50 Fun Facts About Thomas Edison

How many US patents did Thomas Edison register?

During his adult life that averaged one patent every 10 to 12 days, many of them for work done by his staff.

In which Ohio town was Edison born in 1847?

He was the seventh and last child of the family, who moved to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854.

Which New Jersey laboratory earned Edison the nickname "The Wizard of" that place?

It was built in 1876 with money from the sale of his quadruplex telegraph, and the township is now named Edison in his honour.

Which invention first brought Edison wide public notice in 1877?

It seemed so magical that the public dubbed him a wizard; his first version recorded on tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder.

Historian Paul Israel blames Edison's deafness on ear infections plus which childhood illness?

Edison told elaborate made-up stories about the cause, and later said deafness helped him concentrate.

What newspaper did the teenage Edison print and sell on trains between Port Huron and Detroit?

It ran only twenty-four issues but had 500 subscribers, and he kept its first issue framed at home until he died.

Why did Edison resign from his night telegrapher job at Stratford Junction, Ontario?

He had been studying qualitative analysis and running chemical experiments on the job.

What was Edison's first patent, granted on June 1, 1869, for?

He had made some money from a stock ticker in Boston, but lost it trying to expand to New York.

What was the quadruplex telegraph, for which Edison received $30,000 in 1874, able to do?

The money funded the Menlo Park lab and an investment in his brother's Port Huron street railway.

Which institution's chemistry course appears to have been Edison's only enrolment in higher education?

He took it to support work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor.

What did Edison invent in 1876 for the telephone, using granules whose resistance changed with sound?

He thought the worst part of Bell's telephone was Emile Berliner's transmitter, and tested 150 materials for the diaphragm.

Which famous ratio did Edison use to describe genius, resenting the "wizard" label as he aged?

He grew to dislike titles that painted him as a genius rather than a hard worker.

What was the tasimeter, which Edison invented to study the corona during the 1878 eclipse?

He wanted to measure the heat coming from the corona during totality.

Which filament material did Edison and Batchelor discover could last over 1,200 hours in a light bulb?

He had started with cardboard blackened with lampblack, then tried grasses and canes such as hemp and palmetto.

Edison's high-resistance filament led him to choose which voltage, still the US household standard?

It was much higher than what his competitors were using at the time.

Which financier's firm helped Edison form the Edison Electric Light Company in New York?

Members of the Vanderbilt family were also among the investors he met through lawyer Grosvenor Lowrey.

What did spectators nickname Edison's lab site when he lit it with electric lights in 1880?

In 1883 he started a parallel construction business to build such systems for small towns.

Which British inventor with an 1880 patent on a similar lamp joined Edison in the company Ediswan?

The joint venture avoided a court battle and sold the bulbs in Britain.

Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York, switched on September 4, 1882, supplied electricity in what form?

The lights were so steady that few noticed the switch-on; some came in the evening to ask why the system was not working.

In which city did Edison switch on the first steam-generating power station in January 1882?

The 93 kW demonstration came eight months before Pearl Street.

Whose alternating current beat Edison's direct current in the 'war of the currents'?

Edison's DC plants could not serve customers more than about a mile from the power station.

Which anti-AC crusader did Edison join in publicly electrocuting animals to smear alternating current?

Though he opposed capital punishment, Edison backed an electric chair powered by Westinghouse AC to damage his rival's image.

The 1892 merger of Edison General Electric with which rival created General Electric?

J.P. Morgan decided the rival was the more valuable company and put its board in charge of the new firm.

What did Edison's near-ruinous ore-milling venture try to extract from low-grade rock and sand?

His Ogdensburg plant used 480 electromagnets, seventy-ton rollers and the largest steam shovel in America.

What did Edison commission a system for casting from cement in a single mould in 1901?

He built employee housing with the method, but the public relations campaign never generated enough demand.

What did Edison say in 1903 after fluoroscopy experiments nearly cost him his eyesight?

His assistant Clarence Dally, a human guinea pig for the project, died at 39 from the exposure.

