preview

The Greatest Inventors Of All Time

Decent Essays

One of the greatest inventors of all time was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio to Samuel and Nancy Edison, an exiled political activist and a school teacher respectively. The name of Mr. and Mrs. Edison’s youngest, most accomplished son was Thomas Alva Edison. Thomas Edison grew up in Port Huron, Michigan where his family relocated when he was just seven years old. He attended public school, but he was too easily distracted to pursue an education in any sort of formal setting. As a result, his mother took him out of school and homeschooled him instead. Although Edison did not attend public school, he did not lack an outstanding education. Not only did his mother teach him everything he would have learned in school, but he was …show more content…

Edison also used the train baggage car as a chemical laboratory, but a freak accident during one of his experiments caused a fire and from then on he was banned from the trains. Fortunately, he managed to learn about telegraphs in his early years, so at the age of fifteen he was employed as a telegraph operator. In the beginning of his career as a telegraph operator, Edison was very successful at his work; however, as technology advanced and telegraphers relied on the sound of the clicks to read messages, Edison was at a disadvantage because of hearing loss suffered when he was a child. Because of his handicap, he received fewer opportunities to work. Fortuitously, he found work at the age of twenty-one at the Western Union Company in Boston. It was while working in Boston that Edison became serious about experimenting with technology and inventing original products. In fact, he patented his first invention which he termed the electric vote recorder. The recorder was intended to speed up the process of voting. Edison assumed politicians would be impressed by this device, but they resented the speed at which votes could be counted because they “wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators” (Thomas Edison Biography). Although Edison did not profit from his first patent, it taught him that the only inventions worth developing were those that the public desired. Thomas Edison’s goal to invent products that appealed to the public began in 1869 when he

Get Access