Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was born on February 11 1847. Thomas Edison was an American inventor who developed many devices such as the phonograph and the electric light bulb. He gathered some scientists in order to help him make many of his inventions, with the help of the inventors. Thomas Edison was able to have 1,093 patents under his name. So you can say he is one of the greatest inventors of all time. But sadly, Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey.

An example of how Thomas Edison story relates to events that occur in today world; in the year 1883 William Sawyer sued Thomas Edison for using his invention of the light bulb. The US Patent stated that Thomas Edison invention was based off William Sawyer’s light bulb. But 6 years later, Edison made an improvement to the light bulb. The improvement was the filament was made of carbon which had high resistance. So the US Patent then approved that he could patent his idea. A similar event occurred in the beginning of this year, Nintendo was sued for 21 million dollars. Nintendo has to pay 21 million dollars to Anascape Ltd, since they infringed the game controller patents.

There is one bias emotion inherited in the research of Thomas Edison. George Westinghouse and Edison became enemies since Edison had promoted direct current (DC) for electric power distribution. The AC created by one of Edison former worker Nikola Tesla, was cheaper and easier to transmit electricity. So Edison waged “The war of currents” which he intended for people to see that AC can cause electrocution. Thomas Edison was had a bias emotion that AC were not safe as DC.

There are 2 difficult questions raised by the historical research of Thomas Edison. On of Thomas Edison main belief was violence was a very bad thing. In his war of currents, he had an elephant electrocuted, just to convince the public that AC were bad way to get electricity. Why didn’t he stick to his belief of nonviolence? In one of his speech he says “we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages”. Well Thomas Edison sent his agents to bribe the theater owner for a copy of the film “A Trip to the Moon”. After the theater owner gave him the copy, he created more copies of the film and sold it for profit. The question is why didn’t create those copies of the film, when he said that we should not harm other human beings. When they sell the copies doesn’t hurt the movie producer who worked hard to make that film?

In this essay I discovered that Thomas Edison was a great inventor who invented over 1,000 inventions. Some of his inventions were the phonograph the light bulb and the kinetoscope. Thomas main belief was nonviolence and doing good, but there were some events where he went against his “belief”. The main bias emotion was he thought that AC was not safe, but DC was very safe. I hope you enjoyed this thoughtfully written essay.