Thomas Edison: The Greatest Inventions In World History

Many inventors have left their mark on society. One inventor, in particular, is commonly found at the top of the list of the greatest inventors in world history. He has influenced and impacted many facets of our lives. His inventions laid the foundation of many industries and products which still exist today.

Thomas Alva Edison, born in Ohio in 1847, obtained his first patent at the age of 21. The last patent in his name was granted two years after his death, in 1933. In between, he registered 1,093 United States patents and another 1,239 patents in other countries. Biographers have estimated that Edison averaged one patent every two weeks during his working life. A prodigious creator, Edison was nicknamed “the Wizard of Menlo Park“ after the numerous creations that came out of his first industrial research center, another first of its kind.

His most notable works include the light bulb, the

phonograph, and the "kinetoscope," a small box for viewing moving pictures. He also greatly improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, batteries, cement, the telegraph, methods of capturing x-rays, and the telephone. He was a strong believer in hard work, and was known to work twenty hours a day. He was quoted as saying “I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.”
This hard work was influential on other great minds from the twentieth century as well. Most notably, motor vehicle tycoon Henry Ford. Ford was hired by Edison as an engineer and gave him lots of encouragement. It wasn’t long before Ford left the Edison Illuminating Company to start the Detroit Automobile Company and further his automobile experiments. Eventually, Ford would start the Ford Motor Company, currently the 69th largest company in the world.
Edison was also a smart businessman and this led him to start 14 companies, including the General Electric Company. Still a world leader over a hundred years after it was formed, General Electric was listed as the world’s largest corporation by Forbes Magazine in 2009 and the fourth largest in 2012.
While Edison is remembered for his major inventions, not everything he invented was a success. He filed an estimated 500 - 600 unsuccessful or abandoned applications for patents. The automatic vote recorder, pneumatic stencil pen, concrete house, and spirit phone are just some of the ideas that weren’t welcomed by the public.
The automatic vote recorder
Thomas Edison was a former telegraph operator and made an early name for himself improving the field of telegraphy.

Among his improvements was an easier-to-use version of the world’s first stock ticker. It was this mode of thought that led Edison to work on his first issued patent, the electrographic vote-recorder. He was one of several inventors at the time developing methods for the U.S. Congress to record their votes in a more timely fashion than the traditional voice vote system.

The idea for electrographic vote-recorder was for a device that was connected to a central clerk's desk. At the desk, the names of the legislators were embedded in metal type in two columns, "yes" and "no." Legislators would move a switch on a voting device at their desk to point to the "yes" or "no," sending an electric current to the device at the clerk's desk. The system allowed officials voting on a bill to cast their decision to a central recorder that calculated the counts automatically. Edison dreamed the invention would “save several hours of public time every day in the

session.”
To his dismay, when Edison took the vote recorder to Washington, it was not met with the glowing regard he had expected. Congress wanted no part of any device that would increase the speed of voting and decrease the time allowed for their filibusters and political wheeling and dealings. For Edison, this was an early lesson and he was quoted “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”
Pneumatic Stencil Pen
As large companies expanded in the late 19th century, there was a huge demand for tools administrative employees could use to complete tasks. Making multiple copies of handwritten documents became especially important. That is when Edison came up with the pneumatic stencil pen in 1876. This electric pen utilized a handheld needle that moved up and down as an employee wrote. Instead of pushing out ink, the pen punched tiny holes through the paper’s surface. The ideas was that operators would create a stencil of the document on wax paper and make copies by rolling ink over it, “printing” the words onto blank pieces of paper underneath.
The problems were that the pen was noisy and much heavier that other office devices. Edison improved the sound and weight problems but still had a problem with the batteries. The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar. Edison was so involved with other projects that he abandon the project assigning the rights to the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
Even though the electric pen wasn’t a success for Edison, the idea lead other inventors to expand his design to create the stencil copying mimeograph, the tattoo gun, and tattoo needle.