MINISTERUL EDUCAȚIEI NAȚIONALE

Colegiul Național ,,Grigore Moisil”, Onești

LUCRARE DE ATESTAT
LA LIMBA ENGLEZĂ

COORDONATOR,
Prof. Velicu Magdalena
Maria

CANDIDAT,
Gondoș Ștefan

CLASA A XII-A G - Științe ale Naturii cu Engleză Intensiv

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 Thomas Alva Edison
,,When you have exhausted all possibilities,
remember this: you haven’t.

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 Table of Contents

Argument ............................................................................................ 4

Introduction ........................................................................................ 6

I. EARLY IN LIFE ............................................................................. 7

II. CAREER ....................................................................................... 9

II.1 Menlo Park ................................................................................ 9

II.2 Inventions ................................................................................ 10

III. PERSONAL LIFE ..................................................................... 12

IV.LATER LIFE .............................................................................. 14

V. AWARDS ................................................................................... 14

VI. QUOTES .................................................................................... 16

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ........................................................... 17

WEBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................... 18

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 Argument

During his 84 years of life, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1,093 patents (singly or
jointly) and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent
light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. He also created the world’s first
industrial research laboratory. Known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” for the New Jersey town
where he did some of his best-known work, Edison had become one of the most famous men in
the world by the time he was in his 30s. In addition to his talent for invention, Edison was also a
successful manufacturer and businessman who was highly skilled at marketing his inventions–
and himself–to the public.

First of all, for those who are not familiar with the story of Thomas Edison, it is about the life of a
boy born in Milan, Ohio. Edison had very little formal education as a child, attending school only
for a few months. He was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a
very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own. This belief in self-
improvement remained throughout his life.At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for
knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects. In this wide-open curriculum Edison
developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him
throughout his life.More than that, at the age of 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell
newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Edison also used his access to the
railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car.
During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire.The conductor
rushed in and hit Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He
was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route. This
accident did not prevent the little Edison from continuing his adventure in discovering and
inventing.

Furthermore, his persistence, impatience of knowledge and optimistic perspective determined

him to discover his first and favourite invention the tin foil phonograph.
While working on improvements to the telegraph and the telephone, Edison figured out a way to
record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders. In 1877, he created a machine with two needles: one for
recording and one for playback. When Edison spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of
his voice would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle."Mary had a little lamb"
were the first words that Edison recorded on the phonograph and he was amazed when he heard
the machine play them back to him. In 1878, Edison established the Edison Speaking Phonograph
Company to sell the new machine.

Last but not least, what has prompted me to choose this topic is my passion for Physics because
since I was a little boy I have been passionated about lightning and for bizarre events who are
produced in nature and how they occur, in my search I came across Mr. Thomas Edison, and later
to idolize him, his effort and his devotion helped the next generation of students through his
biggest invention, the electric light bulb.By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New
Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing
electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament
from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. In order to improve the bulb,

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Edison needed all the persistence he had learned years before in his basement laboratory. He
tested thousands and thousands of other materials to use for the filament. He even thought about
using tungsten, which is the metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he could not work with
it given the tools available at that time.

Taking everything into consideration, I truly believe that Thomas Edison can rightly be regarded
as one of the greatest inventors of all times, a household name in the domain of science whose
inventions have greatly contributed to the progress of mankind. He is a person who everybody
should know about to find out a lot of interesting things about him and the person as well as
about his work.He has a lot of inspirational quotes among which the following is my favourite
one: "There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its
potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death
in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.".This is an
inspirational quote due to the fact that it can change a lot of perspectives made for myself as well
as for many people.

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 Introduction

Thomas Edison did not invent the modern world. He was, however, present at the creation, a
significant figure in the organization and growth of America's national markets, communications
and power systems, and entertainment industries.

One hundred and fifty years after his birth—and 66 years after his death—his name stands for
inventive creativity, and his electric lamp is the symbol of a bright idea, beloved by cartoonists
and advertisers. His list of 1,093 U.S. Patents remains unchallenged by any other inventor. It is a
tribute to his talents as an inventor, businessman, and promoter that many people think that we
owe our way of life to his ideas.

