Early life
Thomas Alva Edison was born on Februay 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio, but grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, after the family moved there in 1854. Thomas was the youngest of seven children born to Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. His patrilineal family line was Dutch by way of New Jersey, with the family surname originally being “Edeson”.
Thomas was taught reading, writing and arithmetic by his mother, a former school teacher. He attended school for only a few months. However, one biographer described him as a very curious child who learned most things by reading on his own. As a child, Thomas became fascinated with technology and spent hours working on experiments at home.
Thomas developed hearing problems at the age of 12. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. He subsequently concocted elaborate fictitious stories about the cause of his deafness. Thomas was completely deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other. It is alleged that he would listen to a music player or piano by clamping his teeth into the wood to absorb the sound waves into his skull. As he got older, Thomas believed his hearing loss allowed him to avoid distraction and concentrate more easily on his work.
It is known that early in his career Thomas enrolled in a chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art to support his work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor. This appears to have been his only enrollment in courses at an institution of higher learning.
Career beginnings
Thomas began his career as a news butcher, selling newspapers, candy and vegetables on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit. He turned a $50-a-week profit by age 13, most of which went to buying equipment for electrical and chemical experiments. At age 15, in 1862, he saved 3-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Jimmie‘s father, station agent J. U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Thomas as a telegraph operator.
Thomas‘s first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway. He also studied qualitative analysis and conducted chemical experiments until he left the job rather than be fired after being held responsible for a near collision of two trains.
Thomas obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers. This began his long streak of entrepreneurial ventures, as he discovered his talents as a businessman. Ultimately, his entrepreneurship was central to the formation of some 14 companies, including General Electric, formerly one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.
In 1866, at the age of 19, Thomas moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. He requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter preoccupation cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilt sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss’s desk below. The next morning Thomas was fired.
Thomas‘s first patent was for the electric vote recorder, U.S. patent 90,646, which was granted on June 1, 1869. Finding little demand for the machine, Thomas moved to New York City shortly thereafter.
One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, while Thomas worked for Samuel Laws at the Gold Indicator Company.
Pope and Thomas founded their own company in October 1869, working as electrical engineers and inventors. In 1874, Thomas began developing a multiplex telegraphic system which could send two messages simultaneously.
Menlo Park laboratory (1876-1886)
Menlo Park Lab in 1880
Thomas‘s major innovation was marked with the establishment of an industrial research lab in 1876. It was built in Menlo Park, a part of Raritan Township in Middlesex County, New Jersey, with the funds from the sale of Thomas‘s quadruplex telegraph. After his demonstration of the telegraph, Thomas was not sure that his original plan to sell it for $4,000 to $5,000 was right, so he asked Western Union to make a bid.
He was surprised to hear them offer $10,000 ($269,294 in 2023), which he gratefully accepted. The quadruplex telegraph was Thomas‘s first big financial success and Menlo Park became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement.
Thomas was legally credited with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research and he drove them hard to produce results.
William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, started working for Thomas and began his duties as a laboratory assistant in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device.
In 1880, Hammer was appointed chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under general manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Thomas, Hammer was “a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting”.
Frank J. Sprague, a competent mathematician and former naval officer, was recruited by Edward H. Johnson and joined the Edison organization in 1883. One of Sprague‘s contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park was to expand Thomas‘s mathematical methods.
Despite the common belief that Thomas did not use mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his electric lighting system including lamp resistance by an analysis of Ohm’s law, Joule’s law and economics.
Thomas with the second model of his phonograph in Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington, D.C (April 1878)
Nearly all of Thomas‘s patents were utility patents, which were protected for 17 years and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to 14 years. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented in describing the first device to record and reproduce sounds.
In just over a decade, Thomas‘s Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Thomas said he wanted the lab to have “a stock of almost every conceivable material“. A newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating the lab contained “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels … silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark’s teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell … cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock’s tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores …” and the list goes on.
