Portfolio of Thomas Alva Edison Biograph

Summary

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio; the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Edison had very little formal education as a child, he was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother.

Edison began working at an early age, he spent much of his free time reading scientific, technical books, and learn how to operate a telegraph. By the time he was sixteen, Edison was proficient enough to work as a telegrapher full time.

Edison worked in a number of cities throughout the United States before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his profession from telegrapher to inventor. He received his first patent on an electric vote recorder, but this invention was a commercial failure.

Edison moved to New York City in 1869. He developed his first successful invention, an improved stock ticker called the "Universal Stock Printer". For this and some related inventions Edison was paid $40,000. He set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey in 1871. During the next five years, he found to time to get married to Mary Stilwell and started a family.

In 1876 Edison sold all his Newark manufacturing concerns and moved his family and staff of assistants to the small village of Menlo Park. Edison established a new facility containing all the equipment necessary to work on any invention.

The first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was the tin foil phonograph. The first machine that could record and reproduce sound created a sensation and brought Edison international fame. Edison next undertook his greatest challenge, the development of a practical incandescent, electric light. Edison's eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical.

After one and a half years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours. The first public demonstration of the Edison's incandescent lighting system was in December 1879. In September 1882, the first commercial power station went into operation providing light and power to customers in a one square mile area.

The success of his electric light brought Edison to new heights of fame and wealth, as electricity spread around the world. Edison's various electric companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought together to form Edison General Electric.When Edison General Electric merged with its leading competitor Thompson-Houston in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the company became simply General Electric.

This period of success was marred by the death of Edison's wife Mary in 1884. A year later, while vacationing at a friends house in New England, Edison met Mina Miller and fell in love. The couple was married in February 1886 and moved to West Orange, New Jersey where Edison had purchased an estate, Glenmont, for his bride. Thomas Edison lived here with Mina until his death.

A few months after his marriage, Edison decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange itself, less than a mile from his home. A three story main laboratory building contained a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large library. Over the years, factories to manufacture Edison inventions were built around the laboratory. The entire laboratory and factory complex eventually covered more than twenty acres and employed 10,000 people at its peak during World War One (1914-1918).

After opening the new laboratory, Edison began to work on the phonograph again. In the process of making the phonograph practical, Edison created the recording industry. The development and improvement of the phonograph was an ongoing project, continuing almost until Edison's death.

While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear", this was to become motion pictures. Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in 1891, and began commercial production of "movies" two years later.

Many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late 1890s, a thriving new industry was firmly established.

 Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested. This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.

Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles.It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery. Unlike iron ore mining, the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.

To better manage operations, Edison brought all the companies he had started to make his inventions together into one corporation, Thomas A. Edison Incorporated, with Edison as president and chairman.

Edison was sixty-four by this time and his role with his company and in life began to change. Edison left more of the daily operations of both the laboratory and the factories to others. The laboratory itself did less original experimental work and instead worked more on refining existing Edison products such as the phonograph.

During the war, at age seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island Sound in a borrowed navy vessel experimenting on techniques for detecting submarines.

In 1928, in recognition of a lifetime of achievement, the United States Congress voted Edison a special Medal of Honor. In 1929 the nation celebrated the golden jubilee of the incandescent light. The celebration culminated at a banquet honoring Edison given by Henry Ford at Greenfield Village, Ford's new American history museum, which included a complete restoration of the Menlo Park Laboratory. Attendees included President Herbert Hoover and many of the leading American scientists and inventors.

During the last two years of his life Edison was in increasingly poor health. Edison spent more time away from the laboratory, working instead at Glenmont. On October 18, 1931 the great man died.

Reflection

The biography of Thomas Alva Edison is so amazing, because I learn many things about effort and struggle to be successful. I think some or all of us know that to get a bulb, Thomas Alva Edison has failed as much as 9998 times, and only in the experiments are to 9999 he managed to successfully create the incandescent lamps that actually light up brightly, and he has patented the invention that as many as 1093 pieces. Many people in this world that want to stop what they do when they get a failure in the first, second or third times, they don’t want to continue what they do until they are successful, it is so different from Thomas Alva Edison, and many people in this world must learn from him to see one thing that be called failed.

From this article I get things that nothing’s perfect in this life. Sometime we get success, but sometime we also get failed, maybe when we are above the top, suddenly we get down. But we will still be able to live well, depending on how we view that life, we can change something to be better if we want to try, because life always follows us, our choice only continue or stop, and get the success or failed with it’s consequence.