The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

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He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World.

Thomas Edison preferred to work on a night shift as it gave him plenty of time to read and experiment with his discoveries. His improvements on the lightbulb, for example, finally made it feasible for people everywhere to light their homes with electricity. Finally, on October 21, 1879, Edison’s light bulb burned for a continuous thirteen and a half hours. Villard was impressed and requested Edison install his electric lighting system aboard Villard's company's new steamer, the Columbia. Edison’s systems relied on direct current (DC)—which could only deliver electricity to a large number of buildings in a dense area.In that same year, Edison also constructed an office and library for himself at the corner of Christie Street and Woodbridge (Tower) Avenue. Cited in Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor Archived June 24, 2016, at the Wayback Machine by Sarah Miller Caldicott, Michael J. Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Edison at his winter retreat in Fort Myers.

Just months before his death, the Lackawanna Railroad inaugurated suburban electric train service from Hoboken to Montclair, Dover, and Gladstone, New Jersey. One of particular importance to Edison was phenol, which was used to make phonograph records—presumably as phenolic resins of the Bakelite type. Latimer worked with the luminaries of his time, including Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Hiram Maxim.

He claimed to sleep just four hours a night, said he didn’t believe in exercise, and reportedly subsisted on a diet of milk and cigars for years. Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, And The Race To Electrify The World, Random House – 2004, pp. But none has been more famous than his improvements to the light bulb, which brought light into the homes of people across the world. The father of the saved child worked as a station agent and offered to train Thomas Edison as a telegraph operator. He spent hours blowing glass tubes, which were laced with calcium tungstate, for an early model fluoroscope.