48 Fun Facts About Thomas Edison

How many US patents did Thomas Edison register?

1,093. That is a patent every ten to twelve days of his adult life; he had once vowed to turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so".

In which Ohio town was Edison born in 1847?

Milan. His father had fled there from Canada after joining a failed rebellion, and moved the family on to Port Huron, Michigan, when Edison was seven.

Edison was nicknamed "The Wizard of" which New Jersey village, home to his laboratory?

Menlo Park. He bought land there after a Newark landlord sued him, and his father oversaw the building of what became known as his "invention factory".

Which invention first brought Edison wide public notice in 1877?

The phonograph. He was only trying to record telephone messages so that they could be written down, then realised his machine could capture sound itself.

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

Scarlet fever. Edison told a taller tale, that he had once been hauled up by his ears, and came to call his deafness a help to concentration.

Where did the teenage Edison write, print and sell his own newspaper, the Herald?

Aboard a moving train. He kept a printing press in the baggage car beside his chemistry bench, until an accidental fire put an end to his experiments on board.

What ended Edison's night job as a telegrapher at Stratford Junction, Ontario?

A near collision of two trains. By his own account he failed to stop a freight in time; summoned before the general manager in Toronto, he slipped out mid-hearing and fled to Michigan.

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

An electric vote recorder. Legislators had no wish to buy a machine that sped up their votes, and Edison resolved never again to invent something nobody wanted.

What could Edison's quadruplex telegraph of 1874 do?

Send four messages at once on one wire, two in each direction. Western Union had backed the work, but Edison sold the rights to its bitter rival, and years of lawsuits followed.

Edison's only enrolment in higher education appears to have been a chemistry course at which Manhattan institution?

The Cooper Union. In 1872 he and assistant Charles Batchelor were trying to record telegraph signals on chemically treated paper, and neither man knew much chemistry.

Which telephone part did Edison perfect using a material whose electrical resistance changed with the pressure of sound?

The carbon microphone. Carbon's jumpy resistance had ruined one of his telegraph instruments; in a telephone it was just what he needed, and his transmitter stayed in use for nearly a century.

Edison, who resented being called a wizard, said genius was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent what?

Perspiration. When a colleague praised his genius, Edison retorted that genius was just "hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense".

In 1878 Edison went west to Wyoming to point his heat-detecting tasimeter at which celestial event?

A total solar eclipse. Astronomers wanted to know whether the Sun's faint corona gave off measurable heat, so Edison built them a detector and joined the expedition himself.

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

Carbonized bamboo. Edison spotted the bamboo rim of a palm-leaf fan lying in the laboratory, had strips of it carbonized and tested, then sent a man to Japan to find more.

Edison gave his first two children which pair of nicknames?

Dot and Dash. Marion and Thomas Jr. got the pet names; their mother fared worse in his laboratory notebook, where the newly-wed Edison grumbled that she "cannot invent worth a damn".

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

J.P. Morgan & Co., then trading as Drexel, Morgan. The backers, Vanderbilts among them, put up their money in 1878, a full year before Edison had a lamp that would stay lit.

On which night in 1879 did special trains bring thousands to see Edison's laboratory lit by his electric lamps?

New Year's Eve. More than three thousand people came, after a full-page New York Herald report on the lamp stirred up such excitement that Edison felt obliged to put on a public show.

Which British inventor merged his rival light-bulb firm with Edison's?

Joseph Swan. He held a British patent on a similar lamp, so instead of fighting him in court Edison joined forces, and the pair sold their bulbs under the blended name Ediswan.

Edison's first commercial power station in America, switched on in 1882, stood on which Manhattan street?

Pearl Street. Edison picked the financial district on purpose, within reach of bankers and two newspapers, and began with only a few hundred lamps.

Months before his famous American plant, Edison switched on a steam-driven public power station in which European city?

London. The Holborn Viaduct station lit nearly a thousand street lamps but ran at a heavy loss; it closed in 1886 and the street went back to gas.

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

George Westinghouse. His alternating current could be sent long distances over thin, cheap wires, while Edison's direct current reached barely a mile from the power station.

Why did Edison back an alternating-current electric chair?

To smear a rival's system. Edison opposed capital punishment, yet his ally Harold P. Brown killed dogs with alternating current before audiences and secretly obtained rival-built generators for the first chair.

The 1892 merger of Edison's lighting company with its rival Thomson-Houston created which industrial giant?

General Electric. The deal backfired on Edison's side: the financiers rated the rival more highly, put its board in charge, and the Edison name vanished from the title.

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

Iron. He sank some $2.5 million of his own money before cheap Lake Superior ore killed the scheme, then shrugged: "It's all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it."

What did Edison plan to mass-produce by pouring his cement into a single giant mould?

