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Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation , mass communication , sound recording , and motion pictures. [ 4 ]
Most of these inventions were not completely original but improvements of earlier inventions. However, one of Edison's major innovations was the first industrial research and development lab, which was built in Menlo Park and West Orange. Throughout the 20th century, Edison was the world's most prolific inventor. At the beginning of the century ...
He became one of the world's earliest experts in electric power distribution. He also built the world's first advertising sign using incandescent electric lights. [ 4 ] He was chief engineer when the English Edison Electric Light company built a central station in London to power 3,000 incandescent lamps on the Holborn Viaduct .
Russian engineer Pavel Yablochkov invented the electric carbon arc lamp. 1876: Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. 1877: American inventor Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. 1877: German industrialist Werner von Siemens developed a primitive loudspeaker. 1878: First electric street lighting in Paris, France 1878
To satisfy this demand, Edison invented the electric pen, which uses a perforating function inspired by the printing telegraph. Edison and his associate Charles Batchelor observed that as this device punctured the paper, a mark was left underneath by its chemical solution. Edison took advantage of this property and built the electric pen around it.
Edison invented by repeatedly trying devices in more complex environments to progressively approximate their final use conditions. Edison blended invention with economics. His electric lighting system was designed to be an economic competitor with gas lighting. Edison assembled and organized the resources that would lead to successful inventions:
William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet in 1825. [19] Electromagnets were then used in the first practical engineering application of electricity by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone who co-developed a telegraph system that used a number of needles on a board which were moved to point to letters of the alphabet. A five needle ...
The war of the currents was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It grew out of two lighting systems developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s: arc lamp street lighting running on high-voltage alternating current (AC), and large-scale low-voltage direct current (DC) indoor incandescent lighting ...