Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in the small town of Milan, Ohio, in the Midwestern United States. His father was of Dutch descent and his mother, a former elementary school teacher, was of Scottish descent. When Edison was seven years old, his father lost money in the shingle business and moved the family to Fort Gratiot, a northern suburb of Huron, Michigan. Soon after moving here, Edison contracted scarlet fever and was ill for a long time. Edison attended school at the age of eight, but after only three months of schooling, he was dismissed by his teachers as "an imbecile" and "dull and stupid". From then on, his mother was his tutor, teaching her son to read and write. Edison had a keen interest in reading, and at the age of 8 he read the writings of Shakespeare and Dickens, the most important playwrights of the English Renaissance, as well as many important history books, and by the age of 9 he was able to read and understand difficult books quickly, such as Parker's Natural and Experimental Philosophy. Edison's earliest interest in the natural sciences was in chemistry, which he loved at the age of ten. He collected about two hundred bottles and saved every little penny to buy chemicals to fill them. at the age of eleven, he experimented with his first telegraph. To earn money to buy chemicals and equipment, he began working, and at age 12, he got a job selling newspapers on trains, traveling between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. He sold newspapers while doing fruit and vegetable business, as long as he had time he went to the library to read. 1861 the United States broke out in the Civil War, just turned 14 years old Edison bought an old printing press, the use of the train's convenience, set up a small newspaper (weekly) - "Herald", to pass the war and news along the way, the first issue of the weekly was printed on the train, the first issue was printed on the train. The first issue was printed on the train. He was the reporter, editor, typesetter, proofreader, printer and distributor. The tabloid was well received, and he grew in talent, knowledge and experience from the intense work, and earned enough money to continue his chemical experiments. With the money he earned he set up a chemical laboratory in the baggage car. Unfortunately, however, once when he was doing his experiments on the train, the train suddenly lurched, causing a piece of phosphorus to fall on a wooden board and cause it to burn. The conductor rushed to extinguish the flames, but also gave him a hard slap on the face, deafened both his ears, he was thrown off the train, when Edison was only 15 years old. (Another story is that on one unfortunate occasion a chemical caught fire and he was thrown out of the train along with his equipment. On another occasion, when Edison was trying to board a freight train, a conductor grabbed him by both ears and helped him on board. (This resulted in Edison becoming deaf for life.) The setback did not discourage Edison; he became fascinated with the telegraph again, and after much deliberation, in 1868 he invented an automatic electric recorder, his first invention. Later he invented two new types of telegraphs, and in 1877 he invented the carbon-based telephone transmitter, which made the original telephone sound clearer; in addition, he also invented the phonograph. In September 1878, when Edison was 31 years old, he began to study the electric light. At that time, gas lamps have replaced kerosene lamps, but the flame flickers, and in the extinguishing of harmful gases; arc lamps have been invented, and in the public **** place to use, but due to the burning hissing sound and the light is too bright, not suitable for indoor. At that time, many European and American scientists have been exploring the manufacture of a new stable luminous body. Edison studied the arc lamp and announced that he could invent a satisfactory light, but needed money. By then he was a man who had patented 170 inventions, and his inventions were so profitable to capitalists that a consortium was willing to provide him with funding. After thousands of failures, in April, 1879, he improved on the rod and tube lamps of his predecessors, and made a glass globe; and on October 21, 1879, he fastened a carbon-treated cotton thread inside a glass bulb, drew out the air, sealed the mouth, and applied the electric current, and it glowed, and a new kind of illuminating object appeared. Between 1880 and 1882, Edison designed electric light sockets, electric knobs, fuses, current cutoffs, meters, hanging lamps, but also designed the main line and branch system, and made the world's largest capacity at the time of the generator, and the establishment of the first power plant in New York, opened up the first civilian lighting system. Later he invented the movie camera with George Eastman. Edison's three major inventions: the phonograph, the electric light and power system, and the motion picture camera, have enriched and improved the civilized life of mankind. Edison died on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84 in West Orange, U.S.A. He was buried in the same city. No one has yet been able to break his record of holding 1,093 invention patents, and people call him the King of Inventions. Edison died of uremia. On August 1, 1931, Edison felt ill and was diagnosed by doctors as suffering from a variety of conditions including chronic nephritis, uremia and diabetes. On October 13, Edison hit the "reef" and fell into a coma, and on October 18, 1931, Edison died at the age of 84.