Over his desk Thomas displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds‘ famous quotation: “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.
In Menlo Park, Thomas had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. His name is registered on 1,093 patents.
Carbon telephone transmitter
In 1876, Thomas began work to improve the microphone for telephones (at that time called a “transmitter”) by developing a carbon microphone, which consists of two metal plates separated by granules of carbon that would change resistance with the pressure of sound waves. A steady direct current is passed between the plates through the granules and the varying resistance results in a modulation of the current, creating a varying electric current that reproduces the varying pressure of the sound wave.
Up to that point, microphones, such as the ones developed by Johann Philipp Reis and Alexander Graham Bell, worked by generating a weak current. The carbon microphone works by modulating a direct current and, subsequently, using a transformer to transfer the signal so generated to the telephone line. Thomas was one of many inventors working on the problem of creating a usable microphone for telephony by having it modulate an electric current passed through it. His work was concurrent with Emile Berliner‘s loose-contact carbon transmitter (who lost a later patent case against Thomas over the carbon transmitter’s invention) and David Edward Hughes‘ study and published paper on the physics of loose-contact carbon transmitters (work that Hughes did not bother to patent).
Thomas used the carbon microphone concept in 1877 to create an improved telephone for Western Union.[46] In 1886, he found a way to improve a Bell Telephone microphone, one that used loose-contact ground carbon, with his discovery that it worked far better if the carbon was roasted. This type was put in use in 1890 and was used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the 1980s.
Thomas’s first successful model of light bulb, used in public demonstration at Menlo Park (December 1879)
In 1878, Thomas began working on a system of electrical illumination, something he hoped could compete with gas and oil-based lighting. He began by tackling the problem of creating a long-lasting incandescent lamp, something that would be needed for indoor use.
However, he did not invent the light bulb. In 1840, British scientist Warren de la Rue developed an efficient light bulb using a coiled platinum filament but the high cost of platinum kept the bulb from becoming a commercial success. Many other inventors had also devised incandescent lamps, including Alessandro Volta‘s demonstration of a glowing wire in 1800 and inventions by Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans. Others who developed early and commercially impractical incandescent electric lamps included Humphry Davy, James Bowman Lindsay, Moses G. Farmer, William E. Sawyer, Joseph Swan, and Heinrich Göbel.
These early bulbs all had flaws such as an extremely short life and requiring a high electric current to operate which made them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. In his first attempts to solve these problems, Thomas tried using a filament made of cardboard, carbonized with compressed lampblack. This burnt out too quickly to provide lasting light. He then experimented with different grasses and canes such as hemp, and palmetto, before settling on bamboo as the best filament. Thomas continued trying to improve this design and on November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using “a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires“.
The patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including “cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways”. It was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1,200 hours.
Attempts to prevent blackening of the bulb due to emission of charged carbon from the hot filament culminated in Edison effect bulbs, which redirected and controlled the mysterious unidirectional current.
Thomas‘s 1883 patent for voltage-regulating is notably the first US patent for an electronic device due to its use of an Edison effect bulb as an active component. Subsequent scientists studied, applied, and eventually evolved the bulbs into vacuum tubes, a core component of early analog and digital electronics of the 20th century.
In 1878, Thomas formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan, Spencer Trask and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Thomas made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.“
Henry Villard, president of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, attended Thomas‘s 1879 demonstration. Villard was impressed and requested Thomas install his electric lighting system aboard Villard‘s company’s new steamer, the Columbia. Although hesitant at first, Thomas agreed to Villard‘s request. Most of the work was completed in May 1880 and the Columbia went to New York City, where Thomas and his personnel installed Columbia‘s new lighting system. The Columbia was Thomas‘s first commercial application for his incandescent light bulb. The Edison equipment was removed from Columbia in 1895.
