Creative writing tutor: Looking at peoples lives - Jones Sally, Jones Amanda 2015

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was one of the world’s most successful inventors. Without the devices he invented, the world would not have the technology it has today. Let’s read his story:

His childhood

Thomas Edison was born on February 11th 1842, in the village of Milan, Ohio, USA. During his childhood, he developed a problem that made him partially deaf. From the start, he was a serious little boy, who didn’t make friends of his own age and was content with his own company. For this reason, he only spent three months at school, because his mother home schooled him after he became known as a dunce, (a word for a stupid boy in the class).

In fact, he had a natural curiosity and was eager to learn. He loved reading and would read history books from an early age. When his family moved to a new town, he vowed to read every book in the public library. At 9 he received a book on physics, but he did not believe the experiments in it until he had tested them himself, in his science laboratory that was in the basement of his home.

His teenage years

Most children are working hard in school today at the age of twelve, but Thomas had a job as a newspaper boy on a long distance steam train. Because he enjoyed chemistry so much, he set up a laboratory in one of the back carriages. Unfortunately, the chemicals blew up, setting fire to the train so that was the end of that job.

After he saved the life of the stationmaster’s baby (from being hit by a train), he found a friend who taught him the trade of telegraph operator. He soon became skilful in taking and sending messages. By fifteen years old, he was in charge of a whole office. His enquiring mind made him determined to understand how the telegraph machine worked and he experimented with a battery in his father’s cellar until he understood it. Then, he invented a device called a telegraph repeater, which enabled him to handle messages that came through fast. He experimented with sending more than one message at a time.

A genius at work

Thomas’s employers considered him to be a dreamy young person and were quite impatient with him, so he drifted from job to job. However, he carried on working hard on his inventions and spent all his wages on books and scientific apparatus. At the age of twenty-one, he invented a stock ticker for offices. For this, and other inventions in the office, he was paid eight thousand pounds. This is worth about three hundred forty five thousand pounds today. This meant he was able to set up a factory in Newark, New Jersey, with three hundred employees, manufacturing electrical apparatus. Here, in an atmosphere of enthusiasm, he made a lot of money. He sold more than fifty inventions, until poor health made him give up his factory. His first patent was granted in 1869, for the invention of an electric vote recorder.

Self Employed

By now Thomas Edison (in his thirties) had a family and he moved them to a small house with a big laboratory. He thought nothing of working five days and nights without sleep. Most of the time, his wife and children dined alone, for the ’wizard’ as he was called, was never to be disturbed. He ate when he was hungry and rested when he was tired, working eighteen to nineteen hours a day. He was as fanatical about his work as some people are about football.

His diligence (hard work) paid off. He worked on some of his inventions for years, trying to perfect them and spent a lot of money on them, using this motto: ’be sure they are needed or wanted, then go ahead’. In this way, he made more than a thousand inventions: the phonograph (an early form of record player 1878), the long distance telephone, the Edison battery, the carbon microphone used in the telephone and the kinema (a system for making moving motion picture) are a few of the inventions that owe much to Edison. He holds about 1,093 patents for new inventions.

Becoming rich and famous

In 1879, Edison and consulting electrical engineer William Hammer (building on the work of others such as Joseph Swan), invented the electric light bulb. The long lasting, incandescent electric light bulb made him rich, but cost him years and vast expense to perfect. He sent men round the world to get the right filament (you pass an electric current through the filament to make the bulb hot). In 1880, Mento Park was first illuminated, followed by a huge electric station, which lit Orange New Jersey. Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878 in New York, with the help of financial backers.

Edison received great honours and many medals for his work. In 1915, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for physics. Wealth and fame did not take away his love of work. It has been said that the secret of his success was due to his ability to spend years of slow, patient experiment on some trivial and uninteresting problem. Edison, a genius of a thousand inventions, had unshakable optimism, a wonderful imagination and these qualities in his character distinguished him from ordinary people. He died in 1931 at the age of eighty-four years. He was famous for the words, ’Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration.’