Thomas Edison Biography

History

Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio. He was seven out of seven children and would be one of only four that would make it to adulthood. By the time he would reach adulthood, Edison would be almost completely deaf. Edison didn’t receive very much education because his mother pulled him out of school and started to homeschool him after just 12 weeks in school. He then started to work at the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan in 1859 when he was only twelve years old. He started to sell newspapers to the passengers and decided that with his advantage of having the news on the train, he would start to publish his own newspaper called the Grand Trunk Herald (Figure 1)This newspaper had the latest in

But has anyone considered how Edison made any one of these? Lets start with the light bulb. The light bulb is made of two rods that conduct electricity and then carry it to a filament that is a low conductor. This is important because he had to be sure that the filament wouldn’t burn up and then destroy it, or not heat up enough to produce any light. The filament was then placed in a vacuum sealed glass orb. The orb made sure that the filament didn’t oxidize and cause the filament to burst into flame and be ruined. By 1880, Edison had successfully made his first 16-watt light bulb and had it patented that same year However, he wasn’t the first one to decide to work on the light bulb. The incandescent bulb had actually been invented in Britain in 1835, but their bulb had an extremely short life span, were way too expensive to mass produce, or used too much energy to be worth using on a mass scale. They experimented with the filament, trying different to improve the life span such as vacuum sealing the orb or filling it with inert gas to prevent it from

But what is the purpose behind all of those different variations of his life? Well, first of all it is nice to know about his life and how he went from someone who worked at the railroad delivering his own newspaper to being one of the greatest inventors of all time. All of these different accounts are about his life, from just a brief summary of Edison’s life to a detailed account of his life from youth to old age. The first biography that comes to mind is Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin. In the introduction, he starts out by saying that prior to this book, no book had been published that had the complete life of Edison (Intro, pg.1) He continues to say that this book will let the reader dive into the life of Edison and decide for themselves whether or not he was an influential person and a great contributor to today’s society. A book like this is able to tell the world about Edison in a way that is easy to understand and recognize his importance to what we call everyday