# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thomas Edison's Early Life

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the seventh and last child born to Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliott Edison, and would be one of four to survive to adulthood. At age 12, he developed hearing loss-he was reportedly deaf in one ear, and nearly deaf in the other-which was variously attributed to scarlet fever, mastoiditis or a blow to the head.

Thomas Edison received little formal education, and left school in 1859 to begin working on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, where his family then lived. By selling food and newspapers to train passengers, he was able to net about $50 profit each week, a substantial income at the time-especially for a 13-year-old.

Did you know? By the time he died at age 84 on October 18, 1931, Thomas Edison had amassed a record 1,093 patents: 389 for electric light and power, 195 for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for storage batteries and 34 for the telephone.

During the Civil War, Edison learned the emerging technology of telegraphy, and traveled around the country working as a telegrapher. But with the development of auditory signals for the telegraph, he was soon at a disadvantage as a telegrapher.

To address this problem, Edison began to work on inventing devices that would help make things possible for him despite his deafness (including a printer that would convert electrical telegraph signals to letters). In early 1869, he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time.

Edison in Menlo Park

From 1870 to 1875, Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey, where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company (then the industry leader) and its rivals. Edison's mother died in 1871, and that same year he married 16-year-old Mary Stillwell.

Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late 1875, but one year later-with the help of his father-Edison was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark.

With the success of his Menlo Park "invention factory," some historians credit Edison as the inventor of the research and development (R&D) lab, a collaborative, team-based model later copied by AT&T at Bell Labs, the DuPont Experimental Station, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and other R&D centers.

In 1877, Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity.

That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced. The device made an immediate splash, though it took years before it could be produced and sold commercially.

Edison and the Light Bulb

In 1878, Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight-a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of prominent financial backers like J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family, Edison set up the Edison Electric Light Company and began research and development.

He made a breakthrough in October 1879 with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of 1880 hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb. In 1881, he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family (which by now included three children) to New York.

Though Edison's early incandescent lighting systems had their problems, they were used in such acclaimed events as the Paris Lighting Exhibition in 1881 and the Crystal Palace in London in 1882.

Competitors soon emerged, notably George Westinghouse, a proponent of alternating or AC current (as opposed to Edison's direct or DC current). By 1889, AC current would come to dominate the field, and the Edison General Electric Co. merged with another company in 1892 to become General Electric.

Later Years and Inventions

Edison's wife, Mary, died in August 1884, and in February 1886 he remarried Mirna Miller; they would have three children together. He built a large estate called Glenmont and a research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking.

Spurred on by others' work on improving the phonograph, he began working toward producing a commercial model. He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K.L. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in 1891.

After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by 1918. In the interim, he had had success developing an alkaline storage battery, which he originally worked on as a power source for the phonograph but later supplied for submarines and electric vehicles.

In 1912, automaker Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for the self-starter, which would be introduced on the iconic Model T. The collaboration began a continuing relationship between the two great American entrepreneurs.

Despite the relatively limited success of his later inventions (including his long struggle to perfect a magnetic ore-separator), Edison continued working into his 80s. His rise from poor, uneducated railroad worker to one of the most famous men in the world made him a folk hero.

More than any other individual, he was credited with building the framework for modern technology and society in the age of electricity. His Glenmont estate-where he died in 1931-and West Orange laboratory are now open to the public as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

Sources

Thomas Edison's Greatest Invention. The Atlantic.
Life of Thomas Alva Edison. Library of Congress.
7 Epic Fails Brought to You by the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison. Smithsonian Magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Thomas Edison: Facts, House & Inventions - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor and businessman whose inventions include the phonograph, incandescent light bulb, motion picture camera and alkaline battery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Einstein's Early Life (1879-1904)

Born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, Albert Einstein grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Munich. As a child, Einstein became fascinated by music (he played the violin), mathematics and science. He dropped out of school in 1894 and moved to Switzerland, where he resumed his schooling and later gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. In 1896, he renounced his German citizenship, and remained officially stateless before becoming a Swiss citizen in 1901.

Did you know? Almost immediately after Albert Einstein learned of the atomic bomb's use in Japan, he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament. He formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and backed Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

While at Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein fell in love with his fellow student Mileva Maric, but his parents opposed the match and he lacked the money to marry. The couple had an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, born in early 1902, of whom little is known. After finding a position as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, Einstein married Maric in 1903; they would have two more children, Hans Albert (born 1904) and Eduard (born 1910).

