Thomas Edison — Prolific Inventor and Father of the Electrical Age

Thomas Alva Edison is born in Milan, Ohio. He receives only a few months of formal schooling and is educated at home by his mother. He develops hearing loss at age 12 from scarlet fever, which later he says helps him concentrate on his work.

Edison works as a traveling telegrapher for Western Union across the Midwest and East Coast. He studies electrical engineering in his spare time, tinkering with improvements to telegraph systems. He publishes a telegraph trade magazine and joins the National Telegraph Union.

Edison receives his first patent for an electric vote recorder. Though commercially unsuccessful, it launches his inventing career. He moves to New York City and founds an electrical engineering partnership.

Edison invents the quadruplex telegraph, transmitting four messages simultaneously over a single wire. He sells it to Western Union for $30,000 — enough to build his own research laboratory and expand his Newark factory to hundreds of employees.

Edison establishes the Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory — the world's first industrial R&D facility. His team of engineers produces a stream of innovations, averaging a patent every 10-12 days for much of his career.

Edison invents the phonograph, the first device to record and reproduce sound. The invention astounds the public and earns him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." He receives a patent in 1878.

Edison demonstrates a carbon-filament incandescent light bulb burning for over 13 hours — later improved to 1,200 hours. He patents the entire electric lighting system, including generators, wiring, and sockets.

Edison's Pearl Street Station in Manhattan begins supplying direct current electricity to 59 customers, powering 1,284 lights. It is the world's first commercial electric power station, demonstrating the viability of centralized electricity distribution.

Edison's DC system competes against George Westinghouse's AC system. Edison campaigns publicly against AC, even supporting the development of the electric chair to discredit it. AC ultimately wins as the standard for long-distance power transmission.

Edison patents the Kinetograph motion picture camera and the Kinetoscope viewer. He builds the Black Maria, the world's first movie studio, in 1893, producing early films that lay the foundation for the motion picture industry.

Edison General Electric merges with Thomson-Houston Electric to form General Electric. Edison is pushed out of the lighting business he created. GE becomes one of the world's largest and longest-lasting corporations.

Edison develops a nickel-iron alkaline storage battery, extremely durable (some units last 50 years). It finds use in electric vehicles, mining lamps, and submarines, becoming his most commercially successful late-career invention.

Edison heads the Naval Consulting Board, working on submarine detection, chemical weapons, and synthetic chemicals. His efforts help establish American chemical independence and lead to dozens of defense-related inventions.

Thomas Edison dies on October 18, 1931, in West Orange, New Jersey, at age 84. His 1,093 US patents, spanning the phonograph, electric light, motion pictures, and the electrical grid, fundamentally transformed modern civilization.