to head the Naval Consulting Board which was formed in 1915, two years before the United States entered World War I, remaining in that position until 1921.

A Fitting Tribute

Edison's companions on his travels were an illustrious group: President Harding, Henry Ford, George Firestone, and naturalists Luther Burbank and John Burroughs. Calling their group the Nature Club and driving in automobiles, they undertook camping trips throughout the eastern United States, enjoying the country over an eight-year period until Harding's death in 1923.

Research continued to be Edison's lifelong enthusiasm; his last patent application was filed in January, 1931—the year of his death.

Following Edison's death on October 18, 1931, President Hoover issued a statement requesting that all Americans turn off their lights for one minute at ten o'clock Eastern Standard Time as a tribute to the great man's memory. Similar interruption of generating machinery was suggested, but deemed too dangerous since so many essential services relied on electric power—a fitting demonstration of the debt owed to Thomas Edison's unique efforts.

Telephone Transmitter

The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, converted the sound waves from the human voice into electric impulses, conducted the impulses through a wire, and converted them back into the human sound at the other end of the wire. The originating transmitter contained a parchment membrane that vibrated in response to sound. A metal button attached to the membrane sent the varied movements to an electromagnet and electric current corresponding to the vibrations induced. This induced current traveled to the receiving device, and where the process was reversed, the electricity caused movement of a magnet which then caused a membrane to vibrate and emit the corresponding sounds.

Thomas Edison worked to improve a drawback in Bell's invention: the weakness of the electric signal limited the quality and distance of the message. His approach was to improve the sensitivity of sound detection at the transmitter by replacing the parchment membrane with a disc of compressed carbon set between metal plates. The electrical resistance of carbon is extremely sensitive to the minute pressure changes caused by sound waves. Edison's solution—improved later by substitution of granulated carbon and then roasting of the granules—became a basic component of telephones for almost a hundred years.

Electric Lamp

In 1847, when Thomas Edison was born in Ohio, local transportation was horse-drawn, inter-city railroads were new, and oil lamps or sometimes gaslights were used for illumination. At the end of his life in 1931, public transportation included the automobile and the airplane, and there was widespread availability of electric power. Edison's innovative approach to invention propelled the development of the electric light plus the generation and distribution system to make it work.

Edison improved upon previous designs to produce the first reliable, commercial electric light bulb. The basic design was a sealed, evacuated glass bulb containing a filament connected by wires to an outside source of electric current. By devoted effort, Edison and his team solved problems with the filament material and improved the vacuum quality, preventing the presence of oxygen that would cause the filament to burn up at the high temperature created by the electric current. The best filament material needed to have high durability for long bulb life and high electrical resistance to provide the brightest light with the least required electrical consumption.

Over a two-year period, Edison tested thousands of filament materials from the prosaic (metals) to the exotic (tropical vegetation) in a worldwide search. A coiled carbon filament is shown in his landmark invention, named the Edison Incandescent Lamp and given U. S. Patent No. 233,898 on January 27, 1880. The final result was an inexpensive, easily manufactured 16-watt lamp bulb that ran a on DC current for up to 1500 hours.

Electricity Generator

Edison built on the 1831 work of Michael Faraday to create the electricity generator used to power his lighting system.

Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, production of an electric current, by spinning a copper disc between the poles of a magnet and detecting the current that resulted in wires connected to the disc.

Edison's innovative application of Faraday's principles was a steam-driven generator that included very large bipolar magnets to improve efficiency and had slight electrical resistance compared to the resistance of the wire distribution network linked to it. It supplied direct current power.

Along with the lamps and the generator, Edison designed and built all of the ancillary equipment: underground supply cables, junction boxes, lampholders, switches, sockets, meters, etc. In effect, this complex combination established the fundamentals of large-scale electricity distribution. The Pearl Street station in Manhattan went live at 3PM on September 4, 1882, supplying 4,400 lamps in 193 buildings and continued to operate and expand for eight years.

