By Mary L. Bushong /
1Have you ever had ideas for inventing new things or of making old things better? If you have, you could be like Thomas Edison. Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. Known as "little Al" to his family, he did not speak at all until he was almost 4 years old. Once he began to speak, he constantly asked questions about how everything around him worked.
3When he started school at age 7, he asked his teacher so many questions that the man no longer wanted him in the class. Tom's mother decided to teach him at home. There he learned about reading, writing, and math from his mother, while his father taught him to read classic stories. When he read all the books at home, his parents took him to a library where he could read even more.
4Tom loved to learn about science, especially engineering, physics, and mathematics. When he was 14, he began to lose his hearing, but he didn't let that bother him. He found that he could use his loss of hearing to help him concentrate. Eventually, he lost all the hearing in his left ear and 80% of the hearing in his right ear.
5One day Tom saved a child from being run over by a train. As a reward, the child's father taught Tom Morse code and how to use the telegraph. By the time Tom was 15, he was working as a telegraph operator. When he was 16 he came up with his first real invention. It was an automatic repeating device. If there were no one in the office when a telegram came through, this device would automatically send the telegram on.
6He wandered around the country as a telegraph operator for five years until 1868, when he finally settled in Boston to work for the Western Union Corporation. Boston was also the center of learning for the new electrical technology. There he learned theories that helped him with his inventions. In 1869 he patented his electric vote counter. It worked really well, but it did not sell. He made up his mind that he would only invent things that made money.
7It was not long before Tom moved to New York. He lived on the streets for three weeks and almost starved while looking for a job. While living in the basement of a building, he learned about stock-ticker machines. When he designed a better one, a company paid him $40,000.00 for all the rights to it. He immediately used the money to establish a laboratory and factory in Newark, NJ. It was not long before he had 300 employees turning out inventions. Most of them were part of the telegraph multiplex systems, but he also designed a carbon transmitter, which made Bell's telephone workable. Before he turned thirty, though, his health became bad, and he had to give up his work.
8Two years later, when Edison regained his health, he opened a new lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey. From 1876-1886 he worked only on inventing things. This earned him the name, "Wizard of Menlo Park". In 1882 he was granted 75 new patents. Many, like the phonograph and the light bulb, cost him thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. The phonograph would record sounds on a foil wrapped cylinder and play them back again. Two years after that, in 1879, he invented the first practical incandescent light bulb. At first they used a bamboo filament, but then Edison discovered that a tungsten wire or filament worked better. He even invented a kind of movie camera and a viewer called a "Kinetoscope."
9Edison did not spend much time at home, because he worked 18-19 hours a day. Sometimes he wasn't even sure if it was day or night. He said, " I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom."
10From 1883-1884 he developed the electrical grid system, which made it possible for many people to use electricity. This invention is considered his greatest achievement. Then in 1892, his Edison General Electric Company merged with another firm to become General Electric Corporation.
11In 1887 he opened a new lab in West Orange, NJ. When it burned down in 1914, Edison did not get upset. He just stated that their mistakes had all been destroyed, and they could start again with a clean slate.
12During World War I, Edison worked with the government on the Naval Consulting Board. He did research into torpedoes and antisubmarine devices. In 1920 he pressured the government into establishing the Naval Research Laboratory.
13It was only when he was in his 80's that he began to slow his work. At age 83, he received his last (1,093rd) patent. He died on October 18, 1931 in New Jersey at the age of 84.
14"Genius," he said, "is two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration." His ability to invent a good, new patent about every two weeks throughout his career is unmatched by any other single person. His imagination, self-confidence and optimism helped him rise above other men to become America's greatest inventor.