What made Edison so extraordinarily successful? He was by any reckoning a brilliant inventor,
but there were many other fine, clever contemporary inventors, now mostly forgotten: Elisha
Gray and George Phelps in telegraphy; Emile Berliner in telephony and sound recording; Edward
Weston in electrical instrumentation; Elihu Thomson, Frank Sprague, and Nikola Tesla in
electrical power and lighting.

Edison outshone them all in the breadth of his accomplishments and the public renown he
garnered. He broadened the notion of invention to include far more than simply embodying an
idea in a working artifact.

His vision encompassed what the twentieth century would call innovation—invention, research,
development, and commercialization. Moreover, he combined a prodigious creativity with a
canny sense of the emerging influence of the popular press, and therein lies the key to his
historical stature.

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 I. EARLY IN LIFE

Thomas Edison, in full Thomas Alva Edison, (born February 11, 1847, Milan, Ohio, U.S.—
died October 18, 1931, West Orange, New Jersey).
In 1854 Samuel Edison became the lighthouse keeper and carpenter on the Fort Gratiot military
post near Port Huron, Michigan, where the family lived in a substantial home. Alva, as the
inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for
five years. He was imaginative and inquisitive, but, because much instruction was by rote and he
had difficulty hearing, he was bored and was labeled a misfit. To compensate, he became
an avid and omnivorous reader. Edison’s lack of formal schooling was not unusual. At the time
of the Civil War the average American had attended school a total of 434 days—little more than
two years’ schooling by today’s standards.

In 1859 Edison quit school and began working as a trainboy on the railroad between Detroit and
Port Huron. Four years earlier, the Michigan Central had initiated the commercial application of
the telegraph by using it to control the movement of its trains, and the Civil War brought a vast
expansion of transportation and communication. Edison took advantage of the opportunity to
learn telegraphy and in 1863 became an apprentice telegrapher.

Messages received on the initial Morse telegraph were inscribed as a series of dots and dashes on
a strip of paper that was decoded and read, so Edison’s partial deafness was no handicap.
Receivers were increasingly being equipped with a sounding key, however, enabling telegraphers
to “read” messages by the clicks. The transformation of telegraphy to an auditory art left Edison
more and more disadvantaged during his six-year career as an itinerant telegrapher in the

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Midwest, the South, Canada, and New England. Amply supplied with ingenuity and insight, he
devoted much of his energy toward improving the inchoate equipment and inventing devices to
facilitate some of the tasks that his physical limitations made difficult. By January 1869 he had
made enough progress with a duplex telegraph (a device capable of transmitting two messages
simultaneously on one wire) and a printer, which converted electrical signals to letters, that he
abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.

Edison moved to New York City, where he initially went into partnership with Frank L. Pope, a
noted electrical expert, to produce the Edison Universal Stock Printer and other printing
telegraphs. Between 1870 and 1875 he worked out of Newark, New Jersey, and was involved in a
variety of partnerships and complex transactions in the fiercely competitive and convoluted
telegraph industry, which was dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company. As an
independent entrepreneur he was available to the highest bidder and played both sides against the
middle. During this period he worked on improving an automatic telegraph system for Western
Union’s rivals. The automatic telegraph, which recorded messages by means of a chemical
reaction engendered by the electrical transmissions, proved of limited commercial success, but
the work advanced Edison’s knowledge of chemistry and laid the basis for his development of the
electric pen and mimeograph, both important devices in the early office machine industry, and
indirectly led to the discovery of the phonograph. Under the aegis of Western Union he devised
the quadruplex, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire, but railroad
baron and Wall Street financier Jay Gould, Western Union’s bitter rival, snatched the quadruplex
from the telegraph company’s grasp in December 1874 by paying Edison more than $100,000 in
cash, bonds, and stock, one of the larger payments for any invention up to that time. Years of
litigation followed.

