Thomas Edison

Edison was granted 1,093 US patents, a record for one person, plus several hundred patents abroad.

The Edison Papers project estimates a further 500 to 600 US applications were unsuccessful or abandoned. A 1910 compilation counted 1,239 non-US patents issued in 34 countries.

He signed the first successful application on 13 October 1868, at the age of 21. He was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio.

That first patent was an Electrographic Vote-Recorder, US patent 90,646, issued on 1 June 1869.

His last, US patent 1,908,830 for a holder for an article to be electroplated, was issued on 16 May 1933, two years after his death in 1931.

In 1882, while he was working on electric light and power, he signed 106 successful applications.

Three of the early printing-telegraph patents were co-invented with Franklin L. Pope.

The two-storey Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey was completed on 25 March 1876, and Edison opened it in April of that year. The building cost $2,500.

It measured about 100 by 25 feet. The ground floor held a machine shop, and the upper floor held a chemical and electrical laboratory.

It opened with two experimenters, Charles Batchelor and James Adams, and three machinists.

Edison promised the new laboratory would turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."

By spring 1878 he had 25 men working for him. At the peak in 1880 the experimenters and machinists numbered 50 to 60.

Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. In a demonstration on 6 December 1877 he recorded a verse of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb", and the machine played it back.

Edison did not invent the first light bulb. Others had worked on electric lighting for at least fifty years before him.

In 1879 he made an incandescent bulb that lasted long enough to be practical. One of the 1879 demonstration bulbs burned for 14.5 hours.

On 31 December 1879 hundreds of people came to see his laboratory at Menlo Park lit by electricity.

A large staff let teams work on different parts of a system at once. That helped him build a complete electric light and power system, not just a bulb.

The Menlo Park laboratory served him for about ten years. Henry Ford later rebuilt it at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

In 1887 Edison built a larger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. It is preserved as part of Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

He worked on the phonograph for 52 years, longer than on any other invention, and called it his "baby."

Edison died in 1931 at the age of 84. He kept working in West Orange until then.