The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles. Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon. But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No. He put both to use in winning a contract to electrify part of New York City, and built a generating plant on Pearl Street that eventually served more than nine hundred customers.
She was twenty-nine. After her death, Edison left Menlo Park for good. One long season of grief and two years later, he married Mina Miller, the twenty-year-old daughter of one of the founders of the Chautauqua Institution. She and Edison had three children of their own, and the family moved to West Orange, New Jersey, where Edison built another laboratory. Like tech C. Newspapers covered his inventions months and sometimes years before they were functional, and journalist after journalist conspired with him for better coverage; one writer even arranged to co-author a sci-fi novel with him.
All the way up to his death, twenty-one years later, at the age of eighty-four, Edison was still making headlines, even if, by then, his rate of perfecting had finally slowed.
How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away. He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, drinking pints of warm milk every few hours and consuming no more than six ounces of solid food per meal.
He worked fifty hours at a time, and sometimes longer—including one stretch of four consecutive days—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding.
His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr.
Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on.
Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. So, too, was the drudgery.
Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another.
The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies. Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his.
It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs. In some of these photos, Ford seemed attentive and alert, but Edison could be seen asleep — on a bench, in a chair, on the grass. His secret weapon was the catnap, and he elevated it to an art.
He could go to sleep any where, any time, on anything. Contact us at letters time. Still life of the first electric light bulb, invented by Thomas Alva Edison in and patented on January 27, By Jennifer Latson. He tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was tedious and very demanding, especially on his workers helping with the experiments.
He always recognized the importance of hard work and determination. I cannot say the same for all my associates. Edison decided to try a carbonized cotton thread filament. When voltage was applied to the completed bulb, it began to radiate a soft orange glow.
Just about fifteen hours later, the filament finally burned out. Further experimentation produced filaments that could burn longer and longer with each test. Patent number , was given to Edison's electric lamp. The Edison lamp from our Attic is dated January 27, It is a product of the continued improvements Edison made to the bulb. Even though it is over a hundred years old, this bulb looks very much like the light bulbs lighting your house right now. The base, or socket, on this 19th century lamp is similar to the ones still used today.
It was one of the most important features of Edison's lamp and electrical system. The label on this bulb reads, "New Type Edison Lamp. Patented Jan. In the early s, Edison planned and supervised the construction of the first commercial, central electric power station in New York City. In , Edison began construction of a new laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Before he died in , Edison patented 1, of his inventions.
The wonders of his mind include the microphone, telephone receiver, universal stock ticker, phonograph, kinetoscope used to view moving pictures , storage battery, electric pen, and mimeograph. Edison improved many other existing devices as well. From a discovery made by one of his associates, he patented the Edison effect now called thermionic diode , which is the basis for all electron tubes. Edison will forever be remembered for his contributions to the incandescent light bulb. Even though he didn't dream up the first light bulb ever crafted, and technology continues to change every day, Edison's work with light bulbs was a spark of brilliance on the timeline of invention.
0コメント