120 Facts About Thomas Edison

1.

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman.

2.

Thomas Edison developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.

3.

Thomas Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees.

4.

Thomas Edison later established a botanical laboratory in Fort Myers, Florida, in collaboration with businessmen Henry Ford and Harvey S Firestone, and a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, that featured the world's first film studio, the Black Maria.

5.

Thomas Edison died in 1931 due to complications from diabetes.

6.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan.

7.

Thomas Edison started his career as a news butcher, selling newspapers and later working as a telegraph operator.

8.

Thomas Edison later worked with Franklin Leonard Pope, developing a multiplex telegraphic system in 1874.

9.

Thomas Edison's lab expanded to occupy two city blocks and was stocked with a vast array of materials for experimentation.

10.

Thomas Edison faced competition from alternating current systems, which could transmit electricity over longer distances and cheaper wires.

11.

The war ended in 1892 when Thomas Edison's company merged with Thomson-Houston to form General Electric, which competed with Westinghouse for the AC market.

12.

Thomas Edison moved to West Orange, New Jersey, and bought a property in Fort Myers, Florida, as a winter retreat.

13.

Thomas Edison focused on finding a domestic source of natural rubber, eventually discovering the Goldenrod plant as a viable option.

14.

Thomas Edison made significant contributions to other fields, such as telegraphy, motion pictures, and X-ray technology.

15.

Thomas Edison designed the first commercially available fluoroscope and invented the tasimeter to measure infrared radiation.

16.

Thomas Edison was involved in mining, attempting to extract low-grade iron ore in the United States and discovering nickel and cobalt deposits in Canada.

17.

Thomas Edison developed the nickel-iron battery, although it wasn't very successful.

18.

Thomas Edison died in 1931 due to complications from diabetes.

19.

Thomas Edison first married Mary Stilwell in 1871, with whom he had three children: Marion Estelle, Thomas Alva Jr.

20.

In 1886, Thomas Edison married Mina Miller, and they had three children: Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore Miller.

21.

Thomas Edison was a freethinker and supported women's suffrage, nonviolence, and monetary reform.

22.

Thomas Edison received numerous awards during his lifetime, including an honorary PhD, memberships in prestigious organizations, medals, and distinctions such as the Officer of the Legion of Honour.

23.

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, but grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, after the family moved there in 1854.

24.

Thomas Edison was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison Jr.

25.

Thomas Edison was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, who used to be a school teacher.

26.

Thomas Edison subsequently concocted elaborate fictitious stories about the cause of his deafness.

27.

Thomas Edison began his career as a news butcher, selling newspapers, candy and vegetables on the trains running from Port Huron to Detroit.

28.

Thomas Edison turned a $50-a-week profit by age 13, most of which went to buying equipment for electrical and chemical experiments.

29.

Thomas Edison studied qualitative analysis and conducted chemical experiments until he left the job rather than be fired after being held responsible for a near collision of two trains.

30.

Thomas Edison obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers.

31.

In 1866, at the age of 19, Thomas Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire.

32.

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey, home, while Thomas Edison worked for Samuel Laws at the Gold Indicator Company.

33.

Pope and Thomas Edison founded their own company in October 1869, working as electrical engineers and inventors.

34.

Thomas Edison began developing a multiplex telegraphic system, which could send two messages simultaneously, in 1874.

35.

Thomas Edison was surprised to hear them offer $10,000, which he gratefully accepted.

36.

Thomas Edison was legally credited with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction.

37.

Thomas Edison's staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

38.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, started working for Thomas Edison and began his duties as a laboratory assistant in December 1879.

39.

Thomas Edison assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting, and other developing inventions.

40.

Thomas Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material".

41.

In Menlo Park, Thomas Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.

42.

Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him wider notice was the phonograph in 1877.

43.

In 1876, Thomas Edison began work to improve the microphone for telephones by developing a carbon microphone, which consists of two metal plates separated by granules of carbon that would change resistance with the pressure of sound waves.

44.

