Home ›› 25 Apr 2022 ›› Opinion
A container of leaked chemicals. A fire in a train car. As a young man, the list of reasons Thomas Alva Edison had been fired from his various jobs seemed as long as the eventual list of the patents he held.
Though the future inventor had revolutionary ideas that would change the course of the industries that hired and fired him, the young man had, in the words of his 1931 obituary in the New York Times, “achieved a reputation as the [telegraph] operator who couldn’t keep a job.”
As it turned out, Edison would become most famous for his legendary ability to apply himself—and his oft-repeated tenet that genius is “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” He would go on to invent devices that defined the modern world—and perfect other groundbreaking innovations. His improvements on the lightbulb, for example, finally made it feasible for people everywhere to light their homes with electricity.
Here’s how the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park” achieved such an outsized reputation—and why he is still known as one of the greatest inventors of all time.
Born in Ohio in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan, where he received only brief formal schooling. His mother, a former schoolteacher, taught him at home from age seven on, and he read widely. His childhood adventures included ambitious chemistry experiments in his parents’ basement, marked with what his biographer characterized as “near explosions and near disasters.”
Edison’s curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit led him to a job at the age of 12 as a “news butcher”—a peddler employed by railroads to hawk snacks, newspapers, and other goods to train passengers. Not content to sell the news, he also decided to print it, founding and publishing the first newspaper ever produced and printed on a moving train, the Grand Trunk Herald. He also performed chemistry experiments on the train.
By the age of 15, due to his unique ability to get fired for planning experiments and inventions in his head while on the job, Edison became an itinerant Western Union telegrapher before moving to New York to start his own workshop. The telegraph would ultimately inspire many of his first patented inventions. In 1874, at the age of 27, he invented the quadriplex telegraph, which allowed telegraphers to send four messages simultaneously, increasing the industry’s efficiency without requiring the construction of new telegraph lines.
In the meantime, Edison had married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, and together they moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. The rural area was the perfect site for a new kind of laboratory that reflected its owner’s inventive, entrepreneurial spirit: a research and development facility where Edison and his “muckers,” as he called them, could build anything their imagination conjured.
Edison continued to improve on the telegraph, and as he worked on a machine that could record telegraphic messages, he wondered if it could record sound, too. He created a machine that translated the vibrations produced by speech into indentations on a piece of paper.
In 1877, now 30, Edison spoke the first two lines of “Mary had a little lamb” into the device and played it back using a hand crank. He had just invented what he called the Edison Speaking Phonograph. The same year, Edison developed an improved microphone transmitter, helping refine the telephone.
Edison’s phonograph was groundbreaking, but it was primarily seen as a novelty. He had moved on to another world-changing concept: the incandescent light bulb.
Electric light bulbs had been around since the early 19th century, but they were delicate and short-lived due to their filaments—the part that produces light. One early form of electric light, the carbon arc light, relied on the vapor of battery-heated carbon rods to produce light. But they had to be lit by hand, and the bulbs flickered, hissed, and burned out easily. Other designs were too expensive and impractical to be widely used.
Nationalgeography
