When the profession of Inventor comes up, the name that immediately pops into most people’s head is Thomas Edison, and there is good reason for this. With over 1,000 US patents and hundreds more around the world, he holds the record for having his name on the most patents. Edison’s work revolutionized the fields of electricity, sound and film recording, and even communications. On top of this he left behind a plethora of inspiring quotes and information about how he was able to create so many great inventions.

Edison is probably best remembered for his work with the light bulb, although he didn’t make the very first light bulb (that distinction goes to Humphry Davy), it was Edison and his team that found a filament that made the light bulb a practical technology. Early light bulbs required huge amounts of electricity and at best lasted only a couple hours, in fact Edison’s first patented light bulb only lasted 13.5 hours. Legends say that the Edison team tried as many as 50,000 different filaments before they found that a carbonized bamboo filament could last for over 12,000 hours. This led to some of his most famous quotes challenging the definition of failure including “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Once Edison succeeded in creating a long lasting light bulb, he proved that he was huge thinker saying things like “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles,” and then went on to make candles obsolete.

The man was constantly thinking of ways to improve everything he touched and really loved inventing. Invention Pub would be doing a huge injustice to Edison if we tried to sum everything he has to teach us into one post, so we will be making Edison a weekly series. Next Monday we will take a closer look at Edison’s favorite invention the phonograph.

For now I’ll leave you with a quote that really embodied Edison’s ability to think huge:

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 4:11 am and is filed under Great Inventors, Thomas Edison. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.