[Edit paragraph]Reasons for the invention of electric light
Edison's family was very poor when he was a child, when the candles and kerosene are very expensive items, Edison invented the electric light Edison every day to think hard, and finally came up with a very good way, the cheapest is electricity, so Edison will be the luminescence connected to the power supply to produce light for lighting, to benefit the world's poor people. The first is a new one, and the second is a new one, which is a new one.
[Edit]Life - Inventions - The Journey of Science
In August 1862, Edison rescued a boy who was about to be killed on a train track. The boy's father was grateful, but with no money to pay him, offered to teach him telegraphy. From then on Edison became involved with this mysterious new world of electricity and embarked on a journey of science. In 1863, Edison worked as a telecommunication telegraph operator at the Stratford Junction station of the Grand Trunk Railway. From 1864 to 1867, he lived a nomadic life as a telegraph operator throughout the Midwest. His travels included Stratford, Adrian, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Nashville, Tennessee, Memphis, Louisville, and Huron. In 1868, Edison came to Boston as a newspaper clerk. In the same year, he received his first patent for an invention. This is a device to automatically record the number of votes, this automatic voting machine is a machine with green and red buttons, as long as the green button is pressed to indicate that the "yes", the red button indicates that the "no", the machine is completed, he went to Washington to show the machine, Edison thought that the machine was a good idea. After the machine was completed, he went to Washington to show it off. Edison thought the device would speed up the work of Congress and thought it would be well received, but a congressman told him that they had no intention of speeding up the agenda, and that it was sometimes politically necessary to vote slowly. From that point on, Edison decided that he would never again work on an invention that people didn't need. In early June 1869, he traveled to New York to look for work. While he was waiting to be summoned at a broker's office, a telegraph machine broke down. Edison was the only one there who could fix it, so he got a better job than he expected, and in October he joined with Pope to form the Pope-Edison Company, which specialized in scientific instruments for electrical engineering. Here he invented the "Edison Universal Press". He offered this printing press to the manager of a large Wall Street firm, and wanted to ask for 5,000 dollars, but lacked the courage to say it. So he asked the manager to give him a price, and he gave him $40,000 dollars. Edison used this money in New Jersey (New Jersey) Newark, Ward Street, built a factory, specializing in the manufacture of various electrical machinery. He worked all night long. He developed many capable assistants, and at the same time, also coincidentally met the industrious Mary (Mary Stilwell), his first bride. In Newark, he made inventions such as waxed paper and the mimeograph, and from 1872 to 1875, Edison invented the two-weight and four-weight telegraph, and assisted others in getting the world's first English typewriter. In the spring of 1876, Edison moved again, this time he moved to New Jersey (New Jersey) "Monroe Park". Here he built the first "invention factory", which marked the beginning of collective research, and in 1877, Edison improved the telephone, which had earlier been invented by Bell, and put it into practical use. He also invented one of his beloved projects, the phonograph. The telephone and telegraph "were a revolution in the extension of the functions of the human senses"; the phonograph was one of the three major inventions that changed people's lives, and "from the point of view of the imagination of the invention, it was his most significant inventive achievement." By this time, people called him "the magician of Menlo Park". Edison in the invention of the phonograph at the same time, after numerous failures finally made a breakthrough in the study of electric light, October 22, 1879, Edison lit the first really have a wide range of practical value of electric light. In order to extend the life of the filament, he re-examined, about