In 1880, Lewis Latimer, a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation, began working for the United States Electric Lighting Company run by Thomas‘s rival Hiram S. Maxim. While working for Maxim, Latimer invented a process for making carbon filaments for light bulbs and helped install broad-scale lighting systems for New York City, Philadelphia, Montreal and London. Latimer holds the patent for the electric lamp issued in 1881 and a second patent for the “process of manufacturing carbons” (the filament used in incandescent light bulbs), issued in 1882.
On October 8, 1883, the US patent office ruled that Thomas‘s patent was based on the work of William E. Sawyer and was therefore invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years. In 1885, Latimer switched camps and started working with Thomas. On October 6, 1889, a judge ruled that Thomas‘s electric light improvement claim for “a filament of carbon of high resistance” was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with yet another competitor, Joseph Swan, who held an 1880 British patent on a similar incandescent electric lamp, Thomas and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain.
The incandescent light bulb patented by Thomas also began to gain widespread popularity in Europe as well. Mahen Theatre in Brno opened in 1882 and was the first public building in the world to use Thomas‘s electric lamps. Francis Jehl, Thomas‘s assistant in the invention of the lamp, supervised the installation.
In 1901, Thomas attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. His company, the Edison Manufacturing Company, was given the task of installing the electric lights on the various buildings and structures that were built for the exposition. At night Thomas made a panorama photograph of the illuminated buildings.
Distribution of Electric power
After devising a commercially viable electric light bulb on October 21, 1879, Thomas developed an electric “utility” to compete with the existing gas light utilities. On December 17, 1880, Thomas founded the Edison Illuminating Company and during the 1880s, he patented a system for electricity distribution. The company established the first investor-owned electric utility.
On September 4, 1882, in Pearl Street, New York City, his 600 kW cogeneration steam-powered generating station, Pearl Street Station’s electrical power distribution system was switched on, providing 110 volts direct current (DC), initially to 59 customers in lower Manhattan, quickly growing to 508 customers with 10,164 lamps. The power station was decommissioned in 1895.
Eight months earlier in January 1882, to demonstrate feasibility, Thomas had switched on the 93 kW first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. This was a smaller 110 V DC supply system, eventually supplying 3,000 street lights and a number of nearby private dwellings, but was shut down in September 1886 as uneconomic, since he was unable to extend the premises.
On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.
War of the currents
As Thomas expanded his direct current (DC) power delivery system, he received stiff competition from companies installing alternating current (AC) systems. From the early 1880s, AC arc lighting systems for streets and large spaces had been an expanding business in the US. With the development of transformers in Europe and by Westinghouse Electric in the US in 1885–1886, it became possible to transmit AC long distances over thinner and cheaper wires and “step down” (reduce) the voltage at the destination for distribution to users.
This allowed AC to be used in street lighting and in lighting for small business and domestic customers, the market Thomas‘s patented low voltage DC incandescent lamp system was designed to supply.[75] Thomas‘s DC empire suffered from one of its chief drawbacks: it was suitable only for the high density of customers found in large cities. His DC plants could not deliver electricity to customers more than one mile from the plant and left a patchwork of unsupplied customers between plants. Small cities and rural areas could not afford an Edison style system, leaving a large part of the market without electrical service. As a result, AC companies expanded into this gap.
Thomas expressed views that AC was unworkable and the high voltages used were dangerous. As George Westinghouse installed his first AC systems in 1886, Thomas struck out personally against his chief rival stating, “Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.”
Many reasons have been suggested for Thomas‘s anti-AC stance. One notion is that the inventor could not grasp the more abstract theories behind AC and was trying to avoid developing a system he did not understand. He also appeared to have been worried about the high voltage from misinstalled AC systems killing customers and hurting the sales of electric power systems in general.
The primary reason was that Edison Electric based their design on low voltage DC and switching a standard after they had installed over 100 systems was, in Thomas‘s mind, out of the question. By the end of 1887, Edison Electric was losing market share to Westinghouse, who had built 68 AC-based power stations to Edison’s 121 DC-based stations. To make matters worse for Thomas, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts (another AC-based competitor) built 22 power stations.
