Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847, and raised in the American Midwest. He started as a telegraph operator, a job that seeded his earliest inventions. In 1876 he opened his first laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he developed early versions of the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera — devices that reshaped how people lived, heard, and saw. He was among the first to run invention like industry: organized science, teams of researchers, the first industrial research laboratory. The work made him wealthy, and he plowed the money back into experim…