How did Edison get rid of poverty and become rich, establish his electronic kingdom, and establish the first research institute? Let’s listen to Teacher Kathy’s story. Among them are 996 blessings, ticking humor, strange philosophy about sleep, beards ignited by flames, invention of phonographs, and generators with long legs.
1. Start a business in the early years
Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in a lower-class family in Ohio, USA. Later, after a long time, he moved to Michigan . I dropped out of school after only three months of studying in school, and almost entirely relying on self-taught.
When he grew up to 12 years old, he got a job selling fruits and newspapers on the train. Working 14 hours a day, he later found that only printing newspapers could make a lot of money, so he saved enough money to create his own newspaper publication: " Fuli Train Herald ", and advertised outside the locomotive. When he had the best performance, he was able to sell 200 newspapers a day and hired four helpers.
▲ Figure 1.1 Edison in childhood
▲ Figure 1.2 Edison printed newspapers on the train
In 1862, a telegraph business appeared in Michigan, and this new thing immediately fascinated Edison. He quit his job on the train, sold his newspaper business, and wandered around the telegraph office all day. Later, according to Edison, he saved the life of a three-year-old son of a telegraph transmitter to prevent him from being hit and killed by a train, so the telegrapher helped Edison learn to send the telegraph and work with him. Edison likes to work night shifts so that he can work at night, read during the day or tinker with something else, but the fatal thing is that Edison doesn't have much time to sleep, and he takes a nap in both day or night. This habit lasts for his life. Later he said, " Sleep is an absurd behavior and a bad habit. "
▲ Figure 1.3 Edison took a nap, not sleeping
Edison believed that relying on not sleeping can conquer time and technology. This habit of lack of sleep once made him fail to see the alarm signal of a train passing through, and he almost got a lunch box early. It was really a great life and fortune. If he survived the disaster, he would have good luck.
2. The first invention
Later Edison changed many jobs. He read every piece of information he obtained and tinkered with his experiments in the room he lived in or in any empty place he could find. When he was 22 years old, he filed for his first patent: electronic voting counter . But I was very unlucky, and although the instrument functions well, no one wanted it. As we all know, what those legislators actually need is not the exact democratic voting results, but the result that is manipulated in line with their wishes.
▲ Figure 1.4 Edison's first patent: electronic voting counter
From then on, Edison had a catchphrase: " I don't want to invent things that cannot be sold ".
▲ Figure 1.5 Edison's catchphrase: I don't want to invent things that cannot be sold
3. Dididada
Although I was thrown into cold water this time, Edison fired his job at the Western Union Telegraph Company and started his own journey of invention. After a year, he founded his own company with more than fifty employees. Edison got married and got married when he was 24 years old. His new wife was Mary Stilwell, eight years younger than him. She is an employee in an Edison store and was acquired by Edison after just three months of joining the company.
▲ Figure 1.6 Edison and her wife
After six years of marriage, they had three children. The eldest and second brothers are named: ‘ Didi ’, ‘Dada’. This can easily let others know that the father of these two children has worked as a telegrapher.
▲ Figure 1.7 Edison's three children
4. Gramophone
Edison almost ignored his family, his mind was full of his work, patent applications one after another. At this time, he applied for a patent for a phonograph, which is an early record player. The phonograph word comes from the sound recorder: phoneaugraph, which was originally a device used to study sound. Convert the human voice into a vibration of a thin needle, leaving scratches on the surface of a rotating glass with ink.
▲ Figure 1.8 Sound recorder
According to the working principle of the sound recorder, Edison envisions replacing the glass with a softer material, so that groove scratches can be left on the surface of the material. I started testing with soft paper, but later I found out that tin foil was better. He shouted at the gramophone microphone, the needle leaving scratches on the tin foil surface. Then rotate the cylinder and the scratches on the tin foil cause the needle to vibrate, which then produces a sound in the microphone. Edison used a phonograph to record the next nursery rhyme: " Mary has a little lamb ", and this incident immediately became popular all over the Internet.
▲ Figure 1.9 Edison's phonograph
5. Invention factory
After becoming famous, Edison has a wave of new venture capital and has built a new office in Menlo Park, New Jersey. This is not an ordinary office, but an invention factory. A small innovation is created every ten days, and a big invention is released every six months. He is like an indefatigable boss, constantly asking his employees for 996, 11-7, which also includes himself. He said, "Hyper pressure on made him white-headed. Yesterday a friend said that he had buried his loess on his neck. "
▲ Figure 1.10 Edison's invention factory
The reason for such an impatient and tireless work is that Edison wants to promote electric lighting technology in commercial use. Fortunately, Sir Humpley David, a British chemist, found two ways to use electricity to shine 70 years ago.
