Childhood and education
An early bout with scarlet fever and ear infections left Edison with hearing problems in both ears as a child and nearly deaf as an adult. Edison would later reveal, with variations in the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident that left his ears damaged. But others tend to dismiss 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 12 weeks. A hyperactive child prone to distraction, his teacher considered him “difficult.”
His mother quickly pulled him out of 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 of self-education and self-directed learning that would serve him throughout his life.
At the age of 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand. Highway Railway line. Using his access to news bulletins teletyped into the station office every day, Thomas began publishing his own little newspaper called the Grand Trunk Messenger. The contemporary articles were a hit among passengers. It was the first of what would become a long line of entrepreneurial endeavors where he saw a need and took advantage of the opportunity.
Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he established. in the baggage car of the train. During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire. The attendant burst in and hit Thomas in the head, likely worsening his hearing loss. He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route.
Biography of Edison
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in the American town of Milen (Ohio). He grew up and was brought up in a simple family with modest incomes. He was the youngest of 7 children to his parents, Samuel Edison and Nancy Eliot.
Childhood and youth
As a child, Edison was shorter than his peers and was not in good health. After suffering from scarlet fever, he became deaf in his left ear. His father and mother took care of him, since they had previously lost two (according to other sources three) children.
Thomas was particularly inquisitive from an early age. He watched the steamships and the work of the carpenters in the port. Also, the boy could hide for a long time in some secluded place, redrawing the inscriptions of certain signs.
Thomas Edison in his youth
However, when Edison went to school, he was considered perhaps the worst student. Teachers spoke of him as a “limited” child. This led to the fact that after 3 months, the parents were forced to take their son out of the educational institution.
After this, the mother began to independently provide Thomas with primary education. It is worth noting that he helped his mother sell fruits and vegetables at the market.
Edison often went to the library, reading various scientific works. An interesting fact is that when the child was barely 9 years old, he mastered the book “Natural and Experimental Philosophy,” which contained almost all the scientific and technical information of that time.
No less interesting is the fact that in the subsequent years of his biography, Thomas Edison carried out virtually all the experiments discussed in the book. As a rule, he was interested in chemical experiments, which required certain financial costs.
When Edison was about 12 years old, he began selling newspapers at a train station. It is curious that over time the young man was allowed to conduct his experiments in the baggage car of the train.
After some time, Thomas becomes the publisher of the 1st train newspaper. Around the same time, he began to become interested in electricity. In the summer of 1862, he managed to save the son of the station master from the moving train, who, as a sign of gratitude, agreed to teach him the telegraph business.
This led to Edison being able to set up his first telegraph line, which connected his home with a friend's house. Soon there was a fire in the baggage car where he conducted his experiments. As a result, the conductor kicked the young chemist off the train along with his laboratory.
As a teenager, Thomas Edison managed to visit many American cities, trying to arrange his life. During this biography, he was often malnourished, since he spent most of his earnings on buying books and conducting experiments.
Edison, telegraph operator
While Edison was working on the railroad, an almost tragic event turned out to be fortunate for the young man. After Edison saved a three-year-old child from a train crossing, the child's grateful father rewarded him by teaching him how to operate a telegraph. By the age of 15, he had already learned enough to work as a telegraph operator.
For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as a traveling telegraph operator, picking up those who had gone off to fight in the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical engineering.
In 1866, at the age of 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 open-ended style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective research and experimentation.
Edison initially succeeded in his telegraph work because early Morse code was written on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was not a handicap. However, as technology developed, receivers were increasingly equipped with audible keys, allowing telegraph operators to “read” messages by the sound of the clicks. This put Edison at a disadvantage, with fewer job opportunities.
In 1868, Edison returned home to find that his beloved mother had become mentally ill and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized that he needed to take control of his future.
At the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, taking a job with Western Union. At the time, Boston was the American center of science and culture, and Edison enjoyed it. In his spare time, he developed and patented an electronic vote recorder for quickly counting legislative votes.
