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Thomas Edison's "invention factory" in the tiny New Jersey village of Menlo Park was a wonderful place to work. It included up-to-the-minute milling machines, microscopes, and almost any other important electrical appliance. He also had every known chemical, and thousands of science books. All this wasn't what made this the best research lab in America back then; it was those gears turning in Edison's head.
He was born to his parents, Nancy and Samuel Edison on February 11, 1847 in Vienna, Canada. When he was still young, him and his family were driven out of their home. When Edison was a little older, he asked many questions. What one thing he hadn't realized is that his teachers would see him asking so many questions and think he wasn't normal or something. Unfortunately, they did think that or something along those lines. His teachers and principles were ready to give up on him and put him in special classes. His mother came to the rescue and said she would home school him because she believed he was just like the other kids, just with a bigger imagination. Luckily this unfairness didn't really influence his later life and if it did, I believe it made him try harder and achieve more. Edison didn't go to college but still had a great life. As his mother expected, he turned out to be someone very important to this world, an inventor, and a very good one at that. Edison invented the phonograph, a very helpful invention, but in 1868, while working as a telegrapher in Boston, he invented a vote recording machine. This was Edison's first real invention, and he patented it in 1869.
One invention Edison was working on in 1878 was a practical electric lamp/light bulb. Electrical lighting was not a new idea back then. An earlier lighting system called an arc lamp (in which a current of electricity leaps across two carbon points) had been used to light some streets in Europe, but their light was too bright to be used in small spaces. The race was on in the United States and Europe to invent an electrical light that could be used in homes and offices. This was something Edison was determined to do.
Edison and his assistants worked without pause through the winter of 1879 using teamwork to try to find the right filament for the light bulb. Copper, steel, metals and their alloys were cut and placed inside a glass bulb. More than 1,500 different materials were tested in all. Each time, Edison had to pump as much air out of the bulb as he could so that the oxygen would not speed up the burning of the filament. But none of the materials he tested worked.
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