Edison created a vacuum inside the bulb, found the right filament to use and ran lower voltage through the bulb. These substantial improvements led to additional ones throughout the years, which made the light bulb a standard, everyday use device. At 22, Edison while working as a telegrapher, he filed for his first patent for the Electrographic Vote Recorder. Edison was looking to help Congress legislators record their votes faster.
The first public demonstration of the Thomas Edison's incandescent lighting system was at the Menlo Park laboratory complex in December of On September 4, , the first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, went into operation, providing light and electricity power to customers in a one square mile area. This marked the beginning of the electric age as the modern electric utility industry has since evolved from the early gas and electric carbon-arc commercial and street lighting systems.
Thomas Edison's Pearl Street electricity -generating station introduced four key elements of a modern electric utility system. It featured reliable central generation, efficient distribution, a successful end use in , the light bulb and a competitive price.
A model of efficiency for its time, Pearl Street used one-third the fuel of its predecessors, burning about 10 pounds of coal per kilowatt hour, a "heat rate" equivalent of about , Btu per kilowatt hour.
Initially, the Pearl Street utility served 59 customers for about 24 cents per kilowatt hour. In the late s, power demand for electric motors dramatically altered the industry. It went from mainly providing nighttime lighting to becoming a hour service due to high electricity demand for transportation and industry needs.
By the end of the s, small central stations dotted many U. Eventually, the success of his electric light brought Thomas Edison to new heights of fame and wealth as electricity spread around the world.
His various electric companies continued to grow until they were brought together to form Edison General Electric in Despite the use of his name in the company title, Edison never controlled this company.
The tremendous amount of capital needed to develop the incandescent lighting industry would necessitate the involvement of investment bankers such as J. And when Edison General Electric merged with leading competitor Thompson-Houston in , Edison was dropped from the name and the company became, simply, General Electric.
Muybridge had proposed that they collaborate and combine the Zoopraxiscope with the Edison phonograph. Edison was intrigued but decided not to participate in such a partnership because he felt that the Zoopraxiscope was not a very practical or efficient method of recording motion.
However, he liked the concept and filed a caveat with the Patents Office on October 17, , that described his ideas for a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear"— record and reproduce objects in motion. The device, called a " Kinetoscope ," was combination of the Greek words "kineto" meaning "movement" and "scopos" meaning "to watch. One of Edison's first motion pictures and the first motion picture ever copyrighted showed his employee Fred Ott pretending to sneeze.
The major problem at the time, though, was that good film for motion pictures was not available. That all changed in when Eastman Kodak began supplying motion picture film stock, making it possible for Edison to step up the production of new motion pictures. To do this, he built a motion picture production studio in New Jersey that had a roof that could be opened to let in daylight. The entire building was constructed so that it could be moved to stay in line with the sun.
Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device. Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car.
Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades. During World War I, the U. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques. However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
By the end of the s, Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber.
During his lifetime, Edison received 1, U. He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, , at the age of His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process. Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time.
The two parted ways in and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs. Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power.
One of the unusual - and cruel - methods Edison used to convince people of the dangers of alternating current was through public demonstrations where animals were electrocuted. One of the most infamous of these shows was the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island. He was 84 years old. Many communities and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical power to commemorate his passing.
Edison's career was the quintessential rags-to-riches success story that made him a folk hero in America. An uninhibited egoist, he could be a tyrant to employees and ruthless to competitors. But by the time he died, Edison was one of the most well-known and respected Americans in the world.
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Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary inventors of the telephone, did important work in communication for the deaf and held more than 18 patents. Nikola Tesla was a scientist whose inventions include the Tesla coil, alternating-current AC electricity, and the discovery of the rotating magnetic field.
George Westinghouse is best known for inventing an air brake system that made railroads safer and promoting alternating current technology, which revolutionized the world's light and power industries. A British system for automatically printing code in ink on paper only achieved words tops.
Between and , Edison developed a vastly superior system , in which a telegraph receiver utilized a metal stylus to mark chemically-treated paper, which then could be run through a typewriter-like device. It was capable of recording up to 1, words a minute, which made it possible to send long messages quickly.
Cross-section of Edison's lamp-black button telephone transmitter. It was Alexander Graham Bell who patented the telephone in Edison got the idea of using a battery to provide current on the phone line and to control its strength by using carbon to vary the resistance.
To do that, he designed a transmitter in which a small piece of lampblack a black carbon made from soot was placed behind the diaphragm. When someone spoke into the phone, the sound waves moved the diaphragm, and the pressure on the lampblack changed. Edison later replaced the lampblack with granules made from coal—a basic design that was used until the s.
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