Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
Thomas A. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847. In 1854 the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where seven-year old Tom Edison set up his first chemical laboratory in the cellar of their large house.
When he was 12 he got his first job as train-boy on the Grand Trunk Railroad. It was on this run between Detroit and Port Huron that he acquired exclusive newsdealer's rights selling candy and papers on the train.
Edison's career as a telegraph operator began when he saved the station agent's young son from the path of a moving freight car. Out of gratitude the father taught Edison the new science of telegraphy. By the time he was seventeen, Edison was "on the road" as a telegraph operator. He drifted from Stratford, Canada, to Adrian, Michigan, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Boston.
When he was 21 years old Edison went to New York, almost penniless. By fixing a broken-down machine in the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, he landed a $300 a month job as superintendent of the company. At the same time he was making many inventions, among them the "Universal" stock ticker. For this and other inventions he received $40.000 and with this money he opened a manufacturing shop in Newark, making stock tickers.
At the age of 29 he went to Menlo Park to make perhaps the greatest invention of all - a successful incandescent electric lamp. Out of the Edison laboratory in the important years between 1876 to 1886 came the carbon telephone transmitter, the phonograph, the Edison dynamo and the Edison incandescent lamp. When the electrical system with which he hoped to light whole cities required a new piece of machinery or a new device, Edison developed it. And if after developing it he could find no manufacturer, he would set up his own plants for manufacturing the equipment he had invented. By the very force of necessity the wizard of Menlo Park became a manufacturer of New York City. On September 4, 1882, Edison started operating the Pearl Street Station, the first central generating station to light New York City.
The Edison interests were expanding and in 1886 Edison sent his agents to look for suitable sites for a new factory. On the outskirts of Schenectady stood two unfinished factory buildings, which were to have been the McQueen Locomotive Works. The location of these buildings impressed Edison and he negotiated to purchase the two plants which were soon turning out the dynamos needed by the Edison generating stations. Other buildings sprang up alongside the original shops and in 1892 this plant became the headquarters of the newly formed General Electric Company.
It began to be apparent early in the 1890s that electrical development was being held up because no company controlled the patents on all the necessary elements for installing an efficient and serviceable system. The conviction was taking shape that the incandescent lamp and the alternating-current transformer system belonged together. The outcome in 1892 was the formation of the General Electric Company with the consolidation of the Thomson-Houston and the Edison General Electric Companies. Edison's was one of the many distinguished names which appeared on the first Board of Directors of the new Company. At this period, however, he concerned himself less and less with manufacturing activities and soon devoted his entire time to his laboratory in West Orange to perfect a modernized phonograph, a motion picture camera and an electrical storage battery.
During World War I Edison experimented on many war problems for the US Government, among them the sound detection of guns and submarines, airplane detection, increasing power and effectiveness of torpedoes, improving submarines and mining harbors. But some of Edison's greatest contributions to America's war efforts were in developing synthetic products for goods we could no longer get from Europe.
Honors and awards were bestowed lavishly on Mr. Edison by persons, societies and countries throughout the world. His greatest honor perhaps, was the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest recognition of service.
Edison died October 18, 1931 in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey at the age of eighty-four.
MEN OF GENERAL ELECTRIC
Biographical Sketches of Some Outstanding General Electric Men
