Thomas Alva Edison: 20th Century Genius - Essay Example

Thomas Alva Edison: 20th Century Genius When thinking about a nominee for the 20th Century Genius Award, logic dictates a certainroute to follow, for a person would only qualify by meeting certain qualifications. These qualifications are essentially threefold: 1) their ideas must be intelligent, 2) these ideas must be practical enough to have been applied, and 3) the results must benefit humanity enough that the basis of the idea continues to be used. Yet a genius is defined most accurately by a certain intuition of thought and by thinking long and hard enough, one finds the proverbial light bulb over one's head. Without question, Thomas Alva Edison would qualify for the award, for, aside from inventing the light bulb, his inventions so revolutionized the world that their effects (and use) are still commonplace today. Through his multiplicity of ideas and fields of interest, Edison epitomizes the Age of Pluralism; the Modern Age can almost be defined through the turning point of his inventions, for Edison has ushered in a new world of possibilities in electronics, physics, chemistry and business. This paper shall focus on a small portion of Edison's works and their ramifications, with the intent of securing his nomination, and hopefully his chances of receiving, 20th Century Genius Award. L. J. Davis (2003) noted that "The early Industrial Revolution was the last time when an ordinary citizen was thought capable of understanding the natural world." (p. 169) as a partial explanation as to how Edison, a common man in manner, came to be regarded as a genius, and because of this, acquired an origin story. These early stories circulated partly from fact, partly from popular imagination, and partly from Edison own predilection towards self-promotion (Davis, 2003). Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio (Adair, 1996). Edison's time spent in school stretches from none at all to four years, depending on the source or on Edison's mood (Davis, 2003), but his mother also exposed him to a wide range of books as well. A favorite, A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy by Richard Green Parker, included instructions for simple experiments, which Edison soon began performing in his bedroom. At 12, Edison began riding the trains, selling concessions and a self-printed newspaper (which he gleaned information for by befriending the telegraph operators). The conductor, Alexander Stevenson, allowed Edison to set up a small laboratory in the baggage car; a privilege revoked when he started a small fire. Popular legend maintains that Edison's partial deafness stems from Stevenson boxing his ears as punishment. Edison cites another incident, in which he was running to catch the train and Stevenson pulled him aboard by the ears. Edison claimed, "I felt something in my ears crack and right after that I began to go deaf." (Adair, 1996, p.32). The most probable cause for his deafness, however, is most likely due to multiple ear infections as a child, although the deafness did seem to begin manifesting around this time (Adair, 1996). In 1862, Edison saved the life of J. U. MacKenzie's three year old son (by pulling him off the tracks), and Mackenzie taught Edison the telegraph system, both out of gratitude and due to the latter's natural aptitude for the work (Baldwin, 1995). Edison's career as a telegraph operator from 1863 through 1868 allowed the him to gain a familiarity with the telegraph and with electricity in general that would form the basis for many of his forthcoming inventions. During this period, Edison quit or was fired from various positions due to his constant toying with equipment. After the failure of several small inventions, Edison arrived in New York City so poor that he obtained permission to sleep in the back room of the Gold Exchange company (where the brokerages met to keep track of stocks and the current gold value). When the ticker broke and caused panic, Edison was able to fix it and essentially hired on the spot (Baldwin, 1995, p.47). Edison's first successful invention was an improved stock ticker, which received enough money that he was able to open up his own shop for inventing in Newark. With the invention of a quadruplex telegraph - a device that not only allowed simultaneous transmission in both directions on the line, but allowed two transmissions both way, effectively multiplying the number of telegraphs available - under contract for Western Union (Davis, 2003), Edison was able to turn his attention exclusively to invention, moving his operations to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to found what he called an "invention factory" in 1876 (Hughes, 1989, p.56). Edison's plan for Menlo Park was to eventually include an office, a scientific and technical library, laboratories (one for chemistry and one for electrical testing), two shops (one for machinery and one for carpentry) and glass blowing facilities (Hughes, 1989). Robert Silverberg (1967) noted Edison's goal to produce "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so." (King, 1995, p.13), a goal somewhat validated by the 400 patents Edison procured during this six year period (Pretzer, 2001, p.16). The first significant project was again for Western Union, who wanted Edison to develop a speaking telegraph to compete with the new telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell. While unable to dislodge Bell's invention, Edison focused on its primary weakness: a poor transmitter (King, 1995, p.15). Bell's design involved a membrane holding a needle suspended in a small cup of mercury. When the membrane vibrated with sound, the needle would move in the liquid, thereby creating a broken series of electrical pulses. Bell's second attempt was essentially the same, he merely replaced the liquid method with an electromagnetic version. The microphone was still poor (Carlson and Gorman, 2001, p.87-88). Edison's transmitter used a carbon plate as a membrane, the vibrations of which directly created pulses in the electrical current (Carlson and Gorman, 2001, p.94-95). The results were so superior that this method