A three story main laboratory building contained a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large library. Four smaller one story buildings built perpendicular to the main building contained a physics lab, chemistry lab, metallurgy lab, pattern shop, and chemical storage.
The large size of the laboratory not only allowed Edison to work on any sort of project, but also allowed him to work on as many as ten or twenty projects at once. Facilities were added to the laboratory or modified to meet Edison's changing needs as he continued to work in this complex until his death in Over the years, factories to manufacture Edison inventions were built around the laboratory. The entire laboratory and factory complex eventually covered more than twenty acres and employed 10, people at its peak during World War One After opening the new laboratory, Edison began to work on the phonograph again, having set the project aside to develop the electric light in the late s.
By the s, Edison began to manufacture phonographs for both home, and business use. Like the electric light, Edison developed everything needed to have a phonograph work, including records to play, equipment to record the records, and equipment to manufacture the records and the machines. In the process of making the phonograph practical, Edison created the recording industry.
The development and improvement of the phonograph was an ongoing project, continuing almost until Edison's death. While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear", this was to become motion pictures.
Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in , and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure, built on the laboratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system, developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures. Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work.
There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together. The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career.
Throughout the decade Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills. To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric.
Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested. This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.
Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity, and steam. Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job.
Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery. By the time Edison introduced his new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities.
However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railway cars and signals, maritime buoys, and miners lamps. For applications such as phonograph records they offer substantial advantages over other materials. During this time, the plastics industry was rapidly emerging: celluloid, the first plastic made from plant material, was introduced in ; the first wholly synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was produced in Edison was aware of the current developments in these new materials, and his team experimented extensively with plastics and resins in their search for a durable record that could be mass-manufactured and produce high-quality sound.
Records made from condensite could be mass-produced, were highly durable, and provided superior sound. Record manufacturing was one of the earliest uses for plastics and thus a major field for experimentation on both quality and mass production. The Edison Disc Phonograph of paired the condensite record with a diamond stylus that Edison invented to provide the highest-quality sound reproduction available at the time. When automobiles were introduced to U.
Edison, who was familiar with battery technology from his earliest days as a telegraph operator, favored battery power but disliked the standard lead-acid battery that was then used.
In he set out to produce a superior version. A battery is a device that converts chemical energy into electrical energy. The basic design is a two-chambered cell with positive- and negative-charged electrodes in an electrolyte solution through which the electrical charge is transmitted. The electrical output of the battery is largely determined by the materials used in its design.
At the time, Edison was producing a primary battery called the Lalande cell by the hundreds of thousands annually. Primary batteries produce electricity, but they cannot be recharged. Lalande cells were messy and required regular replacement of electrolytes. He experimented extensively with metals and electrolyte solutions to perfect his version of a rechargeable battery. The approach required advances in purification of nickel metal and a new production method for iron powder.
After extensive research and manufacturing tests, the Edison battery began sales in When reintroduced in , the improved Edison Storage Battery solved earlier problems of sustained electrical discharge and reliability in road tests. As Edison had envisioned, it was used primarily in small electrical vehicles, such as delivery vehicles in urban areas, although it was not adopted widely for automobile design. I will have the best equipped and largest laboratory extant, and the facilitiesincomparably superior to any other for rapid and cheap development of an invention,and working it up into commercial shape with models, patterns and special machinery.
In fact, there is no similar institution in existence. Edison, in a letter to J. Hood Wright, From this position, he recognized the important need for finding a domestic source for rubber, a material that was essential to automobile production and many other uses. As early as Edison began to experiment in this field. Edison used rubber in his electrical storage batteries and was close friends with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, both of whose businesses were closely tied to rubber.
His background in business and materials science made him uniquely qualified to lead the endeavor. The following year Edison completed his botanic laboratory in Fort Myers.
At this time, all rubber was produced from natural sources—in particular the latex of Hevea trees—and the vast majority was imported from plantations in Southeast Asia.
Edison set out to identify a source of rubber that could be produced domestically from plants that could be grown quickly in the U.
He was aware of past surveys of native plants to identify their rubber content, but he believed that a larger, more systematic survey might identify a new source of rubber. He invited botanists from New Jersey to Florida to send samples of local plants to his botanical laboratory for analysis. As the project grew, more than 17, plant samples from around the world were analyzed for their rubber content, and one group of plants— Solidago , commonly known as goldenrod—was selected as the most promising due to both its high rubber content and ability to be grown quickly in the U.
