Plan: Ali, Muhammad

Edison, Thomas Alva

When Thomas Edison was only 7 years old, he was expelled from his school because the headmaster thought he was too slow to learn. His mother then taught him at home and encouraged his interest in science. By the time he was 10 he had made his own laboratory. At the age of 12 he began to sell newspapers and sweets in the carriages of the new railway trains. He set up a laboratory in the luggage van so that he could do experiments while the train was in the station. He later started working as a telegraph operator, but he continued doing experiments in his spare time.

Edison set up his own telegraph company before setting up a research laboratory, which he called his ‘invention factory’. He used to boast that this laboratory made a small invention every ten days and a big one every six months. In total, Edison patented over 1000 inventions. One of the most important was the world's first machine for recording sounds, the phonograph. The whole of our modern recording industry, for both pop and classical music, developed from this invention.
Edison also helped to invent the electric lamp. The English inventor J. W. Swan had pioneered the work on electric lamps some 20 years earlier. The lamp consisted of a wire inside a glass bulb from which all the air had been taken out to create a vacuum. When an electric current was passed through the wire, called a filament, it glowed white hot and so gave out light. While he was experimenting, Edison found that a current could also flow across the vacuum to a plate inside the bulb. He did not understand why, but we know today it is due to electrons escaping from the filament: it is known now as the Edison effect. This discovery led to the invention of the electronic valve (used before transistors and microchips) and was really the beginning of the whole of our modern electronics industry.