He demonstrated his light bulb in December Swan incorporated the improvement into his light bulbs and founded an electrical lighting company in England. Swan wasn't the only competitor Edison faced. In , Canadian inventors Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans filed a patent for an electric lamp with different-sized carbon rods held between electrodes in a glass cylinder filled with nitrogen.
The pair tried, unsuccessfully, to commercialize their lamps but eventually sold their patent to Edison in The company was started with financial contributions from J.
Morgan and other wealthy investors of the time. The company constructed the first electrical generating stations that would power electrical system and newly patented bulbs. The first generating station was opened in September on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan.
Other inventors, such as William Sawyer and Albon Man, threw in the towel, merging their company with Edison's to form General Electric, according to the U. Department of Energy DOE. Where Edison succeeded and surpassed his competition was in developing a practical and inexpensive light bulb , according to the DOE. Edison and his team of researchers in Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park, N.
In November , Edison filed a patent for an electric lamp with a carbon filament. The patent listed several materials that might be used for the filament, including cotton, linen and wood. Edison spent the next year finding the perfect filament for his new bulb, testing more than 6, plants to determine which material would burn the longest. Several months after the patent was granted, Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could burn for more than 1, hours. Bamboo was used for the filaments in Edison's bulbs until it began to be replaced by longer-lasting materials in the s and early s.
In , Lewis Howard Latimer, one of Edison's researchers, patented a more efficient way of manufacturing carbon filaments. And in , Willis R. And although his accomplishments spoke for themselves, Edison was equally prolific, and ambitious, in inventing myths to boost his reputation as a larger-than-life innovator, as a TIME profile notes.
For one thing, he often claimed to be entirely self-taught, having never attended a day of school. He also boasted of never needing more than three hours of sleep a night. Per TIME:. When the Ford Motor Co. In some of these photos, Ford seemed attentive and alert, but Edison could be seen asleep — on a bench, in a chair, on the grass.
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 In the interim, he had had success developing an alkaline storage battery, which he originally worked on as a power source for the phonograph but later supplied for submarines and electric vehicles.
In , automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T. The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs.
Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator , Edison continued working into his 80s. His rise from poor, uneducated railroad worker to one of the most famous men in the world made him a folk hero. More than any other individual, he was credited with building the framework for modern technology and society in the age of electricity. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in , when he was just 21 years old. That was just the start of a career in which he would obtain 1, U. Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.
He invented the first alternating current AC motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf.
0コメント