Edison how many inventions

That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in , he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days.

There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter.

Not all these inventions worked or made money. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be; his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed; and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone.

His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household—plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families. His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan.

Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life. Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. People had been making wires incandesce since , and plenty of other inventors had demonstrated and even patented various versions of incandescent lights by , when Edison turned his attention to the problem of illumination.

Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification. That early endeavor only ever earned him the ire of his mother, who fretted about explosions, so, at thirteen, the young entrepreneur started selling snacks to passengers travelling on the local railroad line from Port Huron to Detroit. He also picked up copies of the Detroit Free Press to hawk on the way home. In , after the Battle of Shiloh, he bought a thousand copies, knowing he would sell them all, and marked up the price more and more the farther he got down the line.

While still in his teens, he bought a portable letterpress and started printing his own newspaper aboard the moving train, filling two sides of a broadsheet with local sundries. Its circulation rose to four hundred a week, and Edison took over much of the baggage car. He built a small chemistry laboratory there, too. Forced out of newspapering, Edison spent the next few years as a telegrapher for Western Union and other companies, taking jobs wherever he could find them—Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky.

He had time to experiment on the side, and he patented his first invention in an electric vote recorder that eliminated the need for roll call by instantly tallying votes. It worked so well that no legislative body wanted it, because it left no time for lobbying amid the yeas and nays. Later, he was able to salvage the process into a better method for producing cement.

Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. His interest in motion pictures began years earlier, when he and an associate named W. Dickson developed a Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device.

Among the first of these was The Great Train Robbery , released in As the automobile industry began to grow, Edison worked on developing a suitable storage battery that could power an electric car. Though the gasoline-powered engine eventually prevailed, Edison designed a battery for the self-starter on the Model T for friend and admirer Henry Ford in The system was used extensively in the auto industry for decades. During World War I, the U. Edison worked on several projects, including submarine detectors and gun-location techniques.

However, due to his moral indignation toward violence, he specified that he would work only on defensive weapons, later noting, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. By the end of the s, Edison was in his 80s. He and his second wife, Mina, spent part of their time at their winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida, where his friendship with automobile tycoon Henry Ford flourished and he continued to work on several projects, ranging from electric trains to finding a domestic source for natural rubber.

During his lifetime, Edison received 1, U. He executed his first patent for his Electrographic Vote-Recorder on October 13, , at the age of His last patent was for an apparatus for holding objects during the electroplating process. Edison became embroiled in a longstanding rivalry with Nikola Tesla , an engineering visionary with academic training who worked with Edison's company for a time. The two parted ways in and would publicly clash in the " War of the Currents " about the use of direct current electricity, which Edison favored, vs.

Tesla then entered into a partnership with George Westinghouse, an Edison competitor, resulting in a major business feud over electrical power. One of the unusual - and cruel - methods Edison used to convince people of the dangers of alternating current was through public demonstrations where animals were electrocuted.

One of the most infamous of these shows was the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy on New York's Coney Island. He was 84 years old. Many communities and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical power to commemorate his passing.

Edison's career was the quintessential rags-to-riches success story that made him a folk hero in America. An uninhibited egoist, he could be a tyrant to employees and ruthless to competitors. But by the time he died, Edison was one of the most well-known and respected Americans in the world.

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in , hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic.

The first problems with the invention were purely cosmetic: the electric pen was noisy, and much heavier than those employees had used in the past. But even after Edison improved the sound and weight, problems persisted. The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar.

By , Edison was involved in the telephone and thinking about what would eventually become the phonograph; he abandoned the project, assigning the rights to Western Electric Manufacturing Co. Edison received pen royalties into the early s.

Albert B. Edison debuted one of his most successful inventions, the phonograph, in But getting a perfected machine to market was a journey that took nearly a decade—and plenty of trial and error. According to DeGraaf, Edison was handling the thin diaphragm the early telephone used to convert words into electromagnetic waves and wondered if reversing the process would allow him to play the words back.

It worked. At first, Edison modeled the invention on spools of paper tape or grooved paper discs, but eventually moved on to a tinfoil disc. He developed a hand-cranked machine called the tinfoil phonograph; as he spoke into the machine and cranked the handle, metal points traced grooves into the disc. When he returned the disc to the starting point and cranked the handle again, his voice rang back from the machine. Reporters and scientists were blown away by the invention; DeGraaf argues it helped make Edison a household name.

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. In , Edison filed a patent for preserving fruits and other organic materials by keeping them sealed in an air-tight glass vessel that sounds like modern-day Tupperware. Reader's Digest noted that Edison's last breath was captured in a test tube using similar technology, and it's on display at the Henry Ford museum.

One of these included a talking doll for children. Inspired by his phonography, Edison created a smaller version of the device and placed it inside imported dolls from Germany. His original intention was to have the dolls ready for sale Christmas that same year, but production failures pushed back their release until According to the National Park Service , Edison wrote in October "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.

And sure enough, he succeeded. By , Edison and a team of scientists invented the first motion picture camera , and by , the first movie theater opened in New York City.

Other inventors contributed to the development of movie cameras and theaters, but Edison is often called "the father of motion pictures.

After receiving early success from the motion picture camera, Edison set out to create movie projectors , which he called kinetoscopes, that could be used in homes or schools. But this invention wasn't nearly as successful. The machines were too expensive, and only of the original 2, sold. Edison was a huge supporter of clean energy technologies, and in he unveiled the " Twentieth Century Suburban Residence ," a completely self-sufficient and "off the grid" home. Each part of the prototype house was powered by his own batteries and a small-scale generator, which charged a bank cells in the basement.

For this first trial, Edison used a gas-run motor, but documents suggest he was interested in switching to wind power. Toward the end of his life, The New York Times reported the green energy enthusiast saying, "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. In , Edison patented an entire system to mass-produce concrete houses.

Edison was interested in creating a cost-effective prototype for working class homes, and the idea was to create houses in one swift concrete pour. These homes measured 25 by 30 by 40 feet high , and were considered largely a failure due to the difficulty in producing the reusable metal molds required to make them. But Edison did manage to build some of these homes near his laboratories in New Jersey, and many of them still stand today. In , Edison became intrigued with ideas of the afterlife, and he set out to create a device that could be used to communicate with the dead.

The invention is thought to have come from a time when Edison was going head to head with Nikola Tesla, who had also been experimenting with contacting spirits.