Photograph of Thomas Edison, National Archives Identifier 315834492
Thomas Edison, perhaps the most famous American inventor, was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio. He was mostly self-educated and started to earn his own living at the age of 13 by selling newspapers and candy on commuter trains. He used much of his earnings to buy electrical and chemical equipment for his experiments.
His first patent was granted in 1869 for an electric vote recording machine. There was little market for it, however, and Edison soon moved on to working on improvements to the telegraph.
[Left] 90,646 Electrographic Vote-Recorder, page 6, National Archives Identifier 7267830
His quadruplex telegraph was his first great commercial success. He sold the invention, which allowed a telegraph to send two messages simultaneously, to Western Union for $10,000.
Patent 209,241 Quadruplex-Telegraph Repeaters, page 34, National Archives Identifier 158486145
Many of Edison’s inventions were really improvements on earlier inventions such as the telegraph and the dynamo. Even the light bulb had been invented previously, but the bulbs were either too expensive to produce or burned out too quickly to be practical. Perhaps Edison’s most important invention wasn’t a device but an idea - the industrial research lab.
Photograph of Thomas Alva Edison, National Archives Identifier 219777023
He built his first lab in Menlo Park, NJ with the money he made from the quadruplex telegraph. Edison hired a staff to dedicate themselves full time to innovation. As the head of the laboratory, he is still credited as the inventor of all of the ideas that came out of the lab even when they were thought up by others.
Drawing for an Electric Lamp, National Archives Identifier 595450
Edison didn’t come to the attention of the wider world until 1877 and the invention of the phonograph, a device that recorded and played back sounds. To the general public, a tinny, recorded voice was amazing, and Edison became known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
[Left] Photograph of Thomas Alva Edison With His Phonograph, National Archives Identifier 219777021
[Right] Patent Drawing for T. A. Edison's Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects, National Archives Identifier 7451938
Edison went on to invent and improve on many new technologies. With William Kennedy Dickson, he invented a motion picture camera called the Kinetograph and a motion picture viewer called the Kinetoscope that allowed one person at a time to view the short motion pictures. Eventually he founded a movie studio that created almost 1200 mostly short films.
Edison was such a prolific inventor and patent filer that he has his own series in Record Group241 Records of the Patent and Trade Mark Office.
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