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 II. CAREER

II.1 Menlo Park

Menlo Park, unincorporated community, Middlesex county, northeastern New Jersey, U.S. It lies
16 miles (25 km) southwest of Newark. Menlo Park is the site of the Edison Memorial Tower
and State Park (and museum) on the grounds where Thomas A. Edison maintained his
experimental laboratories from 1876 to 1886 and where he perfected many of his inventions. The
131-foot (40-metre) Edison Memorial Tower, on the spot where the first commercially
practical incandescent lamp was made, is capped by a lightbulb 13 feet (4 metres) high and 8 feet
(2.5 metres) across; a perpetual light was placed at the base of the tower in 1929. The laboratory
buildings were removed in 1929 by industrialist Henry Ford to his Greenfield Village Museum
in Dearborn, Michigan.

The laboratory

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II.2 Inventions:
The phonograph

Edison invented many items, including the carbon transmitter, in response to specific demands
for new products or improvements. But he also had the gift of serendipity: when some
unexpected phenomenon was observed, he did not hesitate to halt work in progress and turn off
course in a new direction. This was how, in 1877, he achieved his most original discovery, the
phonograph. Because the telephone was considered a variation of acoustic telegraphy, Edison
during the summer of 1877 was attempting to devise for it, as he had for the automatic telegraph,
a machine that would transcribe signals as they were received, in this instance in the form of the
human voice, so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. (The telephone was not
yet conceived as a general person-to-person means of communication.)

Some earlier researchers, notably French inventor Léon Scott, had theorized that each sound, if it
could be graphically recorded, would produce a distinct shape resembling shorthand, or
phonography (“sound writing”), as it was then known. Edison hoped to reify this concept by
employing a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of paraffined paper.
To his astonishment, the scarcely visible indentations generated a vague reproduction of sound
when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus.

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The electric light

Another offshoot of the carbon experiments reached fruition sooner. Samuel Langley, Henry
Draper, and other American scientists needed a highly sensitive instrument that could be used to
measure minute temperature changes in heat emitted from the Sun’s corona during a
solar eclipse along the Rocky Mountains on July 29, 1878. To satisfy those needs Edison devised
a “microtasimeter” employing a carbon button. This was a time when great advances were being
made in electric arc lighting, and during the expedition, which Edison accompanied, the men
discussed the practicality of “subdividing” the intense arc lights so that electricity could be used
for lighting in the same fashion as with small, individual gas “burners.”

The basic problem seemed to be to keep the burner, or bulb, from being consumed by preventing
it from overheating. Edison thought he would be able to solve this by fashioning a
microtasimeter-like device to control the current. He boldly announced that he would invent a
safe, mild, and inexpensive electric light that would replace the gaslight

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 III. PERSONAL LIFE

Marriages and children

On December 25, 1871, at the age of 24, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell (1855–1884),
whom he had met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three
children:
Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965), nicknamed "Dot"Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935),
nicknamed "Dash"William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield
Scientific School at Yale, 1900.Mary Edison died at age 29 on August 9, 1884, of unknown
causes: possibly from a brain tumor[118] or a morphine overdose. Doctors frequently prescribed
morphine to women in those years to treat a variety of causes, and researchers believe that her
symptoms could have been from morphine poisoning.[119]
Edison generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family.Mina Miller
Edison in 1906.
On February 24, 1886, at the age of 39, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller (1865–1947)
in Akron, Ohio.[120] She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the
Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children
together:

Mina Miller Edison

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Madeleine Edison (1888–1979), who married John Eyre Sloane.

Charles Edison (1890–1969), Governor of New Jersey (1941–1944), who took over his father's
company and experimental laboratories upon his father's death.
Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992), (MIT Physics 1923), credited with more than 80
patents.Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.
Wanting to be an inventor, but not having much of an aptitude for it, Thomas Edison's son,
Thomas Alva Edison Jr., became a problem for his father and his father's business. Starting in the
1890s, Thomas Jr. became involved in snake oil products and shady and fraudulent enterprises
producing products being sold to the public as "The Latest Edison Discovery". The situation
became so bad that Thomas Sr. had to take his son to court to stop the practices, finally agreeing
to pay Thomas Jr. an allowance of $35 (equivalent to $996 in 2019)[28] per week, in exchange
for not using the Edison name; the son began using aliases, such as Burton Willard. Thomas Jr.,
suffering from alcoholism, depression and ill health, worked at several menial jobs, but by 1931
(towards the end of his life) he would obtain a role in the Edison company, thanks to the
intervention of his brother.