Thomas Edison was one of many inventors working on the problem of creating a usable microphone for telephony by having it modulate an electrical current passed through it.

45.

Thomas Edison's work was concurrent with Emile Berliner's loose-contact carbon transmitter and David Edward Hughes study and published paper on the physics of loose-contact carbon transmitters.

46.

Thomas Edison used the carbon microphone concept in 1877 to create an improved telephone for Western Union.

47.

In 1886, Thomas Edison found a way to improve a Bell Telephone microphone, one that used loose-contact ground carbon, with his discovery that it worked far better if the carbon was roasted.

48.

In 1878, Thomas Edison began working on a system of electrical illumination, something he hoped could compete with gas and oil-based lighting.

49.

Thomas Edison began by tackling the problem of creating a long-lasting incandescent lamp, something that would be needed for indoor use.

50.

Thomas Edison then experimented with different grasses and canes such as hemp, and palmetto, before settling on bamboo as the best filament.

51.

Thomas Edison continued trying to improve this design and on November 4,1879, filed for US patent 223,898 for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires".

52.

Thomas Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31,1879, in Menlo Park.

53.

Villard was impressed and requested Thomas Edison install his electric lighting system aboard Villard's company's new steamer, the Columbia.

54.

The incandescent light bulb patented by Thomas Edison began to gain widespread popularity in Europe as well.

55.

On December 17,1880, he founded the Thomas Edison Illuminating Company, and during the 1880s, he patented a system for electricity distribution.

56.

Eight months earlier in January 1882, to demonstrate feasibility, Thomas Edison had switched on the 93 kW first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London.

57.

Thomas Edison expressed views that AC was unworkable and the high voltages used were dangerous.

58.

Thomas Edison has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.

59.

Thomas Edison appeared to have been worried about the high voltage from misinstalled AC systems killing customers and hurting the sales of electric power systems in general.

60.

Primary was the fact that Thomas Edison Electric based their design on low voltage DC and switching a standard after they had installed over 100 systems was, in Thomas Edison's mind, out of the question.

61.

The development of the electric chair was used in an attempt to portray AC as having a greater lethal potential than DC and smear Westinghouse at the same time via Thomas Edison colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator.

62.

Thomas Edison moved from Menlo Park after the death of his first wife, Mary, in 1884, and purchased a home known as "Glenmont" in 1886 as a wedding gift for his second wife, Mina, in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey.

63.

In 1885, Thomas Edison bought 13 acres of property in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly $2,750 and built what was later called Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat.

64.

Thomas Edison became concerned with America's reliance on foreign supply of rubber and was determined to find a native supply of rubber.

65.

Thomas Edison did the majority of the research and planting, sending results and sample rubber residues to his West Orange Lab.

66.

Thomas Edison employed a two-part Acid-base extraction, to derive latex from the plant material after it was dried and crushed to a powder.

67.

Thomas Edison is credited with designing and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope, a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs.

68.

Until Thomas Edison discovered that calcium tungstate fluoroscopy screens produced brighter images than the barium platinocyanide screens originally used by Wilhelm Rontgen, the technology was capable of producing only very faint images.

69.

The fundamental design of Thomas Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, although Thomas Edison abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally.

70.

Thomas Edison invented a highly sensitive device, that he named the tasimeter, which measured infrared radiation.

71.

The device was not patented since Thomas Edison could find no practical mass-market application for it.

72.

Thomas Edison's innovations included the development of the quadruplex, the first system which could simultaneously transmit four messages through a single wire.

73.

Thomas Edison was granted a patent for a motion picture camera, labeled the "Kinetograph".

74.

Thomas Edison did the electromechanical design while his employee William Kennedy Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development.

75.

In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope or peep-hole viewer.

76.

The Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope Francais, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15,1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies.

77.

Thomas Edison had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.

78.

In 1903, when the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island announced they would execute Topsy the elephant by strangulation, poisoning, and electrocution, Thomas Edison Manufacturing sent a crew to film it, releasing it that same year with the title Electrocuting an Elephant.

