Image: Photograph of Edison with his phonograph (2nd model), taken in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. studio in April 1878. (Public Domain)
On this day in history, November 29, 1877, American inventor Thomas Edison demonstrated his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time. He built a machine that converted the vibrations produced by speaking into grooves on a piece of paper. Edison communicated the first two lines of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into the machine and played it back using a hand crank. He had just developed what he dubbed the Edison Speaking Phonograph. Edison never improved his device, but Alexander Graham Bell invented an advanced phonograph using wax cylinders in 1880.
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Ohio in 1847. He spent his youth in Port Huron, Michigan. His mother, formerly a schoolteacher, instructed him at home from the age of seven, and he was a voracious reader. He also attempted impressive chemistry experiments in his parent’s basement, marked with “near explosions and near disasters,” as his biographer explained.
Edison’s entrepreneurial disposition led him to take a job at age 12 as a “news butcher” – a street trader tasked by railroads to sell passengers snacks, newspapers, and other items. Not content to sell the news, he chose to print it, creating and publishing the first newspaper ever printed on a moving train, the Grand Trunk Herald.
By the time he was 15, due to his distinctive ability to get fired for planning experiments and inventions in his head while working, Edison became a Western Union telegrapher before relocating to New York to operate his own workshop. The telegraph would eventually stimulate many of his first patented innovations. In 1874, at 27, he invented the quadruplex telegraph, which permitted operators to transmit four messages concurrently, growing the industry’s productivity without creating new telegraph lines.
In the interim, Edison married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, and they relocated to Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. The rural area was the ideal location for a new type of laboratory that echoed its owner’s ingenious, entrepreneurial essence: a research and development site where Edison and his “muckers,” as he referred to them, could create anything their imaginations conceived.
Edison continued to upgrade the telegraph, and as he worked on a machine that would record telegraphic communications, he pondered if it could record sound, too. He created a device that translated the vibrations produced by speech into grooves on a piece of paper. This was called the Edison Speaking Phonograph.
Edison’s phonograph was cutting-edge but predominantly seen as a novelty. He had moved on to an alternative world-altering idea: the incandescent light bulb.
Electric light bulbs have been present since the early 19th century, but they were frail and short-term due to their filaments – the part that produces light. One early type of electric light, the carbon arc light, depended on the vapor of battery-heated carbon rods to make light. Yet they had to be lit by hand, and the bulbs blinked, hissed, and burned out quickly. Other designs were too costly and not practical to be commonly used.
Edison’s, by contrast, were cheap, reasonable, and long-lasting. In 1879, after years of zealously improving the idea of light bulbs, he showed a bulb that could last a remarkable 15 hours.
“My light is at last a perfect one,” Edison boasted to the New York Times. When people learned about the bulb, they gathered at Menlo Park, and hundreds of them examined the laboratory – now bright with electric light – in a public demonstration on December 31, 1879. A Black inventor named Lewis Latimer advanced Edison’s innovation, making lightbulb filaments more durable and working to make them economically. Meanwhile, Edison created an electric utility company and worked toward improvements to make electric light even more available.
Edison’s inventions led to worldwide fame – and a ruthless battle over electrical current. Edison’s methods relied on direct current (DC) – which could only distribute electricity to numerous buildings in a dense area. However, Edison’s competitors – including Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – used cheaper alternating current (AC) systems, which could distribute electricity to customers over greater distances.
As AC systems spread, Edison utilized the press to fight against Westinghouse and Tesla, assigning electricity-related deaths to AC and contributing to an advertising campaign demonstrating the deadly capability of alternating current. The fight intensified when Edison funded public testing that comprised killing animals with AC. Still, its horrific pinnacle happened when Edison, desperate to guarantee his technology reigned, secretly funded the invention and creation of the first electric chair – guaranteeing it ran on AC.
Despite the disturbance of his anti-AC campaign, Edison eventually lost the current war due to the truths of pricing and his deteriorating power in the electric utility he had established.
In 1884, calamity struck when Mary died of a morphine overdose. In 1886, the 39-year-old Edison married 20-year-old Mina Miller. While vacationing in Fort Myers, Florida, the twosome met a person who would become one of Edison’s scientific partners later in life: Automobile pioneer and Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford.
Edison persisted in being at the forefront of innovation, which stretched from motion pictures – he opened the world’s first production studio, recognized as the Black Maria, in 1893 – to talking dolls. He claimed to sleep only four hours per night, said he did not trust exercise, and reportedly lived on a diet of milk and cigars for many years. Finally, he perished due to complications of diabetes in 1931 at age 84.
Subscribe to “History Daily with Francis Chappell Black” to receive regular updates regarding new content:
Help us with our endeavors to keep History alive. With our daily Blog posts and our publishing program we hope to inform people in a comfortable and easy-going manner. This is my full-time job so any support you can give would be greatly appreciated.
History Daily With Francis Chappell Black 
Leave a comment