THOMAS EDISON

ON February 11th, 1847, a great personality Thomas A. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. His inventions have changed the entire pattern of civilization. Edison’s ideas have invaded almost every phase of our daily life. We pick up a telephone and his handiwork is there. We push a switch and Edison’s idea illuminates the room. We put a record on a phonograph and Edison makes it come to life. He helped create the electrical age and made the world of motion pictures. Edison has made our world a more convenient, a more interesting and a much better place   in which to live. And what is just as important, he created millions of new jobs. 

Thomas A. Edison

Nearly all of us are familiar with the story of the first incandescent lamp, his experiments with the phonograph and motion pictures, but perhaps some of the other high-lights in his life are not so well known. Edison never seemed to have enough to do. Even while working fifteen hours a day as a train newsboy, on the side he learned telegraphy and set up an amateur printing press in the mail car.  His education consisted of observing, doing and reading. Later when he became an expert telegraph operator, he still found time to continue his studies.

Edison’s mind from early youth was always filled with ideas. He was always looking for better ways to do the job. But he had more than ideas. He had the desire and ability to put them into physical form and try them out. But this experimenting cost money, and the minute young Tom would get hold of a few dollars, it went into apparatus and equipment. 

But it wasn’t long before his experiments bore fruit. He redesigned the clumsy stock ticker of that day and sold the improved machine for $40,000, a fortune then. To Edison, it meant only that he could spend more money and time in research. By the time he was 30 he had become a professional inventor. He had more ideas than he could complete by himself, so he set up a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey and employed some assistants to help him work on the many unknown details. This procedure of Edison’s is probably the first time in history that an organized group was used to investigate a problem. The lone inventor was being replaced by organized research. The Menlo Park Laboratories were moved to Dearborn, Michigan under Mr. Edison’s supervision where it became a part of the great Ford Museum. Out of this laboratory came the telephone transmitter, the phonograph, the incandescent lamp and the motion picture. 

First working drawing of Phonograph

Because of the variety and number of Edison’s inventions, we are apt to get the impression that these things came to him easily – that they were just flashes of genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is one story about Edison that illustrates not only this point but brings out his ability to use a fact whether it was good or bad. 

Edison was hard at work experimenting on an important invention. In spite of numerous attempts, he could not get the result he wanted. All his efforts failed. A sympathetic friend said to him, “It’s too bad to do all that work for nothing”. “But it’s not for nothing”, said Edison. “We have got a lot of good results. Look now, we know 700 things that won’t work”.

     

A further illustration of this tenacity of purpose is demonstrated by his search for the best filament material for his incandescent lamp. For eighteen to twenty hours a day he experimented with all sorts of materials – from human hair to plant fiber from the South Seas – until one day he found that carbonized bamboo fiber gave the best results. Most people would have stopped there but not Edison – he had to find the best type of fiber. As one writer said, “he ransacked the earth from the Malay Peninsula to the jungles of the Amazon. He tried 6,000 varieties and it cost him over $100,000 until he found the ideal type in the South American jungle”.

Incandescent Lamp

Just as a journey of a thousand miles start with a single step, this man has taught us that many times the great inventions start with small ideas. And Edison lived in a world of ideas – he knew he was surrounded by thousands of things, every one of which he felt he could improve. His only difficulties were that the days and nights were too short and there were not enough hands and minds to work on all the problems. If he were living today, I am sure Edison would look around and say, “Let us not become egotists just because we have made some progress. There are many problems yet unsolved and it seems to me there are just about as many things to be done now as there where when I was a boy, but the opportunities are so much greater. So let us get to work”.