tried more than 6000 kinds of fiber materials, only to find a new luminescent body - Japanese bamboo filament, which can last for more than 1,000 hours, to achieve the purpose of durability. In one respect, this invention was the crowning achievement of Edison's life. He went on to create a power supply system that allowed distant lamps to be distributed from a central power station, a major technological achievement. His first discovery in pure science occurred in 1883. Experimenting with electric lamps, he observed what he called the Edison effect: an electric charge traveling from a hot filament through space to a cold plate inside a lit bulb. Edison patented this discovery in 1884, but did not study it further. Instead, scientists next to him used the Edison effect to develop the electronics industry, especially radio and television. Edison also attempted to do for the eyes what the phonograph did for the ears, and the movie camera was born. Using a strip of George Eastman's newly invented celluloid film, he took a series of photographs and projected them rapidly and continuously onto a curtain, creating the illusion of motion. He first experimented with motion pictures in his laboratory in 1889 and applied for a patent in 1891, and in 1903 his company produced its first feature film, "Train Robbery." Edison did much to organize and standardize the film industry. After Edison moved his laboratory to West Orange in 1887, he founded a number of commercial companies to manufacture and market his many inventions; these companies were later merged into the Edison General Electric Company, later known as General Electric. In 1888, a magical character, Nikola Tesla, invented the world's first alternating current (AC) generator, which dealt a severe blow to Edison's direct current industry, and the most famous "War of the Currents" in the history of inventions began. As a capitalist, Edison began to discredit Tesla's alternating current (AC) generator, which was used to electrocute elephants and electrocute prisoners in death row. He used AC electricity to kill elephants and the electric chair to prove that AC electricity was dangerous, but then Tesla used practice to prove that AC electricity was safe under normal circumstances. This war without smoke and mirrors came to a dramatic climax in 1893, when the Columbia Exposition was held in Chicago, and AC electricity won the victory over DC electricity. The battle also ended in Edison's defeat. Thereafter, his interests turned to fluoroscopy, ore mashing machines, the magnetic separation of iron, storage batteries, and railroad signaling devices. During World War I, he developed torpedo mechanisms, flamethrowers and underwater periscopes. On October 21, 1929, the 50th anniversary of the invention of the electric light, people held a grand celebration for Edison, Germany's Albert Einstein and France's Madame Curie and other famous scientists have congratulated him. Unfortunately, in this celebration, when Edison made a speech, due to excessive excitement, suddenly fainted. From then on, his health deteriorated. Edison had received little formal education, but his contribution to mankind was so great, what was the secret? In addition to having a curious heart and an instinct for personal experimentation, he had the boundless energy and boldness to work hard beyond the ordinary. When some people called Edison a "genius", he explained: "Genius is 1% inspiration plus 99% perspiration." He was in the "invention factory", many different professional organization, which has scientists, engineers, technicians, workers *** more than 100 people, Edison's many major inventions is to rely on the collective strength to achieve success. In addition, his wife had also played a fairly important role. Edison's success, but also should be attributed to his mother's understanding since childhood and patient teaching, so that the original was considered to be an imbecile Edison, grew up to become a world-famous "king of invention". Edison's invention in his life, in the United States Patent Office officially registered 1093 kinds. 1881 is his invention of the highest record year. This year, he applied for the case of 141 kinds of inventions, an average of every three days there is a new invention. Edison's life tells us: great achievements, out of hard labor.