However, Massachusetts legislators were not interested. As they explained, most legislators did not want votes to be counted quickly. They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators.
The childhood and youth of Thomas Edison
“Al,” as his friends often called him, was reluctant to attend school. He often skipped classes and behaved so badly that his mother, a former teacher, was forced to leave Thomas home-schooled. Despite this, Al fell in love with reading and retained this love throughout his life. In addition, at an early age he equipped his first laboratory in the basement of his house.
Thomas was forced to work from the age of 12. He sold fruits, snacks and newspapers in the train carriage. At that time, trains were the most progressive of all existing modes of transport. Edison even printed his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Messenger, which he distributed in the same way.
At the age of 15, Thomas Edison became a traveling telegraph operator. Using Morse code, he sent and received messages by telegraph. Over the next seven years, Thomas Edison traveled widely and often worked at night to receive messages for trains and the Union Army during the Civil War. In his free time, Edison studied the principle of the telegraph and after some time decided that he knew a way to improve it. Finally, he came to the realization that he wanted to invent such things himself.
Thomas Edison: Inventions
In 1869, when he was 22, Edison moved to New York and developed his first invention, an improved ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized multiple stock tickers for a trade. The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was so impressed that they paid him $40,000 for the rights. With this success, he left his telegraph job to devote his time to invention.
By the early 1870s, Thomas Edison had gained a reputation as a first-class inventor. In 1870, he established his first small laboratory and manufacturing plant in Newark, New Jersey, and employed several machinists.
As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed products for the highest bidders. Often it was the Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, but just as often it was one of Western Union's competitors.
In one such case, Edison developed a quadruplex telegraph for Western Union, capable of transmitting two signals in two different directions on the same wire, but railroad magnate Jay Gould wrested the invention from Western Union, paying Edison over $100,000 in cash, bonds, and stock. , and was released from several years of legal proceedings.
In 1876, Edison moved his expansion efforts to Menlo Park, New Jersey, and built an independent industrial research center including machine shops and laboratories. That same year, Western Union approached him about developing a communications device to compete with Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.
However, in December 1877, Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph. Although this invention was not commercially viable for another decade, the invention brought him worldwide fame.
Inventions
The secret of the great self-taught inventor is simple and lies in a quote from Thomas Edison himself, which over time became a catchphrase:
“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
He proved the truth of the statement more than once, spending days and nights in laboratories. As he himself admitted, he was sometimes so carried away that he spent up to 19 hours a day working. Edison has 1093 patents received in the United States and 3 thousand documents on the authorship of inventions issued in other countries. At the same time, they did not buy the first creations from the man. For example, compatriots considered the vote counter in elections useless.
Thomas Edison in his laboratory
Luck smiled during the period of work in. Thomas got a job thanks to the fact that he repaired the telegraph apparatus - no one could cope with this task, even invited craftsmen. And in 1870, the company gladly bought the system he had improved for telegraphing exchange bulletins about gold and stock prices. The inventor spent the money on opening his own workshop for the production of tickers for stock exchanges; a year later, Edison already owned three such workshops.
Soon things went even better. Thomas founded, the next five years were fruitful, in particular, the greatest invention appeared - the quadruplex telegraph, with the help of which it became possible to transmit up to four messages simultaneously over one wire. Inventive activity required a well-equipped laboratory, and in 1876, near New York, in the town of Menlo Park, the construction of an industrial complex for scientific research work began. The laboratory later brought together hundreds of bright minds and skillful hands.
Thomas Edison with a phonograph
Attempts to convert telegraph messages into sound resulted in the advent of the phonograph. In 1877, Edison recorded the children's song "Mary Had a Little Lamb" using a needle and tinfoil. The innovation was considered borderline fantastic, and Thomas received the nickname The Wizard of Menlo Park.
Two years later, the world accepted Thomas Edison's most famous invention - he managed to improve the light bulb, extending its operating time and simplifying production. Existing lamps burned out after a couple of hours, consumed a lot of current, or were expensive. Edison announced that soon all of New York would be illuminated by fireproof light bulbs, and the price of electricity would become affordable, and began an experiment. For the filament, I tried 6,000 materials and finally settled on carbon fiber, which burned for 13.5 hours. Later the service life increased to 1200 hours.
