Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison

Heroes. Heroes are people who fight for a better world, people who never give up, people that have great values and desires for our future, people who made their goals a fact, people like you and I who decided to make their lives useful for everyone. Thomas Edison was a great man, he invented and discovered many things, but when he was young, he was a poor student and owned a small amount of formal education. He had to study at home because his mother had problems with the teaching method at school. From that time on, he started working harder every day for his mother to be proud of him. He even taught himself much by reading his favorite books on his own (some of them by Isaac Newton). At these early ages he began to show curiosity about mechanical objects. His mother made him feel so confident that he started questioning everything and its functions. He even made his own lab in his room!

Thomas Edison’s first amazing invention in Menlo Park (he was called the Wizard of Menlo Park) was the thin foil phonograph. He was working to amend the efficiency of a telegraph transmitter, when he noticed that the tape of the machine surprisingly gave off a noise resembling spoken words when the telegraph was played at a high speed. As a result, he started wondering if he could record something similar to a telephone message. His experiments began with the diaphragm of a telephone receiver with a needle attached to it. He concluded that the needle could prick paper tape to record his message. This and more experiments lend him to the right one, he tried a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, amazingly, played back a short message recorded by him: “Mary had a little lamb.”

Among his greatest works was the development of a practical incandescent electric light. He didn’t invent it, as many people believe; he developed a 50 year-old idea. In 1879 using lower current electricity, a small carbonized filament, and an improved vacuum inside the globe, he was able to produce what he wanted, the reliable, long-lasting, source of light. His goal now was to transform that source of light into a practical, safe, and not expensive electric lighting system for daily use. After about 1 and a half years of hard work and experiments he finally invented an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread that burned for approximately 14 hours.

Thomas Alva Edison held 1,093 patents in his life, most of them very useful and handy in our daily life. He wasn’t perfect, however, he also had a few failures in his life as all human beings do. One of his failures was that he couldn’t create a more practical way to mine iron ore, among others. He kept trying and trying until finally concluding he couldn't reasonably invest more time and money in the project.

I made Thomas Edison my hero because he was an honest man. I made him my hero because he worked hard his entire life. I made him my hero because he persevered, because when something wasn’t right, he started over, because he didn’t get tired even though there were 10 times the unexpected results, because he continued giving all that he could to make our lives better. I made him my hero because he started out as a poor student and, through dedication and hard work, became an important scientist. I made him my hero, because I really consider that he is an example for everyone to follow; an example for those people who still say “I can’t”, an example for those people who think they can’t do anything good with their lives, a perfect example of someone who had a real love for life. For all these things, I made Thomas Alva Edison my hero.