The Wizard of Menlo Park

He blew up a train car at the age of 12 after experimenting with it and became the greatest patent inventor. On Thomas Alva Edison and the invention of the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb

Adva Livni | Galileo

Do "schools not teach students to think"? When Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was expelled from school at the age of seven, no one could have imagined what ideas he would bring to the world as an adult. The incandescent light bulb, the power station (direct current), the phonograph, the talking doll and more - Edison registered 1,093 patents in the US alone, which are ideas that changed the world.

The curious boy studied at home with his mother and never stopped exploring the world. At the age of six he set fire to the barn "to see what would happen" and later spent a long time incubating on goose eggs, for the same reason. In 1859, when he was 12 years old, he broke into a business career as a candy and newspaper seller on the train and conducted experiments in the freight car. When the train exploded, he was fired from his job and began working as a telegraph operator.

The telegraph was the basis for many inventions related to communication - radio, telephone and fax - and provided Edison with an extensive field for his future work. Edison never acquired a formal scientific education. Science in itself did not interest him: he wanted to invent patents that would sell. One of his principles was: "If it can't be sold, I don't want to invent it."

Even before he turned thirty, Edison was known as the "Wizard of Menlo Park". In this quiet town in New Jersey, Edison built a patent manufacturing laboratory, to which he recruited scientists, engineers and technicians. These worked day and night on hundreds of inventions according to his vision.

The phonograph - to capture the sounds

In 1877, while looking for a way to record telegraphic transmissions, Edison accidentally discovered that he could record sound. When he attached a needle to the diaphragm of the telephone receiver into which he spoke, he noticed that the sound waves moved the needle. The needle engraved its vibrations on a cylinder coated with tin foil or wax, and when it moved in these grooves afterwards and oscillated at the frequency of the sound waves, the recorded sound was heard. "Mary Has a Little Sheep" was the first song ever recorded. It was the phonograph, the most beloved invention of Edison, who had been almost completely deaf since he was 12 years old.

The phonograph, also called the "talking machine", had two needles: a needle for recording and a needle for playback. The "record" was a wax roll that could play for two minutes. He heralded a new era, in which the importance of the written word decreases and "the best vocalists are recorded singing opera, and you can hear them over and over again."

Edison's competitors began to produce similar devices, which instead of using a cylinder, played music from flat discs, which were disc-shaped, and were relatively durable, easy to reproduce and player extensions. Encouraged by his assistants, who began secretly working on developing a phonograph for records, Edison abandoned the cylindrical phonograph. In 1911, he began distributing phonograph records that were made of extremely durable material and played high quality music. Edison enjoyed conducting sound tests, in which the gramophone competed in the dark with live music. On May 23, 1916, three of his patents, filed a few years before, on the record phonograph were finally accepted. Edison continued to work and improve the phonograph until 1929.

light up the world

In 1878, Edison began to think about ways to optimize the electric bulb and make it cheaper (in relation to the arc lamps, which were common in Europe at the time, and in relation to previous attempts to produce an incandescent bulb).

Edison aspired to light the world with electric bulbs, so that "only the rich could afford to light their homes with candles". His laboratory scientists worked hard to find the perfect filament, which would be able to glow for a long enough time. For a whole year they tried hundreds of materials: from coconut fibers to gold. Finally they discovered that carbonized cotton fiber can burn for up to 13.5 hours. Edison performed the first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb on New Year's Eve of 1879, heralding the beginning of the electric age.

On May 2, 1880, 115 Edison light bulbs illuminated the passenger halls of the steamship "Columbia". This was the first commercial order of Edison bulbs, and all the bulbs survived the two-month voyage from New York to San Francisco. The lighting system continued to operate on the ship successfully for 15 years (with bulbs replaced, of course).

Many of Edison's inventions happened to him while he was looking for something else. He was proud to always start where others left off, and declared that "the fact that something doesn't do what you planned it to do, doesn't mean it's useless."

Henry Ford said of Edison that he is the greatest inventor and the worst businessman in the world. Edison sometimes stole ideas from others, turned his back on inventions that could not be ignored, such as electronics and alternating current, and lost a fortune on failed inventions - but no one could take away from him his creativity, ambition and adherence to the goal. Edison left behind 3.5 million pages of patent records, and a world that was very different from the world he came into 84 years earlier.