Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents and industrialised invention itself, building the first laboratory designed to produce innovations on a schedule. Born in Ohio in 1847, he had almost no formal schooling, was taught by his mother, and went partially deaf in childhood. He worked as a telegraph operator from his teens, and his early patents improved telegraphy — the quadruplex of 1874, which sent four messages at once over one wire, funded what came next. He opened the Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey in 1876, staffed with machinists, chemists and mathematicians. It was the model for the corporate research laboratory. The phonograph in 1877 recorded and reproduced sound for the first time and made him famous. His incandescent lamp of 1879 was not the first, but the carbonised bamboo filament and high-resistance design made it commercially viable — and, crucially, he built the system around it: generators, meters, switches and the Pearl Street station that lit lower Manhattan from September 1882. He was a systematiser and a relentless empiricist rather than a theorist, testing thousands of filament materials by brute search. He treated his staff's work as his own output, and his contest with George Westinghouse over alternating current in the late 1880s involved publicly electrocuting animals and promoting the electric chair to associate AC with death. He lost: AC transmits over distance, and his direct current did not. He also developed the motion picture camera and an alkaline storage battery, and sank a fortune into an iron-ore separation venture that failed. General Electric grew out of the 1892 merger of his companies. He died in 1931.

• Lived: 1847 CE – 1931 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: inventor