How is thomas edison remembered

He believed no one really needed much sleep. He once said that anyone could learn to go without sleep. Thomas Edison did not enjoy taking to reporters. He thought it was a waste of time. However, he did talk to a reporter in nineteen seventeen.

He was seventy years old at the time and still working on new devices and inventions. The reporter asked Mister Edison which of his many inventions he enjoyed the most. He answered quickly, the phonograph. He said the phonograph was really the most interesting. He also said it took longer to develop a machine to reproduce sound than any other of his inventions.

Thomas Edison told the reporter that he had listened to many thousands of recordings. He especially liked music by Brahms, Verdi and Beethoven. He also liked popular music. Many of the recordings that Thomas Edison listened to in nineteen seventeen can still be enjoyed today.

His invention makes it possible for people around the world to enjoy the same recorded sound. The reporter also asked Thomas Edison what was the hardest invention to develop. He answered quickly again -- the electric light. He said that it was the most difficult and the most important. Before the electric light was invented, light was provided in most homes and buildings by oil or natural gas.

Both caused many fires each year. Neither one produced much light. Mister Edison had seen a huge and powerful electric light. He believed that a smaller electric light would be extremely useful. He and his employees began work on the electric light.

An electric light passes electricity through material called a filament or wire. The electricity makes the filament burn and produce light. Thomas Edison and his employees worked for many months to find the right material to act as the filament. 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. When voltage was applied to the completed bulb, it began to radiate a soft orange glow. Just about fifteen hours later, the filament finally burned out. Further experimentation produced filaments that could burn longer and longer with each test. Patent number , was given to Edison's electric lamp. The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss.

He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route. While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator.

For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science. The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting.

He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation. Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap. However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.

In , Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take control of his future. Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company. At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it.

In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature. However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly.

They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators. In Edison married year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses. During their year marriage, they had three children, Marion, Thomas and William, who himself became an inventor. In , Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior.

In , at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing. By the early s, Edison had acquired a reputation as a first-rate inventor. In , he set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, and employed several machinists.

As an independent entrepreneur, Edison formed numerous partnerships and developed products for the highest bidder. But the new research into Edison's papers shows that Edison's talent for motivating people extended well beyond this elite inner circle—a finding that may contain an important lesson for the entrepreneurial research-and-development firms that are the modern-day incarnations of Edison's vision.

Everyone—from his closest lieutenants to the cadre of skilled workers who operated his facilities—was encouraged to jot down diagrams and ideas. Particularly good ideas would be initialed by the experimenter in charge of the project and then developed further by the group, making it impossible to assign the credit for an invention to any one creator.

This is not to imply that Edison's opinion carried no more weight than that of any other collaborator. A large, burly figure with piercing eyes and a bristling intolerance for laziness, he was very much the commander leading the charge for innovation. Typically he would surge forth on his own course of research, dashing off ideas and conducting experiments seemingly as fast as they came to mind. Once the groundwork for an invention had been laid, he would leave the details to others.

The frequent notes of assistants duly recorded the master's advice: "Mr Edison says the temp is to[o] high. In addition to tapping the creative juices of his staff, Edison was knowledgeable about the research of competitors.

Contrary to public perception, he almost never worked on any invention that wasn't already being pursued by several other people. What set him apart from his peers was his knack for transforming those ideas into practical results. The Edison Papers team has been able to find little evidence to support the view that inspiration again and again struck Edison like lightning bolts out of the blue.

Take Edison's widely repeated account of a carbon-filament light bulb that burned forty hours straight as his associates watched, transfixed by the miracle. That episode, dramatized in a Hollywood film starring Spencer Tracy as the great inventor, never really happened. Scrutinizing the notebooks from that period, the scholars discovered that the bulb burned only fifteen and a half hours.

According to Paul Israel, a historian preparing a biography of Edison based on the archival endeavor, the team's version of that exciting event became inflated after subsequent tests of other carbon-filament materials confirmed the general approach.

A casual reading of Edison's notebooks leaves one with the impression that Eureka! That's because Edison tended to become wildly enthusiastic about virtually any quirky or unaccountable phenomenon—from the unexpected deflection of a galvanometer needle during an electrical experiment to his discovery on his daily walk around the lab grounds of a bug emitting an unusual odor this so fascinated the inventor that he wrote to Charles Darwin about it.

Yet the project team can identify only a few Eureka! A classic spinoff, the phonograph emerged unbeckoned from work on telegraphs and telephones. In the interest of efficiency, the American mode of telegraphy used receiving instruments that produced a series of clicks, which operators mentally translated into letters.

The clicks themselves left no lasting trace. In Edison and his associates developed a telegraph recorder that would emboss a message on paper, so that it could be transmitted repeatedly at high speed and a receiving operator could rerun it more slowly for transcription.

One July day in Edison considered using a very similar technique for recording telephone messages. The next day he realized that he could dispense with the electrical message, directly emboss the vibrations of the original sounds, and replay them for a simulacrum of the speaker's voice. This flash of insight paved the way for the modern recording industry. Why, given that major inventions seldom emerge as revelations, was Edison so effective?

The Edison Papers Project scholars can point to attitudes, work habits, and methods of reasoning that clearly contributed to his prolific output. In Israel's view, perseverance was a cornerstone of Edison's strength. This idea is captured in his famous proclamation, "Invention is ninety-nine percent perspiration, and one percent inspiration.

But the recent scholarship casts doubt on the inventor's clever but ultimately facile account of his own genius, addressing such fundamental issues as what enabled him to push ahead in the face of numerous setbacks and how exactly he learned from failure. Edison could not conceive of any experiment as a flop. As Israel puts it, "He saw every failure as a success, because it channeled his thinking in a more fruitful direction.

Sam Edison would simply brush himself off and embark on a new moneymaking scheme, usually managing to shield the family from financial hardship. Israel says, "This sent a very positive message to his son—that it's okay to fail—and may explain why he rarely got discouraged if an experiment didn't work out. Very few challenges failed to yield to Edison's brute intelligence, but one that did ultimately defeat him was the undersea telegraph.

To help his experiments, Edison designed a laboratory model of a transatlantic cable, in which cheap powdered carbon was used to simulate the electrical resistance of thousands of miles of wires.

Alas, the rumble of traffic outdoors, clattering in the machine shop, or even the scientists' footsteps shook the equipment enough to change the pressure of the connecting wires on the carbon, thus altering its resistance.

Since the accuracy of the model depended upon constant resistance in the carbon, Edison finally abandoned this approach. But later, when confronted with the problem of how to improve the transmission of voices over the telephone, he used a funnel-shaped mouthpiece to focus sound waves on a carbon button.

The pressure of those vibrations altered the resistance in the circuit in synchrony with the speaker's voice.