Thomas Edison

Aside from his amazing history as an adult, Thomas Alva Edison lived an equally exciting childhood. Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. At the time, his father was owner of a successful shingle and lumber company. However, with new railroads being built through Milan, his father lost customers to the bigger companies that began to open. The Edison's were forced to move to Port Huron, where he first began his education. When he was only seven years old his teacher, the Reverend G.B. Engle, considered Thomas to be a dull student and was terrible in math. After three months of school his teacher called him addled, which means confused or mixed up. Thomas stormed home. The next day, Nancy Edison brought Thomas back to school to talk to Reverend Engle. He told her that Thomas couldn't learn. His mother became so angry with the strict Reverend that she decided to home-school him. After a while his mother, a former teacher herself, recognized his unusual abilities to reason. She quickly got him interested in History and Classic books. Thomas, however, was strangely attracted to the subject of science.

By the age of ten Thomas Edison had already been experimenting and by now owned a sizable quantity of chemicals. Unfortunately, his experiments were often quite expensive and he found it his duty to pay for them. Because he didn't go to school, he had plenty of time to earn money by himself. When he was only twelve, he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway; he even printed the newspapers himself. He spent everything he earned on books and chemicals. After about one year, his mother became so sick of the noises of exploding beakers, the smells of burning, and smoke filling the house that he was no longer allowed to perform his experiments at home. Luckily, he was given permission to move to his lab into the train baggage car. He would be able to experiment during the long five-hour layover in Detroit. Sadly, one of chemicals fell off an unstable rack and caught fire. The fire was quickly spotted and only caused minor damage. Tom was then banned from experimenting on the train.

Along with chemistry, he began to work with telegraphy. When he was fourteen, he and another boy who lived nearby set up a telegraphic connection between their houses. By using the telegrapher so often, Tom became equivalent to a second class, which could earn a very steady pay. With his knowledge in telegraphy he began working as a full time operator. Soon after, he made his first major invention, which was a telegraphic repeating instrument that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second line without the need for an operator. He had invented a machine that does the job he was hired to do. For a while, Edison kept this invention secret. He began using it while at work, but was caught asleep with it on. After he was fired, he moved to Boston. Here, he planned to dedicate all of his time to research for new inventions. Soon after, he invented an automatic vote counter. Now the presidential votes could be counted in a fraction of the time it used to take. However, the government didn't like it, it was too fast. Those who decided not to use it argued that people want time between the time that they vote and the time they hear the results. However, this machine is later used, and the same design is still used today.

Since his last invention didn't produce any profit, he was hoping his next invention would help him financially. Edison wandered from Boston to New York City in 1869 close to broke. He convinced an employee at the Gold Indicator Company to let him sleep in his office. While there he studied the Stock Ticker, a telegraph machine that was used to report the price of gold to brokers' offices. A few days later the machine broke down and couldn't be fixed by any of the employees. Edison surprised the manager by repairing it, and he received a job as a Supervisor, getting $300 a month. He continued to study the ticker and made numerous advancements on it. His new ticker would be able to print out fresh stock quotes and values on a thin piece of paper. This made it easier to stay updated and made the business a bit more competitive. Edison needed a good-sized payday and he expected to make around $4,000 for the patent rights for the ticker. But the ticker had such a huge impact on the stock market, and they became so popular that he was able to sell the rights for nearly $40,000. The stock ticker was a great success.

Rather than spend the money on new supplies, he let it grow in the bank while he made plans to open a new and improved lab in Newark, New Jersey. He planned on continuing research with telegraphy he began improving his earlier devices which made it possible to send several messages over the same line. This greatly improved the productions of the existing telegraph lines. At the same time he was making improvements on Alexander Graham Bell's phone, he invented a carbon telephone transmitter, which improved the clarity and lowered the cost of the existing models. By adding a carbon transmitter, it enabled people to talk, rather than shout into the receiver. On Christmas 1871, when he turned 24, he married Mary Stilwell, age 16, but that hardly affected his working life. He was then asked to improve the telegraph by increasing the maximum number of words able to be sent per minute. He increased it from 40-50 to around 200. In 1872 he received 38 patents.

In 1873 he invented a working model of the duplex, and then the quadruplex lines. This invention saved $500,000 for telegraphers. While studying for new paper for the telegraph, Edison came upon paraffin wax paper and introduced it as wrapping paper for candies. Because Edison was not very well studied in the world of business, he was having some problems like most inventors. He therefore moved to a place called Menlo Park, New Jersey, to continue research. There he started his own laboratories so no one could bother him with business problems, and started a new life where the only thing he would do would be to continue research and development. In this stage of life he made some of his most important inventions.

In early 1877, Edison started working with things other than telegraphy. He invented the carbon transmitter, which made the invention of the phone possible. He stumbled into the invention of the phonograph. The invention of the phonograph made him famous and he was in the spotlight for the first half of 1878, he was tired and worn out by the second half and took a vacation. And as soon as he got back, he started working on the incandescent light. The idea came from a visit to William Wallace's shop in Connecticut. The hardest part was said to be creating the arc for the electrons to travel through. The metal either was a bad conductor, or burned too fast to be useful. It had been