Thomas Edison Essay -- essays research papers

doubting Thomas Alva Edison is considered one of the greatest inventors in history. He was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847 and died in 1931. During his life he patented 1,093 inventions. Many of these inventions are in use forthwith and changed the world forever. Some of his inventions include telegraphy, phonography, electric spark and photography. His most famous inventions were the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb.Edison did some of his greatest work at Menlo Park. While experimenting on an underwater cable for the instinctive telegraph, he found that the electrical resistance and conductivity of carbon alter accordingly to the pressure it was under. This was a major theoretical discovery, which enabled Edison to invent a "pressure relay" using carbon rather than magnets, which was the usual stylus to vary and balance electrical currents. In February of 1877 Edison began experiments designed to produce a pressure relay that would amplify and improv e the audibility of the telephone, a thingmajig that Edison and others had studied merely which Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent, in 1876. By the end of 1877 Edison had developed the carbon-button vector that is still used today in telephone speakers and microphones.Many of Thomas Edisons inventions including the carbon transmitter were in response to demands for new products and improvements. In 1877, he achieved his most unmatched discovery, the phonograph. During the summer of 1877 Edison was attempting to devise for the automatic telegraph a machine that would put down a signals as they were received into a form of the human vowel system so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. Some researchers had theorized that severally sound, if it could be graphically recorded, would produce a distinct shape resembling rook hand, or phonography, as it was known then. Edison hoped to make this concept real by employing a stylus-tipped carbon transmitte r to make impressions on a plunder of paraffined theme. To his amazement, the barley visible indentations generated a vague sound when the paper was pulled game beneath the stylus. In December 1877 Edison unveiled the tinfoil phonograph, which replaced the strip of paper wrapped in tinfoil. Many people would not believe what they were comprehend including a leading French scientist who declared it to be a misrepresentation device of a ventri... ...ed whether something might be done, only how.Edisons career, the fulfillment of the American dream of rags-to-riches through hard work and intelligence, made him a folk hero to his countrymen. In temperament he was an uninhibited egotist, at once a tyrant to his employees and their most entertaining companion, so that thither was never a dull moment with him. He was charismatic and courted publicity, but he had difficulty socializing and neglected his family. His shafts at the expense of the " hirsute" fraternity of theorist s sometimes led formally trained scientists to depreciate him as anti-intellectual yet he employed as his aides, at respective(a) times a number of eminent mathematical physicists, such(prenominal) as Nicole Tesla and A.E. Kennelly. The contradictory nature of his forceful personality, as well as such eccentricities as his ability to catnap anywhere, contributed to his legendary status. By the time he was in his middle 30s Edison was said to be the best-known American in the world. When he died he was the venerated and mourned as the man who, more than any other, had displace the basis for the technological and social revolution of the modern electrical world.