Word: edisonizing
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Fortunately for him, America during the post-Civil War boom of the 1870s was famished for faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time. He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice, and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or creating new products...
...first patent, for an electric vote recorder, taught him a lesson that would guide the rest of his career. There was no demand, at the time, for electric vote recorders, and his device earned him nothing. Edison vowed never again to invent something unless he could be sure it was commercially marketable...
Other candidates for this honor soon abounded. Edison was working on a problem in telegraphy in 1877 when he noticed that a stylus drawn rapidly across the embossed symbols of the Morse code produced what he later described as "a light, musical, rhythmical sound, resembling human talk heard indistinctly." If it was possible, he reasoned, to "hear" dots and dashes, might not the human voice be reproduced in a similar manner? After much trial and error, Edison gathered a small group of witnesses and recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a strange-looking contraption. The spectators were amazed...
...Edison is commonly called the inventor of the light bulb. In truth, he and his co-workers accomplished far more than that. In 1879 they created an incandescent lamp with a carbonized filament that would burn for 40 hours, but a working laboratory model was only the first step. How could they make this device illuminate the world? For this they would need a host of devices, including generators, motors, junction boxes, safety fuses and underground conductors, many of which did not exist. Amazingly, only three years later Edison opened the first commercial electric station on Pearl Street in lower...
Either alone or as the supervisor of his research teams, Edison amassed more than 1,000 patents, including one for the movie camera. That invention alone would have ensured his lasting renown, but it was only one of the many contributions Edison made to the now ubiquitous technological environment. He created the look and sound of contemporary life. He cared not at all about the fame and wealth he earned as long as he was allowed to get on with his work. He never lost the relentless desire to learn and to make things that had animated...