Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, but grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, after the family moved there in 1854. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison Jr. (1804–1896, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871, born in Chenango County, New York). His patrilineal family line was Dutch by way of New Jersey. His great-grandfather, loyalist John Edeson, fled New Jersey for Nova Scotia in 1784. The family moved to Middlesex County, Upper Canada, around 1811, and his grandfather, Capt. Samuel Edison Sr. served with the 1st Middlesex Militia during the War of 1812. His father, Samuel Edison Jr. moved to Vienna, Ontario, and fled to Ohio after his involvement in the Rebellion of 1837. Edison was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, a former school teacher. He attended school for only a few months, but was a very curious child who learned most things by reading on his own. Inspired by A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, a book given to him by his mother, the young Edison tinkered and learned about electricity. Edison developed hearing problems at the age of 12. Historian Paul Israel attributed the cause of his deafness to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. He subsequently concocted elaborate fictitious stories about the cause of his deafness. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other. Edison later listened to a music player or piano by clamping his teeth into the wood to absorb the sound waves into his skull. Edison began his career as a news butcher, selling newspapers, candy, and vegetables on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit. He turned a $50-a-week profit by age 13, most of which went to buying equipment for electrical and chemical experiments. Edison was proud of his work on the train, and he hung a frame with the first issue of the Grand Trunk Herald in his home until he died. At age 15, in 1862, he saved a child from being struck by a runaway train. The father was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator. He began working as a telegrapher in a local general store before moving to Stratford Junction, Ontario, where he worked as a night telegrapher for the Grand Trunk Railway. While on the job, he studied qualitative analysis, conducted chemical experiments, and negligently slept. This led to the near collision of two trains, after which he resigned. ==Telegraphy==

From 1863 to 1869, Edison worked several night shift telegraphy jobs in Ontario, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Massachusetts. As an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. In Cincinnati, he lived with Ezra Gilliland, who he remained friends with for 25 years. He joined the National Telegraph Union and wrote for their magazine. In addition to spending his time tinkering, he studied Spanish. He created a reputation among the other young, male telegraph operators for being bright and trying new things, but on several occasions his tinkering interfered with his work. His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, , which was granted on June 1, 1869. Edison moved to New York City in 1869. One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher, Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished young Edison to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey, home while Edison worked for Samuel Laws at the Gold Indicator Company. Pope and Edison founded their own company in October 1869, working as electrical engineers. Edison attracted wealthy and connected investors. With the money, they hired fifty employees within a few months and opened a larger shop in Newark, New Jersey. The company made money by renting out telegraph lines. To win business, they manufactured machines to record telegraphs and typewriters that printed directly to the wire. Edison strictly regulated his employees’ work and efficiency while trying many experiments. Edison enrolled in a chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art to support his work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor. This appears to have been his only enrollment in courses at an institution of higher learning. At the factory, Edison and Batchelor collaborated fervently; their notebooks jointly signed "E&B" contain near-constant experimentation with improvements to the telegraph. Edison grew the company to a few hundred employees, and in 1874, received $30,000 for inventing the first telegraph that could simultaneously transmit four messages through a single wire. With the money, Edison invested in the Port Huron street railway, which was owned by his brother William Pitt. He expanded his own business, and he hired his young nephew and father. ==Menlo Park laboratory ==