[edit]Life in West Orange
Edison lived longer and longer in New York, and shorter and shorter relative to his time in Menlo Park, beginning in the winter of 1881. His wife and children lived in New York, and his old home, Menlo Park, became a place reserved for summer escapes. Edison's family spent several summers in Menlo Park. In 1884, Edison was 37 years old. It was a sad year for Edison, and in the summer of 1884, Mary Edison was stricken with typhoid fever, a dangerous disease. At first it was thought that she had merely caught a cold and would be cured by a few doses of medicine. Therefore, Edison, who was fighting in New York, did not visit her. Mary's sister Alice and the doctors did their best to watch over her every day and stayed by her bedside. Soon the lady's condition worsened, and Edison did not go to the Institute for several days. Edison was known as a "workaholic" and it was rare for him not to come to the Institute, so his colleagues were worried. Mrs. Edison's hopes for recovery were dashed, and in the early morning hours of August 9, 1884, Mary Edison died. After funeral services at the residence, the casket was taken to a small station and sent by train to her childhood home of New Yorkk. The news of her death was sent on August 16: The wife of the famous inventor Edison died suddenly on Saturday, the ninth of the month, at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Funeral services were held on the afternoon of the twelfth, with more than 400 guests. Among them were Eden, manager of the Edison Company; Johnson, assistant manager; Laurey, De Navarro and Roosevelt. There were many floral tributes from the mourners. She was buried in the cemetery at Mount Pleasant, New York. Mrs. Edison's death left him three infant children, Dot, 11, Thomas Alva Jr. and William L. Rice, age 6. The death of his wife made him feel a loneliness he had never known before. Yet he had to keep working. He was not to be brought to a standstill. He rented his house to William and Alice h olzer, and sent his children to New York in the care of their grandmother Stilwell. Monroe Park could not give the inventor anything but sad memories, so he moved out all those machines, medicines, instruments, etc. and abandoned it. A few years later the old house was burned down by a lightning strike, and the old electric light plant by the Pennsylvania Railroad also burned down. After Edison moved out it was the farmers who moved in. The large room above the laboratory was rented out for dances. L.m. Hussey used it as the headquarters for his pipe band and set up a stage behind the room. The first floor downstairs was used for a time as a barn. The old building gradually fell apart, and the timbers were removed to build the neighboring houses, which finally collapsed. The east end of the brick machine shop was converted into a storage room for miscellaneous items for the Monroe Park Fire Department. The other end was also used as a barn for a time. A farmer named Thomas j. McConnell lived in the glasshouse and raised many hogs in the pasture. Later a family named Willcox moved into the former office house and raised many chickens in the house. In the years between 1884 and 1885 Edison's life was lonely and monotonous. When Mary was alive she didn't ask much of Tom, she loved him and understood the importance of his career, Edison didn't have as much time for family life but Mary was always waiting for him. Now Edison was very lonely and monotonous and he may have apologized to her for not spending a lot of time. Edison began an experiment to reform the arc lamp in 1877, proposing to engage in splitting the current and changing the arc lamp into a white light. This experiment was to be satisfactory. It was necessary to find a substance for the filament that would burn to a white heat, and this filament was to withstand burning at a heat of two thousand degrees for a thousand hours or more. At the same time the use should be simple, can withstand the daily use of the impact, the price should be cheap, but also so that the light and extinction of a lamp does not affect the light and extinction of any other lamp, to maintain the relative independence of each lamp in order to choose this kind of do lamp. This was an extremely bold idea at the time, requiring great effort to explore, to test. Silk with the material, Edison first with carbonized material to do the test, after the failure of the metal platinum and iridium high melting point alloy to do the filament test, but also did on the quality of ores and minerals seedling **** one thousand six hundred different tests, the results have failed. But at this time he and his assistants have made great progress, already know the white hot filament must be sealed in a high degree of vacuum glass globe, and not easy to melt off the reason. Thus, his experiments returned to the charcoal filament. He worked around the clock until the first half of 1880, Edison's white-hot lamp experiments were still fruitless. His full attention in the charcoal on the work, only plant-based charcoal test reached more than six thousand kinds. The related test notebooks amounted to more than two hundred books, *** counting more than 40,000 