Which chemistry did Edison settle on for his rechargeable battery after testing 10,000 combinations?

It arrived too late for electric cars, which were vanishing by 1910, and Henry Ford still lent him $1.1 million to keep researching.

Which future carmaker met Edison in 1896 while working for the Edison Illuminating Company?

Edison encouraged his tinkering with automobiles; the two remained friends until Edison's death.

Who did much of the real work on Edison's motion picture camera, the Kinetograph?

Edison focused on the electromechanical side while his assistant led the optical and film effort; they split by 1895.

What was the Kinetoscope, which Edison built in 1891?

It was first publicly exhibited alongside the Kinetograph camera on May 20, 1891.

Which 1903 Edison Manufacturing film recorded the death of Topsy at Luna Park, Coney Island?

The same year his studio released The Great Train Robbery; it made nearly 1,200 films between 1894 and 1911.

What was the Motion Picture Patents Company, the 1908 conglomerate of nine studios, commonly known as?

It was a conglomerate of nine major film studios.

Which film did Edison name as his favourite movie?

He thought talkies had "spoiled everything", and his favourite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.

Which wartime advisory body did Edison head in 1915?

He wanted the Navy's research site far from Washington so bureaucrats would not slow the work, and was overruled.

Which plant did Edison identify as a domestic source of rubber after testing 17,000 samples?

He announced in 1929 that Leavenworth's variety could be bred to yield 12 percent latex; Ford and Firestone funded the search.

Which chemical did Edison start producing at Silver Lake in 1914 when the war cut off supplies for his records?

The plants made six tons a day; he also built benzene plants and made the aniline dyes Germany had monopolised.

Which naturalist joined Edison's motor camping trips with Ford and Firestone from 1914 to 1924?

The trips doubled as moving advertisements for Ford cars and Firestone tyres, with reporters in tow.

Which son took over Edison's business and later served as Governor of New Jersey?

He received the presidency of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. in 1926, when his father was 79.

What is on display in Dearborn, Michigan, in a sealed test tube taken from the inventor's deathbed?

His son Charles had several test tubes near the body sealed; one was sent to a famous carmaker friend.

Which president asked Americans to turn off their lights for a minute in Edison's memory in 1931?

The Statue of Liberty's torch was darkened and New York's subway lines halted for the tribute.

How old was Mary Stilwell when Edison married her on Christmas Day 1871?

She was an employee at one of his shops and had met him only two months earlier; she died at 29.

Where did Edison marry his second wife, Mina Miller, in 1886?

Her father Lewis Miller had made his fortune from a wheat mower and co-founded the Chautauqua Institution.

What did the deaf Edison love so much on the Fourth of July that he made his own with added TNT?

It was one of the few household occasions he took part in; he left child-rearing to Mina and her five maids.

Which writer's The Age of Reason heavily influenced Edison, whom historians call a "freethinker"?

Edison insisted the author was no atheist but a "scientific deist" who believed in a supreme intelligence.

Which award did Edison receive on May 29, 1928, with President Coolidge joining by radio?

He had received France's Legion of Honour back in 1881 and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal in 1920.

Where was Edison's Florida winter retreat, Seminole Lodge, located?

He bought the 13 acres in 1885 for roughly $2,750; a carmaker friend later lived a few hundred feet away.

Which fellow telegrapher let the penniless young Edison live in his New Jersey basement in 1869?

The pair founded an electrical engineering firm that October and soon had fifty employees in Newark.

Edison's West Orange laboratory, finished after 1887, dwarfed Menlo Park by what factor?

He put Charles Batchelor in charge of building the new complex after feeling he had outgrown the old one.

Where did Edison first meet his second wife Mina Miller in December 1884?

Her father Lewis Miller grew rich on wheat-mower improvements and co-founded the Chautauqua Institution.

Edison, a lifelong Republican, briefly backed which candidate's third-party presidential run?

His own father had been a Democrat who supported Confederate secession.