Thomas Alva Edison: The Most Important Inventions Of Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. Thomas's father, Samuel, was an exiled political activist from Canada. His mother, Nancy, was a school teacher. As a child he got scarlet fever which left him to have loss of hearing in both ears. As he got older he was almost deaf. He was misbehaving in school, so he was home school by his mother. At 12, he started his own business selling newspapers to train passengers and started his own newspaper called the "Grand Trunk Herald". He saved a 3 year old from being run over by a train, so the father taught him how to use a telegraph. At 21, he went to Boston and got a job at the Western Union Company. That is when he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder to count

It started with the British, with the arc lamp in 1835. For years after people around the world experimented on an incandescent lamp. They tried things like filling the bulb with gas but they did not last very long and they were very expensive. Finally in 1879, Thomas Edison made a bamboo filament (the part of the bulb that actually makes the light) that was able to last 1,200 hours. Lighting has changed over the years but some of the new inventions still were made in the 1800’s. Glassblower Heinrich Geissler and physician Julius Plücker discovered that they could make light by removing almost all of the air from a long glass tube and by passing an electrical current through it. They called it the Geissler tube. In the early 1900’s Peter Cooper Hewitt made the fluorescent lamp. While the Cooper Hewitt lamps were more efficient than incandescent bulbs, no one really used them because of the blue green color of the light. European researchers made neon tubes coated with phosphors (that made the light white). In the mid and late 1930s the U.S. was showing the fluorescent lights to the navy and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These lights lasted longer and were about three times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. In 1976, Edward Hammer at General Electric figured out how to bend the fluorescent tube into a spiral shape, creating the first compact fluorescent light