Thomas Edison and his light bulb
Edison demonstrated the possibility of using light bulbs, as well as the developed system for producing and consuming electricity, by creating a power plant in one of the New York districts: 400 light bulbs flashed. The number of electricity consumers increased from 59 to half a thousand over several months.
In 1882, the “War of Currents” broke out and lasted until the beginning of the second millennium. Edison favored the use of direct current, which, however, was transmitted without loss only over short distances. Nikola Tesla, who joined Thomas's laboratory, tried to prove that alternating current was more efficient - it was transmitted over hundreds of kilometers. The future legendary inventor proposed using it for power plants and generators, but did not find support.
Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla
Tesla, at the request of the owner, created 24 alternating current machines, but did not receive the promised 50 thousand dollars for the work from Edison, was offended and became a competitor. Together with industrialist George Westinghouse, Nikola began to introduce alternating current everywhere. Thomas sued and even conducted black PR campaigns, using the killing of animals to prove the dangers of this type of current. The apogee was the invention of the electric chair for executing criminals.
The war ended only in 2007: the chief engineer ceremoniously cut the last cable through which direct current was supplied to New York.
Thomas Edison's carbon microphone
The prolific inventor also patented an X-ray device, calling it a fluoroscope, and a carbon microphone that increased the volume of telephone communications. In 1887, Thomas Edison built a new laboratory in West Orange, larger than the previous one and equipped with the latest technology. A voice recorder and an alkaline battery appeared here.
Edison also left a mark on the history of cinematography. In Thomas's laboratory, the kinetoscope, a device capable of showing moving images, saw the light of day. In essence, the invention was a personal cinema - a person watched a film through a special eyepiece. A little later, Edison opened the Kinetoscope Parlor hall and equipped it with ten boxes.
Thomas Edison's light bulb
Although Thomas Edison was not the inventor of the first light bulb, he did come up with the technology that helped bring it to the masses. Edison was called upon to perfect a commercially practical and efficient incandescent light bulb after English inventor Humphry Davy first invented the first electric arc lamp in the early 1800s.
In the decades following Davey's creation, scientists such as Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan, Henry Woodward, and Matthew Evans worked to improve electric or vacuum light bulbs, but were unsuccessful in their attempts.
After an attempt by Woodward and Evans, obtaining a patent and improving the design, Edison received a patent for his own improved light bulb in 1879. He began producing and selling it for widespread use. In January 1880, Edison set out to create a company that would provide electricity to power and light the cities of the world.
That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned electrical utility that later became the General Electric Corporation. In 1881 he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were installed. In 1882, the Pearl Street Power Plant supplied 110 volts of electricity to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.
Biography of Thomas Edison - briefly
Of course, the name of the American electrical engineer, self-taught inventor and businessman, Thomas Edison, is known to many. After all, during his rather long life, he invented and patented 4
thousands of inventions that are still used by people all over the world. In addition, he is the founder of the first research center, as well as one of the people who did a lot for the development of cinema.
Therefore, I would like to briefly talk about the life of this outstanding scientist, about his family and about his inventive activities.
Childhood
Edison was born February 11, 1847
in one of the American states, namely in Ohio, in the town of Milen. My father was engaged in selling wheat, and even succeeded in this business. However, he soon went bankrupt and, when the future inventor reached the age of seven, the Edison family had to move to Michigan.
Interestingly, Thomas did very poorly at school, as he was very absent-minded and inattentive. In addition, there was another reason for his poor academic performance - a hearing problem that arose as a result of complications from an illness suffered in early childhood. All this led to the boy being transferred to home schooling, which was carried out by his mother, Nancy Elliott, who worked as a school teacher.
