The Life and Achievements of Thomas Edison

"He led no armies into battle, he conquered no countries, and he enslaved no peoples. Nonetheless, he exerted a degree of power, the magnitude of which no warrior ever dreamed. His name still commands respect as sweeping in scope and as worldwide as that of any other mortal - a devotion rooted deep in human gratitude and untinged by the bias of race, color, politics, or religion." (Edison's Homepage) Thomas Edison was a man of great intellect who expanded the vast freedom of knowledge that present-day inventors appreciate.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847. There are many stories about what Edison was like as a child. They all show that from an early age, Edison was curious about the world around him and always tried to teach himself through reading and experiments. It was during Edison's teenage years that he began to experiment with different things and to tinker with objects.

Moreover, In 1869, when Edison was twenty-two years old, he patented his first invention and advertised that he "would hereafter devote his full time to bringing out his inventions."(Edison 67) It wasn't too long after this that Thomas Edison publicly exhibited his incandescent electric light bulb, which was his most important invention and one requiring the most careful research and experimentation to perfect.

After testing over two thousand materials, Thomas Edison made a filament that worked. Edison repeated a recent experiment he had done but this time with coarse sewing machine thread. The thread had been "carbonized" and fixed into place. The thread filament had then fused into a bar of "sunlight" when the current of electricity had been applied. It was after this that Edison was totally convinced that he had what it took to produce the most socially acceptable form of "artificial" lighting in existence.

Unfortunately, Edison would soon learn that the task of prosperously applying the benefits of an incandescent bulb in a real-world setting would be far more challenging than doing so in his laboratory. He now faced the huge task of having to invent, manufacture, and perfect- in a standardized form - hundreds of highly efficient and affordable components that the Earth had never seen... From the generators, regulators, and meters at the central generating plant to the outlets, switches, lamps, and sockets in the homes of consumers - and everything in between. All of which culminated in the almost forgotten model facility he built in Brockton, Massachusetts. (Edison's Homepage) It was after Thomas Edison had completed all this that the world was opened to a truly new way of life.

Furthermore, it was the many inventions similar to this one that Edison had taken credit for and ones such as this that aided the expansion of modern-day knowledge in the World of Science. The picture on the banner of Thomas Edison depicts Edison holding the planet Earth in one hand and a light bulb in the other. The purpose of this is to indicate the light from the bulb hitting the dismal Earth as if it were showing it new life. The background of the banner is black, this is to represent space. The circular shape resembles the planet Earth.

In conclusion, present-day society has been greatly influenced by the modifications Thomas Edison made to the world due to his invention of the light bulb. Edison's invention led the way for many others to come. If the light bulb hadn't been invented, then modern-day's Earth would still live in darkness, darkness from the lack of light yet, and also from the lack of a widespread insight into science.

Cite this page