CHAPTER 1 FOURTEEN HOURS LI ix weeks In September 1878 Thomas Edison told the group of newspaper reporters who came to his Menlo Park New Jersey laboratory he needed six weeks In that time he would invent a reliable light bulb Not only that he would also create a power system that would make the light bulb usable Edison was already a famous and respected inventor when he made his declaration to the press Among other things he had invented the phonograph and improved the stock ticker Even with his proven record as an inventor Edison's goal for the light bulb was huge
NV Thomas Edison in 1878 The phonograph was one of the many inventions he would I create or perfect during his
THOMAS EDISON Thomas Edison was born in Ohio in 1847 The Edison family moved to Michigan in 1854 Young Edison was a bright student and tended to exasperate his teachers with his constant questions His mother took over the job of teaching him and Edison later credited her with his interest in learning Soon he developed an interest in the sciences as well as in making money By age 12 Edison was selling newspapers and snacks on a nearby train that ran between Port Huron and Detroit His interest in telegraphy and learning from telegraph operators along the railroad line led to his first telegraph job Edison learned Morse code a system of tapping in dot and dash patterns that correspond to letters By age 16 Edison had come up with his first invention a machine that would automatically transmit the Morse code used by telegraph machines Edison never attended college but he went on to invent many other machines ultimately collecting more than 1 000 patents His favorite invention was the phonograph which could record and produce sounds He married twice his first wife died and had six children Two of them had the nicknames Dot and Dash after his work with Morse code The reporters returned to New York and published Edison s claim When the news went public the gas companies that supplied the fuel for the gaslights that lit most of the United States took a hit on the stock market which tracks the financial worth of various companies Then everyone settled in to wait Six weeks passed No light bulb Six months passed No light bulb 8
Finding a Filament As the weeks and then months passed Edison was far behind his original schedule but he was not discouraged He did not believe failure was a setback Rather he saw it as a necessary step on the path to success This problem however had many thousands of steps Edison was not the first inventor to experiment with incandescent light The idea was already 40 years in development by the time he turned his attention to it Incandescent lights operate by passing an electric current through a material called a filament The flow of electrons produces heat and as the filament gets hotter it glows The whole apparatus is encased in a glass bulb from which the air has been removed By creating this vacuum environment the materials in the filament are unable to chemically react with the surrounding air and break down The heat itself though causes the filament to deteriorate and most of the early incandescent lamps lasted only a short time before the filament burned through These early light bulbs were novel interesting things to look at but they weren't very practical No one could read a book or mend a shirt or do anything else useful in the few minutes some of the lamps provided light The ones that did last longer were expensive to manufacture and distribute Edison knew he had to find a way to make a working light bulb that would last considerably longer while also staying affordable His first task was to create efficient vacuum 9
