Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was a great inventor, innovator and businessman. He is best remembered for improving upon the light bulb and making it usable for extended periods of time—as opposed to just a few hours—via electricity, as well as many of his other inventions. He was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio and was the youngest of seven children. It is hard to believe that he started speaking at the late age of four, however, after he did, he began pestering the adults around him with questions of how and why something worked, which was a great indicator of the curious and inventive man he would grow up to be. Edison had scarlet fever at a young, vulnerable age, leaving him with difficulties in his ear and causing him to
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Thus, he established it in Menlo Park. There, he devised and developed three of his most renowned inventions: a microtasimeter, the phonograph, and the electric light bulb. In 1877, the Western Union urged Edison to make a telephone which would compete with Alexander Graham Bell’s. Edison started working on the microtasimeter, a device which would be able to clarify sounds over the telephone in the form of a button with compressed carbon to improve the device. During the summer of that year, Edison discovered a method on how to record sound. Using this remarkable discovery as well as his extensive knowledge of mechanics and chemistry, he developed the phonograph in the late fall of the very same year. The invention astounded the people, and Edison was then dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park” and the “inventor of the age.” Starting in the fall of 1878, Edison began devoting all his time to developing a system of electrical lighting. He was interested in how it worked, and wanted to generate the electrical lighting. For the next thirty months, Edison dedicated all his concentration and study upon that subject and consequently developed an innovation to the current light bulb of the time—an electrical lightbulb. He also observed a strange electrical phenomenon that was later dubbed as the “Edison effect.” It turned out to be the basis of vacuum-tubes, devices that control electric current electrodes in an evacuated