pages, after three years of time. He worked eighteen or nine hours a day. Only at three or four o'clock in the morning did he sleep with his head resting on two or three books, lying under the table used for experiments. Sometimes he slept on the stool three or four times a day for only half an hour at a time. By the first half of 1880, Edison's white-hot lamp test is still no result, even his assistant was discouraged. One day, he put the laboratory of a banana fan tied to the side of a bamboo filament torn into a thin wire, after carbonization into a filament, the results of this time than before to do all sorts of experiments are excellent, this is the earliest invention of Edison's white-hot lamp - bamboo filament lamp. This bamboo filament lamp continued for many years. Until 1908 after the invention of tungsten filament to replace it. Edison after this began to develop the alkaline storage battery, the difficulties are great, his spirit of research, is very amazing. This type of battery was used to supply raw power. He and a selected assistant painstakingly research nearly ten years of time, through many many hardships and failures, a moment he thought to go to the destination, but a moment and know wrong. But Edison did not waver and started again. It took about 50,000 trials and more than 150 books of test notes to reach his goal. Reference: Edison's life of diligence, good thinking, hard work, at the age of 75, but also every day on time to the laboratory to sign in for work, he worked almost every day for more than a dozen hours during the decades, and in the evening in the study to read 3 to 5 hours of books, if you use the usual people's lifetime activities to calculate the time, his life has been doubled to prolong the time. Therefore, Edison proudly told people on his 79th birthday, "I am already 135 years old." He lived to the age of 84 and made a whopping 1,093 inventions in his lifetime, with his greatest contributions being the invention of the phonograph and the automatic telegraph, and experimenting with and improving the incandescent lamp and the telephone. Edison 20 years old began to study the electric light, lasted more than 10 years, he has selected the bamboo cotton, graphite, tantalum ...... and so on thousands of different substances for filament materials for testing, often overnight, once he and his assistants worked continuously for 5 days and nights. 1879 Edison used carbon filament as an incandescent filament, and ignited for 40 hours. Due to the porous surface of carbon filament, brittle, low strength. Soon replaced by tungsten wire.
[edit]Childhood stories
Edison was born at three o'clock in the morning on February 11, 1847 in a blizzard, his father also took him to the street to boast to others, everyone called him Al, as a child, Edison loved to ask questions, and often asked some strange questions to make people feel very annoyed, family members or pedestrians on the road or are the object of his questions, if he was dissatisfied with the answer to the adults, he was not satisfied with the answer to the question. If he was dissatisfied with the adult's answer, he would go to experiment himself. Once Al saw the mother goose in the goose house hatching eggs, he asked his mother why the mother goose always sat there all day long. His mother told him that the mother goose was hatching eggs, and Al thought that if the mother goose could do it, then I must be able to do it too. After a few days, his mother and father found that Al had been squatting in the wood room, not knowing what he was doing, and when the family found out that Al was hatching the eggs, everyone laughed out loud. When he was eight years old, Edison went to elementary school, but he dropped out after only three months of classes. When Al was in class, his mother was often called to the school to talk to the teacher because Al often asked questions that the teacher thought were very strange, and the teacher thought that he was an imbecile, so his mother decided to teach Al by herself, and was determined to teach Al to become a great genius. Self-study course, Al was taught by his mother, and later Al also got permission to set up a laboratory in the basement, in order to keep people from messing with his experiments Al also came up with the brilliant idea of putting a poison label on the bottle of each experiment. One morning when he was twelve years old, Edison suddenly said to his mom Mom I want to go sell newspapers OK? Mom was shocked when she heard this, and Dad was angry when he heard it, but after Al's repeated pleas his parents finally agreed, and he happily ran to the railroad company and also got permission to sell newspapers on the train, it was a hundred kilometers from Port Hugh Lane to Detroit, and after Al had been a paperboy on the train for a few months, he opened two stores in Detroit, one of which sold magazines, and the other sold vegetables, Fruit, cream, etc., he also hired two teenagers to help watch the store, and agreed to share the dividends with them, and soon the railroad passes an additional train, he sent a newsboy with the car selling, so a twelve-year-old newsboy has been unconsciously become a teenage capitalist.