Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in the city of Milan in the northern US state of Ohio, the youngest of seven children of a teacher and a politically active farmer and land speculator. Edison, who died on October 18, 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey, was an American inventor, electrical engineer and entrepreneur in the field of electricity and electrical engineering. His merits lie above all in the commercialization of his inventions, which he combined into a system of power generation, power distribution and innovative electrical consumer goods.

Edison’s fundamental inventions and developments in the field of electric light (the light bulb in 1979), telecommunications, sound media (in particular the phonograph in 1877) and images had a major influence on general technical and cultural development. In later years, he achieved important process engineering developments in the chemical and cement industries. His organization of industrial research shaped the development work of later companies.

Childhood and education

Edison was already hard of hearing as a child. This had an impact on his school education. The teachers thought he was “difficult” and his classmates mocked him because of his hearing impairment. But Edison didn’t let it get him down. He taught himself and read a lot. This was a good foundation for his later work as an inventor.

He entered working life in 1859 at the age of just twelve, when he was employed by a newspaper and confectionery merchant who offered his goods on passenger trains between Detroit and Port Huron. During his time as a train boy, Thomas Alva Edison spent a lot of time reading books on technology and physics to pass the long train rides home from work. He mainly obtained his literature from the Detroit public library.

As he had a talent for managing people from a young age, he managed to make others work for him while he retreated to the baggage car and pursued his favorite pastime of reading. He tested the information he gathered from the books by setting up a small laboratory on the train and secretly carrying out experiments. During this time, he was already writing small articles for his own newspaper, which he sold to passengers.

In 1862, he began training as a telegraph operator and practiced this profession in various positions from 1863. His professional commitments took him to Boston, Louisville, Startfort, Memphis and several other cities until 1868. Through his activities during these years, Edison acquired a comprehensive education in telegraph technology and the business side of the industry. He deepened his knowledge by reading specialist literature.

Professional career and scientific achievements of Thomas Alva Edison

His training prompted him to work on his own inventions in the field of telegraph technology from 1868. His first development was a duplex technology that enabled the simultaneous transmission of two messages over a single line. In order to make a name for himself in the professional world as quickly as possible, he wrote a report on his achievement, which he published in the magazine “The Telegrapher” in April 1868. However, his first patent for an electrically operated vote counter to speed up voting at political meetings, which he applied for in 1868, did not bring him the success he had hoped for.

Edison then moved to New York, where he found a well-paid and responsible job at the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company thanks to the electrical engineer Franklin Leonard Pope, whom he met there. Together with Pope, Edison later founded Pope, Edison & Co. The two engineers jointly developed several successful inventions, which they applied for patents for. However, the company only existed for a few years due to differences of opinion between Edison and Pope. The joint patents were acquired by the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company in 1870. Pope later represented a number of engineers who were involved in legal disputes with Thomas Alva Edison as a patent attorney.

After Edison and Pope parted company, the inventor found a new partner in the technician William Unger and set up his own workshop in Newark. In the following years, he manufactured telegraphs for numerous private customers. These lucrative orders led to an expansion of the company, which prompted Edison to buy out his partner Unger and replace him with the inventor Joseph Thomas Murray. This economically well-considered step marked the beginning of the important global corporation with which Edison would later write business history. Nevertheless, these years were still characterized by financial uncertainty, as his income was only temporarily secure.

It was not until 1876 that he became world-famous practically overnight when he took over the management of the Menlo Park Laboratory and presented his groundbreaking invention, the phonograph, to the public. With this device, Edison succeeded for the first time in recording speech or music and then reproducing it via a hand-turned drum. The drum, wrapped in tin foil, went down in the history of technology as the Edison drum. Numerous inventions followed in the years that followed, establishing Edison’s international reputation as a visionary technician and making him a wealthy man.