After his death on October 18, , the project continued for five years until it was transferred to the U. Department of Agriculture. Learn more about the development of synthetic rubber in the U. While popularly regarded as an inventor, Edison was an able applied chemist whose numerous inventions and businesses were enabled by his chemical knowledge.
He built a small chemistry laboratory there, too. Forced out of newspapering, Edison spent the next few years as a telegrapher for Western Union and other companies, taking jobs wherever he could find them—Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky. He had time to experiment on the side, and he patented his first invention in an electric vote recorder that eliminated the need for roll call by instantly tallying votes.
It worked so well that no legislative body wanted it, because it left no time for lobbying amid the yeas and nays. Although legislators did not want their votes counted faster, everyone else wanted everything else to move as quickly as possible.
Financial companies, for instance, wanted their stock information immediately, and communication companies wanted to speed up their telegram service. Armed with those inventions, he found financial support for his telegraphy research, and used money from Western Union to buy an abandoned building in New Jersey to serve as a workshop. In , having outgrown that site, he bought thirty acres not far from Newark and began converting the property into what he liked to call his Invention Factory.
It was organized around a two-story laboratory, with chemistry experiments on the top floor and a machine shop below. In , when he was twenty-four, he married a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Stilwell, who had taken refuge in his office during a rainstorm. They had three children, two of whom Edison nicknamed Dot and Dash. He first had in mind a kind of answering machine that would transcribe the contents of a call, but he quickly realized that it might be possible to record the voice itself.
To test the idea, Edison spoke into a diaphragm with a needle attached; as he spoke, the needle vibrated against a piece of paraffin paper, carving into it the ups and downs of the sound waves.
So novel was the talking machine that many people refused to believe in its existence—understandably, since, up to that point in history, sound had been entirely ephemeral. But once they heard it with their own ears they all wanted one, and scores of new investors opened their pockets to help Edison meet the demand. This was the team that banished the darkness, or at least made it subject to a switch.
By the eighteen-seventies, plenty of homes were lit with indoor gas lamps, but they produced terrible fumes and covered everything in soot. The filament was the trickiest part, and he and his team tried hundreds of materials before settling on carbon, which they got to burn for fourteen and a half hours in the fall of A year later, when they tried carbonized bamboo, it burned for more than a thousand hours.
By the New Year, individual light bulbs had given way to a network of illumination around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light.
The world was still measured in candlepower, and each bulb had the brightness of sixteen candles. Menlo Park had barely been a stop on the railway line when Edison first moved there. Now, in a single day, hundreds of passengers would empty from the trains to see the laboratory that made night look like noon. But, by February, , Edison had executed Patent No.
In early , he quit telegraphy to pursue invention full time. From to , Edison worked out of Newark, New Jersey , where he developed telegraph-related products for both Western Union Telegraph Company then the industry leader and its rivals.
Despite his prolific telegraph work, Edison encountered financial difficulties by late , but with the help of his father was able to build a laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, 12 miles south of Newark. In , Edison developed the carbon transmitter, a device that improved the audibility of the telephone by making it possible to transmit voices at higher volume and with more clarity.
That same year, his work with the telegraph and telephone led him to invent the phonograph, which recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of paraffin-coated paper; when the paper was moved beneath a stylus, the sounds were reproduced.
In , Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight—a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of prominent financial backers like J.
He made a breakthrough in October with a bulb that used a platinum filament, and in the summer of hit on carbonized bamboo as a viable alternative for the filament, which proved to be the key to a long-lasting and affordable light bulb. In , he set up an electric light company in Newark, and the following year moved his family which by now included three children to New York.
He built a large estate and research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, with facilities including a machine shop, a library and buildings for metallurgy, chemistry and woodworking. He also had the idea of linking the phonograph to a zoetrope, a device that strung together a series of photographs in such a way that the images appeared to be moving. Working with William K. Dickson, Edison succeeded in constructing a working motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, and a viewing instrument, the Kinetoscope, which he patented in After years of heated legal battles with his competitors in the fledgling motion-picture industry, Edison had stopped working with moving film by
0コメント