Thomas Edison

On February eleventh, 1847, a genius was born in Milan, Ohio; a genius that would revolutionize the fields of science and engineering and permanently change the social order to encompass the American Dream and the "Rags-to-Riches" sort of success that so many before him sought; a genius who would energize the hearts and minds of the people as their hero, who engineered the twentieth century. But it would not be so; not for many years, at least. Beginning in his "rags", he was born the son of Samuel and Nancy Elliot Edison, their seventh child, but only their fourth surviving. When he was seven, he attended schooling in Port Huron, Michigan, but dropped out only five years later to work on the railroad.

But the railroad was not where a career would lie! And neither was it the hiding place of Thomas Edison's interest, and, in 1863, his true potential began to come forth, as he became an apprentice telegrapher. Telegraphy, the communications of the day, was the forefront of technology and science, and a major player in the advancement of electric technology in the latter half of the19th Century. Branching on that, in 1869, Edison leaves his long-held job for entrepreneurship, and patents his first few inventions, including a printer, for telegraphers; this may have been especially important to him, seeing as he had been hearing-impaired for most of his life, and telegraphy had been somewhat of a challenge as his hearing degraded.

As it turned out, in the end, an entrepreneur was what Thomas was to be; in 1871, he marries Mary Stillwell, and just five years later he adopts the laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where much of his inventing will take place. In fact, it's here, while studying the electric resistance of carbon that he builds his first phonograph, a device with which one can record sounds for later playback. It's a major advancement, as it used incoming sounds and a vibrating needle to inscribe the sounds onto a cylinder, which could be read later by the device.

This is only his first advancement, however, as his research into the properties of carbon branched off into another, more fruitful topic. Electric lamps; the idea itself was fifty years old, but no one had ever figured out how one would keep the device burning for very long, as, it did exactly that; it burned up the filament, which the electric current ran though; all of this took place in a vacuum, to keep the device itself from combusting. Instead, together with the lower-than-hypothesized current amounts that he ran though the filament, itself a piece of sewing thread, Edison managed to make the light shine for thirteen-and-a-half consecutive hours. It was the first really successful model of electric lighting besides Arc Lights (which are more dangerous themselves then gas) and, along with a generator that Edison invented and a socket with an on-off switch for the current, it was the first practical for home use.

This jumped his fame so high, that some called him the 'Wizard of Menlo Park' and yet some more were willing to go so far as to called him the 'Best known American on Earth'. In conjunction with his advancements in technology, Edison also brought out the best in the common man; he himself having grown up in a small Michigan town, he showed that the American 'Rags-to-Riches' regime was still one that was achievable, and for that, he was a wizard of his day. Edison's company went through turbulent later years, involving the invention of the kinetiscope, a device that "Does to the eye what the phonograph does to the ear," and an elaborate flame war with the Russian scientist Nikola Tesla over the most practical type of electric current for commercial use. But, as he always said to himself and others, it was never a question of if, only how.

Thomas Edison passed away on October eighteenth, 1931, having led the fulfilling life anyone would have wanted, and changing the course of history to one in which electricity took center stage; he really can be considered the major innovator that made the twentieth century possible, and a hero that showed that the 'nobility' would not always be the ones of power, that the common people could fulfill their dreams, too.