Parallel to expanding competition between Thomas and the AC companies was rising public furor over a series of deaths in the spring of 1888 caused by pole mounted high voltage alternating current lines. This turned into a media frenzy against high voltage alternating current and the seemingly greedy and callous lighting companies that used it. Thomas took advantage of the public perception of AC as dangerous, and joined with self-styled New York anti-AC crusader Harold P. Brown in a propaganda campaign, aiding Brown in the public electrocution of animals with AC, and supported legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system) in what was now being referred to as a “war of the currents”.
The development of the electric chair was used in an attempt to portray AC as having a greater lethal potential than DC and smear Westinghouse, via Thomas colluding with Brown and Westinghouse‘s chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to ensure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator.
Thomas was becoming marginalized in his own company having lost majority control in the 1889 merger that formed Edison General Electric. In 1890 he told president Henry Villard he thought it was time to retire from the lighting business and moved on to an iron ore refining project that preoccupied his time. Thomas‘s dogmatic anti-AC values were no longer controlling the company.
By 1889 Thomas‘s Electric’s own subsidiaries were lobbying to add AC power transmission to their systems and in October 1890 Edison Machine Works began developing AC-based equipment. Cut-throat competition and patent battles were bleeding off cash in the competing companies and the idea of a merger was being put forward in financial circles.
The War of Currents ended in 1892 when the financier J.P. Morgan engineered a merger of Edison General Electric with its main alternating current based rival, The Thomson-Houston Company, that put the board of Thomson-Houston in charge of the new company called General Electric. General Electric now controlled three-quarters of the US electrical business and would compete with Westinghouse for the AC market. Thomas served as a figurehead on the company’s board of directors for a few years before selling his shares.
West Orange and Fort Myers (1886-1931)
Thomas A. Edison Industries Exhibit, Primary Battery section (1915)
Thomas moved from Menlo Park after the death of his first wife, Mary, in 1884, and purchased a home known as “Glenmont” in 1886 as a wedding gift for his second wife, Mina, in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. In 1885, Thomas bought 13 acres of property in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly $2,750 (equivalent to $93,256 in 2023) and built what was later called Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat.
The main house and guest house are representative of Italianate architecture and Queen Anne style architecture. The building materials were pre-cut in New England by the Kennebec Framing Company and the Stephen Nye Lumber Company of Fairfield Maine. The materials were then shipped down by boat and were constructed at a cost of $12,000 each, which included the cost of interior furnishings. Thomas and Mina spent many winters at their home in Fort Myers, and Edison tried to find a domestic source of natural rubber.
Due to the security concerns around World War I, Thomas suggested forming a science and industry committee to provide advice and research to the US military, and he headed the Naval Consulting Board in 1915.
Thomas became concerned with America’s reliance on foreign supply of rubber and was determined to find a native supply of rubber. His work on rubber took place largely at his research laboratory in Fort Myers, which has been designated as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.
The laboratory was built after Thomas, Henry Ford and Harvey S. Firestone pulled together $75,000 to form the Edison Botanical Research Corporation. Initially, only Ford and Firestone were to contribute funds to the project, while Thomas did all the research.
Thomas, however, wished to contribute $25,000 as well. Thomas did the majority of the research and planting, sending results and sample rubber residues to his West Orange Lab. Thomas employed a two-part Acid-base extraction, to derive latex from the plant material after it was dried and crushed to a powder.
After testing 17,000 plant samples, he eventually found an adequate source in the Goldenrod plant. Edison decided on Solidago leavenworthii, also known as Leavenworth’s Goldenrod. The plant, which normally grows roughly 3–4 feet tall with a 5% latex yield, was adapted by Thomas through cross-breeding to produce plants twice the size and with a latex yield of 12%.