Research and development facility {{multiple images |total_width = 500 In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. It was built in 1876, a part of Raritan Township (now named Edison Township in his honor) with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results. As the leader of his laboratory, Edison was credited for inventions made in large part by those working under him. He worked extreme hours and expected those around him to follow suit. This often meant 18 hours per day Monday through Friday and additional work on Saturday and Sunday. One employee described the work as "the limits of human exhaustion." For Edison, big business came with big publicity. He shut down public and reporter access to the laboratory at Menlo Park and tailored his image with interviews. He expanded his public involvement by funding the creation of Science, which published its first volume in 1880. Edison kept his publishing role anonymous, and the journal began as a mouthpiece for pro-Edison articles. He gave up the journal in 1883 due to its lack of profit. It was subsequently led by Alexander Graham Bell. In just over a decade, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material". In 1887 the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels ... silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell ... cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores ..." and the list goes on. Carbon telephone microphone presses on the conducting diaphragm, the granules of carbon are pressed together and decrease their electrical resistance. In 1876, Edison began work to improve the microphone for telephones by developing a carbon microphone, which consists of two metal plates separated by granules of carbon that would change resistance with the pressure of sound waves. He vigorously stirred up public awareness for this new invention by engaging with journalists and performing public demonstrations. The phonograph was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park". As he aged, he grew to resent titles representing him as a genius, and he emphasized "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." In April 1878, Edison demonstrated the phonograph before the National Academy of Sciences. Although Edison obtained a patent for the phonograph in 1878, he did little to develop it until Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter produced a phonograph-like device in the 1880s that used wax-coated cardboard cylinders. In 1887, the Edison Phonograph Company was founded to compete with Bell. Gilliland had worked for Bell developing the phonograph but came to help Edison start the new venture. Unfortunately for their friendship, the venture ran out of money before getting a product to market and had to raise money from an exploitative investor. Jesse Lippincott offered simultaneous deals to Edison, Gilliland, and Bell in an attempt to form a phonograph monopoly. However, he knew Edison would not take the bargain, so obfuscated his own, Gilliland's, and Bell's roles in the deal and made the offer through Edison's personal attorney. When Edison discovered the scheme, he was infuriated, but Gilliland went to Europe, which ended their friendship. After five years of litigation, Edison assumed total control of the company. The drama led to multiple other fall outs that tore apart the tight circle of Edison's wealthy inventor-friends. . Edison struggled for years to bring a phonograph to market. The principal technical issue was getting the recording material durable enough for prolonged use without it wearing out the phonograph's needle. He attempted to pivot to making talking dolls with a miniature phonograph inside. However, the system usually failed during shipment and production was shut down in 1890. Edison thought that the phonograph would be a powerful instrument for conducting business and would redefine the role of secretaries. However, by 1899 Edison's phonograph company submitted to market demands and produced a cheap model that was in high demand for entertainment. In 1900, this phonograph was sold for $10, and buyers could additionally select from the 3,000 different musical records produced by Edison's 1,000 employees in the phonograph works. The quality of line work was strictly supervised by experts. Edison had no musical training, could not read sheet music, and was mostly deaf. Through 1915, he exerted tight control on the production of records, personally approving every artist based on what he thought sounded good and preventing their names from being attached to the music. Widespread adoption of the radio was detrimental to phonograph sales. Edison's business sold 90% fewer records in 1921 compared to 1920. From 1922 to 1926, radio sales went up 843%. Younger managers, especially his son Charles, tried to get Edison to enter the radio business or adopt new advertising methods. However, Edison chose to focus on weeding out employees that did not meet his mark. Tasimeter Edison invented a highly sensitive device, that he named the tasimeter, which measured infrared radiation. His impetus for its creation was the desire to measure the heat from the solar corona during the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. ==Electric light==

