Biography of Thomas Alva Edison

Let there be light

11 February 1847
October 18, 1931
Thomas Edison is the famous American inventor and industrialist born in Milan, Ohio, on day 11 February 1847, to whom we owe the invention of the light bulb. Son of a poor family, is forced to drop out of school after a few months of attendance due to financial problems; receives a cursory statement from mother and, at just 12 years old, begins to sell newspapers on trains of the "Grand Trunk Railway", devoting free time to his early experiments with electrical and mechanical equipment. Such a primitive laboratory organises aboard a wagon but, due to a fire accidentally caused by him, was fired. Save but then luckily stationmaster's son who was about to be run over by a train, making the gratitude of his father, allowing him to attend the Telegraph Office of the station. Later, while employed as a Telegrapher, he invented a telegraphic repeating instrument for the automatic transmission of messages.
The sale of the Telegraph apparatus, gradually improved, won him huge sums that in 1876 uses to open a small private workshop. In the context of the Telegraph transmissions, extremely significant was the invention of the dual and quadruple systems that allowed you to forward multiple messages simultaneously on a single line. Important for the development of the telephone, invented independently by the Italian Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell, American was his design of the coal microphone (1876). In 1877 Announces invention of the phonograph, a device by which the sound could be recorded mechanically. A simple cylinder that is wrapped in Tin Foil, which is run manually by a crank, the invention constitutes a major breakthrough in the field.
It is said that a man asked if he was the creator of the first so-called "talking car", to which Edison replied: "No, the first talking car was created many millennia ago, from Adam's rib!" Two years later, Edison has publicly the first electric lamp, which gets notable success. Edison competitor is J.W. Swan, but the competition between the two ends shortly afterwards, with the establishment of the company Edison & Swan United Light Company, to whom will smile upon a profitable future. In the following period he devoted himself instead to the refinement of the dynamos to generate the electricity needed to power new devices by designing, among other things, the first major power station in New York City. In 1882 the Edison Electric Light Company will produce 100 thousand light bulbs per year. In the same year, first in London and New York, and then in Milan (Santa Radegonda) will go into operation the first power stations for the distribution of electricity in the streets and in homes. In 1887 Edison moved from Menlo Park laboratory in West Orange (both in New Jersey), where it continues experiments and research. The following year invents the cinetoscopio, the first apparatus with which it was possible to make movies for quick succession of individual images.
Among his latest inventions include the Edison storage battery (a battery of nickel iron alkaline batteries), yet extremely rough but with a high capacitance per unit weight. His other findings are a mimeograph and a wireless telegraph method to communicate with moving trains. At the outbreak of World War I designs and builds plants for the production of benzene, phenol and aniline derivatives, which were previously imported from Germany. His last years he was busy to refine some earlier inventions.
Notes the thermoelectric effect, known as the "Edison effect-Richardson", which consists of a flow of electrons from a heated filament; the many applications of this discovery in the field of electronics were included until many years later.
Edison does not conquer all the thousand and over patents alone: intelligently leverages many capable staff and of their ideas and then refine them and turn them into useful and marketable, revealing himself therein, as well as a great technologist, also a far-sighted businessman, ahead of his time. Disappears in West Orange, New Jersey, on 18 October, 1931, at 84 years of age.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.