The Biography of Thomas Edison

"... Thomas Edison was more responsible than any one else for creating the modern world ....  No one did more to shape the physical/cultural makeup of  present day civilization.... Accordingly, he was the most influential figure of the millennium...." 
The Heroes Of The Age: Electricity And Man

Surprisingly, little "Al" Edison, who was the last of seven children in his family, did not learn to talk until he was almost four years of age.  Immediately thereafter, he began pleading with every adult he met to explain the workings of just about everything he encountered. If they said they didn't know, he would look them straight in the eye with his deeply set and vibrant blue-green eyes and ask them "Why?"

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Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison was not born into poverty in a backwater mid-western town. Actually, he was born -on Feb. 11, 1847 - to middle-class parents in the bustling port of Milan, Ohio, a community that - next to Odessa, Russia - was the largest wheat shipping center in the world. In 1854, his family moved to the vibrant city of Port Huron, Michigan, which ultimately surpassed the commercial preeminence of both Milan and Odessa....

At age seven - after spending 12 weeks in a noisy one-room schoolhouse with 38 other students of ll ages - Tom's overworked and short tempered teacher finally lost his patience with the child's persistent questioning and seemingly self centered behavior.  Noting that Tom's forehead was unusually broad and his head was considerably larger than average, he made no secret of his belief that the hyperactive youngster's brains were "addled" or scrambled.

If modern psychology had existed back then, Tom would have probably been deemed a victim of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and proscribed a hefty dose of the "miracle drug" Ritalin. Instead, when his beloved mother - whom he recalled "was the making of me...  [because] she was always so true and so sure of me...  And always made me feel I had someone to live for and must not disappoint." - became aware of the situation, she promptly withdrew him from school and began to "home-teach" him.  Not surprisingly, she was convinced her son's slightly unusual demeanor and physical appearance were merely outward signs of his remarkable intelligence.

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     A descendant of the distinguished Elliot family of New England, New York born Nancy Edison was the devout and attractive daughter of a highly respected Presbyterian minister and an accomplished   educator in her own right.  After the above incident, she commenced teaching her favorite son the "Three Rs" and the Bible. Meanwhile, his rather "worldly" and roguish father, Samuel, encouraged him to read the great classics, giving him a ten cents reward for each one he completed. 

     It wasn't long thereafter that the serious minded youngster developed a deep interest in world history and English literature. Interestingly, many years later, Tom's abiding fondness for Shakespeare's plays lead him to briefly consider becoming an actor. However, because of his high-pitched voice and his extreme shyness before every audience - except those he was trying to influence into helping him finance an invention - he soon gave up the idea.

     Tom especially enjoyed reading and reciting poetry. His life-long favorite was Gray's Elegy In A Country Churchyard. Indeed, his favorite lines - which he endlessly chanted to himself and any within hearing distance - came from its 9th stanza: ?The boast of heraldry of pomp and power, All that beauty all that wealth ere gave, Alike await the inevitable hour. The path to glory leads but to the grave.?

     At age 11, Tom's parents tried to appease his ever more voracious appetite for knowledge by teaching him how to use the resources of the local library. This skill became the foundation of many factors that gradually caused  him to prefer learning via independent self instruction. 

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     Starting with the last book on the bottom shelf, Tom set out to systematically read every book in the stacks.  Wisely, however, his parents promptly guided him into  towards being more selective in what he read.... By age 12, Tom had not only completed Gibbon's Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Sears' History Of The World, and Burton's Anatomy Of Melancholy, he had devoured The World Dictionary of Science and a number of works on Practical Chemistry.

     Unfortunately, in spite of their noble efforts, Tom's dedicated parents eventually found themselves incapable of addressing his ever increasing  interest in the  Sciences.  For example, when he began to question them about concepts dealing with Physics - such as those contained in Isaac Newton's great "Principia" - they were utterly stymied.  Accordingly, they scraped enough money together to hire a clever tutor to help their precocious son in trying to understand Newton's complex mathematical principles and unique style....

     Unfortunately, this experience had some negative affects on the highly impressionable boy. He was  so disillusioned by how Newton's sensational theories were written in classical aristocratic terms -which he felt were unnecessarily confusing to the average person -he overreacted and developed  a hearty dislike for all such "high-tone" language and mathematics....

     On the other hand, the simple beauty of Newton's physical laws did not escape him. In fact, they very much helped him sharpen his own free wheeling style of clear thinking, proving all things to himself through his own method of objective examination and experimentation."    Tom's response to the Principia also enhanced his propensity towards gleaning insights from the writings and activities of other great men and women of wisdom,   never forgetting that even they might be entrenched in preconceived dogma and mired down in associated error....

      All the while he was cultivated a strong sense of perseverance, readily expending whatever amount of perspiration needed to overcome challenges. This was a characteristic that he later noted was contrary to the way most people respond to stress and strain on their body....  The key upshot of this attribute was that his unique mental, and physical, stamina stood him in good stead when he took on the incredible rigors of a being a successful  inventor in the late 19th Century....