First experiments
After switching to homeschooling, Thomas Edison became interested in chemistry. This interest in science led the boy to open a laboratory, necessary for conducting constant experiments, in the basement of his own house. The young “scientist” was only 10
years old at the time. In addition, the boy began selling vegetables and fruits, and later other goods on trains, as he needed funds for experiments.
In order not to stop his experiments even while working, Edison moved his laboratory to a baggage car, which was also used as a newspaper office. All this activity brought the boy $10 every day.
IN 15
Edison got a job as a telegraph operator (he held this position for
5
years), thereby gaining a new hobby. The result of this hobby is a telegraph line connecting the houses of parents and a friend.
After reading Michael Faraday's book "Experimental Investigations into Electricity" in 1868
year, Edison tried himself as an inventor. The first discovery that did not bring him any profit was a system for electrically recording votes during elections.
Opening of the laboratory
An unsuccessful debut did not break the inventor, but on the contrary pushed him to develop new things necessary for people. So, from the end of 1870
, in his New York workshop, he began working on the creation of a stock ticker capable of transmitting stock quotes.
Together with this, he developed a special telegraphic circuit capable of transmitting up to 4
messages.
10
from Western Union , which was an excellent help for opening an industrial research laboratory in the village of Menclo.
During the same period, the inventor created a carbon microphone, which helped improve the quality of telephone communications many times over.
IN 30
years Edison created another thing for which he began to be considered almost a wizard, namely the phonograph.
During the same period, he worked on improving the incandescent lamp invented by the Russian engineer A. Lodygin.
Edison equipped the original version of the lamp with a threaded base and a twisted tungsten spiral. In addition, he developed a switch and wiring diagram for it. All this contributed to the fact that the first power plant appeared in New York, illuminated by modernized incandescent lamps. IN 1882
Edison became the founder of a company that manufactured electrical generators, cables and light bulbs.
last years of life
At 40
, the inventor moved again, this time to West Orange, where he opened a modern laboratory designed for the simultaneous work of several people.
Here he worked for 16-18 hours
, invented a voice recorder and a movie camera, and modernized the phonograph.
However, Edison did not forget about his personal life. The inventor was married twice. Thomas first married in 1871
year on the telegraph operator Mary Stillwell, who gave him
3
children (a daughter and
2
sons).
However, his wife died of brain cancer at 29
.
The inventor entered into a second marriage in 1886
with Mina Miller, who also bore him
3
children. She died after surviving her husband for several years.
The last years of the scientist passed quietly in the circle of his family, who helped him fight diabetes. However, the disease prevailed, and Thomas Edison died from its complications
October 18 1931
. He was buried in the backyard of his home in West Orange.
Later inventions and business
In 1887, Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the main research laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent much of his time there observing developments in lighting technology and power systems. He also improved the phonograph and developed the motion picture camera and alkaline battery.
Over the next few decades, Edison found his role as an inventor, moving into one as an industrialist and business manager. The West Orange laboratory was too large and complex for any one person to fully manage, and Edison found that he was not as successful in his new role as he had been in his old one.
Edison also discovered that much of the future development and improvement of his inventions was carried out by university-trained mathematicians and scientists. He worked best in an intimate, unstructured environment with a few assistants, and he was open about his disdain for academic and corporate operations.
In the 1890s, Edison built a magnetic iron ore processing plant in northern New Jersey, which turned out to be a commercial failure. He was later able to translate the process into a better method for producing cement. On April 23, 1896, Edison became the first person to design a motion picture, which featured the world's first theatrical release at the Koster & Bial music hall in New York City.
As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked to create a suitable battery that could power an electric car. Although the gasoline engine eventually prevailed, in 1912 Edison developed a self-starting battery on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford. This system has been widely used in the automotive industry for decades.
During World War I, the US government asked Thomas Edison to head a naval consulting board that examined inventions submitted for military use. Edison worked on several projects, including underwater detectors and methods for locating weapons. However, due to his moral indignation towards violence, he specified that he would only work on defensive weapons, Fr.
By the end, Thomas Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time in a winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile magnate Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, starting from trains to the search for a domestic source of natural rubber.