79.

In 1908, Thomas Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios.

80.

Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, which was founded in 1929.

81.

Thomas Edison said his favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation.

82.

Thomas Edison thought that talkies had "spoiled everything" for him.

83.

High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast of the United States and Thomas Edison tried to mine low-grade ore.

84.

Thomas Edison developed a process using rollers and crushers that could pulverize rocks up to 10 tons.

85.

In 1901, Thomas Edison visited an industrial exhibition in the Sudbury area in Ontario, Canada, and thought nickel and cobalt deposits there could be used in his production of electrical equipment.

86.

Thomas Edison returned as a mining prospector and is credited with the original discovery of the Falconbridge ore body.

87.

Thomas Edison looked on them as something customers could use to power their phonographs but saw other uses for an improved battery, including electric automobiles.

88.

The then available lead acid rechargeable batteries were not very efficient and that market was already tied up by other companies so Thomas Edison pursued using alkaline instead of acid.

89.

Thomas Edison had his lab work on many types of materials, eventually settling on a nickel-iron combination.

90.

Thomas Edison did not demonstrate a mature product until 1910: a very efficient and durable nickel-iron-battery with lye as the electrolyte.

91.

Thomas Edison responded by undertaking production of phenol at his Silver Lake facility using processes developed by his chemists.

92.

Thomas Edison built two plants with a capacity of six tons of phenol per day.

93.

Thomas Edison built two plants to produce raw material benzene at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Bessemer, Alabama, replacing supplies previously from Germany.

94.

Thomas Edison manufactured aniline dyes, which previously had been supplied by the German dye trust.

95.

Thomas Edison sold his surplus to Bayer, who had it converted to salicylic acid by Heyden, some of which was exported.

96.

In 1920, Thomas Edison spoke to American Magazine, saying that he had been working on a device for some time to see if it was possible to communicate with the dead.

97.

Thomas Edison said the device would work on scientific principles, not by an occult means.

98.

Thomas Edison was impressed with Ford's internal combustion engine automobile and encouraged its developments.

99.

Thomas Edison was said to have been influenced by a popular fad diet in his last few years; "the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every three hours".

100.

Thomas Edison is reported to have believed this diet would restore his health.

101.

Thomas Edison became the owner of his Milan, Ohio, birthplace in 1906.

102.

Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18,1931, in his home, "Glenmont" in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina.

103.

Rev Stephen J Herben officiated at the funeral; Edison is buried behind the home.

104.

On December 25,1871, at the age of 24, Thomas Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, whom he had met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops.

105.

Mary Thomas Edison died at age 29 on August 9,1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain tumor or a morphine overdose.

106.

Thomas Edison generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family.

107.

On February 24,1886, at the age of 39, Thomas Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio.

108.

Thomas Edison was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities.

109.

Thomas Edison was labeled an atheist for those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter:.

110.

Thomas Edison was an advocate for monetary reform in the United States.

111.

Thomas Edison was ardently opposed to the gold standard and debt-based money.

112.

Thomas Edison argued that, if the government can produce debt-based money, it could equally as well produce money that was a credit to the taxpayer.

113.

Thomas Edison was on hand to turn on the lights at the Hotel Thomas Edison in New York City when it opened in 1931.

114.

The Port Huron Museum, in Port Huron, Michigan, restored the original depot that Thomas Edison worked out of as a young news butcher.

115.

Thomas Edison was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1969.

116.

The Thomas Edison statue replaced one of 19th-century state governor William Allen that had been one of Ohio's two allowed contributions to the collection.

117.

The Thomas Edison Medal was created on February 11,1904, by a group of Thomas Edison's friends and associates.

118.

Thomas Edison has appeared in popular culture as a character in novels, films, television shows, comics and video games.

119.

Thomas Edison's prolific inventing helped make him an icon, and he has made appearances in popular culture during his lifetime down to the present day.

120.

Thomas Edison is portrayed in popular culture as an adversary of Nikola Tesla.