   Oddly, a factor that  shaped Tom's personality in both a negative and a positive way was  his  poor   hearing.... Even though this condition -and the fact that he had only three months of formal schooling - prevented him from taking advantage of the benefits of a secondary education in contemporary mathematics, physics, and engineering, he never let it interfere with  finding ways   of  compensating....     More precisely,  it was this his  highly individualistic  style of acquiring knowledge that eventually  led  him to  question scores  of the prevailing theories on the workings of electricity..... Approaching  this complex field  like a "lone eagle," he  used his kaleidoscopic mind  and his legendary memory, dexterity, and patience to  perform  whatever experiments were  necessary to  come up with his own   related      theories...    As many  of his contemporaries continued to  indulge the  popular electrical pontifications of the day, he was ever sharpening his now ingrained  style of  dispassionate and bold analysis....  "I accept almost nothing dealing with electricity without thoroughly testing it first." he often  declared.  Not surprisingly, by arming his brains  with  this    perspective,  he soon established a firm foothold in the world of practical electrical science    And of course, at the dawn of the "Age Of Electric Light And Power," nothing   could  have better served his ultimate destiny in the field of invention...

Returning to the story of  his youth, by age 12, Tom had  already  become an  "adult." He had  not only talked his parents into letting him go to work selling newspapers, snacks, and candy on the local railroad, he had started an entirely separate business selling fruits and vegetables.....

  And at age 14 -during the time of  the famous pre-Civil War debates between Lincoln and Douglas -he exploited his access to the associated news releases that were being teletyped into the station each day and published them in his own little newspaper.    Focusing  upon such newsworthy "scoops," he quickly enticed over 300  commuters to subscribe to his splendid little paper:  the Weekly Herald....   Interestingly, because this was the first such publication  ever to be type-set, printed, and sold on a train,  an English journal now gave him his first exposure to international notoriety when it related  this story  in 1860. 

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      After his hero, Abraham Lincoln, was  nominated for president, Tom not only distributed campaign literature on his behalf, he  peddled flattering photographs of "the great emancipator."  (Interestingly, some 25 years later, Tom's associated feelings about abolition caused him to select Brockton, Massachusetts as the first place to model  the first standardized central power system, described elsewhere on the Brockton web site.)

At its peak, Tom's mini-publishing venture  netted him more than ten dollars per day. Because this was considerably more than enough to provide for his own support, he had a good deal of extra income, most of which went towards outfitting the chemical laboratory he had set up in the basement of his home. But hen his usually patient and tolerant mother finally complained about the odors and danger of all the "poisons" he was amassing, he transferred most of them to a locked room in the basement and put the remainder in his locker room on the train.
 
One day, while traversing a bumpy section of track, the train lurched, causing a stick of phosphorous to roll onto the floor and ignite. Within moments, the baggage car caught fire. The conductor was so angry, he severely chastised the boy and struck him with a powerful blow on the side of his head. Purportedly, this may  have aggravated some of the loss of  hearing he may have inherited and from  a later bout he had with scarlet fever.  In any case, the station master  penalized him by  restricting him to peddling his  newspaper to venues in railroad stations along the track ....

Remarkably,  years later and  not long after he had acquired the means to have an operation that "would have likely restored his hearing," he flatly refused to act upon the option.... His rationale was that he was afraid he "would have difficulty re-learning how to channel his thinking in an ever more  noisy world."  Whatever the cause for this defect,   by the time Tom was 14 years of age, it  was  virtually impossible for him to acquire knowledge in a typical educational setting. Amazingly,  however, he never seemed to fret a whole lot over the matter. Naturally inclined towards accepting his fate in life - and promptly  adapting to whatever he was convinced was out of his control -he always reacted by committing  himself to compensating via  alternative methods....

Ultimately, Tom  became totally deaf in his left ear, and approximately 80% deaf in his right ear. Poignantly, he once stated that the worst thing about this condition was that he was unable to enjoy the beautiful sounds of singing birds.  Indeed, he loved the creatures so much, he later amassed an aviary containing  over 5,000 of them. One day while he was on the train, the stationmaster's very young son happened to wander onto the tracks in front of an oncoming boxcar. Tom leaped to action.  Luckily - as they tumbled away from its oncoming wheels - they  ended up being only slightly injured.

Copyrighted - never before published - tintype of Bredding and Bell in October of 1876 on the day they successfully communicated across Boston's Charles River in the world's first long distance two-way telephone conversation. i.e., "The world's first practical telephone conversation."

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Success at last!

     It should come as no surprise that, during his free time, Edison soon resumed  his habit of "moonlighting" with the telegraph, the quadruplex transmitter, the stock-ticker, etc. Shortly thereafter, he was absolutely astonished - in fact he nearly fainted - when a corporation paid him $40,000 for all of his rights to the latter device.

