Could he have been an inventor without his mother: Who is Thomas Edison?

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio, the son of a Canadian refugee and his schoolteacher wife. His mother, Nancy Elliot, was originally from New York.

Known as "Al" in his youth, Thomas Edison was the youngest of seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. When Edison was born, the children were all teenagers. Edison tended to be in poor health when he was young and was a poor student. When the headmaster told Edison that he was "confused" or "slow", his angry mother took him out of school and started homeschooling him. Edison said years later, “My mother gave me everything. He was always right, he was confident in me, and I felt like I had someone to live for and not disappoint.” At an early age, he was fascinated with mechanical things and chemical experiments.

In 1859, at the age of 12, Thomas Edison took a job selling newspapers and candy from the Grand Trunk Railroad to Detroit. He started working at two businesses in Port Huron, one with a fresh produce stand and the other with a newsstand. He did freelance or very low-cost trade and shipping on the train. He set up a laboratory for chemistry experiments in the luggage car and began printing the "Grand Trunk Herald", the first newspaper published on a train. An accidental fire caused him to stop his experiments on the train.

Around the age of twelve, Edison lost almost all of his hearing. There are several theories as to what causes hearing loss. Some attribute this to the consequences of scarlet fever as a child. Others think that in the train fire, the contractors slapped Edison and damaged his headphones. Thomas Edison explained this when, after an accident, he was picked up by the ear and taken to the train. However, he did not let his disability discourage him. In fact, he often considered it an advantage, as it made it easier for him to concentrate on his experiments and research. No doubt his deafness made him more lonely and shy in dealing with others.

Thomas Edison rescued a three-year-old boy from an oncoming freight car in 1862. Grateful father J.U. MacKenzie taught Edison rail telegraphy as a reward. He was hired as a telegraph operator in Port Huron that winter. Meanwhile, he continued his scientific experiments. Between 1863 and 1867, Edison immigrated from city to city to take up telegraph jobs in the United States.

In 1868, Thomas Edison moved to Boston, where he worked at the Western Union office, and devoted more time to inventing. Edison resigned from his job in January 1869, intending to devote himself fully to inventing. His first invention to obtain a patent was an electrical vote recorder in June 1869. Because of politicians' reluctance to use the machine, he decided not to waste time inventing things that no one wanted in the future.

Edison moved to New York in mid-1869. A friend of his, Franklin L. Pope, let Edison sleep in a room at the Gold Indicator Company (Samuel Laws' company) where he worked. Thomas Edison repaired a broken machine when he was hired there to manage and improve printing presses.

Later in his life, he participated in many telegraph-related projects and partnerships. In October 1869, "Pope, Edison and Co." He teamed up with Franklin L. Pope and James Ashley to form his organization. They described themselves as electrical engineers and masters of electrical devices. Edison received several patents for improvements to the telegraph. The partnership was founded in 1870 by Gold and Stock Telegraph Co. merged with

In 1874 he began work on a versatile telegraph system for Western Union, eventually developing the bidirectional telegraph (quadruplex) capable of sending a bidirectional message in both directions at the same time. By selling the patent rights for his Quadruplex machine to rival Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Co., he dealt with a series of court cases that Western Union eventually won out. He developed an electric pen in 1875, among other telegraph inventions.

During this period, his personal life changed a lot. Edison's mother died in 1871, and he married a former employee, Mary Stilwell, on Christmas Day that year. Although Edison loved his wife, their relationship was fraught with difficulties. The main reasons were that he was constantly busy with work and had illnesses. Thomas Edison slept frequently in the laboratory and spent most of his time with his male colleagues.

Yet their first child, Marion, was born in February 1873, followed by a son, Thomas Jr., in January 1876. Edison nicknamed his two sons "Dot" (Dot) and "Dash" (Long line), referring to telegraphic terms. A third child, William Leslie, was born in October 1878.

Mary died in 1884, either from cancer or from morphine given to treat cancer. Edison remarried: His second wife was Mina Miller, daughter of Ohio industrialist Lewis Miller, who founded the Chautauqua Foundation. They married on February 24, 1886, and had three children: Madeleine (1888), Charles (1890), and Theodore Miller Edison (1898).