Einstein's Miracle Year (1905)

While working at the patent office, Einstein did some of the most creative work of his life, producing no fewer than four groundbreaking articles in 1905 alone. In the first paper, he applied the quantum theory (developed by German physicist Max Planck) to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect, by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by light. The second article contained Einstein's experimental proof of the existence of atoms, which he got by analyzing the phenomenon of Brownian motion, in which tiny particles were suspended in water.

In the third and most famous article, titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Einstein confronted the apparent contradiction between two principal theories of physics: Isaac Newton's concepts of absolute space and time and James Clerk Maxwell's idea that the speed of light was a constant. To do this, Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, which held that the laws of physics are the same even for objects moving in different inertial frames (i.e. at constant speeds relative to each other), and that the speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames. A fourth paper concerned the fundamental relationship between mass and energy, concepts viewed previously as completely separate. Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 (where "c" was the constant speed of light) expressed this relationship.

From Zurich to Berlin (1906-1932)

Einstein continued working at the patent office until 1909, when he finally found a full-time academic post at the University of Zurich. In 1913, he arrived at the University of Berlin, where he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. The move coincided with the beginning of Einstein's romantic relationship with a cousin of his, Elsa Lowenthal, whom he would eventually marry after divorcing Mileva. In 1915, Einstein published the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterwork. This theory found that gravity, as well as motion, can affect time and space. According to Einstein's equivalence principle-which held that gravity's pull in one direction is equivalent to an acceleration of speed in the opposite direction-if light is bent by acceleration, it must also be bent by gravity. In 1919, two expeditions sent to perform experiments during a solar eclipse found that light rays from distant stars were deflected or bent by the gravity of the sun in just the way Einstein had predicted.

The general theory of relativity was the first major theory of gravity since Newton's, more than 250 years before, and the results made a tremendous splash worldwide, with the London Times proclaiming a "Revolution in Science" and a "New Theory of the Universe." Einstein began touring the world, speaking in front of crowds of thousands in the United States, Britain, France and Japan. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, as his work on relativity remained controversial at the time. Einstein soon began building on his theories to form a new science of cosmology, which held that the universe was dynamic instead of static, and was capable of expanding and contracting.

Einstein Moves to the United States (1933-39)

A longtime pacifist and a Jew, Einstein became the target of hostility in Weimar Germany, where many citizens were suffering plummeting economic fortunes in the aftermath of defeat in the Great War. In December 1932, a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein made the decision to emigrate to the United States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would never again enter the country of his birth.

By the time Einstein's wife Elsa died in 1936, he had been involved for more than a decade with his efforts to find a unified field theory, which would incorporate all the laws of the universe, and those of physics, into a single framework. In the process, Einstein became increasingly isolated from many of his colleagues, who were focused mainly on the quantum theory and its implications, rather than on relativity.

Einstein's Later Life (1939-1955)

In the late 1930s, Einstein's theories, including his equation E=mc2, helped form the basis of the development of the atomic bomb. In 1939, at the urging of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising him to approve funding for the development of uranium before Germany could gain the upper hand. Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940 but retained his Swiss citizenship, was never asked to participate in the resulting Manhattan Project, as the U.S. government suspected his socialist and pacifist views. In 1952, Einstein declined an offer extended by David Ben-Gurion, Israel's premier, to become president of Israel.

Throughout the last years of his life, Einstein continued his quest for a unified field theory. Though he published an article on the theory in Scientific American in 1950, it remained unfinished when he died, of an aortic aneurysm, five years later. In the decades following his death, Einstein's reputation and stature in the world of physics only grew, as physicists began to unravel the mystery of the so-called "strong force" (the missing piece of his unified field theory) and space satellites further verified the principles of his cosmology.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, Albert Einstein grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Munich. As a child, Einstein became fascinated by music (he played the violin), mathematics and science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Remarkably, he only worked on his invention because he misunderstood a technical work he had read in German. His misunderstanding ultimately led to his discovery of how speech could be transmitted electrically.

Alexander Graham Bell's Early Life, Early Inventions, and Education

Alexander Graham Bell was born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. His mother's name was Eliza Grace Symonds.