     Convinced that no bank would honor the large check he was given for it, which was the first "real" money he had ever received for an invention, young Edison walked around for hours in a stupor, staring at it in amazement. Fearful that someone would steal it, he laid the cash out on his bed and stayed up all night, counting it over and over in disbelief. The next day a wise friend told him to deposit it in a bank forthwith and to just forget about it for a while.

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     A few weeks later, Edison wrote a series of poignant letters back home to his father: "How is mother getting along?... I am now in a position to give you some cash... Write and say how much....Give mother anything she wants...." Interestingly, It was at  this time that he also repaid Bredding the $35.00 he had borrowed  earlier.

     Over the next three years, Edison's progress in creating successful inventions for industry really took off....  For example, in 1874 - with the money he received from the sale of an electrical engineering firm that held several of his patents - he opened his first complete  testing and development laboratory in Newark, New Jersey.
 

   At age 29, he commenced work on the carbon transmitter, which ultimately made Alexander Graham Bell's amazing new "articulating" telephone (which by today's standards sounded more like someone trying to talk through a kazoo than a telephone) audible enough for practical use. Interestingly, at one point during this intense period, Edison was as close to inventing the telephone as Bell was to inventing the phonograph. Nevertheless, shortly after Edison moved his laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J. in 1876, he invented - in 1877 - the first phonograph.

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     In 1879, extremely disappointed by the fact that Bell had beaten him in the race to patent the first authentic transmission of the human voice, Edison now "one upped" all of his competition by inventing the first commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb...

     By now, Edison was being hailed world-wide as The wizard of Menlo Park, The father of the electrical age," and The greatest inventor who ever lived." Naturally, when World War I began, he was asked by the U. S. Government to focus his genius upon creating defensive devices for submarines and ships. During this time, he also perfected a number of important inventions relating to the enhanced use of rubber, concrete, and ethanol.

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     By the 1920s Edison was internationally revered. However,  even though he was personally acquainted with scores of very important people of his era, he cultivated very few close friendships. And due to the continuing demands of his career, there were still relatively long periods when he spent a shockingly small amount of time with his family.

It wasn't until his health began to fail, in the late 1920s, that Edison finally began to slow down and, so to speak, "smell the flowers." Up until obtaining his last (1,093rd) patent at age 83, he worked mostly at home where, though increasingly frail, he enjoyed greeting former associates and famous people such as Charles Lindberg, Marie Curie, Henry Ford, and President Herbert Hoover etc. He also enjoyed reading the mail of admirers and puttering around, when  able, in his office and home laboratory. 

     Thomas Edison died At 9 P.M. On Oct. 18th, 1931 in New Jersey. He was 84 years of age. Shortly before passing away, he awoke from a coma and quietly whispered to his very religious and faithful wife Mina, who had been keeping a vigil all night by his side:  "It is very beautiful over there..."

     Recognizing that his death marked the end of an era in the progress of civilization, countless individuals, communities, and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights and, or, briefly turned off their electric power in his honor on the evening of the day he was laid to rest at his beautiful estate at Glenmont, New Jersey.  Most realized that, even though he was far from being a   flawless human being and may not have really had the avuncular personality that was so often ascribed to him by myth makers, he was an essentially good man with a powerful mission....  Driven by a superhuman desire to fulfill the promise of research and invent things to serve mankind, no one did more to help realize  our Puritan founders dream of creating a  country that - at its best - would be viewed by the rest of the world as "a shining city upon a hill."

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ADDENDUM

Because of the  peculiar voids that Edison often evinced in  areas such as  cognition, speech, grammar, etc., a number of medical authorities have argued  that he may have been plagued by a fundamental learning disability that went  well beyond mere deafness....  A few  of have conjectured that this mysterious ailment - along with his lack of a formal education - may account for why he always seemed to "think so differently" compared to others of his time: "Always tenaciously clinging to those unique methods of analysis and experimentation with which he alone seemed to feel so comfortable...."

Whatever the impetus for his unique personality and traits, his incredible ability to come up with a meaningful new patent every two weeks throughout his working career "added more to the collective wealth of the world - and had more impact upon shaping modern civilization - than the accomplishments of any figure since Gutenberg...." Accordingly, most serious science and technology historians grant that he was indeed "The most influential figure of our millennium."
 

Notes: In 1929, Edison's close friend, Henry Ford, completed the task of moving Edison's original Menlo Park laboratory to the Greenfield Village museum in Dearborn, Mich. In 1962 his existing laboratory and home in West Orange, N.J. were designated as National Historic Sites.

Copyright © Gerald Beals June, 1999. All rights registered and reserved.  Please Note: Absolutely no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form - or stored by any means in a database or retrieval system - without the prior written and express permission of the author. Infringements will be (in fact  one is currently being)  prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

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