Thomas Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. This area was later known as the "invention factory". This was because it was a place where multiple inventions were worked on at the same time. Edison did many experiments to find answers to problems. "I never give up until I get what I'm after. Negative results are just what I'm after. They're just as valuable to me as positive results," he said. Edison liked to work long hours and expected a lot from his employees.

One of Edison's interests was to build an ore-grinding machine that would extract various metals from ore. In 1881, Edison founded the Ore-Milling Co., but the venture was fruitless because it had no market. He returned to work in 1887, believing that his invention could help the largely depleted Eastern mines compete with Western mines in 1887. He founded the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works in 1889. Edison was overwhelmed by his work and began spending a lot of time away from home in the Ogdensburg mines in New Jersey. Despite spending a lot of money and time on this project, it failed when it was launched. Additional ore resources were found in the Midwest.

Thomas Edison also began to promote the use of cement, and in 1899 Edison became the Portland Cement Co. founded his company. He sought to promote the extensive use of cement for the construction of low-cost houses and advocated the extensive use of concrete in phonographs, furniture, refrigerators, and pianos. Unfortunately, Edison was ahead of his time in these ideas because the widespread use of concrete was not economically feasible at that time.

In 1888 he met Eadweard Muybridge of West Orange and studied his Zoopraxiscope. This machine used a circular disk with still photos on it. The photographs consisted of successive phases of movement and created the illusion of movement.

He refused to work with Muybridge on the device and started working on the motion picture camera in the lab. Thomas Edison the same year, "I'm working on an instrument that does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." said.

The task of inventing the machine fell to Edison's assistant, William K. L. Dickson. Before Dickson returned to celluloid tape, he initially experimented with a cylinder-based device to record images. Dickson, returning from Paris in October 1889, greeted Edison with a device that reflected images and played sound. In 1891, patent applications were filed for the movie camera Kinetograph and the moving-image peephole Kinetoscope.

Kinetoscope salons opened in New York and soon spread to other major cities in 1894. In 1893, a movie studio opened in the West Orange complex that would later become Black Maria (the slang name for the police criminal transport vehicle the studio resembles). Various short films were produced by recording the acts of the day. Edison was reluctant to develop a movie projector. He thought there was more money in the peephole business.

As a result of rivalry between other film companies, heated legal battles broke out between Edison and the others. Edison sued many companies for alleged patent infringement. Motion Picture Patents Co. Its establishment was seen by the court as an unfair monopoly in 1915.

In 1913 he tried to synchronize the sound to the film. His lab developed the Kinetophone, which synchronizes the sound on a phonograph cylinder with the picture on the screen. Although this initially attracted attention, the system was far from perfect and disappeared in 1915. The great inventor left the film industry in 1918.

In 1911, Edison's companies were merged into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. and reorganized under As the organization became more diversified and structured, Edison, who still had decision-making power, became less involved in day-to-day operations. The aim of the institution was not to produce new inventions one after another but to find answers to market needs.

In 1914, a fire broke out in the West Orange laboratory and 13 buildings were destroyed. Although the loss was great, Edison led the rebuilding of the area.

Edison suggested that when Europe entered World War I, one should be prepared, and he thought technology would be the future of war. He was elected as the head of the Naval Warfare Advisory Board in 1915. The decision was made in an attempt by the government to bring science into the defense program. Edison was instrumental in creating a laboratory for the navy that opened in 1923. However, many of his suggestions on the subject were not taken into account. He did most warship research during the war. He especially worked in submarine detection. However, as a result of the inventions and suggestions he presented, he felt that the navy was not open to new ideas.

In the 1920s, Edison's health deteriorated and he began to spend more time at home with his wife. Although Charles was president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., his relationship with his children was distant. He wanted to implement some of his work in his West Orange lab while continuing to experiment at home but was not approved by the board. One of his admirable projects during this period was to find an alternative to rubber.

Henry Ford, an admirer, and friend of Edison rebuilt Edison's invention factory in Greenfield Village, Michigan, as a museum in 1929. The museum opened on the 50th anniversary of Edison's discovery of electric light. The "Golden Jubilee of Light" was led by Ford and General Electric. Celebrities such as President Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman, Marie Curie, and Orville Wright attended the grand dinner in Edison's name. Edison's health deteriorated and he had to leave the celebration.

The series of illnesses he had suffered in the last two years continued until he fell into a coma on October 14, 1931. Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, at his Glenmont estate in Westmont, New Jersey.