Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the youngest of seven children. Scarlet fever in childhood left him increasingly deaf, a limitation he later claimed helped him concentrate. He began as a telegraph operator, learning the technology that would shape his early inventions: the stock ticker, the quadruplex telegraph that sent four messages simultaneously over a single wire. In 1876, he established the world's first industrial research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, an 'invention factory' where teams of craftsmen, machinists, and experimenters worked under his direction. The phonograph came first, astonishing the world in 1877 with a machine that recorded and replayed sound. Then came the electric light, not just the bulb, which required testing thousands of materials for filaments, but the entire system: generators, distribution networks, insulation, switches, meters. Edison understood that a bulb without infrastructure was worthless.