Eventually, Edison's system was replaced due to the work of Nikola Tesla, who had first worked for Edison. He devised alternating current (AC) generators. AC current can be easily and efficiently sent over long distances with little power loss because it is "transformable." The current is generated and its voltage increased for transmission over the wire power grid and then decreased to lower, safer voltage at its destination. The AC electrical system continues to be the world standard.

Edison had always worked overlapping projects and such was the case with the phonograph. His first ideas of the phonograph came at the same time that he was working on the telephone transmitter. The phonograph was related to his previous inventions which were created in attempt to obtain a permanent copy of telegraph messages. He pondered ways of creating a permanent copy of messages sent by telephone. In fact, his February 19, 1878 patent refers to the "Phonograph or Speaking Machine."

The original tinfoil phonograph had three components:

• The speaker tube containing a diaphragm attached to a scribing stylus
• A four-inch diameter metal drum attached to a hand crank and wrapped around with a roll of tinfoil
• The listening tube, very similar to the speaking tube, containing a detecting stylus attached to a diaphragm.

In operation, spoken sound entered the speaking tube, causing the diaphragm to vibrate. The vibrations passed through the stylus and were inscribed on the tinfoil in a vertical groove (hill and dale) pattern while the drum was being rotated by hand at 60 revolutions per minute. When the stylus of the listening tube rode over the recorded indentations, the resulting vibrations passed through the detecting stylus and vibrated the listening diaphragm to reproduce the speech in the listening tube. The cylinder had a three-minute recording capacity. It was on this machine that Edison created the first recording of human voice as he recited "Mary Had A Little Lamb”. Public demonstrations cemented Edison's reputation as an outstanding inventor.

For commercial applications, the tinfoil material proved too flimsy and Edison switched his attention to his light bulb experiments. Meanwhile, other inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter worked on improving Edison's invention. The result was a change from tinfoil to wax cylinders with a floating, less destructive stylus. Edison then turned his attention back to the phonograph; the Menlo Park laboratory went to work and produced an improved wax cylinder machine in 1889.

A novel and expensive feature of this machine was the electric motor included to drive the drum. The expense limited its market to office-dictating machine uses and Edison moved on again to other research. He later had some success with reproducing phonograph recordings and with a dictating phonograph, the Ediphone.

In the 10-year period after Edison’s innovations with phonograph technology, the phonograph industry had turned to longer playing, more durable discs rather than cylinders as a recording medium, and music was now the recording content. While Edison adapted to this with new materials to improve disc recording, copying fidelity, and a spring drive motor, his product was incompatible with other systems and his endeavors were overtaken by companies such as the Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia.

Acknowledgement

In 1915, Thomas Alva Edison was awarded the Franklin Medal in Engineering for "Discoveries contributing to foundation of industries and the well-being of the human race."

The full text of the award citation reads: "In recognition of the value of his numerous basic inventions and discoveries forming the foundation of world-wide industries, signally contributing to the well-being comfort and pleasure of the human race."

The Committee on Science and the Arts report on Case File No. 2640 and 2641, dated March 3, 1915, is at right. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, of Leiden, Holland, also received a Franklin Medal that year, "in recognition of his long-continued and indefatigable labors in low-temperature research which have enriched physical science not only with a great number of new methods and ingenious devices, but also with achievements and discoveries of the first magnitude."

The Thomas Alva Edison presentation is made possible by support from The Barra Foundation and Unisys. This website is the effort of an in-house special project team at The Franklin Institute, working under the direction of Carol Parssinen, Senior Vice-President for the Center for Innovation in Science Learning, and Bo Hammer, Vice-President for The Franklin Center. Special project team members from the Educational Technology department are:  Karen Elinich, Barbara Holberg, Margaret Ennis, and Jay Treat. Special project team members from the Curatorial department are:  John Alviti and Andre Pollack. The project's  Advisory Board Members  are:  Ruth Schwartz-Cowan, Leonard Rosenfeld, Nathan Ensmenger, and Susan Yoon.

Read the Committee on Science and the Arts Report on their awarding of the Franklin Medal to Thomas Edison.

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