He began experimenting with ways to improve the telegraph, which led to his invention of the automatic telegraph, duplex telegraph, and message printer. It was about this time that Thomas dedicated his life to being a full-time inventor. He continued his work on the telegraph and his ideas also gave birth to the universal stock ticker. His father Samuel supervised the construction of the new laboratory; it opened in In the period from to Edison and his associates worked on at least three thousand different theories to develop an efficient incandescent lamp.
Incandescent lamps make light by using electricity to heat a thin strip of material called a filament until it gets hot enough to glow. Many inventors had tried to perfect incandescent lamps to "sub-divide" electric light or make it smaller and weaker than it was in the existing arc lamps, which were too bright to be used for small spaces such as the rooms of a house.
Edison's lamp would consist of a filament housed in a glass vacuum bulb. He had his own glass blowing shed where the fragile bulbs were carefully crafted for his experiments. Edison was trying to come up with a high resistance system that would require far less electrical power than was used for the arc lamps.
This could eventually mean small electric lights suitable for home use. By January , at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours.
In order to improve the bulb, Edison needed all the persistence he had learned years before in his basement laboratory. He tested thousands and thousands of other materials to use for the filament. He even thought about using tungsten, which is the metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he couldn't work with it given the tools available at that time. One day, Edison was sitting in his laboratory absent-mindedly rolling a piece of compressed carbon between his fingers.
He began carbonizing materials to be used for the filament. He tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was tedious and very demanding, especially on his workers helping with the experiments. He always recognized the importance of hard work and determination. I cannot say the same for all my associates.
Edison decided to try a carbonized cotton thread filament. The device allowed officials voting on a bill to cast their decision to a central recorder that calculated the tally automatically.
But when he took the vote recorder to Washington, Edison was met with a different reaction. It was an early lesson. 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.
Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in , hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic. 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. By , 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 s. Albert B. Edison debuted one of his most successful inventions, the phonograph, in But getting a perfected machine to market was a journey that took nearly a decade—and plenty of trial and error.
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.
Reporters and scientists were blown away by the invention; DeGraaf argues it helped make Edison a household name. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by In the interim, he had had success developing an alkaline storage battery, which he originally worked on as a power source for the phonograph but later supplied for submarines and electric vehicles.
In , automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T. The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs.
Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator , Edison continued working into his 80s. His rise from poor, uneducated railroad worker to one of the most famous men in the world made him a folk hero. More than any other individual, he was credited with building the framework for modern technology and society in the age of electricity. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in , when he was just 21 years old. That was just the start of a career in which he would obtain 1, U. Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current AC motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it.
His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf. Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal. Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe. Developed in the s and s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication.
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