How many edison inventions

But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers. She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good. One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution. She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory.

Like tech C. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.

How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away. He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal.

He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding. His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr.

Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes.

But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people.

So, too, was the drudgery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another.

The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies. Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his.

It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs.

Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola.

It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. In December , Edison developed a method for recording sound: the phonograph. His innovation relied upon tin-coated cylinders with two needles: one for recording sound, and another for playback.

His first words spoken into the phonograph's mouthpiece were, "Mary had a little lamb. Army to bring music to the troops overseas during World War I. While Edison was not the inventor of the first light bulb, he came up with the technology that helped bring it to the masses. After buying Woodward and Evans' patent and making improvements in his design, Edison was granted a patent for his own improved light bulb in He began to manufacture and market it for widespread use.

In January , Edison set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power and light the cities of the world. That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became General Electric. In , he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed.

In , the Pearl Street generating station provided volts of electrical power to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. In , Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which served as the primary research laboratory for the Edison lighting companies. He spent most of his time there, supervising the development of lighting technology and power systems.

He also perfected the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery. Over the next few decades, Edison found his role as inventor transitioning to one as industrialist and business manager. The laboratory in West Orange was too large and complex for any one man to completely manage, and Edison found he was not as successful in his new role as he was in his former one. Edison also found that much of the future development and perfection of his inventions was being conducted by university-trained mathematicians and scientists.

He worked best in intimate, unstructured environments with a handful of assistants and was outspoken about his disdain for academia and corporate operations. During the s, Edison built a magnetic iron-ore processing plant in northern New Jersey that proved to be a commercial failure. Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for producing cement.

Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device. Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades.

During World War I, the U. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

By the end of the s, Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber. During his lifetime, Edison received 1, U. He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, , at the age of His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process.

Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time. The two parted ways in and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs.

Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power. Each Kinetoscope was about 4 feet tall, 20 inches square, and had a peep hole magnifier that allowed the patron to view 50 feet of film in about 20 seconds.

A battery-operated lamp allowed the film to be illuminated. Edison was 22 years old and working as a telegrapher when he filed his first patent for the Electrographic Vote Recorder. The device was made with the goal of helping legislators in the US Congress record their votes in a quicker fashion than the voice vote system.

The legislators would move a switch to either yes or no, sending electric current to the device at the clerks desk. Yes and No wheels kept track of the votes and tabulated the final results. His giant mine project in northwestern NJ consumed huge amounts of money as experimentation plodded forward. Engineering problems and a decline in the price of iron ore [the discovery of the Mesabi iron rich ore deposits near the Great Lakes] all lead this invention to be abandoned.