His father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a professor of speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh. His father also wrote definitive books about speech and elocution, which sold very well in the UK and North America.

The young Alexander was home-schooled until he was 11, following which he attended Edinburgh's Royal High School for four years: he enjoyed science, but did not do well academically.

Although his schoolwork was poor, his mind was very active. One day, he was playing at a flour mill owned by the family of a young friend. Bell learned that de-husking the wheat grains took a lot of effort and was also very boring. He saw that it would be possible for a machine to do the work, so he built one. He was only 12 at the time. The machine he built was used at the mill for several years.

Aged 15, he joined his grandfather who had moved to London, England. His grandfather home-schooled him, which seemed to bring out the best in Bell again. When he was 16, he enrolled at Weston House Academy in Elgin, Scotland, where he learned Greek and Latin and also earned some money teaching elocution.

While he was 16, he and his brother tried to build a talking robot. They built a windpipe and a realistic looking head. When they blew air through the windpipe, the mouth could make a small number of recognizable words.

For the next few years, Bell moved to a new school most years, either teaching elocution or improving his own education.

To Canada

While Bell moved around a lot, he continued to carry out his own research into sound and speech. He worked very hard indeed, and by the time he was 20 he was in very poor health and returned to his family home, which was now in London.

By mid-1870, when Bell was 23, both of his younger brothers had died of tuberculosis. Bell's parents were terrified that Alexander, whose health was fragile, would suffer a similar fate. He was now their only surviving child.

Bell's father had gone to Canada when he was younger and found that his poor health had improved dramatically. He now decided that what was left of his family should move to Canada, and by late 1870, they were living in Brantford, Ontario. Thankfully, Alexander Graham Bell's health began to improve.

While living in Brentford, Bell learned the Mohawk language and put it in writing for the first time. The Mohawk people made him an Honorary Chief.

And the United States

When he was 25, Bell opened his School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, MA, where he taught deaf people to speak. At age 26, although he did not have a university degree, he became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory.

The Invention of the Telephone

While he was moving jobs and locations around the UK and North America, Bell had developed an overriding desire to invent a machine that could reproduce human speech.

Speech had become his life: his mother had gone deaf, and Bell's father had developed a method of teaching deaf people to speak, which Bell also taught. His research into mechanizing human speech had become a relentless obsession: in the UK it had driven him almost to collapse.

When Bell was only 19 years old, he had described his work in a letter to the linguistics expert Alexander Ellis. Ellis told Bell his work was similar to work carried out in Germany by Hermann von Helmholtz.

A Mistake Puts Bell on the Right Track

Bell eagerly read Helmholtz's work, or tried to read it. It was in German, which he did not understand. Instead, he tried to follow the logic of the book's diagrams. Bell misunderstood the diagrams, believing that Helmholtz had been able to convert all of the sounds of speech to electricity.

In fact, Helmholtz had not been able to do this - he had only succeeded with vowel sounds - but from then on, Bell believed it could be done!

Aged 23, Bell built a workshop in the new family home in Ontario and experimented there with converting music into an electrical signal.

In Boston, aged 25, Bell continued his experiments through the night while working in the day. In summer, he would return to his workshop in Ontario and continue his experiments.

Financial Backing for a Voice Telegraph

In 1874 Bell was 26. The first electrical telegraph lines had been built forty years earlier, in the 1830s. These allowed electrical clicks (Morse code) to be instantly transmitted over great distances. Bell wanted to transmit human speech instead of clicks, and he was getting close to doing it.

He had found that human speech came in wave like patterns. He now hoped to produce an electrical wave that would follow the same patterns as someone's speech.

He won financial backing from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, two wealthy investors. Hubbard also brought in Anthony Pollok, his patent attorney. The money enabled Bell to hire Thomas Watson, a skilled electrical engineer, whose knowledge would complement Bell's.

Patenting the Telephone

Aged 27, in 1875, Bell and his investors decided the time had come to protect his intellectual property using patents.

Bell had a patent written for transmission of speech over an electrical wire. He applied for this patent in the UK, because in those days UK patents were granted only if they had not first been granted in another country. Bell told his attorney to apply in the USA only after the patent had been granted in the UK.

