A vessel of leaked chemicals. A fire in a train car. As a young gentleman, the list of explanations Thomas Alva Edison had been fired from his numerous jobs appeared as long as the ultimate list of the patents he held.
Though the forthcoming inventor had radical ideas that would transform the course of the industries that employed and fired him, the young man had, in the words of his 1931 memorial in the New York Times, “accomplished a status as the [telegraph] operator who couldn’t keep a job.”
As it turned out, Edison would become most well-known for his fabulous ability to apply himself—and his oft-repeated belief that genius is “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” He would go on to create devices that defined the contemporary world—and perfect other revolutionary inventions. His enhancements on the lightbulb, for example, finally made it possible for people everywhere to light their homes with electricity.
Here’s how the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park” attained such an massive reputation—and why he is still recognized as one of the greatest inventors of all time.
Born in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan, where he received only short-term formal schooling. His mother, a previous schoolteacher, skilled him at home from age seven on, and he read extensively. His childhood quests included striving chemistry experiments in his parents’ cellar, marked with what his biographer characterized as “near explosions and near tragedies.”
Edison’s inquisitiveness and tactical spirit led him to a job at the age of 12 as a “news butcher”—a pitchman employed by railroads to hawk snacks, newspapers, and other items to train passengers. Not satisfied to sell the news, he also decided to print it, founding and printing the first newspaper ever formed and printed on a moving train, the Grand Trunk Herald. He also accomplished chemistry experiments on the train.
By the age of 15, owing to his unique aptitude to get fired for arranging experiments and creations in his head while on the job, Edison became a wandering Western Union telegrapher before arriving in New York to start his private workshop. The telegraph would eventually inspire many of his initial original inventions. In 1874, at the age of 27, he designed the quadriplex telegraph, which permitted telegraphers to direct four messages simultaneously, increasing the industry’s productivity without necessitating the creation of new telegraph lines.
In the meantime, Edison had married one of his staff, Mary Stilwell, and together they shifted to Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. The rural area was the perfect location for a new kind of test site that mirrored its owner’s creative, tactical spirit: a research and development ability where Edison and his “muckers,” as he named them, could build anything their imagination invented.
Edison continued to advance on the telegraph, and as he functioned on a mechanism that could record telegraphic messages, he questioned if it could record sound, too. He fashioned a machine that translated the vibrations formed in speech into depressions on paper.
In 1877, now 30, Edison spoke the first two lines of “Mary had a little lamb” into the device and replayed using a hand crank. He had just invented what he termed the Edison Speaking Phonograph. The same year, Edison advanced an enhanced microphone transmitter, helping perfect the telephone.
Edison’s phonograph was revolutionary, but it was chiefly seen as a novelty. He had moved on to another world-changing idea: the glowing light bulb.
Electric light bulbs had been around since the early 19th century, but they were fragile and short-lived due to their filaments—the portion that produces light. One early form of electric light, the carbon arc light, trust on the vapor of battery-heated carbon poles to harvest light. But they had to be ignited by hand, and the bulbs sparkled, rustled, and burned out easily. Other designs were too costly and unrealistic to be widely used.
Edison’s, by contrast, were inexpensive, real, and long-lasting. In 1879, after years of fanatically improving on the notion of light bulbs, he established a bulb that can last a record-breaking 14.5 hours.
“My light is at last a perfect one,” Edison bragged to a New York Times journalist that year. When individuals heard about the bulb, they gathered to Menlo Park, and hundreds of them observed the laboratory—now vivid with electric light—in a public demonstration on December 31, 1879.
Scientists belief as well as the judgement universally expressed by the non-scientific was that Edison had in reality formed the light of the future, reported the New York Herald.
In turn, a Black inventor named Lewis Latimer advanced Edison’s improvement, making lightbulb filaments extra durable and working to resourcefully manufacture them. Meanwhile, Edison recognized an electric utility and drove toward revolutions that would make electric light even further accessible.
Edison’s creations led to worldwide recognition—and a cutthroat rivalry over electrical currents. Edison’s structures depended on direct current (DC)—which could only distribute power to a large number of buildings in a dense area. However, Edison’s competitors used alternating current (AC) structures, which were inexpensive and could transport electricity to customers over longer distances.
As AC systems spread, Edison used the media to wage war against Westinghouse and Tesla, attaching electricity-related deaths to AC and joining in an advertising campaign that presented the deadly potential of alternating current. The rivalry heightened when Edison sponsored public researches that involved killing animals with AC. But its horrible peak occurred when Edison, frantic to ensure his technology triumphed, in secret financed the creation and building of the first electric chair—certifying it ran on AC.
Despite the surprise of his anti-AC movement, Edison eventually lost the existing war due to the realisms of pricing and his declining influence in the electric usefulness he had formed.
In 1884, tragedy struck when Mary died of a probable morphine overdose. Two years later, the 39-year-old Edison wedded 20-year-old Mina Miller. While wintering in Fort Myers, Florida, the couple encountered a man who would become one of Edison’s scientific traitors later in life: Automobile developer and Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford.
During World War I, both Ford and Edison concerned about the dependance on the United Kingdom for rubber, which was perilous to the war effort. Together with Henry Firestone, who made his wealth selling rubber tires, the duo initiated a research establishment and a lab to examine potential U.S. native sources that could yield rubber. Though Edison believed goldenrod might be a substitute, the plan never revealed a feasible source for U.S.-made rubber.
Edison sustained to make a name for himself through his superficially endless energy for invention and research, which stretched from motion pictures—he unlocked the world’s first production studio, known as the Black Maria, in 1893—to talking dolls. He claimed to slumber just four hours a night, said he didn’t trust in exercise, and allegedly survived on a diet of milk and cigars for years. Ultimately, he submitted to difficulties of diabetes in 1931 at age 84.
considered as the wizard of Menlo Park, Edison can be seen nowadays in the myriad fields he influenced. From motion pictures to fluoroscopy to batteries, there’s seemingly no turn of technological invention he didn’t touch—and throughout his lifetime, he extended 1,093 copyrights in his name in the U.S. alone.
During his life, he was criticized for what some felt was a careless approach to innovation. But Edison’s continual energy for invention, and his preparedness to try anything and everything along the way, gained him the status of one of the supreme minds in American history.
Every shining light is his remembrancer, inscribed the New York Times after his demise. Every powerhouse is his memorial. Wherever there is a phonograph or radio, wherever there is a moving picture, voiceless or speaking, EDISON survives.