During the 1911 New York Electrical show, Thomas told representatives of the copper industry it was a shame he did not have a “chunk of it”. The representatives decided to give a cubic foot of solid copper weighing 486 pounds with their gratitude inscribed on it in appreciation for his part in the “continuous stimulation in the copper industry”.
Other inventions
Thomas is credited with designing and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope, a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs. Until Thomas discovered that calcium tungstate fluoroscopy screens produced brighter images than the barium platinocyanide screens originally used by Wilhelm Röntgen, the technology was capable of producing only very faint images.
The fundamental design of Thomas‘s fluoroscope is still in use today, although he abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally. Dally made himself an enthusiastic human guinea pig for the fluoroscopy project and was exposed to a poisonous dose of radiation; he later died (at the age of 39) of injuries related to the exposure, including mediastinal cancer.
In 1903, a shaken Thomas said: “Don’t talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them.” Nonetheless, his work was important in the development of a technology still used today.
Tasimeter
Thomas invented a highly sensitive device, that he named the tasimeter, which measured infrared radiation. His impetus for its creation was the desire to measure the heat from the solar corona during the total Solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. The device was not patented since Thomas could find no practical mass-market application for it.
Telegraph improvements
The key to Thomas‘s initial reputation and success was his work in the field of telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This, together with his studies in chemistry at the Cooper Union, allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock ticker, the first electricity-based broadcast system.
Thomas‘s innovations also included the development of the quadruplex, the first system which could simultaneously transmit four messages through a single wire.
Motion pictures
Thomas was granted a patent for a motion picture camera, labeled the “Kinetograph“. He did the electromechanical design while his employee William Kennedy Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson.
In 1891, Thomas built a Kinetoscope or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891.
In April 1896, Thomas Armat‘s Vitascope, manufactured by the Edison factory and marketed in Thomas‘s name, was used to project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City. Later, he exhibited motion pictures with voice soundtrack on cylinder recordings, mechanically synchronized with the film.
Officially the kinetoscope entered Europe when wealthy American businessman Irving T. Bush (1869–1948) bought a dozen machines from the Continental Commerce Company of Frank Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus. Bush placed from October 17, 1894, the first kinetoscopes in London. At the same time, the French company Kinétoscope Edison Michel et Alexis Werner bought these machines for the market in France. In the last three months of 1894, the Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in Europe.
In Germany and in Austria-Hungary, the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop Gesellschaft, founded by the Ludwig Stollwerck of the Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co of Cologne.
The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison’s Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists. On May 14, 1895, the Edison’s Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. Businessman Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative in starting this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In 1898, he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France.
Thomas‘s film studio made nearly 1,200 films. The majority of the productions were short films showing everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls including titles such as Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1910) and the first Frankenstein film in 1910.
In 1903, when the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island announced they would execute Topsy the elephant by strangulation, poisoning, and electrocution (with the electrocution part ultimately killing the elephant), Edison Manufacturing sent a crew to film it, releasing it that same year with the title Electrocuting an Elephant.
As the film business expanded, competing exhibitors routinely copied and exhibited each other’s films. To better protect the copyrights on his films, Thomas deposited prints of them on long strips of photographic paper with the U.S. copyright office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era.
In 1908, Thomas started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust). Thomas was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, which was founded in 1929.
Thomas said his favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation. He thought that talkies had “spoiled everything” for him. “There isn’t any good acting on the screen. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf.”
Thomas‘s favorite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.
Mining
Starting in the late 1870s, Thomas became interested and involved with mining. High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast of the United States and Edison tried to mine low-grade ore. Thomas developed a process using rollers and crushers that could pulverize rocks up to 10 tons. The dust was then sent between three giant magnets that would pull the iron ore from the dust. Despite the failure of his mining company, the Edison Ore Milling Company, Thomas used some of the materials and equipment to produce cement.
In 1901, Thomas visited an industrial exhibition in the Sudbury area in Ontario, Canada and thought nickel and cobalt deposits there could be used in his production of electrical equipment. He returned as a mining prospector and is credited with the original discovery of the Falconbridge ore body.