By 1876, things in the USA had become murkier. In February of that year, Elisha Gray applied for a US patent for a telephone which used a variable resistor based on a liquid: salt water.

In the transmitter, the liquid resistor transferred to an electric circuit the vibrations of a needle attached to a diaphragm which had been made to vibrate by sound. The electrical resistance of the circuit changed in tandem with the needle's position in the liquid, and so sound was converted into an equivalent electrical signal. The receiver converted the electrical signal back into sound using a vibrating needle in liquid connected to a diaphragm which vibrated to recreate the sound that had been transmitted.

On the same day, Bell's attorney filed his US patent application.

It was only in March 1876 that Bell actually got his invention to work, using a design similar to Gray's. Hence Gray lay claim to have invented the telephone.

On the other hand, Bell had established the concept before Gray, and in all demonstrations of a working phone Bell gave or developed commercially he used his own setup rather than a water based variable resistor. In fact, in 1875, Bell had filed a patent for a liquid mercury based variable resistor, predating Gray's liquid variable resistor patent.

Bell had to fend off around 600 lawsuits before he could finally rest in bed at night as the legally acknowledged inventor of the telephone.

"Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."

By summer 1876, Bell was transmitting telephone voice messages over a line several miles long in Ontario.

Making Money

Near the end of 1876, Bell and his investors offered to sell their patent to Western Union for $100,000. Western Union ran America's telegraph wires, and its top people believed the telephone was just a fad. They thought it would not be profitable.

How spectacularly wrong they were!

By 1878, Western Union's opinion had altered dramatically. They now thought that if they could offer $25 million to get the patent, they would have gotten it cheaply.

Unfortunately for Western Union, in 1877, the Bell Telephone Company had been launched. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Not Just the Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell had a restless mind. The telephone made him wealthy and famous, but he wanted new challenges, and he continued inventing and innovating.

The Photophone, or Optical Telephone

Today, it is standard practice to transmit huge amounts of data using photons of light through optical fiber.

In 1880, Bell and his assistant Charles Summer Tainter transmitted wireless voice messages a distance of over 200 meters in Washington D.C. The voice messages were carried by a light beam, and Bell patented the photophone. This was two decades before the first radio messages were sent without wires and a century before optic fiber communications became commercially viable.

The Metal Detector

In 1881, after President James Garfield was shot, Bell invented the metal detector to locate the bullet precisely. The rudimentary metal detector worked in tests, but the bullet in the President's body was too deep to be detected by the early detecting equipment.

National Geographic Society

In 1888 Bell was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. In 1897, he became its second president.

The End

Alexander Graham Bell died aged 75 on August 2, 1922 in Nova Scotia, Canada. He had been ill for some months with complications from diabetes. He was survived by his wife, Mabel, and two daughters - Elsie and Marian.

Every phone in North America was silenced during his funeral in his honor.

The unit of sound intensity, the bel, more usually seen as the smaller unit, the decibel, was named after Bell: it was conceived of in the Bell Laboratories.

Author of this page: The Doc
© All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Alexander Graham Bell." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 14 Sep. 2014. Web.
<www.famousscientists.org/alexander-graham-bell/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Remarkably, he only worked on his invention because he misunderstood a technical work he had read in German. His misunderstanding ultimately led to his discovery of how speech could be transmitted electrically. Alexander Graham Bell was born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Benjamin Franklin ‑ Biography, Inventions & Facts | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Benjamin Franklin (1706‑1790) was a statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, a Founding Father and a leading figure of early American history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1927) was an English mathematician and physicist who developed influential theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics. Years of research culminated with the 1687 publication of “Principia,” his landmark work that established the universal laws of motion and gravity.

# data[].attributes.body
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan OH. He was the seventh and last child born to Samuel Edison Jr. In his 84 years he acquired 1,093 patients. When Edison was in his 30's he was one of the most popular men in the world. In 1877 he developed the Carbon Transmitter.

# data[].attributes.body
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in the German city of Ulm. He died in 1904. He dropped out in 1894 and moved to Switzerland. In 1930 he invented what he calls the Einstein Refrigerator that requires no electricity.

# data[].attributes.body
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was 23 both of his younger brothers had died of tuberculosis. In 1886 he invented the Graphophone. the Graphophone was a improved version of Thomas Edison's Phonograph.