My Science School

Yes, Edison did have something to do with cement as well! In fact, he held 49 patents related to cement. They included the equipment to process cement, waterproofing cement paint, and a single-pour mould for concrete. He had imagined a concrete-age for the future, with houses, furniture, pianos and refrigerators made of concrete!

Edison’s interest in cement started on noticing how much sand waste was produced by his ore milling company. This fine sand was sold to cement manufacturers for making concrete. In 1899, Edison founded the Edison Portland Cement Company, in Stewartsville, New Jersey. It had the longest rotating kilns in the world, almost twice as long as the usual cement kilns. Edison licensed other manufacturers to use the kilns. This helped the others to improve their production, but affected the profits of his own company.

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When it came to cement and concrete, Edison was looking at the larger picture. What he wanted was to create a cost-effective method to build working class homes; his innovative idea was to build a house in a single pour of concrete. Edison patented his system to mass-produce concrete houses in 1917.

This idea was not a great success, mostly because it was difficult to produce the reusable metal moulds which were required to make those houses. However, Edison was able to build some of these homes in New Jersey.

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There were many attempts to make the telegraph more efficient, and Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex telegraph was the most famous among them.

Edison had been trying for many years to find a method to send two messages simultaneously over a single wire. Western Union adopted the duplex system developed by Joseph Stearns, which could send two messages in opposite directions, in 1872. William Orton, president of the company then asked Edison to invent other methods, too. Edison combined the duplex with the diplex system which sent two messages in the same direction, thus making it possible to send four messages simultaneously - two in each direction.

The quadruplex telegraph lost its importance later, with the coming of multiplex telegraphy that made it possible to send eight or more simultaneous transmissions, and the teletype machines.

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The mimeograph was a forerunner of the present-day photostats machines. It used a technique called stencilling, first made possible by Edison’s electric pen and duplicating press. The electric pen would make stencils, by making minute perforations on the paper. The duplicating press would press ink through the stencil on to a new sheet of paper. Edison’s patent on this covered the electric pen that made the stencils as well as the flatbed duplicating process. The machine was marketed to the public by A.B. Dick, to whom Edison had sold the patent. It was Dick who named the new device a mimeograph.

Further improvements were made on this in the early 20th century. A hand-cranked drum was added to it, which was later replaced by a motorized one. This increased the speed and also simplified the process. Also called a ‘mimeo’ for short, the stencil duplicators were mostly used in schools and offices, at first.

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Yes, Edison did invent an electric pen, too! You might wonder why a pen should have electricity, but it was actually a device used to make multiple copies. The idea was born when Edison and his colleague Charles Batchelor noticed something interesting on their telegraph printer, which had a stylus that punctured the special chemical paper. As the paper got punctured the chemical solution got through it and made a marking under it. This set them thinking: why not use this idea for making multiple copies of documents?

This led to the invention of the electric pen, in 1875. This device would make perforations on paper. The perforated paper could then be used as a stencil of handwritten documents for making several copies. The electric pen was powered by a small electric motor: it is said to be the first appliance driven by an electric motor, to be produced and sold in the U.S.A. Edison received a patent on it in 1877.

The electric pen did not survive for long, as simpler methods to make stencils came later. But the very idea of stencil-copying came from this brilliant idea of Edison’s. It can even be considered a forerunner of today’s tattoo guns.

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Edison’s phonograph never ceased to amaze other inventors. Many made attempts to make improvements on it. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, produced a phonograph of his own. He wanted to give Edison due credit for his original efforts in developing the phonograph. Bell suggested to bring out the new machine in both their joint names. This was in 1887.

This made Edison angry: why should he share the credit for something which was basically his invention? He decided to develop an improved version of the original machine that he had built ten years ago. He spent a year on this project. The fragile tin foil of the original phonograph was given up, and all-wax cylinders were used for the recording surface. A sapphire was used as the needle, and the pick-up head was also more sophisticated. The new phonograph worked far better than the original one.

The technique of sound-recording was to undergo many more changes. The phonograph itself was later replaced by the gramophone. Yet the world will never forget Edison’s place as the person who taught the world to record sound.

Now we are all talking about electric cars that will hopefully replace the ones that run on oil. But, even during the early days of automobiles there were electric vehicles. They were, in fact, more popular in the beginning than the oil-driven ones. However, the electric cars of those days had a big problem with their batteries. They were heavy and often leaked acid, corroding the insides of the car. This gave a challenge to Edison, who was also a lover of automobiles. He started on a project to invent a lighter, more powerful and more dependable battery.

It was no easy task, and he knew that the conventional batteries of those days needed thorough improvements. His aim was to make a new battery that was three times more powerful than the existing ones and weighed less, too. He did extensive research on this. Even though an early design flopped, Edison succeeded in making a reliable battery, in 1903, which went into mass production in 1910. However, this new invention could not retain public attention, as Henry Ford brought out the Model T cars, which ran on an internal combustion engine using petrol, and were inexpensive.

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Those were still the days when the world depended a lot on coal. In the U.S., demands for coal increased during the early years of the 20th century as the country was getting more and more industrialised. As mining activities increased, so did the number of mining disasters. During the1900s, hundreds of people died in mining accidents, and the Mine Safety Appliance Company sought Edison’s help to get lighting inside the mines.

By then, the homes in America had started to get electricity, but providing electric lighting inside the mines was not easy: the wiring costs would be too high. Edison’s solution to this problem was a lamp that carried its own power! He started to work on a cap lamp for miners in 1914, using a rechargeable battery. The Edison Cap Lamp had a battery kept in a case, which miners could attach to their belts. A flexible cord connected the cap lamp to the battery. Edison also put in some safety measures, as the mines had gases that easily caught fire. He ensured that if, by any chance, the bulb broke, and the electrical connection would be cut off immediately, thereby averting the danger of a fire inside the mine.

