A year later, while vacationing at a friends house in New England, Edison met Mina Miller and fell in love. The couple was married in February and moved to West Orange, New Jersey where Edison had purchased an estate, Glenmont, for his bride. Thomas Edison lived here with Mina until his death. When Edison moved to West Orange, he was doing experimental work in makeshift facilities in his electric lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage, however, Edison decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange itself, less than a mile from his home.
Edison possessed both the resources and experience by this time to build, "the best equipped and largest laboratory extant and the facilities superior to any other for rapid and cheap development of an invention ". The new laboratory complex consisting of five buildings opened in November A three story main laboratory building contained a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large library.
Four smaller one story buildings built perpendicular to the main building contained a physics lab, chemistry lab, metallurgy lab, pattern shop, and chemical storage. The large size of the laboratory not only allowed Edison to work on any sort of project, but also allowed him to work on as many as ten or twenty projects at once.
Facilities were added to the laboratory or modified to meet Edison's changing needs as he continued to work in this complex until his death in Over the years, factories to manufacture Edison inventions were built around the laboratory. The entire laboratory and factory complex eventually covered more than twenty acres and employed 10, people at its peak during World War One After opening the new laboratory, Edison began to work on the phonograph again, having set the project aside to develop the electric light in the late s.
By the s, Edison began to manufacture phonographs for both home, and business use. Like the electric light, Edison developed everything needed to have a phonograph work, including records to play, equipment to record the records, and equipment to manufacture the records and the machines. In the process of making the phonograph practical, Edison created the recording industry.
The development and improvement of the phonograph was an ongoing project, continuing almost until Edison's death. While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear", this was to become motion pictures.
Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in , and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure, built on the laboratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system, developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures. Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work.
There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together. The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. Throughout the decade Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills.
To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric. Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested.
This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time.
As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge. Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity, and steam.
Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job. Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery.
By the time Edison introduced his new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railway cars and signals, maritime buoys, and miners lamps.
Unlike iron ore mining, the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery. By , Thomas Edison had built a vast industrial operation in West Orange. Numerous factories had been built through the years around the original laboratory, and the staff of the entire complex had grown into the thousands.
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He is credited today for helping to build America's economy during the Industrial Revolution. Edison was born on February 11, , in Milan, Ohio. He was the youngest of seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. An early bout with scarlet fever as well as ear infections left Edison with hearing difficulties in both ears as a child and nearly deaf as an adult. Edison would later recount, with variations on the story, that he lost his hearing due to a train incident in which his ears were injured.
But others have tended to discount this as the sole cause of his hearing loss. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction, he was deemed "difficult" by his teacher. His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home. At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects.
In this wide-open curriculum Edison developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him throughout his life. At age 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Exploiting his access to the news bulletins teletyped to the station office each day, Edison began publishing his own small newspaper, called the Grand Trunk Herald.
The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity. Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car.
During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire. The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss.
He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route. While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator. For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.
The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation. Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap.
However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment. In , Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work.
The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take control of his future. Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company. At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it. In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature. However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly.
They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators. In Edison married year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses.
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