Thomas Alva Edison and his contributions to science and technology (Part 01)
# The Early Days
Read about Edison`s journey to inventions.
In 1850, A three-year-old kid was walking to his animal farm along with his mother where he found a hen laying over the eggs. He was curious about hatching and was observing it keenly. It was hard to figure out this phenomenon for a kid of this age. The mother answered his query after a few questions that the hen is fertilizing, and the eggs will bear the chicks out of them sooner. Later the day, he went missing from his home. After a search of a few hours, his mother found him seated at the animal farm and interestingly he was trying to replace himself with the hen to find whether the same works for him [1][4]. It was an unintentional funny move resulting in the breakage of eggs. This height of curiosity led him as a top scientist among his contemporaries. This child was fascinated by technology and used to spent most of his time at home doing chemical experiments.
This scientist is well known as Thomas Alva Edison. He is popular for his inventions such as light bulbs, power generators and mass communications. The American inventor and businessman born on February 11, 1847, in Milan Ohio [1]. He was the last child of Ogden Edison Junior and Nancy Edison. In 1854, at the age of seven, he moved to Port Huron along with his family [2]. It was 1860 and Abraham Lincoln was running his presidential campaign during the pre-civil war times. He used to sell newspapers on a train passing by Port Huron to Detroit at the age of twelve years [3]. He used to buy equipment for his experiments from that profit. He was considered almost half deaf and was expelled from his school owing to his inability to memorizing things. This deafness helped him to focus more on work and get less distraction. His mother adored him, and She was a school teacher who taught him the basics of reading and writing. He was fond of rich fame and admiration like most humans.
Edison had a creative mind of resolving the technicalities and reselling the stuff. From his little experience of selling printed newspapers. He observed the method of printing technology and tried to recreate a smaller one. Instead of buying it from some other publisher, he started his newspapers. People appreciated the effort of this one-man show. His paper was in a good sale before but sooner the sale plunged due to less news quality. Sooner the bad day occurred, and his news factory caught fire. By this little experience, he found that selling newspapers was a profitable business.
He had put his focus on a telegraph pole, lying parallel to train tracks. These towers were handling and delivering thousands of messages at the time. He was again curious this time about how the words are converted into sound signals. He challenged himself the way he did at the time of creating a printing machine. He started visiting telegraph offices to understand the coding and decoding mechanisms. As it is said, things go fine universally when one is determined to do so.
Edison was fifteen years old in 1862 when he saved a three years old kid from being rolled into a boxcar train. The grateful father of this little child, J.U. Mackenzie wanted to pay a reward but instead, Edison demanded to learn telegraphy codes as a payout. He was no more a newspaper hawker but a telegraph operator. The United States was going under a huge crisis of civil war, the nation was split into two and the transfer of news about the ongoing affairs was at its peak. It kept him busy at work most of the time. Edison was obsessed with the science of these machines. He used to spend additional time digging into the telegraphic transfer. He catalogued all the problems and difficulties in operating these machines. The civil war almost perished in 1865 and the innovator wanted to start working on creating one of his telegraph machines.
He lamented the mechanism of inefficient telegraphic sending which required many operators to encode and decode. Similar to that it was only people to send one message to one station at a time which caused repetition of encoding the same message multiple times. He had an idea of making this process automatic and forming a broadcasting method. In 1868, he arrived in Boston before spending years in several cities. By this time, he had worked seven years as a telegraph operator, but this was not only the job he did for a living. He left this job in 1869 to start making a business out of it.
Thomas Edison headed towards New York to shape his future. He met a couple of businessmen where he discussed his ideas on modern mechanisms of message delivery. He was applauded and succeeded to grab funds to start working on that. The very thing he innovated was the automatic vote recorder, but this machine failed the path to commercialization. The major reason was that the politicians were not obliged to honesty in the voting system. This was his first patent in the technology industry. Edison found out that innovations without a roadmap to commercial usage are not worthy of spending time. He was paid $40,000 for an improved stock ticker. It was an electricity-based broadcast system. He married Mary Stilwell who was an employee at his workshop and started a family by this time.
He started a small laboratory in the Newark Manufacturing facility in 1871. This was the first of its kind anywhere and became a reference for modern labs such as Bell Laboratories. He ignited the communication industry with his multiplex telegraph machine which was a revolution of that time. He gained a huge market value after this success where many investors wanted to put money on his idea. He started this journey to establish his whole business empire where commercial innovations are the prime focus. After the demonstration of the quadruplex telegraph, he was not sure whether to sell it for $4000 to $5000. He took services of western union and was amused to hear the $10,000 offer. Edison was legally attributed to most of the inventions made at this laboratory because the staff used to carry his direction.
In 1876, Thomas Edison built his first factory and state-of-the-art workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey. This laboratory covered an area of 34 hectares and hired the top scientist of the country. This team was working hard to invest in machines that can record voice and photos. Edison was home to commercialising technologies and attracting crowds to its applications. He was titled a “Wizard of Menlo Park” with his tin-foil phonograph invention. It was one of the simplest sound recorders where voice can be saved on a plastic disc and heard back using a small metallic pin with sufficient clarity. This sensation brought Edison into the international limelight. He was the first one to sing the poem “Merry had a little lamb” with his commercial creation. After the rich popularity of this discovery, Thomas Edison was invited to the American congress to present a demonstration on his device which later became famous as a phonogram [3]. His factory expanded to two-third of the city blocks where he had almost all kinds of material needed for experiment and the urgent start of work.
Now the wizard of Menlo park moved with a new motive of creating something which can help people light up their houses. It was not a very new idea by that time because in 1850 many European cities used to have arc light. Although, these arc lights used to produce a lot of lighting but were not suitable for houses because of unbearable heat. That was the main reason for the presence of arc light at high height on chokes only. He held a press briefing in 1878 where the famous inventor claimed his discovery of the electric bulb. He thought that if we create a vacuum in a tube and cross a wire there then electrification will create huge light. More observable than the ones done with oil/gas lamps.
Edison started to ameliorate the microphone for telephony using carbon. It was done using two metal plates using a resistance of pressure waves. A steady current used to pass from these plates to alter the varying current to reproduce sound waves. This mechanism used direct current and transformer to generate a signal on telephone lines. He also furnished a bell telephone microphone that used to rely on loose-contact carbon.
Thomas believed that the idea is only one per cent of anything, rest in the struggle and hard endeavours which make it come true. His laboratory had a facility to create a vacuum, but the major concern was the material of filament. The team of scientists tried almost everything available in their reach. They just found platinum filament a suitable choice, but it was too expensive for commercialization. Edison aimed to make an economic electric bulb that is suitable for the common household. After one year of trials, they finally concluded the choice of material as Carbon filament. Although, it is a huge controversy for this legit invention with Lewis Latimer considered as a real contributor to the incandescent lighting experiment.
Read about his business ideologies.
Reference
1. Baldwin, Neal (1995). Edison: Inventing the Century. Hyperion. pp. 3–5. ISBN 978–0–7868–6041–8.