A whole three-storey house. He dreamed of filling them with concrete furniture, refrigerators and even pianos, but builders never took to the idea and the scheme was dropped.

Edison gave up work on which new technology in 1903, saying he was afraid of it, after it maimed his assistant?

X-rays. Clarence Dally, who had tested the laboratory's fluoroscope on his own hands, lost both arms to radiation burns and died the following year, aged 39.

Which chemistry did Edison settle on for the rechargeable battery he designed to power electric cars?

Nickel–iron. The first cells leaked and lost their charge, so Edison recalled them and halted production in 1904, then spent about five more years getting the battery right.

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

Henry Ford. Edison urged the young engineer to keep tinkering with his petrol car, and a grateful Ford later rebuilt his hero's old laboratory as a museum in Michigan.

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson did most of the real work on which invention credited to Edison?

The movie camera. Edison handled the electrical side while Dickson led the work on optics and film, then left in 1895 and helped to found a rival film company.

What was the Kinetoscope, which Edison built in 1891?

A peep-hole film viewer for penny arcades. Edison saw more profit in one-customer machines than in projection, until rivals' big-screen shows forced him to buy in a projector and sell it as his own.

Which 1903 Edison Manufacturing film was shot at Luna Park, Coney Island, and featured Topsy?

Electrocuting an Elephant. Despite the legend, Edison had no part in the killing: the park's bosses ordered Topsy put to death, and his feud over alternating current had ended a decade earlier.

Edison's 1893 film studio was nicknamed the Black Maria because it looked like which kind of vehicle?

A police wagon. The cramped, tar-papered shed had a roof that opened to the sky and stood on a pivot, so the whole studio could be swung round to follow the sun.

Which wartime advisory body did Edison head in 1915?

The Naval Consulting Board. Edison wanted its research laboratory built at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, well away from Washington's officials; he was outvoted, and the lab did not open until 1923.

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

Goldenrod. He was still trying to breed more rubber into the weed when he died in 1931, and the project was eventually handed over to the Department of Agriculture.

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

Phenol. His surplus became the prize in a wartime plot: German agents quietly bought it up to keep it out of British explosives, and it went into Bayer's aspirin instead.

What did Edison and naturalist John Burroughs do on their much-publicised holidays together?

Camping by motor car. They called them vagabond trips and slept under canvas, though the convoy doubled as rolling publicity for the cars and tyres two of its members sold.

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

Charles. His half-brother Thomas Jr. fared differently: after he lent the family name to quack remedies, their father paid him a weekly allowance to stop using it in business.

A sealed test tube from Edison's deathbed, displayed in Dearborn, Michigan, is said to hold what?

His last breath. Edison's son had the test tubes that stood near the deathbed sealed, and one was sent to an old friend, whose museum later put it on show.

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

Herbert Hoover. He turned down a plan to switch off the power stations themselves, warning that it would cost lives, and called that dependence on electricity a monument to Edison's genius.

By his own account, Edison taught Mina Miller which skill so that he could propose to her in secret?

Morse code. With her family looking on, he tapped the question into her hand and she tapped back "yes"; they married at the Millers' estate in Akron, Ohio, in February 1886.

Edison quietly bankrolled the 1880 launch of which scientific journal?

Science. He kept his backing anonymous while its early issues flattered his work, then gave up the loss-making weekly; Alexander Graham Bell's money later revived it.

Which Founding-era writer did Edison call "one of the greatest of all Americans"?

Thomas Paine. Edison read him as a boy from his parents' shelves and later defended him against his critics: "He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not."

Which award did Edison receive in 1928 at a ceremony broadcast on radio?

The Congressional Gold Medal. The broadcast came with a twist: radio had been souring Edison's record business, and only that spring had he reluctantly agreed that his own company should start making sets.

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

Fort Myers. He bought the land on a Florida holiday in 1885, honeymooned there a year later, and in old age turned its gardens into a test bed for home-grown rubber.

In 1869 Edison and partner Franklin Pope set up a firm that advertised their services under which professional title?

Electrical engineers. Edison had reached New York that spring with little to his name; Pope, an established telegraph expert, gave him his start and a room in the family home.

In 1887 Edison began a far larger laboratory complex in which New Jersey town?

West Orange. He had just bought an estate there for his new bride, and vowed to build "the best equipped and largest laboratory extant" near his home.

Edison's father-in-law, Lewis Miller, co-founded which American summer institution?

Chautauqua. Edison went there in 1885 to meet Mina Miller's family, then wrote her father a formal letter asking for her hand: "I trust my suit will meet with your approval."

Edison publicly backed which candidate's third-party run for the presidency in 1912?

Theodore Roosevelt. Edison came out for the Progressive ticket and for votes for women in the same announcement; four years later he ended up endorsing the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.