In 1878, Edison began working on a system of electrical illumination that he could deploy in a large-scale commercial utility, something he hoped could compete with gas and oil-based lighting. Key to his system would be developing a durable low resistance incandescent lamp, essential for a wide-scale indoor lighting system. There had been many incandescent lamps devised by inventors prior to Edison, but these early bulbs all had flaws such as an extremely short life and requiring a high electric current to operate, which made them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan, Spencer Trask, and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison continued trying to improve this design and on November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires". The patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament, including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways". culminated in Edison effect bulbs. Edison's 1883 patent for voltage-regulating is the first US patent for an electronic device due to its use of an Edison effect in an active component. He wrote some of Edison's speeches and assisted with hiring decisions. 's new steamship, the Columbia, was the first commercial application for Edison's incandescent light bulb in 1880. Henry Villard, president of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, attended Edison's 1879 demonstration. Villard was impressed and requested Edison install his electric lighting system aboard the Columbia. Although hesitant at first, Edison agreed to Villard's request. Most of the work was completed in May 1880, and the Columbia went to New York City, where Edison and his personnel installed Columbia new lighting system. The Columbia was Edison's first commercial application for his incandescent light bulb. Villard was subsequently induced to finance the construction of an electrically powered and lighted train built on a custom track built by Edison's company. The train worked and some of the technology was patented, but Edison elected to focus on the bulbs and did not follow through with developing the train. To avoid a possible court battle with yet another competitor, Joseph Swan, who held an 1880 British patent on a similar incandescent electric lamp, formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain. Sawyer's original filament improvement process was better, and Westinghouse, which owned rights to Sawyer's patent, was able to take a sizeable portion of the bulb market share from Edison by 1889. To prove he was making progress, Edison hosted a board meeting that was illuminated by his system. On December 17, 1880, he founded the Edison Illuminating Company, and during the 1880s, he patented a system for electricity distribution. Edison paid his New York workers significantly more than other firms in the 1880s. Before fully commercializing power distribution, Edison needed a way to measure how much power his customers consumed. He invented a cell with a zinc solution and zinc plates that received some of each customer's current. This resulted in zinc from the solution precipitating onto the plates, which were weighed on a monthly basis to determine how much current had passed through and bill the customer accordingly. In January 1882, to demonstrate feasibility, Edison had switched on the 93 kW first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. On September 4, 1882, in Pearl Street, New York City, his 600 kW cogeneration steam-powered generating station, Pearl Street Station's, electrical power distribution system was switched on, providing 110 volts direct current (DC). Subscriptions quickly grew to 508 customers with 10,164 lamps. Edison's DC empire suffered from one of its chief drawbacks: it was suitable only for the high density of customers found in large cities. Edison's DC plants could not deliver electricity to customers more than from the plant, and left a patchwork of unsupplied customers between plants. Small cities and rural areas could not afford an Edison style system, leaving a large part of the market without electrical service. AC companies expanded into this gap. Many reasons have been suggested for Edison's anti-AC stance. One notion is that the inventor could not grasp the more abstract theories behind AC and was trying to avoid developing a system he did not understand. Edison also appeared to have been worried about the high voltage from improperly installed AC systems killing customers and hurting the sales of electric power systems in general. The primary reason was that Edison Electric based their design on low voltage DC, and switching a standard after they had installed over 100 systems was, in Edison's mind, out of the question. By the end of 1887, Edison Electric was losing market share to Westinghouse, who had built 68 AC-based power stations to Edison's 121 DC-based stations. To make matters worse for Edison, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts (another AC-based competitor) built twenty-two power stations. Parallel to expanding competition between Edison and the AC companies was rising public furor over a series of deaths in the spring of 1888 caused by pole mounted high voltage alternating current lines. This turned into a media frenzy against high voltage alternating current and the seemingly greedy and callous lighting companies that used it. Edison took advantage of the public perception of AC as dangerous, and joined with self-styled New York anti-AC crusader Harold P. Brown in a propaganda campaign, aiding Brown in the public electrocution of animals with AC, and supported legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system) in what was now being referred to as a "war of the currents". The development of the electric chair was used in an attempt to portray AC as having a greater lethal potential than DC and smear Westinghouse, via Edison colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to ensure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator. Edison was becoming marginalized in his own company having lost majority control in the 1889 merger that formed Edison General Electric. In 1890 he told president Henry Villard he thought it was time to retire from the lighting business and moved on to an iron ore refining project that preoccupied his time. He served as a figurehead on the company's board of directors for a few years before selling his shares. ==Mining==

