Why edison is famous

Although it failed to live up to automotive expectations, the Edison battery proved to be a profitable invention and paved the way for the modern alkaline battery. In , scientists at Stanford University created a high-performance, low-cost version of the nickel-iron battery Edison developed more than a century ago.

The prototype battery developed by the researchers could someday be used to help power electric vehicles -- much as Edison originally envisioned. Edison was a huge enthusiast of clean energy technologies -- even designing prototypes for small-scale wind-powered electricity generation. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people.

So, too, was the drudgery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory.

Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another.

The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies. Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his.

It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs. Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material.

When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act.

Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in and runs until , Part 2 goes from to , and so on. The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.

Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy.

But a backward biography, while certainly an invention, is, as Edison might have pointed out, neither practical nor profitable. It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life. The "Wizard of Menlo Park" brought the world electric light, recorded music, and the movies, among other things, and turned innovation into a science by inventing the research laboratory.

Years of Change Born in , Edison would witness tremendous change during his lifetime. He would also instigate many of those changes. At age 12, he began work as a train boy on a Michigan railroad.

That newfangled conveyance brought with it the telegraph , and soon young Edison, whose hearing was deteriorating, found work as a telegraph operator. The self-taught boy set up a mobile chemistry lab and printing press, and tinkered with telegraphy instruments, his lifelong habit of experimentation firmly in place.

Over his career, Edison would successfully patent a record 1, inventions in the United States -- more than double the number of his closest competitor, George Westinghouse. Edison also found that much of the future development and perfection of his inventions was being conducted by university-trained mathematicians and scientists. He worked best in intimate, unstructured environments with a handful of assistants and was outspoken about his disdain for academia and corporate operations.

During the s, Edison built a magnetic iron-ore processing plant in northern New Jersey that proved to be a commercial failure. Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for producing cement. Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. 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.