Inventor / Businessman
1847 – 1931
Tommie is Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in American history –having developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world: the first commercial light bulb, a universal stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, electrical power, recorded music, motion pictures, and more. He amassed a record 1,093 patents covering key innovations and minor improvements in wide range of fields, including telecommunications, electric power, sound recording, motion pictures, primary and storage batteries, and mining and cement technology.
As important, he broadened the notion of invention to encompass what we now call innovation-invention, research, development, and commercialization-and invented the industrial research laboratory. Edison’s role as an innovator is evident not only in his two major laboratories at Menlo Park and West Orange in New Jersey but in more than 300 companies formed worldwide to manufacture and market his inventions, many of which carried the Edison name, including some 200 Edison illuminating companies.
Links to Thomas Edison Timeline.
Notable Quotables:
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.
What you are will show in what you do.
To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.
Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
The biography.com website has a nice Thomas Edison bio and video (watch out for pre-roll!).
Source: The Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers
Patents by year.
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Links worth noting:
The Edison Mythology and the Birth of Motion Pictures — part two
[…] As I grew older, I “branched out” when my mother helped me develop an interest in the life of inventor Thomas Edison. […]