1.) Thomas Edison is
an American inventor and is one of the greatest inventors of all time.
2.) He was born in Milan,
Ohio, USA
on February 11, 1847. He died on October 18 1933 at the age of 86.
3.) Thomas Alva Edison
is of Dutch and British ancestry.
4.) Edison attended school for 3
months only in Port Huron,
Michigan. This was his only
formal public education.
5.) His mother continued his
education, teaching him reading, writing, and arithmetic. She also read to him
from well-known English writers, such as Edward Gibbon, William Shakespeare,
and Charles Dickens.
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| Nancy Matthews Elliott |
6.) When he was 12, his job
was selling newspapers, apples, and candy on the Detroit
and Port Huron
branch of the Grand Trunk Railroad.
7.) Edison
was partly deaf possibly due to a childhood attack of scarlet fever.
8.) Although he considered his
partial deafness almost an asset, particularly when he wanted to concentrate on
an experiment, he mentioned in his diary that he haven't heard a bird sing
since he was 12 years old.
9.) At 15, he bought a small
secondhand printing press and installed it in a baggage car and started
producing the “Weekly Herald”, which he printed, edited, and sold on the Grand
Trunk Railroad.
10.) In 1862, Edison
saved a 3-year-old boy from being run over by a boxcar. The boy was the son of
the stationmaster in Mount Clemens,
Michigan.
11.) In gratitude, the
stationmaster offered to teach Edison how to
operate the telegraph gladly accepted the offer.
12.) Within 5 months he learned
to send and receive dispatches and for the next 4 years he traveled thousands
of miles as a telegrapher.
13.) Edison
spent most of his salary on various laboratory and electrical instruments,
which he would take apart and rebuild.
14.) In 1871, Edison met his first wife,
Mary Stilwell, and married her on Christmas Day of that year.
15.) Mary and Thomas had a
daughter, Marion
(1873), and two sons, Thomas, Jr. (1876) and William (1878)
16.) His second wife was Mina
Miller, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. They were married in February
1886 and had daughter, Madeleine (1888) and two sons, Charles (1890) and
Theodore (1898).
17.) Because of his work, Edison spent
little time with his family and avoided socialization.
18.) Oftentimes, he wore dirty
shirts and shabby working clothes. Nevertheless, his associates describe him a
humorous type of person and had a genuine affection for his family.
19.) He would sleep for 4 hours
only in a day and would work for 72 hours especially when an experiment is
about to be completed.
20.) Edison's
most famous statement: “'Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent
perspiration”.
21.) Edison
was a dedicated inventor who worked at an early age and continued to work right
up until his death.
22.) This prolific inventor was
well known for his focus and determination and patented over 1,000 inventions.
23.) Among his most important
inventions were the electric light, the phonograph, and the motion-picture
camera.
Motion Camera
24.) The period from 1879 to 1900
is called the Age of Edison. This span of time is the period when Edison
produced and perfected most of his devices.
25.) Edison was
already knowledgeable about electricity and telegraphy as a teenager.
26.) When he was 21 years of age,
he developed a telegraphic vote-recording machine. This was the first of his
inventions to be patented.
27.) In 1869, Edison’s
second patented work was an improved version of a fully automatic stock ticker,
which printed stock market quotations and gold prices on a paper tape.
28.) The first invention that
brought him money was another improvement on the stock ticker. He received
$40,000 for this invention. That amount is worth $530,000 in 2000.
29.) Edison and a business
partner used this amount in establishing a machine shop and manufactured his
improved stock ticker.
30.) He would usually spend up to
18 hours a day in his workshop in Newark,
New Jersey.
31.) One of Edison’s
significant inventions was the quadruplex, a highly efficient telegraph
that could send four messages at a time over a telegraph wire.
32.)
In 1876, Edison established a laboratory at Menlo
Park, New Jersey, the
world’s first laboratory dedicated to industrial research.
33.) Within ten years people
throughout the world knew of Edison as the
Wizard of Menlo Park.
34.) Edison
improved the telephone which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell to such an
extent that it could carry speech clearly over almost unlimited distances.
35.) In March 1878, Edison's
telephone system connected New York City to Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, a distance of 172
km.
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