My Famous American today was Thomas Edison. The first invention of his that I heard about was the light bulb. Edison was born in Ohio in on February 11, 1847. He was always curious about machinery. As a young kid he asked his teacher so many questions that she got impatient with him. His mother took him out of school and home schooled him. He learned by doing experiments. That's kind of like me except my mom isn't cool and doesn't let me learn only from experiments. When I was in kindergarten I only got to have 20 questions per day because they got fed up with me. Edison had problems with his hearing and he said it was because he was running to catch a train and a conductor pulled him up onto the train by the ears. I don't know if that's really true though. Besides the light bulb, he invented the phonograph and combined the phonograph and cameras to make the first motion pictures. Altogether Edison got more than 1,000 patents. I think he might be the most awesome American ever.
2 comments:
Jon,
Edison was a great inventor, but he had some blemishes as well. For example, he owned a product development lab where very bright people came up with product ideas. Most of these were patented. Guess who put his name on them???? That's right, Edison. So I'm not so sure that he really came up with all 1000.
Did you know he was one of the first to pirate a movie? Yes indeed! A frenchman made a science fiction movie of a flight to the moon. Edison made a copy and sold it in the US. When the frenchman came to the US to sell his movie, Edison had already sold it and made a lot of money. Did Edison give the money to its rightful owner???? Nah. This was before copyright laws that protected creators of movieds.
Old Guy.
I'm a big fan of Thomas Edison too. It's amazing some of the things that were totally crazy at the time that became practical due to his work (and the work of his company, of course). He wasn't the first person to make a light bulb, but he was the first person to make a light bulb that lasted long enough and was cheap enough that people would want to buy it.
Another amazing inventor and experimenter of that day was Nikola Tesla. He is the man credited with inventing the radio. He and Edison, although both brilliant inventors, were almost complete opposites (and really didn't like each other very much)! Tesla was into showy demonstrations of man-made lightning and wild new ideas and Edison was into making technology practical. Both of these guys were amazing.
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