THOS. A. EDISON.
Thomas A. Edison.
Born in Milan, Erie county, Ohio, February 11, 1847, he attended school for a few months only, being educated at home by his mother, a woman of superior ability and attainments.
The boy was an apt scholar, showing preference for historical and scientific subjects.
In 1854 his father removed to Port Huron, Mich., where, at the age of twelve, he was engaged as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. While thus employed he took every occasion to watch the operations of the telegraph at the various stations on the line. He erected a wire between his father’s house and that of a neighbour, himself making the instruments to save the cost of battery material; he experimented with a tom-cat, using the fore and hind feet as electrodes. The connections having been duly made he tried to start an induced current by rubbing the back of the feline. This amusing experiment was not a success, however, and was abandoned; later on he was rewarded for bravery in rescuing the child of the station master from the front of a moving train by receiving lessons in telegraphy, which he soon mastered, and was employed as telegraph operator on the Grand Trunk Railway for a time, leaving thereafter for the United States, where he worked in various cities, meanwhile devoting himself to the study of electrical science then little understood in America.
While working as operator in New Orleans, La., he invented the automatic repeater. In 1864 he conceived the idea, which he afterwards perfected, of duplex telegraphy, but it was not put into practical operation until 1872. His next important inventions were the quadruplex and the printing telegraph for stock quotations.
In time his inventions were numerous and varied. On the lists of inventions at the patent office, Washington, in 1895, no less than 600 were credited to his name. The most notable amongst these are the quadruplex, the phonograph and the incandescent light.
Although Edison had acquired considerable wealth, yet in 1896 he publicly declared that he would have been at least $600,000 better off if he had never taken out a patent or defended one, and that all the money he ever made was made by manufacturing his inventions or in their practical use.
In 1896 he established the village of Edison, N. J., in the very centre of an iron ore deposit, a plant for the magnetic separation of iron from the rock in which it is embedded in the mine, the process being purely automatic. He first invented a crusher capable of reducing ten tons of rock to dust every minute; he then invented apparatus whereby the iron ore was separated from the dust by means of a magnet, the extracted ore being made into briquettes and easily handled for transport to the blast furnace.
Mr. Edison is one of the simplest and unostentatious of men, careless in his costume, abstemious and simple in his habits, unselfish and generous in dispositions.