Starting in the late 1870s, Edison became interested and involved with mining. High-grade iron ore was scarce on the east coast, resulting in high costs as ore was usually shipped from the Midwest. He tried to change this by mining low-grade ore and beach sand. Several others had attempted to improve the refining process by using magnets to separate iron from other metals, but none had been able to do so profitably. Edison bought several mines in the eastern states and began constructing a new centralized mining operation in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. The new process used rollers and crushers that pulverized five ton rocks. To obtain the boulders, Edison purchased the largest steam shovel in America. Nevertheless, the mine was rapidly losing money. Cement Despite the failure of his mining company, Edison used some of the materials and equipment to produce Portland cement. Manufacturing of iron ore produced a large quantity of waste sand which Edison sold to cement manufacturers. In 1899, he established the Edison Portland Cement Company, intending to manufacture his own cement and make improvements to its production process. In the manufacturing of Portland cement, limestone, the primary ingredient, is baked at high temperature with the other minerals. Edison designed a novel system which improved the efficiency of this process by baking the cement in horizontal 150ft long kilns which allowed the cement to achieve the same quality after cooking longer at a lower temperature. This consumed less coal resulting in saving from the manual labor needed to load coal into kilns. Edison reused most of the factory material from the iron extraction process at the Ogden mine to construct his new system. In addition to selling the cement itself, Edison later licensed the proven system to cement manufactures in America and collected royalties into the 1920s. In 1901, Edison sought to parlay his cement business by starting a cheap housing development initiative. He wanted to create small towns in which every American could afford to buy a home. To bring down the cost of building he commissioned a system for casting a whole three story house from cement in a single mold. He used this method to build employee housing and made a public relations campaign that did not yield sufficient demand for him to pursue it further. == West Orange ==

Moving the works The first labor strike against Edison occurred in the spring of 1886. It was led by D.J. O'Dare of the Edison Tube Works. Manufacturing in New York City was typically performed for nine hours a day, and Edison's employees were among the best paid in the city. However, they were not paid overtime for the additional work that was often performed. The strike sought more pay, overtime pay, and the right to unionize work. Edison and other managers were completely unwilling to negotiate unionization due to the loss of control. By the end of the year, the various manufacturing facilities in the city were closed and centralized as the Edison United Manufacturing Company opened a new factory in Schenectady, New York. The citizen's of Schenectady subsidized 16% of the real estate cost to help attract Edison's business to their town. Samuel Insull began working for Edison in 1881 as a secretary. He had previously worked at Vanity Fair. The two became friends as Insull became a trusted lieutenant. Later, when Mary was dying, Insull helped the family make arrangements. As with all of Edison's men, Insull worked hard. When Edison United Manufacturing Company opened, he was one of two managers. In December, Edison was housebound due to pleurisy. He recovered, but by May 1887 he needed emergency surgery to treat abscesses below his ear. He had surgeries there again in 1906 and 1908. In December 1914, a fire killed one employee and destroyed thirteen buildings causing $1.5 million in damages. The fundamental design of Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, although Edison abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistants, Clarence Dally and Charles Dally. In 1903, a shaken Edison said: "Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them." The brothers often acted as human guinea pigs for the fluoroscopy project. Clarence died, at the age of 39, of injuries related to the exposure, including mediastinal cancer. His lab tested 10,000 combinations of electrodes and solutions eventually settling on a nickel-iron combination. A total recall was issued due to the batteries losing power after several recharge cycles. By 1908, with the Model T on the road, gas cars were taking over the market. Edison did not demonstrate a mature battery until 1910: a very efficient and durable nickel-iron-battery with lye as the electrolyte. The nickel–iron battery was never very successful; by the time it was ready, electric cars were disappearing, and lead acid batteries had become the standard for starting gas-powered cars. ==Motion pictures==

