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Subject: Thomas Edison
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royal28 16.07.09 - 06:00pm
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 October 18, 1931) was an American inventor, scientist and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed The Wizard of Menlo Park by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large teamwork to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel The Iron Shovel Edison, Jr. (18041896) (born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (18101871). He considered himself to be of Dutch ancestry.[1] In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him addled. This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint. His mother then home schooled him.[2] Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union. Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle ear infections. Around the middle of his career Edison attributed the hearing loss to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. In his later years he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.[3][4] Edison's family was forced to move to Port Huron, Michigan, when the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854,[5] but his life there was bittersweet. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, as well as vegetables that he sold to supplement his income. This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures as he discovered his talents as a businessman. These talents eventually led him to found 14 companies, including General Electric, which is still in existence, and one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.
In 1887, Edison won the Matteucci Medal. In 1890, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
He was ranked thirty-fifth on Michael H. Hart's 1978 book The 100, a list of the most influential figures in history. Life magazine (USA), in a special double issue in 1997, placed Edison first in the list of the 100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years, noting that the light bulb he promoted lit up the world. In the 2005 television series The Greatest American, he was voted by viewers as the fifteenth-greatest.
In 1983, the United States Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law 97 - 198), designated February 11, Edison's birthday, as National Inventor's Day.
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