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AC power
"Alternating current." This type of electrical power system, attributed to George Westinghouse, had the power to transmit voltages of up to 1000V. The key to this power was the transformer, which reduced high voltages to safe levels. AC power became a serious competitor with Edison's DC power because it could transmit over greater distances at lower costs, although detractors claimed it was unsafe. -
DC power
"Direct current." This was Edison's preferred form of electrical power system. Though it could only transmit voltages up to 240V, it had many advantages in the battle for electrical dominance. Edison's generators were more advanced and his systems could transmit power as well as electricity. -
Gold & Stock
This New York City telegraph company provided the young Edison with his first jobs and invention contracts. Their primary customer was the Stock Exchange. In 1870 they commissioned Edison to create a printer and a telegraph, facsimiles of the most advanced types, for them. -
Kinetoscope
Edison invented this technology for viewing projection films in 1891. Though he could have used it as a projection device, he decided that he could make more money using it as a peepshow device. Hence, the Nickelodeon, built for one person to view a film at a time. -
Menlo Park
Edison's first research laboratory was established in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. Edison's most creative and successful period as an inventor was spent here. The laboratory itself, with its emphasis on a loose hierarchy, cooperation, innovation and teamwork, became the model for many science and technology research laboratories afterwards. -
Nickelodeon
These individual viewing devices, powered by Edison's Kinetoscopes, were incredibly popular with urban audiences in the 1890s. For twenty-five cents admission, customers entered parlors of the machines and passed along them, viewing short films. -
Ore-milling
This is widely considered as Edison's most disastrous foray into industrial production. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s he sunk the majority of his personal fortune into an elaborate ore-milling production designed to transform the production of iron and steel for furnaces. The process involved concentrating magnetic iron ore, magnetite, into small briquettes. -
patent
Patents were an integral part of an inventor's life, and Edison owned over 1,000 of them by the end of his life. They were licenses given to an inventor by the federal government to forbid others from copying or stealing the invention. -
phonograph
One of Edison's most famous inventions, although it was not until another inventor threatened to bring it to market that he paid attention to it seriously as a consumer product. Edison and a team of researchers invented it at Menlo Park in November 1877, partially using telephone technology. -
Storage battery
One of Edison's later (pre-World War One) preoccupations was the creation of a storage battery that would serve as a source of power for consumers and businesses. Many inventors had unsuccessfully attempted to create a safe, effective, commercially successful storage battery for some fifty years before Edison took up the challenge in the early 1900s. He joined their ranks, despite making headway in the field. -
telegraph
The telegraph, first completed in 1837 by two Englishmen, transformed communication in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. (In fact, transcontinental telegraphy preceded transcontinental railroads by seven years.) As a young man, Edison was fascinated with both the telegraph and the life of a telegrapher, and many of his first inventions revolve around the device. -
telephone
Although the work for the telephone belongs to several inventors, the modern, practical telephone is generally credited to Alexander Graham Bell, who patented his device in March 1876. Edison quickly moved to improve upon Bell's invention. -
Thomas Edison, Inc.
On March two, 1911, all of Edison's many companies were incorporated into the greater body of Thomas Edison, Inc. The move represents a greater move towards the philosophy of big business. -
West Orange
The second of Edison's great research facilities, established in 1886 in West Orange, New Jersey. This laboratory was much larger than the one at Menlo Park and less romantic, though Edison accomplished much here, including work on the electric lighting system and the phonograph and invention of the motion picture camera and the dictating machine. -
Western Union
The major telegraphing company in America by the 1870s, it bought Gold and Stock and multiple small telegraphing companies in the late 1860s. Edison worked in many of their offices during his youth.
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