Thomas Edison Born: The Wizard of Menlo Park

Thomas Edison was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other, probably from scarlet fever as a child, possibly from a conductor grabbing him by the ears and lifting him onto a moving train. He didn't consider it a disability. He said it helped him concentrate. He held 1,093 patents, still one of the largest patent portfolios in American history, and built an industrial research laboratory that was itself a major invention. Born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847, Edison was largely self-educated. His mother pulled him from school after a teacher called him "addled." She taught him at home, and he devoured books on chemistry and physics. He worked as a telegraph operator as a teenager and began improving the equipment he used, filing his first patent at 21 for an electric vote recorder. Nobody wanted it. He learned to focus on inventions people would pay for. The phonograph, in 1877, was the first device that could record and play back sound. People were stunned. Edison spoke the words "Mary had a little lamb" into a cylinder wrapped in tin foil, and the machine played them back. He was 30. Scientific American called it "the most wonderful invention of the century." His Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey, opened in 1876, was the world's first dedicated industrial research facility. He hired teams of machinists, chemists, and engineers and organized them to pursue inventions systematically. The model, collaborative invention at industrial scale, was adopted by Bell Labs, General Electric, and every corporate R&D facility that followed. The incandescent light bulb, demonstrated publicly in 1879, required not just the bulb itself but an entire electrical distribution system: generators, wiring, switches, meters. Edison built all of it. He opened the Pearl Street power station in lower Manhattan in 1882, providing electricity to 85 customers. When a fire destroyed his entire West Orange research complex on December 9, 1914, he watched it burn and reportedly told his son: "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." He was insured. He rebuilt within weeks. He died on October 18, 1931, at 84.