His attempts to mine the ore body were not successful and he abandoned his mining claim in 1903. A street in Falconbridge, as well as the Edison Building, which served as the head office of Falconbridge Mines, are named for him.
Rechargeable battery
In the late 1890s, Thomas worked on developing a lighter, more efficient rechargeable battery (at that time called an “accumulator”). He looked on them as something customers could use to power their phonographs but saw other uses for an improved battery, including electric automobiles. The then available lead acid rechargeable batteries were not very efficient and that market was already tied up by other companies so Thomas pursued using alkaline instead of acid.
He had his lab work on many types of materials (going through some 10,000 combinations), eventually settling on a nickel-iron combination. Besides his experimenting Thomas also probably had access to the 1899 patents for a nickel–iron battery by the Swedish inventor Waldemar Jungner.
Thomas obtained a US and European patent for his nickel–iron battery in 1901 and founded the Edison Storage Battery Company, and by 1904 it had 450 people working there. The first rechargeable batteries they produced were for electric cars, but there were many defects, with customers complaining about the product.
When the capital of the company was exhausted, Thomas paid for the company with his private money. He did not demonstrate a mature product until 1910: a very efficient and durable nickel-iron-battery with lye as the electrolyte. The nickel–iron battery was never very successful; by the time it was ready, electric cars were disappearing, and lead acid batteries had become the standard for turning over gas-powered car starter motors.
Chemicals
At the start of World War I, the American chemical industry was primitive: most chemicals were imported from Europe. The outbreak of war in August 1914 resulted in a shortage of imported chemicals. One of particular importance to Thomas was phenol, which was used to make phonograph records—presumably as phenolic resins of the Bakelite type.[117]
At the time, phenol came from coal as a by-product of coke oven gases or manufactured gas for gas lighting. Phenol could be nitrated to picric acid and converted to ammonium picrate, a shock resistant high explosive suitable for use in artillery shells. Most phenol had been imported from Britain, but with war, Parliament blocked exports and diverted most to production of ammonium picrate. Britain also blockaded supplies from Germany.
Thomas responded by undertaking production of phenol at his Silver Lake facility using processes developed by his chemists. He built two plants with a capacity of six tons of phenol per day. Production began the first week of September, one month after hostilities began in Europe. He built two plants to produce raw material benzene at Johnstown, Pennsylvania and Bessemer, Alabama, replacing supplies previously from Germany. Thomas manufactured aniline dyes, which previously had been supplied by the German dye trust. Other wartime products include xylene, p-phenylenediamine, shellac, and pyrax. Wartime shortages made these ventures profitable. In 1915, his production capacity was fully committed by midyear.
Phenol was a critical material because two derivatives were in high growth phases. Bakelite, the original thermoset plastic, had been invented in 1909. Aspirin, too was a phenol derivative. Invented in 1899, it had become a blockbuster drug. Bayer had acquired a plant to manufacture in the US in Rensselaer, New York, but struggled to find phenol to keep their plant running during the war. Edison was able to oblige.
Bayer relied on Chemische Fabrik von Heyden, in Piscataway, New Jersey, to convert phenol to salicylic acid, which they converted to aspirin. It is said that German companies bought up supplies of phenol to block production of ammonium picrate. Thomas preferred not to sell phenol for military uses. He sold his surplus to Bayer, who had it converted to salicylic acid by Heyden, some of which was exported.
Spirit Phone
In 1920, Thomas spoke to American Magazine, saying that he had been working on a device for some time to see if it was possible to communicate with the dead. He said the device would work on scientific principles, not by occult means. The press had a field day over Thomas‘s remarks.
The actual nature of this invention remained a mystery; there were no details revealed to the public. In 2015, Philippe Baudouin, a French journalist, found a copy of Thomas‘s diary in a thrift store with a chapter not found in the previously published editions. The new chapter details Thomas‘s theories of the afterlife and the scientific basis by which communication with the dead might be achieved.