is still in use today. George Parsons Lathrop (1890) found out while interviewing Edison for the Harper's Monthly that just prior to working on the transmitter, Edison had been working on a recording device for the telegraph when he noticed that the needle made a noise when drawn across a previous indentation (King, 1995, p.19). This thought returned to him while working on the telephone membrane. Rigging up a megaphone apparatus to a cylinder wrapped in tin, Edison proceeded to develop the phonograph, the first machine ever to record and reproduce actual sound. The development of this completely new invention secured Edison international fame; it was instantly a sensation, despite Edison quickly placing to the side without further improvement for the next ten years. (Davis, 2003). Edison was focusing on a new challenge and a new medium: light. With the invention of the phonograph, Edison became known as "the Wizard of Menlo Park" (Hughes, 1989, p.56). The Wizard did not actually invent electric lighting, but he did design the most practical version and invented both means of producing it and means of making it both practical and commercial. Electric lighting had been discovered and toyed with for over seventy years and came in two forms: arc lighting (which created a blinding spark between two electrified carbon rods) and incandescent lighting (by which energy was passed through a substance until the medium heated enough to give off light). Edison focused on the latter, abandoning the commonly used platinum (which would eventually melt) for a carbon based filament, which through trial and error he discovered to be best provided by a small piece of bamboo (to later be replaced by the tungsten filament of today). Not only having to design the filament, Edison had to invent his own method of creating a vacuum in the bulb itself, for the absence of oxygen significantly extended the life of the filaments (Flatow, 1992, pp.103-108). But what set Edison 'light-years' ahead of his competition was envisioning a distribution system by which the electric light might be made available to the public. Founding the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878 and using dynamos as generators, Edison mimicked the water pipe systems to distribute power from a Pearl Street location in New York to Wall Street and a surrounding mile radius. The Pearl Street Station was destroyed by a fire in 1890, but Edison's model, based on a direct current distribution system, was by then reproduced in locations across Europe and North America (Hughes, 1989, pp.58-59). In 1886, Edison left Menlo Park to the even larger 'factory' of West Orange (Millard, 1990, p.77). Having by then created recorded sound (and soon to perfect it further for commercial purposes) as well as having entered the medium of the visual with his light bulb and distribution system, Edison began contemplating some form of visual recording, preferably accompanied with sound. Here, in 1887, Edison began to experiment with the wet-plates used then for photography. Using the new product of celluloid, Edison and his team developed a mechanism whose cogs, when run through perforations on a length of celluloid, allowed an exposure of twenty to forty frames per second. This was the origins of Edison's Kinetescope, which was first exhibited at the Chicago's World Fair of 1893 (Edison, 1948). The Kinetescope allowed an observer to view the film through a small peephole; Edison reluctantly turned to projection only after other film makers began to do so. Edison's company produced the first film with a storyline, thus founding both the technology for and the path down which the movie industry would eventually follow (King, 1995, p.77). Edison's volume and range of inventions was both unprecedented and never again reached. His creation of sound recording and development of the motion picture have both boomed into multi-billion dollar industries. His invention factory at Menlo Park served as the model for all industrial Research and Development departments. The carbon plate phone transmitter is still in use after over a century, while Edison's vision of electricity distribution and the light bulb have forever changed the world, moving it from the Industrial Revolution and into the Modern Age. With so many inventions still in circulation and, for those now obsolete, serving as the springboard for modern designs, Thomas Alva Edison indisputably qualifies for the 20th Century Genius Award. No other figure is recognized for such a wide influence in such a multitude of fields, and while many of these discoveries would have undoubtedly been discovered at some point, the sheer volume produced by one man undoubtedly defines him as a creative and technical 'genius'. Works Cited Adair, Gene. (1996). A Teenaged Businessman. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.29-35). Baldwin, Neil. (1995). A Vagabond Telegrapher. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.36-44). Carlson, W. Bernard and Michael E. Gorman. (2001). Thinking and Doing at Menlo Park: Edison's Development of the Telephone, 1876-1878. In William S. Pretzer (Ed.) Working at Inventing. Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press. (pp.84-99). Davis, L.J. (2003). Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing. Edison, Thomas Alva. (1948). Motion Pictures: The New Revolution. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.136-147). Flatow, Ira. (1992). Edison's Role in the Electric Light. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.100-111). Hughes, Thomas P. (1989). Committing to Inventing: Menlo Park and Pearl Street Station. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.54-62). King, David C. (1995). Thomas Alva Edison: the King of Inventors. Lowell: Discovery Enterprises, Ltd. Millard, Andre. (1990). Creating the West Orange Lab. In Carol Cramer (Ed.) Thomas Edison. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc. (pp.75-89). Pretzer, William S. (2001). Introduction: the Meanings of the Two Menlo Parks. In William S. Pretzer (Ed.) Working at Inventing. Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press. (pp.12-31). Read More