Thomas Edison

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Thomas Edison

Nancy Elliot moved to Vienna, Canada where she met Sam Edison Jr. They later married and moved to Milan, Ohio because Sam was a Canadian political firebrand who was exiled from his country. After they moved, Nancy and Sam had seven kids. The last kid they have was Thomas Alva Edison, who was born on February 11, 1847. Growing up, Edison and his family were poor. They didn’t make a lot of money to fit all seven of their kid’s needs. Furious, Nancy took him out of school and homeschooled him because a school master called him “addled”.

When Edison was 7 they moved to Port Huron looking for jobs that paid more than their regular salary. At the age of 12, Edison began working on a local branch of the Grand Trunk Railroad selling newspapers, magazines, and candy. In one of the baggage cars, Edison conducted a laboratory for his experiments. He also made a Printing room, which led to the first newspaper published on a train, called Grand Trunk Herald.  When he was 12, he also lost almost all of his hearing. They thought his hearing disappeared either by the scarlet fever he had as a baby, the conductor boxing his ears after he caused a fire in the baggage car, or by Edison’s saying it’s from an incident where he was grabbed by his ears and lifted to a train.

In 1862 Edison rescued a 3 year old from a track where a boxcar was about to roll onto him, as a reward for saving him, his grandfather, J.U. MacKenzie, taught him railroad telegraphy as a reward. That winter he took a job as a telegraph operator in Port Huron, and on the side he did his experiments. From 1863 to 1867, Edison went from city to city in the United States taking available telegraph jobs. In 1869, he moved to Boston where he worked in the Western union office and worked his inventions more. But, In 1869 Edison resigned his job, and devoted all of his time to inventing things. His first invention to receive a patent was the Electric Vote Recorder, in June 1869. No one was using his machine, so he vowed to only invent things that people would use.

Just as his success is rising, in 1871 Edison’s mother died. More than a year later, he married a former employee, Mary Stilwell, on Christmas day. He loved his wife, but their relationship was difficult, mostly because of Edison’s preoccupation with work and Mary’s constant illness.  Edison’s first child Marion was born in February 1873, followed by, Thomas Jr., which was born in January 1876. Edison referred to Marion and Thomas Jr. as “dot” and “Dash”. But the came along his third child, William Leslie, which was born in October 1878.

While experimenting with the telephone and telegraph, he made the first phonograph in 1877. But soon the glory ended, when his wife died from a possible brain tumor on August 9, 1884.Two years later, he then remarried to Mina Miller on February 24, 1886. After he moved to a large mansion named Glenmont in West Orange, New Jersey. After the marriage, his kids became distant. Mina and Edison made their own family. Madeline born in 1888, Charles born in 1890, and Theodore born in 1898.

Not only was Edison an inventor, but he also had an interest in ore-mining. In 1887, he was experimenting on the electromagnetic separation and concentration of low-grade iron and gold ores. In the 1890s he built a full scale plant in northern New Jersey to process iron ore. After a while he gave up on mining because he missed inventing things. In 1877 Edison built an industrial research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Him and William Dickson from 1888 till 1893 worked on a motion picture camera, called a kinetograph. By 1918, Edison ended his involved in the making of the motion picture field.

In 1915 he was named head of the Naval Consulting Board, because he felt that technology would be the future war. But five years later Edison’s health became worse. He began to spend more time with his wife because he knew he would be alive much longer. For the last two years of his life, his ailments caused his health to decline even more until he elapsed into a coma on October 18, 1931, at his estate, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey. He passed away on October 18, 1931.