Thomas Edison's Biography

Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio.

Thomas Edison, the man who was to invent the gramophone, the megaphone, and the carbon granule microphone, lost much of his hearing when he was a boy.

Thomas Edison seems to have been adept at improving things based around his situation. Starting off as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway, he went on to print and publish his own paper, the Grand Trunk Herald. Similarly, during the Civil War he started off working as telegraph operator, and ended up inventing the electric vote recording machine.

Edison established an industrial research laboratory from the proceeds of his invention of the paper ticker-tape automatic repeater for stockmarket prices.

An incredibly prolific inventor, Thomas Edison took out over 1000 patents including the incandescent light bulb (1879), which he developed simultaneously with and independently of Joseph Swan. He designed the first power station selling electricity to the public in New York in 1882.

By the end of the nineteenth century the Edison General Electric Company was one of three firms that had emerged to exploit the growth in the electrical supply industry.

In 1912 he produced the first talking motion pictures.

Thomas Edison died on 18 October 1931.