Thomas Edison

Their life

The Menlo Park invention factory made innovation industrial: 1,093 patents, the phonograph, practical electric light, and the systems — generation, wiring, metering — that made a bulb matter. He tested thousands of filaments and called none of them failures.

Known for

• Menlo Park 'invention factory'
• The phonograph
• Practical light bulb and power grid
• Losing the War of Currents
• Early motion-picture technology
• 1,093 U.S. patents

The road they walked

Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the last of seven children in a family that soon moved to Port Huron, Michigan. He had almost no formal schooling — a schoolmaster once called him 'addled,' and his mother took over his education at home — and by his teens he was already deaf in one ear and losing hearing in the other, a condition whose cause he attributed to a bout of scarlet fever, though he also told a story about being struck by a train conductor. He went to work as a telegraph operator, the era's high-tech trade, and it was there he found his real education: in the wires, relays, and messy mechanics of a communications system still being invented as it was used.

His first patent, an electric vote recorder, taught him a lesson he never forgot — nobody wanted it, because efficiency wasn't always welcome in politics. But a set of stock-ticker improvements sold for enough money, in 1869, to set him up as a full-time inventor. In 1876 he built something new to American industry: a dedicated research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, staffed with machinists, chemists, and mathematicians, organized to produce inventions on a schedule the way a mill produced cloth. This was the real innovation — not any single device, but the idea that discovery itself could be industrialized, funded, and repeated.

What came out of that lab and its successor at West Orange defined much of modern life: the phonograph, the first device to record and play back sound, arrived in 1877 and made him famous as 'the Wizard of Menlo Park.' The incandescent bulb followed in 1879, but Edison understood that a bulb without a power system was a curiosity, so he built the generators, wiring, and meters to go with it, opening the Pearl Street Station in Manhattan in 1882 as the first central power plant in the country. He fought hard, and often unfairly, to keep his direct-current system dominant against George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla's alternating current in the so-called War of Currents — a battle he lost on the merits but never stopped claiming. Later years brought motion-picture technology, the founding of what became General Electric, and a body of work that closed out at 1,093 U.S. patents, still a record.

How their story ended

Edison died on October 18, 1931, at Glenmont, his estate in West Orange, New Jersey, worn down by complications of diabetes after months of declining health. He had kept working nearly to the end, still tinkering with a lifelong project to find a domestic source of rubber. Word of his death prompted a quiet, spontaneous tribute: at the request of President Hoover, many towns across America dimmed their electric lights for a moment in his honor — a fitting close for a man whose inventions had made such gestures possible.

In their words

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From the Journal