In the first way, David found that if high voltage is applied between two carbon rods, bright light can be generated, which is called an arc lamp. After Edison tested David's arc light, he felt that this thing was not working. Anyone who has seen electric welding knows that using arc lamps indoors will not only blind people’s glasses, but also the arc lamps will burn out after not long.
▲ Figure 1.11 Early light bulbs are similar to tulip
David discovered the second way to pass a large current in the metal, which can heat the metal until it emits light. This is called incandescent lamp . Edison focused on incandescent lamps. Early experiments ended with a light bulb burning. Later, Edison covered the outer shell of the filament with a glass shell and used the vacuum pump to drain the internal air, which could prevent the filament from catching fire. The glass bulb is fixed on the screw port of the kerosene lamp oil tube, and looks very much like a tulip bulb. It was later called Light Bulb, or the light bulb.
In September 1878, Edison met with a reporter from the New York Sun and advocated that he had won a complete victory in the process of making light bulbs. The title of the article is: Edison's latest electrical miracle, achieving lighting, heating and energy transfer at low cost . In fact, just like Jia Yueting, who is building a car at , has not had a single word yet. There was neither a practical light bulb nor a generator. He wanted to make some money first through this gimmick, but he was slapped in the face by facts in the laboratory.
However, in April of the following year, he began to develop DC generator that can generate sufficient power. A huge electromagnet generates a strong magnetic field, and a small rotor is used to maximize the output current through a complex winding , and a steam engine drives the rotor to rotate. They called the generator shape " Mary Ann's long legs ".
▲ Figure 1.12 Mary Ann's long legs
Yes, in the eyes of these big men who work all day long, this is not a generator, it is clearly a young lady with fair skin, beautiful and long legs. You know, women were not allowed to enter the factory at that time. The biggest feature of Edison DC generator is that its windings have extremely low internal resistance, which can generate more current than other generators used.
6. Light bulb
Okay, now there is a generator, but the light bulb still burns out after only one hour. Edison insists that all light bulbs are used in parallel so that each bulb can be turned on or off independently, and even if it is burned out, it will not affect each other. It is precisely for this reason that compared with other types of light bulbs of the same period, Edison's light bulbs need a high impedance material to make filament. His workers began to test thousands of materials one by one, and even tested different people's beards to make filaments, some are good and some are bad.
▲ Figure 1.13 Different light bulbs and the shape of the filament in the same period
In the end, they found that a kind of filament formed after carbonization of a cotton thread can last for fourteen and a half hours. Although this time is not practical in commercial use, it has stood out in patent application. On November 4 of the same year, he applied for a cotton thread bulb. This patent is actually useless, and Edison still needs a light bulb that can last for hundreds of hours instead of fourteen hours. He insisted on searching for materials that grow in nature, and he said: will never give up. I firmly believe that in God's great studio, plants with parallel fibers are grown very suitable for use as filaments. Go and find it .
▲ Figure 1.14 Edison and his employees
So Edison sent people all over the world to find filament materials. An employee named Seg Lide was unfortunately infected with mercury in the Menlo Park factory and later survived. While searching for filament materials for Edison for Edison, he suffered from yellow fever . This time he was not so lucky and unfortunately died. Later, an Edison employee discovered that a Japanese bamboo used in the main deck of the ship could continuously emit gentle light and could light up for up to 1,500 hours. At this point, Edison finally fulfilled his promise.
7. Contributions in electrical aspects
There are still the only ones who remember the invention of Edison, mainly his light bulbs, but his contributions also include lamps, generators, power transmission lines, lighting facilities, etc. Edison was particularly concerned about electricity safety. He insisted on laying wires on the ground, which required digging trenches and laying wires everywhere in the city. Later, in order to save money, this method was replaced by other solutions.
▲ Figure 1.15 Series and parallel circuits in current transmission
He also invented the transfer of power through parallel or series, which are still used today. At the generator port, use thick feeder to connect, and then go to the user terminal and use many parallel wires to connect the lights. A famous Scottish scientist named Sir William Thomson, who was later awarded Lord Calvin, asked: Why did no one think of these genius methods except Edison?
Edison said: Everything is innovation, and every step is to explore in the darkness. I need to make generators, light bulbs, wires, etc., which contain many details that have never been heard of by humans.
Undoubtedly, Edison began to look for new wealth investors, and his factory in Menlo Park also occupied two entire blocks of the city. Just when he was full of confidence and wanted to conquer the whole world, he was involved in a war without thinking. The dispute between DC and AC originally occurred between Westinghouse Electric and Tesla , but later evolved into a battle between Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse Electric.
