Did Thomas Edison Jump In Front Of A Train
His inventions included the electric pen, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, improving the telegraph and the telephone. Thomas Edison. How exactly did a child, who was homeschooled, invent some of the greatest inventions in history.
Thomas was the son of Nancy Elliott and Sam Edison, Jr. It has been said that he was born with an alarmingly big head, with doctors saying that he had brain fever. Young Edison was told that he was a poor student, his teachers called him confused and unable to think. When Nancy found out, what his son was called in school, she took him out of the school and decided to teach him at home. At 15 Edison walked into the office of the Detroit Free Press wanting to buy his usual volume of newspaper, it was also the time of the Civil War. People were curious about the war, and they were looking for information. Edison started to sell them, the information they were looking for, he bought 1000 papers and sold them all on the same day. Learning his first lesson in business, an idea useful to the masses can make money.
Edison lost his hearing at the age of 12, but it did not bother him. He believed that not hearing voices around him help him avoid distractions, allowing him to focus on his experiments. Maybe it was his inability to hear that made him shy towards others.
This shyness however did not stop him from rescuing a 3-year-old. One day he saw a child on the tracks, unaware of a train approaching, Edison ran towards the child and got him off tracks just in time. After rescuing the boy, the father showed his appreciation by teaching him telegraphy. And he started to work as a telegraph operator. It was the first electric form of long-distance communication. However the telegraph system had a flaw, it could not send a message if the distance exceeded 200 miles. For a long-distance message it had to pass through many stations, each operator listening to the message would pass it on until it travels the distance it needs to. By the time the message reaches its final destination, the meaning was either lost or changed. While working as a telegraph operator Edison made a breakthrough, he fixed the machine so that it could receive a message and sends it on, automatically. For his invention, Edison, 19 at the time was fired; the supervisor was upset because he had a child beat him to a problem he was working at. During his work as a telegraph operator, his boss asked him to send a telegraph message every hour to see if he was up and working. Edison being an inventor, built the machine to automatically signal his boss every 60 minutes while he snoozed away.
Edison was excited about his life and he wrote: I am 21, I may live to be fifty, I have got so much to do. Life is short I’m going to hustle. He started to work on his first machine, this was his first invention that received a patent. Maybe it was the excitement from getting his first patent, but he had forgotten his lesson from selling newspapers. His invention was an electric vote counter, it worked perfectly. But it was not required by anyone. Frustrated, from no one buying his invention. He made it his goal to only work on jobs that people wanted.
Completely broke at 21 Edison moved to New York City. A friend, Franklin Pope, allowed him to sleep in the backroom of Samuel Laws’ Gold Indicator Company. One day Edison fixed a broken machine at the company. This allowed him to open a business of his own with a partner, Franklin. They build electrical components and solved problems. He was on his way to a lifetime of inventions, but it came with its own challenges. As he went broke quite a few times and spend money defending his patents. He invented the electric pen, received several patents for improvements to the telegraph.
Around now he got sad news, he found out that his mother had passed away. Edison said many years later, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” Maybe it was the grief for his mother that made him sleep in the lab and spent much of his time making inventions.
By the time he was 39, he improved the telephone. Telephones, at the time, had flaws, the signals were scratchy and hard to hear. Edison wanted to make it better. In making it better he invented the phonograph. A device used for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. Famously his first words were “Mary had a little lamb”.
His next big invention changed the world; it brought us out of the darkness at night. Light bulb. Lamps before used kerosene or petroleum, but his light bulb ran on electricity. With the backing of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family. The Edison Electric Light Co. was formed on November 15 to carry out experiments with electric lights and to control any patents resulting from them. His vision at the time was to light up the lower Manhattan with electricity. With the vision on board, work started, this work would not only change Manhattan but also the entire world.
Work went on for 3 years, the streets were torn apart to install electrical wires. And then on September 4, 1882, a switch was turned on, lighting up 800 lights in 25 buildings, the electric age had begun. A year later, there were 513 customers using 10,300 lamps.
Over the next years, Edison made improvements to the phonograph and continue to work on inventions, one of which was the Kinetophone. In 1912, automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T. Edison’s battery was used extensively in industry.
In the 1920s, Edison’s health became worse, and he began to spend more time at home with his wife. His health got worse and worse, and on October 14, 1931, he went into a coma, four days later he passed away.
Thomas Edison wanted to make things that were useful. He would never accept things as they were. He held 1093 patents for inventions the most of any American inventor. 389 for electric light and power, 195 for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for storage batteries, and 34 for the telephone. His inventions helped build thousands of electric tools, games, and entertainment systems. A child who had a big head at birth, who was told by teachers that he was a confused man, shaped today’s electrical age.