While working on the mining project, Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, one of his employees at the mine who was also a photographer, began trying to make camera "to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" in 1888, initially in the form of microphotographs on a cylinder. Edison focused on the electromechanical elements while Dickson lead the optical and film effort. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891. Customers who watched the final round saw Leonard score a knockdown. In the last three months of 1894, an associate of Edison's sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in the Netherlands and Italy. In Germany and in Austria-Hungary, the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop Gesellschaft, founded by the Ludwig Stollwerck of the Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co of Cologne. By 1895, Dickson was beginning to set up business for himself separate from Edison. The exact motivation for the split is unknown but likely stemmed from disagreements between Dickson and Edison. The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists. On May 14, 1895, the Edison's Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. Businessman Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative in starting this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In 1898, he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France. In April 1896, Thomas Armat reached a deal with Edison in which Edison's company manufactured and sold the Vitascope to project films produced in Edison's film studio. It was advertised as an Edison invention to boost sales, but was in fact, the invention of Armat and C. Francis Jenkins. Edison had attempted unsuccessfully to make his own projector, but acknowledged the Vitascope was better at that time. Edison's film studio made nearly 1,200 films. The majority of the productions were short films showing everything from acrobats to parades to fire calls including titles such as ''Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1910), and the first Frankenstein film (1910). Edison was happy to have Edwin S. Porter porter run the creative side of the movie business. In 1903, the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island announced they would execute Topsy the elephant. Edison Manufacturing filmed, Electrocuting an Elephant'', as AC current killed the poor animal. To better protect the copyrights on his films, Edison deposited prints of them on long strips of photographic paper with the U.S. copyright office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era. In 1908, Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust). In 1913, movies used live actors and bands to add sound to the experience. However, Edison was again feeling confident in his kinetophone technology to synchronize recorded sound and motion picture playback. Edison said his favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation. He thought that talkies had "spoiled everything" for him. "There isn't any good acting on the screen. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf." His favorite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. ==National security==

Due to the security concerns around World War I, Edison suggested forming a science and industry committee to provide advice and research to the US military, and he headed the Naval Consulting Board in 1915. However, he attended few of the meetings due to his deafness. One of the board's main tasks was to prepare a site to conduct research for the navy. Edison wanted to locate the site far from Washington DC, as too many visits from bureaucrats would slow down the research. However, he was not listened to by the other board members and turned his focus to experiments in military technology. Edison, and many other businessmen, became concerned with America's reliance on foreign supply of rubber. The laboratory was funded by Edison, Ford, and Firestone with $75,000. Age did not make Edison any less familiar with the press. He used his 80th birthday to give tours of his experimental garden and promote his research into various domestic plants for producing rubber. Edison employed systematic problem solving to rubber production. He rejected other plants based on combinations of their latex content, the extraction processes needed to get the latex from the plant, where the latex is found in the plants, growth speed, and ability to harvest the plant. Edison responded by undertaking production of phenol at his Silver Lake facility using processes developed by his chemists. He built two plants with a capacity of six tons of phenol per day. Production began the first week of September, one month after hostilities began in Europe. He built two plants to produce raw material benzene at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Bessemer, Alabama, replacing supplies previously from Germany. Edison manufactured aniline dyes, which previously had been supplied by the German dye trust. Other wartime products include xylene, p-phenylenediamine, shellac, and pyrax. Wartime shortages made these ventures profitable. In 1915, his production capacity was fully committed by midyear. ==Final years==

, Edison, and Harvey S. Firestone in Fort Myers, Florida, on February 11, 1929 Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Edison at his winter retreat in Fort Myers. They were friends until Edison's death. Edison and Ford undertook annual motor camping trips from 1914 to 1924. Harvey Firestone and naturalist John Burroughs also participated. The trips functioned as a moving advertisement for Ford cars, Firestone tires, and whatever Edison had going on at the time. A team of reporters joined to ensure word spread. In 1926, at 79 years old, Edison handed over the presidency of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. to Charles. Death In the final years of his life, Edison continued to chew tobacco daily and his diabetes worsened. Edison died on October 18, 1931, at Glenmont and was buried on the property. Edison's last breath is kept, as a memento, in a test tube at The Henry Ford museum near Detroit. Charles Edison had the test tube prepared and sent to Ford as a symbol of his father's love of chemistry and friendship with Ford. A plaster death mask and casts of Edison's hands were also made. == Domestic life==

