Thomas Alva Edison Facts
Thomas Alva Edison Facts
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| Interesting Thomas Alva Edison Facts: |
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| Edison was born in Milan, Ohio but grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. |
| He was the seventh and youngest child of Canadian immigrant, Samuel Ogden Edison. |
| Edison only spent three months in school before being educated at home by his mother. |
| A childhood bout of scarlet fever left him with a hearing loss. |
| As a child Edison earned money by selling candy and newspapers to passengers on the trains that ran through Port Huron. |
| He wrote and published his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold also with the other papers. |
| Edison saved a three-year-old from being struck by a train and the grateful father, J.U.MacKenzie, trained Edison as a telegraph operator; some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to the telegraph. |
| In 1877 he invented the phonograph and in 1878 traveled to Washington to demonstrate it to the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Congressmen and President Rutherford Hayes. |
| The Washington Post wrote that the demonstration was "a scene...that will live in history." |
| After he sold the rights to the quadruplex telegraph to Western Union for $10,000, Edison established the research laboratory at Menlo Park in New Jersey. |
| In 1879 he hired William Joseph Hammer as his laboratory assistant. |
| The experiments on the telephone, phonograph, iron ore separator, and electric light. |
| Edison wanted his lab stocked with many different materials and he amassed over 8,000 chemicals, nuts, bolts and wire of every size, hair and teeth of humans and many animals and an assortment of feathers, varnishes and oils. |
| In 1877-78 he invented the carbon microphone that remained in use in telephones until the 1980s. |
| In 1878 he began work on an incandescent bulb that would be long-lasting enough and cheap enough to produce to be a commercial success. |
| The first successful bulb had a carbon filament and was tested on October 22, 1879. |
| In 1889 he received a patent for a distribution system for electricity and in 1870 he created the Edison Illuminating Company which supplied electricity to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. |
| Edison produced the first commercially profitable fluoroscope by using calcium tungstate in the screens to produce a much brighter image. |
| Unfortunately Edison abandoned experimentation with X-rays after exposing his assistant, Clarence Dally, to a fatal dose of radiation. |
| In 1891 Edison invented the Kinetoscope. |
| In 1896 he unveiled the Vitascope motion picture projector and later he added voice with cylinder recordings synchronized with the picture. |
| Edison's studio made almost 1200 short films. |
| Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes at his home in West Orange, New Jersey. |
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