UNDER THE MICROSCOPE/Prof William Reville: Thomas Alva Edison was the most prolific inventor ever. He was awarded 1,093 patents and created much of the technology common in the modern world. His life's work is a testament to his best-known saying, "Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration".
Edison's most famous inventions include a practical electric light bulb, an electric generating and transmission system, a sound-recording device and a motion picture projector.
Born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, Thomas was a self-centred child who constantly asked questions about how things work. His teachers became impatient with the child and after only three months of class-work his mother withdrew him from school and taught him at home. Thomas showed huge interest in everything from history to literature, to science. His parents hired a tutor to help him with mathematics and science.
Thomas developed a strong sense of perseverance at an early age. Another factor that shaped his unique personality was the fact that he gradually became totally deaf, an after-effect of contracting scarlet fever at the age of 14. Rather than fretting, he used silence to develop his concentration. Later in life, when he had money for an operation to restore his hearing he refused to do so on the grounds that he "would have difficulty re-learning how to channel my thinking in an ever more noisy world".
In 1859, aged 12, Thomas went to work selling newspapers and snacks on the trains between Port Huron and Detroit. By 1862 he was typesetting and printing a news sheet on the moving train, using news stories teletyped daily into the railway station. One day in the railway station at Huron Edison, rescued a boy from death under an oncoming train and the grateful father taught him Morse code and telegraph operation. He spent the next few years supporting himself as an itinerant operator and carrying out experiments to improve the telegraph device.
At the age of 16 he made his first invention, the "Automatic Repeater", that transmitted signals between unmanned telegraph stations. This made it possible for anyone to translate code at their own pace and convenience.
In 1868 Edison took a job as a calligrapher with the Western Union Company in Boston. He continued his experimental projects and after six months received his first patent for a vote-recording machine. This device was not a commercial success because it was ahead of its time. Edison decided that from now on he would waste no time inventing things that had no immediate sales appeal.
While in Boston, Edison attended lectures on the "multiplexing" of telegraph signals. This related to transmitting electrical impulses over telegraph wires at different frequencies, producing horn-like simulations of the human voice. Multiplexing principles eventually lead to the invention of the telephone, the fax machine, the microphone, and more.
In 1869, Western Union sacked Edison for insufficiently concentrating on his primary responsibilities and, penniless, he moved to New York. He wandered around the financial district, sleeping in a building basement and he poked around the offices examining the stock-ticker machines. One day a very important stock-ticker machine broke down. A crowd gathered around the machine but no one knew how to fix it. Edison moved forward and fixed the machine after a few minutes tinkering. The delighted manager hired Edison at the handsome salary of $300 a month to keep all the company stock-ticker machines in working order.
Edison invented a new stock-ticker machine. To his surprise, a corporation bought all the rights to the machine for $40,000. Over the next few years he created several successful inventions for industry and serious money began to pour in. In 1874, he opened a testing and development laboratory in Newark, New Jersey. In 1876, he moved his laboratory to Menlow Park, New Jersey. In 1876, Edison invented the carbon telephone transmitter "button" which finally made telephony a practical commercial success. This invention lead to the development of the microphone, which made early radio possible.
In 1877 Edison announced the invention of a phonograph on which sound could be recorded on a tinfoil cylinder. Two years later he unveiled his best-known invention, the incandescent electric light bulb. Of all his inventions, this one had taken the most careful research and experimentation to perfect.
He tested thousands of different types of filament for the bulb before eventually settling on a carbon filament. He was interviewed during the course of the work by a reporter who remarked on the huge number of failed experiments to date. Edison explained: "Young man, you don't know how the world works. I haven't had a single failure. What I have done is discover a thousand ways that don't work." Edison developed and installed the world's first large central electric power station in 1882 in New York city. He used direct current, however, which later lost out to the alternating current system developed by Nicola Tesla.
Edison died in 1931 in New Jersey. Shortly before dying he awoke from a coma and whispered to his wife, "It is very beautiful over there."
William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and director of microscopy at University College Cork