Including his foreign patents, successfully filed in other countries, his total is 2, What makes him such an important figure in the world of invention is the depth and breadth of his work. He patents whole systems and the components that support such systems. Edison appears to have had two great periods where his patent applications soared, , and ; but throughout his career there is a steady flow of ideas and concepts for new products. 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 addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse In , Connecticut-born gun manufacturer Samuel Colt received a U. Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the Thomas Jefferson , author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U. Wilbur and Orville Wright were American inventors and pioneers of aviation. In the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight; they surpassed their own milestone two years later when they built and flew the first fully practical Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Thomas Edison. Edison's Phonograph. Thomas Paine. Advice from the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson. Nikola Tesla Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.
Alexander Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. Guglielmo Marconi Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal.
Thomas Paine Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe. See More.
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