On July 18, 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. It was developed over the following months. This invention was fundamentally different from most of Edison’s other inventions. Edison’s work on automatic telegraphs led to the discovery that embossed strips of paper produce sound when they are moved quickly. Edison used this to build the phonograph. Thomas Edison remembers that the first recording he made with a working phonograph was the song “Mary had a little lamb”. He was thrilled when he heard his own voice. In November 1877, he showed the phonograph to the public. On February 19, 1878 he received the patent. The entrepreneur Julius Block suggested giving the Russian Emperor Alexander III a phonograph as a gift.

Edison dreamed of electrifying cities and concentrated on developing the light bulb at the end of the 1970s, with which he celebrated his first international successes in 1879/80. This was followed by the founding of various companies such as the Edison Lamp Co. and the Edison Electric Light Co. as well as branches in Europe that distributed the light bulbs. Edison registered over thirty patents for technical developments relating to the incandescent lamp, which led to the gradual supply of electricity to New York from 1883 onwards using underground cables.

In 1893, a lucrative contract to electrify the World’s Fair in Chicago went to Edison’s competitor George Westinghouse. In the Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla, who had briefly worked for Edison’s company, Westinghouse had found an ingenious employee who had developed alternating current with the idea of a rotating magnetic field. Between Edison, who favored direct current as the only possibility for electrification, and Westinghouse came the so-called Electricity War, the first major economic conflict in the history of the United States. Thanks to the work of his indispensable employee Nikola Tesla, Westinghouse finally succeeded in introducing an incandescent lamp powered by alternating current, which was much more efficient than Edison’s invention and did not flicker.

Edison invented the “talking chocolate” together with Ludwig Stollwerck. This was a record with deep writing. He also built a phonograph for children in 1903. It could play music from a chocolate record. This phonograph was called “Eureka”. It had a Junghans movement and was sold in Europe and the USA. There were also records made of durable material. Edison was able to compete with his phonograph cylinders for a few more years against the phonograph developed by Emil Berliner invented gramophone invented by Emil Berliner.

After his defeat in the electricity war, Edison concentrated on technical developments in the film industry and invented the Kinetograph, the direct predecessor of today’s film camera. This success led him to become involved with the electrical equipment of film studios from the beginning of the 20th century and the development of various sound carriers carriers. Edison thus became one of the pioneers of the American film industry.

In 1915, Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla were nominated for the Nobel Prize. However, as both refused to accept the prize together, they were passed over for selection. From then on, the ageing Edison devoted himself increasingly to improving electrically powered vehicles. Before he died in New Jersey on 18 October 1931, he had recognized the principle of alternating current, which he had long rejected, as a better solution and admitted that his arrogance towards Westinghouse and Tesla was a serious mistake.

The private life of Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison’s parents are Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804-1896) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810-1871). In 1871, Edison married Mary Sitwell, the mother of his daughter Marion and his two sons Thomas Alva Jr. and William. She died in 1884, whereupon Edison married Mina Miller. This marriage also produced a daughter and two sons. His son Charles, born in 1890, took over the management of the company after his father’s retirement in 1927.

Thomas Alva Edison was not only regarded as a visionary inventor, but also as a highly talented and unscrupulous entrepreneur who outdid many of his competitors with sometimes questionable business practices. Over the course of his career, he registered almost 1100 patents. To denounce Tesla’s achievements, he caused numerous animals, including cats and dogs, to die in agony from alternating current during public demonstrations.

By electrifying and killing an elephant, he laid the foundation for the development of the electric chair, which was used in the USA to execute people sentenced to death until 2013.

What were Thomas Alva Edison’s most important inventions and patents?

The incandescent lamp

Edison may not have been the first to develop an incandescent lamp, but his version was practical, durable and economical enough to be widely used. He developed a functioning electric lighting system that revolutionized night work and life in cities.

The phonograph

With the phonograph, Edison invented the first device for recording and reproducing sound. This made it possible to record and distribute music and speech.

The power grid

Edison was instrumental in the development of the first public electricity grid in New York. He advocated the use of direct current, although alternating current later prevailed.

The Kinetograph

This early film camera was able to record moving images. Edison thus contributed to the development of the film industry.

Improvements to the telegraph

Edison improved the existing telegraphs and developed new applications, such as a vote counter.