Family

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 IV. LATER LIFE

Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont" in
Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift
for Mina. Rev. Stephen J. Herben officiated at the funeral; Edison is buried behind the home.

Edison's last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at The Henry Ford museum near Detroit.
Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventor's room shortly
after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask and casts of Edison's hands were also made.
Mina died in 1947.

V. AWARDS
The President of the Third French Republic, Jules Grévy, on the recommendation of his Minister
of Foreign Affairs, Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, and with the presentations of the Minister of
Posts and Telegraphs, Louis Cochery, designated Edison with the distinction of an Officer of the
Legion of Honour (Légion d'honneur) by decree on November 10, 1881; Edison was also named
a Chevalier in the Legion in 1879, and a Commander in 1889.In 1887, Edison won the Matteucci
Medal. In 1890, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Philadelphia City Council named Edison the recipient of the John Scott Medal in 1889.

In 1899, Edison was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal of The Franklin Institute.He was
named an Honorable Consulting Engineer at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World's fair in
1904.In 1908, Edison received the American Association of Engineering Societies John Fritz
Medal.

In 1915, Edison was awarded Franklin Medal of The

Franklin Institute for discoveries

contributing to the foundation of industries and the well-

being of the human race.In 1920, the United States Navy
department awarded him the Navy Distinguished Service
Medal.

In 1923, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers

created the Edison Medal and he was its first recipient.In
1927, he was granted membership in the National Academy
of Sciences.

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On May 29, 1928, Edison received the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 1983, the United States Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law 97–
198), designated February 11, Edison's birthday, as National Inventor's Day.Life magazine
(USA), in a special double issue in 1997, placed Edison first in the list of the "100 Most
Important People in the Last 1000 Years", noting that the light bulb he promoted "lit up the
world". In the 2005 television series The Greatest American, he was voted by viewers as the
fifteenth greatest.

In 2008, Edison was inducted in the New Jersey Hall of Fame

In 2010, Edison was honored with a Technical Grammy Award.

In 2011, Edison was inducted into the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame and named a Great Floridian
by the governor and cabinet of Florida.

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 VI. QUOTES
Following are a few Thomas Edison quotes to inspire and motivate. Edison is well known for his
many inventions, but he is also well known for his hard work ethic and perseverance. Even after
many failed attempts with his light bulb design, Edison continued on knowing each failure
brought him closer to success. We hope these Thomas Edison quotes give you the motivation to
persevere.

“Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each
day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night."

“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is
success.”

“A genius is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.”

“When I have finally decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead on it and make
trial after trial until it comes.

“I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.”

“My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions…. The
dove is my emblem…. I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it…. I am proud
of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill….

“Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability…. We
should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with
preparation.”

“One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man
who loves his work. But speaking for myself, I can honestly say this is not so…I continue
to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world
calls success.”

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 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Edison chiefly stands as an example of a heroic inventor and, more broadly, a

heroic U.S. citizen. His lack of much formal education, his strong practical bent,
his independent habits, his apparent willingness to take on virtually any technical
challenge-all resonated deeply with a nation that was becoming more and more
bureaucratic, scientific, and professionalized yet feeling ambivalent about the
transition. Edison left an enormous legacy. He was simultaneously a one-of-a-kind
“wizard” and an everyman who aspired to greatness through hard work and
creativity. In the popular imagination he served as a great inspiration more than a
leader. However, those who explore the new Edison scholarship will find many
valuable leadership lessons about how to organize and motivate creative teams,
how to move technological ideas into the marketplace, and how to cultivate a
potent public image.

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 WEBLIOGRAPHY

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#See_also
 https://www.thomasedison.org/brief-biography
 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Edison
 https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-life-of-thomas-edison-history-
essay.php
 https://www.ducksters.com/biography/thomas_edison.php

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