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While trying to improve his incandescent lamp, Edison observed something curious: in a vacuum, electrons flow from a heated element (like the filament inside the incandescent bulb) to a cooler metal plate. He patented the finding, even though he could not explore it further. The name given to this phenomenon was, the Edison Effect.

A British scientist named John Ambrose Fleming later made the world’s first radio valve in 1904, based on the Edison Effect: it was called the diode. Two years later, an American named Lee de Forest invented the triode, which became an important part of radio technology paving the way for the wonders of the electronic age.

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All of you must love movies, and pictures that move on the screen are nothing new to us. However, this technological wonder was a great novelty when it first came, during the latter half of the 19th century.

Edward Muybridge, a British photographer took still photos of people and animals in motion, and mounted them on a spinning frame. When they were projected onto a screen with the frame spinning, the pictures appeared to be moving. This was in 1878.

Muybridge’s device caught Edison’s attention early in 1888. He decided to go further ahead with this. Edison’s idea was to make the first practical movie camera and projector, and chose a Scottish assistant named William Dickson for help. The camera they made was called ‘kinetograph’, and it used the celluloid film strip which George Eastman had just invented. Dickson came up with the brilliant idea to make small holes along both sides of the film, to make it run smoothly over notched wheels inside the camera.

The world’s first film studio was built in the laboratory yard. The studio got a funny nickname, ‘Black Maria’, because its insides were painted black. Sunlight came through the roof, and the whole building could be rotated to get the best lighting for the performers. The ‘movies’ they made were to be seen in a viewing instrument called the kinetoscope. It was a machine one peeped into. Ten ‘pay-to peep’ machines were installed for the public in New York City, in 1894. Huge crowds turned up to peer through an eyepiece and watch the 90-second films.

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Edison’s movie magic caught the world’s fancy. In 1894, two Americans named Franck Maguire and Joseph Baucus acquired the world rights on the kinetoscope, outside the U.S. and Canada, and started to market it. Edison did not take international patents on his movie camera and the viewing machine. Therefore, many inventors in Europe copied and modified them, making improvements.

Movies projected on to a screen were soon to follow. The first commercially viable projector was invented by the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis. They were inspired by an exhibition of Edison’s kinetoscope in Paris, and sought to combine the movie camera with a projector. Their new device was called the Cinematographe. Thus, the Lumiere brothers first brought the cinema to large audiences, basing their efforts on Edison’s Kinetoscope.

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Mention the name Edison, and a bulb flashes in your mind! All of you would have heard that the incandescent electric bulb was invented by Edison. However, it is not exactly true to say that it was Edison who invented the idea of electric lighting. A number of people had worked on this idea before him, and some had even developed some forms of electric lighting. British inventor Humphry Davy had made an electric arc lamp in the early 1800s. In the decades that followed it, there were some other attempts to perfect electric lights, but they were not successful.

What Edison sought to make was an efficient incandescent light bulb that would be commercially practical, and he succeeded. He designed a vacuum bulb in the late 1870s, which was to have a metal filament that shone when heated. Later, Edison decided to use a carbonised filament in the model, getting the idea while absent-mindedly playing with a piece of lampblack. He tried different carbonised materials, starting with cardboard, and eventually decided on bamboo which had long, durable fibres.

Using an improved vacuum pump that effectively removed air from the bulb, Edison was able to give his bulbs a lifetime of approximately 1,200 hours.

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We always take for granted a world that is lit with electricity. Edison’s contribution to making this possible did not stop with the bulb. He did not want his incandescent bulbs to end up just as a scientific curiosity, and wanted them to be useful to the world. He developed a suite of other inventions to develop a whole system of lighting technology. Edison modelled this on the system of gas lighting that existed in those days. He showed, in 1882, that electricity could be distributed through a series of wires, from a generator. At the same time he also put his mind on improving the means to generate electricity. He developed the first commercial power utility, Pearl Street Station, in Manhattan, New York which started to function in September 1882. Fired by coal and using six dynamos, it first provided power to people within a few kilometres.

It was the beginning of the electric age. A second power station was soon opened by Edison in Wisconsin, which used water power from the Fox River - the world’s first hydroelectric plant.

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We may find it difficult to imagine a world without electric supply. But in those days, Edison did not have the luxury of having electric plugs on the wall. To conduct his experiments, he had to generate his own power.

Edison realised that the existing generators used for arc lighting would not be enough for his incandescent lighting. Therefore, Edison and his chief assistants Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton started to work on designing a new generator. The team designed a new dynamo during the first months of 1879, which was different in many ways from the others that then existed. Most importantly, it had a smaller internal resistance, which meant a more efficient power output. Edison’s dynamo had large bipolar magnets, which gave it an interesting nickname – ‘long-legged Mary-Ann’.

The new dynamo helped to provide the first public electric supply in the U.S.

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The phonograph created a sensation, and the star inventor was on the front page of all newspapers.

Edison travelled across the U.S. with the magical machine, and was even invited to the White House to give a personal demonstration to President Rutherford B. Hayes. The phonograph made Edison world famous, even though it would not become commercially viable for another decade. The device made further sensation when the U.S. Army used it to bring music to its troops during World War I.

Edison knew, right from the beginning, that the phonograph would be a success. But he had thought it would be used mostly as an office tool. When he sang those nursery lines in the first attempt on the phonograph, Edison had no idea that the future of his wonderful invention would be in music.

Capturing the sound was like a fairy tale come true: no wonder Edison won the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”