Before the light bulb, teenage Edison published a newspaper on a moving train
At 13, Thomas Edison was selling newspapers, candy and vegetables on trains between Port Huron and Detroit, clearing about 50 dollars a week and spending it on chemicals and wires. He even printed his own paper, the Grand Trunk Herald, with 500 subscribers. That hustle foreshadowed a career of 1,093 American patents.
Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, the youngest of seven children, Edison moved with his family to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854. He spent only a few months in school; his mother, a former teacher, taught him, and a science compendium she gave him sparked his tinkering. Hearing trouble began around age 12, likely from scarlet fever and untreated ear infections, leaving him deaf in one ear. As an adult he claimed deafness helped him concentrate. As a night telegrapher in Ontario he dozed and experimented on duty until two trains nearly collided, and he quit.
Between 1863 and 1869 he drifted through telegraph jobs across several states. His first patent, granted on June 1, 1869, covered an electric vote recorder. In New York he partnered with Franklin Pope, and in 1874 he received 30,000 dollars for the quadruplex telegraph, which sent four messages over one wire at once. That sale paid for Menlo Park, New Jersey, built in 1876 and often called the first industrial research laboratory; the township was later renamed after him.
Menlo Park made him famous. His 1877 phonograph, recording onto tinfoil around a grooved cylinder, seemed almost magical and earned him the title Wizard of Menlo Park, though he preferred to credit 99 percent perspiration. For a carbon telephone microphone he tested 150 materials, favouring parchment and tinfoil for the diaphragm. Staff often worked 18-hour days, and Edison collected credit for much that they invented, averaging a patent every 10 to 12 days.
From 1878 he pursued electric lighting to replace gas lamps, but competition with Westinghouse's alternating current forced him to give ground, and a merger produced General Electric. A mining venture nearly bankrupted him, after which he turned to cement, batteries, records and early motion pictures. His final obsession was finding a domestic source of rubber. He died in 1931, and his son Charles took over the business.
Source: Thomas Edison