Mary On December 25, 1871, at the age of 24, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell (1855–1884), whom he had met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children: • Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965), nicknamed "Dot" • William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, 1900. Edison generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family. Thomas Jr. was often sick as a child, but Edison left his care in Mary's hands. In her childhood, Marion often came to the laboratory at Menlo park. Wanting to be an inventor, but not having much of an aptitude for it, Thomas Jr. became a problem for his father and his father's business. Starting in the 1890s, Thomas Jr. became involved in snake oil products and shady and fraudulent enterprises, producing products being sold to the public as "The Latest Edison Discovery". The situation became so bad that Thomas Sr. had to take his son to court to stop the practices, finally agreeing to pay Thomas Jr. an allowance of $35 () per week, in exchange for not using the Edison name; the son began using aliases, such as Burton Willard. Thomas Jr. struggled with alcoholism and depression. Thomas Jr. had a disastrous one year marriage which began in 1899 and caused scandal for himself and the senior Edison. In 1931, nearing the end of his life, he obtained a role in the Edison company, thanks to the intervention of his half-brother Charles. Edison neglected his wife after the first few years of their marriage. Mina Thomas met Mina Miller at the World Cotton Centennial in December 1884. She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, who had made significant personal wealth by selling a wheat mower for which he had invented several improvements. He was a co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities. Mina enjoyed the socialite lifestyle and practiced a strict Methodist faith her whole life. On February 24, 1886, at the age of 39, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller (1865–1947) in Akron, Ohio. • Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992) In his second marriage he was also often neglectful of his wife and children. When he was around, he was extremely controlling. He left nearly every aspect of housekeeping and child rearing to Mina and her five maids. One exception was the Fourth of July. Being deaf, Edison enjoyed the very loud boom made by fireworks. He made his own fireworks into which he added a small amount of TNT. Edison wrote Mina love letters about missing her while he was away for extended periods. She married John Eyre Sloane. Theodore went on to study physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Charles studied general science at MIT. He took over his father's business after his death. Later he served one term as Governor of New Jersey (1941–1944). The main house and guest house are representative of Italianate architecture and Queen Anne style architecture. Edison purchased a home known as Glenmont in 1886, in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. He sold it to Mina in 1891. Edison liked boats, cars, and fishing. He drove only on very limited occasions, but, for research purposes, owned several cars which helped him bond with his son, Charles, who he encouraged to drive even as a child. ==Views==

On religion and metaphysics File:19101002 "No Immortality of the Soul" Says Thomas A. Edison - The New York Times.jpg|thumb|This 1910 New York Times Magazine feature states that "Nature, the supreme power, [Edison] recognizes and respects, but does not worship. Nature is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent." Edison is quoted as saying "I am not an individual—I am an aggregate of cells, as, for instance, New York City is an aggregate of individuals. Will New York City go to heaven?" Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker". Edison explored and promoted ideas in panpsychism. Politics Edison's father was a Democrat that supported the secession of the Confederate States of America. Edison was a supporter of women's suffrage. He said in 1915, "Every woman in this country is going to have the vote." His employment of women was somewhat notable at the time. He assigned women factory jobs that required nimble fingers like making the brush wires for dynamos. Nonviolence was key to Edison's political and moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." Following a tour of Europe in 1911, Edison spoke negatively about "the belligerent nationalism that he had sensed in every country he visited". which proposed a commodity-backed currency. The proposals failed to find support and were abandoned. ==Awards==

(1890), National Portrait Gallery commemorated the 125th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb. The following is an incomplete list of awards given to Edison during his lifetime: • In 1878, honorary PhD from Union College • On November 10, 1881, Officer of the Legion of Honour • In 1889, the John Scott Medal • In 1908, John Fritz Medal • In 1920, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. • In 1923, the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers • On May 29, 1928, the Congressional Gold Medal ==See also==

• The Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition • The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, book edition in 9 volumes; each can be downloaded at no cost • volume 1 18471873 online; also download vol 1 • volume 2 1873–1876 online; also download vol 2 == External links ==