Thomas Edison
American inventor and businessman (1847-1931) · United States · Scientists · Died at 84
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Something wrong?He didn't invent the light bulb from scratch, but he made it work for entire cities - and then kept going. The phonograph, the motion picture camera, the first industrial research lab: Edison turned invention itself into a system, which may be the most Edison thing of all.
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Photos 12
Edison in 1861
Edison's first patent with a schema for the electric vote recorder.![Group photo taken as a postcard of the employees in front of the factory at Edison's Newark Factory on Ward St in 1873. The trees are bare and the surrounding buildings are much smaller. Edison is visible peeking out of the fourth floor window. He wrote that he was too busy working to come downstairs.[24]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Thomas_Edison%27s_Newark_Factory_shop%2C_Edison_%26_Unger%2C_10-12_Ward_St._in_Newark._%2865fcf5dee388427087f9e6a38f081d37%29.jpg/1280px-Thomas_Edison%27s_Newark_Factory_shop%2C_Edison_%26_Unger%2C_10-12_Ward_St._in_Newark._%2865fcf5dee388427087f9e6a38f081d37%29.jpg)
Group photo taken as a postcard of the employees in front of the factory at Edison's Newark Factory on Ward St in 1873. The trees are bare and the surrounding buildings are much smaller. Edison is visible peeking out of the fourth floor window. He wrote that he was too busy working to come downstairs.[24]
Operation of a carbon microphone. When a sound wave presses on the conducting diaphragm, the granules of carbon are pressed together and decrease their electrical resistance.
Edison with the second model of his phonograph in Mathew Brady's studio in Washington, D.C. in April 1878In their own words 10
, The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge.
Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire.
X-rays ... I am afraid of them.
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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 experimental mining operations, the first film studio, and a final tally of 1,093 US patents before his death on October 18, 1931.
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