Beginning of the biography
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in the city of Milen (sometimes called Milan in Russian-language sources) in the American state of Ohio.
Edison's ancestors came to America from Holland. Edison's childhood is partly reminiscent of the childhood of another brilliant inventor - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Both suffered from scarlet fever and became practically deaf; both were declared unfit for school. But while Tsiolkovsky studied at school for several years, Edison only went to school for three months, after which he was called “brainless” by the teacher. As a result, Edison received only home education from his mother. Thomas Edison as a child
In 1854, the Edisons moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where little Thomas sold newspapers and candy on trains, and also helped his mother sell fruits and vegetables. In his spare time, Thomas enjoyed reading books and scientific experiments. He read his first science book at the age of 9. It was "Natural and Experimental Philosophy" by Richard Greene Parker, which told almost all the scientific and technical information of the time. Over time, he performed almost all the experiments mentioned in the book. Edison set up his first laboratory in the baggage car of a train, but after a fire there, the conductor threw it out onto the street along with the laboratory. While working on the railroad, the teenage Edison founded his own travel newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, which he printed with 4 assistants. In August 1862, Edison saved the son of the head of one of the stations from a moving carriage. The boss offered to teach him telegraphy in gratitude. For several years, Edison worked in various branches of the telegraph company (this company still exists and, after the decline of the telegraph, is engaged in money transfers). Edison's first attempts to sell his inventions were unsuccessful, as was the case with a device for counting votes cast for and against, as well as with a device for automatically recording stock exchange rates. However, things soon went well. Edison's most important invention, which ultimately led to the creation of computer networks, was the quadruplex telegraph. The inventor planned to get 4-5 thousand dollars for it, but in the end in 1874 he sold it to Western Union for 10 thousand dollars (about 200 thousand dollars taking into account inflation today). With the money received, Edison opens the first industrial research laboratory in the world in the village of Menlo Park, where he worked 16-19 hours a day.
Thomas Edison Laboratory (Menlo Park)
Edison’s famous saying: “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” For Edison himself, who was self-taught, everything was exactly like this, for which he was criticized by another famous inventor Nikola Tesla: “If Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would not waste time determining the most likely place her location. He would immediately, with the feverish diligence of a bee, begin to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. His methods are extremely ineffective: he can waste enormous amounts of time and energy and achieve nothing unless he is helped by a lucky break. At first I watched his activities with sadness, realizing that a little creative knowledge and calculations would have saved him thirty percent of his work. But he had genuine contempt for bookish education and mathematical knowledge, trusting entirely to his instincts as an inventor and the common sense of an American.” However, not knowing, for example, higher mathematics, Edison did not shy away from resorting to the help of more qualified assistants who worked in his laboratory.
Thomas Edison in 1878
Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla
Edison became embroiled in a long-running rivalry with Nikola Tesla, a visionary academically trained engineer who had briefly worked with Edison's company. The two parted ways in 1885 and would publicly clash with the use of direct current electricity favored by Edison versus alternating current championed by Tesla. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, leading to a major business feud over electricity.
Edison's legacy
Edison's career was a typical rags to riches success story that made him a folk hero in America. A free egoist, he could be a tyrant for his employees and ruthless for his competitors. Although he was an advertising seeker, he communicated poorly and often neglected his family.
But by the time of his death, Edison was one of the most famous and respected Americans in the world. He was at the forefront of America's first technological revolution and laid the foundation for the modern electric world.
What does unshakable faith in a child lead to?
Thus, Nancy taught Thomas to read and write. The woman saw very well how inquisitive her son was and encouraged his desire for self-education. The mother never forbade her son to experiment and make mistakes. She knew that this was the only way to follow the path of self-improvement. Nancy never said a bad word about her son. Later, the brilliant inventor will talk about this in his memoirs.
Edison asserted with full confidence that it was his mother who molded him into a genius with a thousand patented scientific developments. This woman believed so much in the success of her own son that he simply could not let her down. The inventor felt that there was the most important person in the world for whose sake he should create.
Found a violation? Report content