Marriages
On December 25, 1871, at the age of 24, Thomas married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, an employee at one of his shops, whom he had met two months earlier. They had three children:
- Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965), nicknamed “Dot“
- Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935), nicknamed “Dash“
- William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, 1900.
Thomas generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family.
Mary Edison died at age 29 on August 9, 1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain tumor or a morphine overdose.
On February 24, 1886, at the age of 39, Thomas married the 20-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children together:
- Madeleine Edison (1888–1979), who married John Eyre Sloane.
- Charles Edison (1890–1969), Governor of New Jersey (1941–1944), who took over his father’s company and experimental laboratories upon his father’s death.
- Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992), (MIT Physics 1923), credited with more than 80 patents.
Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.
Wanting to be an inventor, but not having much of an aptitude for it, Thomas‘s son, Thomas Alva Edison Jr., became a problem for his father and his father’s business. Starting in the 1890s, Thomas Jr. became involved in snake oil products and shady and fraudulent enterprises producing products being sold to the public as “The Latest Edison Discovery”.
The situation became so bad that Thomas Sr. had to take his son to court to stop the practices, finally agreeing to pay Thomas Jr. an allowance of $35 (equivalent to $1,187 in 2023) per week, in exchange for not using the Edison name. Thomas Jr. began using aliases, such as Burton Willard.
Thomas Jr., experiencing alcoholism, depression and ill health, worked at several menial jobs, but by 1931 (towards the end of his life) he would obtain a role in the Edison company, thanks to the intervention of his half-brother Charles.
Final years
Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Thomas at his winter retreat in Fort Myers. Ford once worked as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit and met Thomas at a convention of affiliated Edison Illuminating companies in Brooklyn, NY in 1896. Thomas was impressed with Ford‘s internal combustion engine automobile and encouraged its developments. They were friends until Thomas‘s death.
Thomas and Ford undertook annual motor camping trips from 1914 to 1924. Harvey Firestone and naturalist John Burroughs also participated.
In 1928, Thomas joined the Fort Myers Civitan Club. He believed strongly in the organization, writing that “The Civitan Club is doing things—big things—for the community, state, and nation, and I certainly consider it an honor to be numbered in its ranks.” He was an active member in the club until his death, sometimes bringing Henry Ford to the club’s meetings.
Thomas was active in business right up to the end. Just months before his death, the Lackawanna Railroad inaugurated suburban electric train service from Hoboken to Montclair, Dover, and Gladstone, New Jersey. Electrical transmission for this service was by means of an overhead catenary system using direct current, which Thomas had championed. Despite his frail condition, Thomas was at the throttle of the first electric MU (Multiple-Unit) train to depart Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken in September 1930, driving the train the first mile through Hoboken yard on its way to South Orange.
This fleet of cars would serve commuters in North Jersey for the next 54 years until their retirement in 1984. A plaque commemorating Thomas‘s inaugural ride can be seen today in the waiting room of Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, which is presently operated by NJ Transit.
Thomas was said to have been influenced by a popular fad diet in his last few years; “the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every three hours“. He is reported to have believed this diet would restore his health. However, this tale is doubtful.
In 1930, the year before Thomas died, Mina said in an interview about him, “Correct eating is one of his greatest hobbies.” She also said that during one of his periodic “great scientific adventures“, Thomas would be up at 7:00, have breakfast at 8:00 and be rarely home for lunch or dinner, implying that he continued to have all three.
Thomas became the owner of his Milan, Ohio, birthplace in 1906. On his last visit, in 1923, he was reportedly shocked to find his old home still lit by lamps and candles.
Death
Thomas died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, “Glenmont” in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina. Rev. Stephen J. Herben officiated at the funeral. Thomas is buried behind the home.
Thomas‘s last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at The Henry Ford museum near Detroit. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventor’s room shortly after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask and casts of Thomas‘s hands were also made.
