Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

Thomas Edison shook the world with his inventions, which changed the face of the world that was hundred years before to the world we are living in. Here are facts and information on the life of Thomas Edison.

Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio State in America to his parents Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliot Edison. He was the seventh child of his parents. Thomas spent seven years of his childhood in Milan before his family shifted to Port Huron in Michigan State where his father was appointed on a new job as a carpenter at Fort Gratiot in 1854.

There are many stories about Thomas Edison, which make different statements each about Thomas and his childhood. According to some stories, Thomas was a very dumb boy and according to some other stories he was a mentally handicap boy during his childhood. But the one that is believed to be true by historians and people is that Thomas had hearing problems, he was not attentive in his class and always faced problems because of the same reason. His teacher couldn’t bare the situation anymore and considered him a dumb boy. His teacher started opposing the very idea of sending Thomas to a school of normal children with his ongoing hearing problems. (According to one story, his teacher one day gave Thomas a letter to give it to his mother and had sent him back home. The letter said, "Your child is too dumb to attend the school!" This letter was further answered with a statement from Thomas’s mother with another letter stating that her child was not a dumb boy, and she will teach him at home instead of sending him back to the school! And she started teaching Thomas at home.)

Even after facing such situations in his school, Thomas had developed immense interest in reading; he started reading almost anything that he found. His hunger for reading helped him in developing interest in science, at the very young age of about 10, Thomas had set up a small laboratory in his room. Thomas spent most of the time in the whole day either reading something or experimenting.

Thomas had many new ideas in his young brain, his daily newspaper "The Grand Trunk Herald" was one such result of his ideas, which he had started printing and distributing from his new experiments laboratory he had obtained when he took-on a job as a train boy on the Grand Trunk Railway. He had found a new place for his laboratory and also for the printing press for his daily newspaper, which was an old cargo vehicle.

When Thomas was about 14 years old, he saved life of a child who was a son of some senior railway authority at the Grand Trunk Railway. The child’s father was very grateful to Thomas and on Thomas’s request he taught him how to use a telegraph to send and receive messages. Thomas was very much interested in learning and using the telegraph to send and receive messages. Soon Thomas had achieved mastery in operating the telegraph.

Thomas was offered a post of roving telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada and New England when he was 15 years old. The telegraph machine that he worked with needed one person to continuously attend the messages being transmitted from the other end and he had to answer to each received answer manually. This thing made Thomas think about developing a telegraphic repeating instrument, which would make it possible to transmit messages automatically. Thomas was engraved in his new inventions such as the duplex telegraph and message printer and some other instruments, that he left his job when he was 20 years of age. Thomas started paying attention towards inventing and production of the machines/instruments that he had invented. Soon he had enough finance, which helped him get going with the new inventions.

Further, Thomas moved to New Jersey when he was about 21 years of age and he opened a new workshop to continue his work at Newark, New Jersey. While being at Newark, Thomas successfully started production of the Edison Universal Stock Printer, a quadruplex Telegrapher, an automatic telegraphic machine and some more instruments like printers and various types of telegraph machines.

As Thomas was more inclined towards developing new things rather than making money from the production of those instruments invented by him, he soon started facing financial problems. Because of financial problems, Thomas had no other choice but to move his workshop to a new place. He soon moved to Menlo Park in New Jersey with the help of his father and the financial aid he had requested from his father. Thomas Edison continued with his invention work and again he came up with some great inventions, which amazed people totally. While working in his new workshop, Thomas was successful in developing a Carbon-Button transmitter, which could help in transmitting voice waves to other place through wire. This Carbon-button transmitter was (even today also) used in telephone speakers and microphones. Further he invented phonograms in the same year while he was at his Menlo Park workshop.

In 1870, Thomas established his company ‘Edison Electronic Light Company’ with the help from some people who provided him with finance. Thomas continued his quest for new inventions and never stopped in his life. He next invented and publicly demonstrated his new invention: an incandescent electric light bulb and helped in installation of first ever Commercial Central Power System at Manhattan. Near 1887, Thomas moved to West Orange, New Jersey to develop and establish his new laboratory and research facility. Thomas further spent rest of his life inventing at his new research lab at West Orange. In 1913, Thomas brought first talking moving pictures in public.

The list of Thomas Edison’s inventions and his research work is so long that it is almost impossible to jolt-down everything in one single article. Thomas Edison was probably the first person to register more than 1000-patented inventions on his name. In his entire life, Thomas never tried to slow down on his invention work and never had a break, even when he married first to Mary Stillwell in 1870, and after death of his first wife when he second time married to Mina Miller in 1886, he always kept thinking and working hard to invent something new, even when Thomas died on 18th October 1931, he was working on one of his upcoming invention.