Inventions of thomas alva edison

Thomas Edison’s Early Life Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the seventh and last child born to Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliott Edison, and would be one of four to survive to adulthood. At age 12, he developed hearing loss—he was reportedly deaf in one ear, and nearly deaf in the other—which was variously attributed to scarlet fever, mastoiditis or a blow to the head. Thomas Edison received little formal education, and left school in 1859 to begin working on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, where his family then lived. By selling food and newspapers to train passengers, he was able to net about $50 profit each week, a substantial income at the time—especially for a 13-year-old. Did you know? By the time he died at age 84 on October 18, 1931, Thomas Edison had amassed a record 1,093 patents: 389 for electric light and power, 195 for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for storage batteries and 34 for the telephone. During the To address this problem, Edison began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness (including a printer that would convert electrical telegraph signals to letters). In early 1869, he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time. Edison in Menlo Park From 1870 to 1875, Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey, where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company (then the industry leader) and its riv...

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He began experimenting with the diaphragm of a telephone receiver by attaching a needle to it based on the reasoning that the needle could prick paper tape to record a message. His experiments led him to try a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his great surprise, played back the short message he recorded, "Mary had a little lamb." The word phonograph was the trade name for Edison's device, which played cylinders rather than discs. The machine had two needles: one for recording and one for playback. When you spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of your voice would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle. The cylinder phonograph, the first machine that could record and reproduce sound, created a sensation and brought Edison international fame. The date given for Edison's completion of the model for the first phonograph was August 12, 1877. It is more likely, however, that work on the model was not finished until November or December of that year since he did not file for the patent until December 24, 1877. He toured the country with the tin foil phonograph and was invited to the White House to demonstrate the device to President Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images Contrary to popular belief, he didn't "invent" the lightbulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. In 1879, using lower current electricity, a small carbonized filament and an improved vacuum inside the globe, he was able to produce a reliable, long-lasting source of ligh...

© Underwood & Underwood/Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Without question, our lives would be very different without the inventions of Thomas Alva Edison. This prodigious creator changed our culture in countless ways with the seemingly miraculous devices that flooded out of his New Jersey laboratory. Edison, born in Ohio in 1847, obtained his first patent at the age of 21. The last patent in his name was granted two years after his death, in 1933. In between, he tallied 1,093 United States patents and more than 1,200 patents in other countries [source: Alex Wong/Getty Images Edison was a 22-year-old telegraph operator when he received his first patent for a machine he called the electrographic vote-recorder. He was one of several inventors at the time developing methods for legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Congress, to record their votes in a more timely fashion than the time-honored voice vote system. In Edison's vote-recorder, a voting device was connected to the clerk's desk. At the desk, the names of the legislators were embedded in metal type in two columns -- "yes" and "no." Legislators would move a switch on the device to point to either "yes" or "no," sending an A friend of Edison's, another telegraph operator named Dewitt Roberts, bought an interest in his machine for $100 and tried to sell it to Washington to no avail. Congress wanted no part of any device that would increase the speed of voting -- decreasing the time for filibusters and political wheeling and de...

Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in 1868, when he was just 21 years old. The famous inventor’s first brainchild was for a “When Edison raised enormous capital, built a laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., and hired a staff of several dozen, each with distinct talents, he pioneered what became the modern corporate research and development process,” explains The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America . “He considered it an invention factory, one that would produce surprising new products at a regular rate.” In many cases, Edison’s genius was taking a new technology that someone else had pioneered and developing a superior way of doing the same thing. “An invention not only has to work fairly well, but it has to be something that the market wants and can afford to buy. Edison understood that as well as anyone in his day,” says Freeberg. Below are some of Edison’s most significant inventions. Automatic Telegraph Edison's filament lamp, with a glass bulb containing a partial vacuum.  Contrary to popular belief, Edison “Edison was one of a half dozen who were putting the elements of a viable lighting system together in those years, and since Edison was late to the race, he benefited from all his predecessors and rivals,” Freeberg explains. In the late 1870s, Edison designed a Phonograph Thomas Edison pictured with his phonograph. While developing his telephone transmitter, Edison got the idea of creating a machine that could record and play b...

Without a doubt, the greatest inventor of the modern era has been Thomas Edison. Many of his over one thousand inventions have profoundly changed the lives of nearly everyone in the world. Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. In 1854, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. There, "Al's" favorite hobbies were reading and performing chemistry experiments in his basement lab. However, his teachers considered young Edison a failure, and his mother soon decided to homeschool him. Edison's first job in 1859 was operating a newstand on the railroad that ran from Port Huron to Detroit. To make the trips more interesting, Edison installed a printing press and chemistry lab in a boxcar. In 1862, he learned how to use a railroad telegraph. Edison then spent many years traveling around Canada and the U.S., working as a telegraph operator and doing scientific experiments in his free time. Finally, in 1869, he decided to become a full-time inventor. On June 1 of that year, Edison was granted his first patent (#90,646) for an electric voting machine. But no one wanted to use the machine, and Edison resolved never again to invent what would not sell. His next invention fared much better: an improved stock market tickertape machine (1869), which earned him an instant $40,000 (about $700,000 today). With his friend Franklin L. Pope, Edison formed an electrical engineering firm based in Newark, New Jersey. With Pope, and later alone, Edison eventually earned ab...

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Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in 1868, when he was just 21 years old. The famous inventor’s first brainchild was for a “When Edison raised enormous capital, built a laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., and hired a staff of several dozen, each with distinct talents, he pioneered what became the modern corporate research and development process,” explains The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America . “He considered it an invention factory, one that would produce surprising new products at a regular rate.” In many cases, Edison’s genius was taking a new technology that someone else had pioneered and developing a superior way of doing the same thing. “An invention not only has to work fairly well, but it has to be something that the market wants and can afford to buy. Edison understood that as well as anyone in his day,” says Freeberg. Below are some of Edison’s most significant inventions. Automatic Telegraph Edison's filament lamp, with a glass bulb containing a partial vacuum.  Contrary to popular belief, Edison “Edison was one of a half dozen who were putting the elements of a viable lighting system together in those years, and since Edison was late to the race, he benefited from all his predecessors and rivals,” Freeberg explains. In the late 1870s, Edison designed a Phonograph Thomas Edison pictured with his phonograph. While developing his telephone transmitter, Edison got the idea of creating a machine that could record and play b...

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© Underwood & Underwood/Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Without question, our lives would be very different without the inventions of Thomas Alva Edison. This prodigious creator changed our culture in countless ways with the seemingly miraculous devices that flooded out of his New Jersey laboratory. Edison, born in Ohio in 1847, obtained his first patent at the age of 21. The last patent in his name was granted two years after his death, in 1933. In between, he tallied 1,093 United States patents and more than 1,200 patents in other countries [source: Alex Wong/Getty Images Edison was a 22-year-old telegraph operator when he received his first patent for a machine he called the electrographic vote-recorder. He was one of several inventors at the time developing methods for legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Congress, to record their votes in a more timely fashion than the time-honored voice vote system. In Edison's vote-recorder, a voting device was connected to the clerk's desk. At the desk, the names of the legislators were embedded in metal type in two columns -- "yes" and "no." Legislators would move a switch on the device to point to either "yes" or "no," sending an A friend of Edison's, another telegraph operator named Dewitt Roberts, bought an interest in his machine for $100 and tried to sell it to Washington to no avail. Congress wanted no part of any device that would increase the speed of voting -- decreasing the time for filibusters and political wheeling and de...