![]() In 1882, he set up a large generator plant on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan and lit the street with electricity. Edison then began working on building a system to carry electricity so people could use his light bulbs. But he didn’t stop with just improving the bulb. He then began to mass produce and sell them. This was at a time when the world still relied on candlesticks. On New Year’s Eve, 1879, Edison lit up New York’s Christie Street, marking the dawn of the electric age. Eventually, Edison’s American lighting company merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company – which made incandescent bulbs under the Sawyer-Man patent. It’s been debated whether Edison’s patent infringed on Sawyer and Man’s previous patent. In 1880, Edison received a historic patent for an improvement to electric lamps. He and his assistant tested thousands of plant materials and finally came up with a filament made from bamboo that could last up to 1,200 hours. But that still wasn’t good enough for him. His bulb with a carbonized filament burned continuously for 14.5 hours. ![]() By October 1879, Edison had an “aha” moment. Previous ones had only been able to work for merely a few minutes at a time. patent for the incandescent lamp in 1878. British inventor Joseph Swan obtained the first patent for a light bulb in Britain two years before Edison patented the lightbulb.Įlectric lamp Sawyer and Man Meanwhile, in America, William Sawyer and Albon Man received a U.S. As I mentioned earlier, others had already been making light bulbs. ![]() His big breakthrough came when he created a successful incandescent lightbulb. He began to expand his factory…and his appetite for other inventions. The phonograph put Edison on the map – giving him the nickname the “Wizard of Menlo Park”. While working to perfect the phone, he also tried to record the human voice. Western Union commissioned him to improve upon Bell’s invention, to make it practical, and so Edison worked on a telephone transmitter. He began by perfecting the telephone there.īy 1876, Alexander Graham Bell had found a way to transmit human voices over wires. Edison used the money to build his great laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Western Union purchased the rights to the invention for $10,000, around $260,000 in value today. His quadruplex telegraph machine enabled his former employer Western Union to save money because the company could now send more messages without having to build new lines. In 1874, he developed an advanced version of a telegraph machine that could send and receive four telegraph messages simultaneously on a single wire – two in each direction. Well, he mainly improved upon what was already invented. He then decided to devote himself to a life as an inventor. He was able to do this even though he was moderately deaf. He began working full-time as a telegraph operator in Michigan, where he grew up, and later traveled around America, working at different offices for years. This was not easy to do operators had to quickly send out signals in dots and dashes, which were converted into letters that made up words and phrases. The boy’s father was deeply grateful and taught Edison how to operate Morse code on a telegraph machine. One day, when he saw a station official’s young son playing by the tracks in the path of an oncoming train, he rescued two-year-old Jimmie Mackenzie before a train crushed him. His life changed when he was 15 years old. Was he America’s greatest inventor, or…was Edison a thief? His critics say his only real invention was taking credit for the inventions of others. ![]() His genius lay in his ability to craft something better. He never crafted something out of nothing. Several inventors had demonstrated various versions of incandescent lights before he patented the first commercially successful lightbulb. He was photographed next to a lightbulb so often that people came to believe he invented it. Thomas Alva Edison one of the greatest inventors ever.
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