How many inventions did edison invent

In early , he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time. From to , Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey , where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company then the industry leader and its rivals.

Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late , but with the help of his father was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark.

In , Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity. That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced. In , Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight—a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years.

With the help of prominent financial backers like J. He made a breakthrough in October with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb. In , he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family which by now included three children to New York.

He built a large estate and research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking.

He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by Direct current DC is an electrical current which flows consistently in one direction - like in a battery.

Edison began using direct current electricity in the early s, after opening the Edison Illuminating Company in New York City in He advocated for this system to be the main source of electricity - but lost out to rival Nikola Tesla's alternating current system, patented in , which is used in mains electricity today. But DC power is also still used today, generally for low-voltage applications like battery charging.

Next, the kinetophone was an attempt to add sound. And finally, the kinetograph was an early motion picture camera. These batteries were one of Edison's most profitable inventions, as they were more efficient, and less leaky and damaging, than the lead-acid batteries being invented at the time. Edison's batteries were invented in , and were used to power some of the first electric vehicles, which were very popular. Some reports suggest Frenchman Gustave Le Gray invented wax paper, but that he used it for photography instead of food.

Not only did Edison invent thousands of objects and ideas throughout his lifetime, but he also conceived of the spaces to do so. Edison pioneered the industrial research laboratory , which paved the way for new research institutions.

For the first five years of his career, Edison's laboratories were machine shops in Newark, New Jersey, where he spent time developing telegraphy, the electric pen, and stock ticker technology. Eventually, he moved to larger spaces, and in , he opened his most well-known laboratory in Menlo Park , New Jersey.

It was here that Edison and his research assistants conducted extensive work on electricity and invented the phonograph. A decade later, he opened an even bigger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, and set out to create the first motion picture camera and record technology. While Edison often gets the sole credit for his many inventions, up to men worked in his sprawling laboratories at a time, all contributing to developing new technologies that would change the world.

Edison's first patented invention came to fruition in The Electrographic Vote Recorder was made for legislators in Congress to vote on issues by switching a device to read either "yes" or "no" rather than handwriting each vote. According to an archivist at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park , Edison thought this invention would make him rich. But Washington officials hated it. Politicians quickly rejected the device out of fear it would disrupt the voting process, and Edison vowed to never again invent something that didn't have an "apparent" market.

In , Edison and his team were experimenting with new ways to improve the telegraph, when they noticed a strange phenomenon happening between the machines. Each time the device vibrated, metal objects that came in contact with it would generate sparks. Edison became curious about this reaction, and determined that it must be the workings of an unknown force, which his team dubbed "etheric force.

He then developed an etheroscope , a device that would measure different ways this force could be transmitted and observe the sparks more closely, but he never quite understood what it meant. Eventually, it became known that his telegraph was actually producing radio frequency electromagnetic waves, which later become the basis for the development of radio technology.

In , Edison patented the electric pen , which allowed workers to make copies of handwritten documents much quicker. The pen was powered by a small electric motor, and as the user would write, a handheld needle punched tiny holes onto the surface of paper. The idea here was to create a stencil by allowing workers to roll ink over the holes and produce copies onto blank sheets of paper underneath. This invention paved the way for the first ever mimeography, and is even thought to be the precursor to the first tattoo gun.

Among Edison's thousands of patents and inventions, the phonograph was his favorite. He developed a method to record sound on cylinders coated in tinfoil in The machine had two needles, one for recording and one for playback, and when he spoke into a mouthpiece, the vibrations of his voice would prompt the recording needle to indent the cylinder and retain the audio.

The first words ever recorded into this machine were the lyrics to "Mary had a little lamb. Throughout the s, Edison worked closely with miners to develop milling technology that would separate magnetic particles , like iron, from non-magnetic rock by placing them into different bins. Between , he designed a full system of "mining, crushing, separating, and concentrating" at a mine in New Jersey, according to the Thomas A.

Edison Papers. But due to unforeseen expense issues, he was forced to shut it down. His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr. Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on.

Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. So, too, was the drudgery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory.

Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another.

The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies.

Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his. It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs.

Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.

He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok. Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do.

To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material.

When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in and runs until , Part 2 goes from to , and so on.

The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.