In 1869 Tom arrived in New York without a job. But Tom had no trouble finding one. He was already known and respected as a smart young man with exciting, original ideas. He was someone who could make things.
Tom had no problem finding work. After a while, he and a fellow worker started their own business. Making and developing new machines—that’s what they would do. The company’s most successful machine was called the universal stock printer. All day long it sent the changing price of gold to businesses on Wall Street. Tom had developed the printer, and he sold the patent for it to Western Union for thirty thousand dollars.
With this money and two investors, Tom started his own company in 1870. He found a large building in Newark, New Jersey, for his Newark Telegraph Works. He continued working on his inventions. But the company also manufactured, or made, machines to sell. Tom was always working to improve any kind of machine. And companies like Western Union came to him to make a machine they needed, or to fix problems with machines they already used.
Working for Tom meant working long hours. He was at the office in Newark all the time. He knew everything that was happening. He kept detailed notes. He made sketches of his new ideas. He worked harder than anyone. Tom believed from his own experience that doing something yourself, like making a machine, was the best way to learn.
One day a young woman named Mary Stilwell came to work at the company. She and Tom fell in love. She was sixteen. He was twenty-four. Three months later, they married on Christmas Day. But even on that day, Tom went to work for a few hours, and Mary quickly found out that Tom would spend much more time at work than at home.
Over the years the Edisons had three children. First came Marion and Thomas Jr. Their father fondly called them Dot and Dash, after Morse code. Then came another son, William. Tom loved his family, but still he spent more time at work than at home. This was not so easy for Mary and the children. Often his wife was lonely and frustrated.
Most inventors worked alone. Tom was different. He liked working with a team as long as he was the boss. He hired the best men he could find. He needed draftsmen who could draw his ideas on paper, machinists who could make things from his sketches, and men who understood what he was trying to do and who could come up with improvements of their own.
Tom called them “The Boys.” They called him “The Old Man,” even though he was only twenty-four years old and younger than many of them. A few of his “Boys” worked with Tom for twenty or thirty years.
In these early years, Tom figured out a way to send four telegraph messages at once—two in one direction and two in the other. Someone else had already figured out how to send and receive two messages, but four meant twice the messages in less time. He called it the quadruplex.
He also perfected an electric pen. The writer “wrote” a message with the pen. A small motor powered by a battery moved the point of the pen up and down, punching small holes into paper to make a kind of stencil. Then the paper with the message on it could be inked onto other pieces of paper with a roller. The message could be printed over and over again.
After six years in Newark, Tom felt that it was time for a change again. He wanted to spend more time inventing instead of manufacturing. He found a small farming community in New Jersey called Menlo Park. It was about twenty-five miles from New York City. It was just the right place for his family and his “Boys”—about a dozen of them.
In 1876 Tom bought two large plots of land and began planning and building. He had a two-story building for his laboratory. The office and a library were in another building. There was a carpentry shop, a machine shop, a glassblowing shed, and an engine house. He even built a boardinghouse where his “Boys” could live.
Tom had a lovely large house built for the family. But having them nearby didn’t mean that Tom was home more. He was rarely home for dinner, even when he promised Mary he’d be there, and never home for lunch.
Young Marion sometimes got to take her father’s lunch to him in his lab. She was the lively, curious one. Unfortunately her brother, Thomas Jr., was often sick.
Sometimes Marion found her father going over work with his “Boys.” Sometimes she’d find him sitting at his simple table facing away from the bustle going on around him. If she was lucky, Tom might give his “Dot” a dime to buy candy.
Marion loved to visit. Everywhere she looked were strange half-built contraptions on the worktables, shelves packed with jars and bottles, and cubbyholes full of feathers, stones, and other interesting materials.
Tom and his “Boys” loved Menlo Park. They were glad to be away from the bustle of Newark. They didn’t even mind when Tom removed all the springs from the clocks so that no one would pay any attention to what time it was.
They still worked long hours, but it was on “Tom’s time.” Sometimes Tom never got home at all. He’d sleep in his clothes on a bench in the lab for a few hours and then go back to work.
Menlo Park was the perfect place to think. Tom once said, “The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking cannot make the most of himself. All progress, all success, springs from thinking.” He called Menlo Park his “invention factory.” His teams of “Boys” worked on as many as forty projects at a time.
The more successful Tom became, the more attention he got. Investors came to see him. Magazines and newspapers wrote articles about him and his inventions.
Tom liked the publicity. The more that people heard about his inventions, the more people would want them.
It was around this time that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Tom wished he had thought of it first. So did Western Union. They wanted their own telephone to compete with Mr. Bell’s. They worried that the telephone might replace the telegraph.
But Bell’s telephone had problems. It only worked over short distances, and you had to shout really loud to be heard. Western Union asked Tom to come up with a better telephone.
What the telephone needed was a different transmitter. That’s the part that transmits, or sends, the voice from one phone to another. It is located in the part of the phone that a person talks into. When the sound of the voice reaches the transmitter, it vibrates, or moves back and forth. Sound is changed into electricity, which can travel long distances over a wire.
Bell’s transmitter was made of metal, and that was the problem. It didn’t make strong enough vibrations. Tom had to find out what material would work better than metal.
This took time. Tom and his team worked day and night. It was Tom who came up with the answer.
One day Tom scraped some carbon off a broken piece of glass from an oil lamp. Carbon, or lampblack, is the black soot a candle or an oil lamp gives off.
Tom rolled the carbon between his fingers as if it were soft clay. He made two button shapes. He put one on Bell’s metal transmitter and one right next to it, almost touching it. When they vibrated, the electrical current carried a strong, clear signal over the phone wire. Problem solved!
Tom was disappointed that he didn’t invent the telephone. But his carbon transmitter made telephones work better. And his transmitter led him to a wonderful invention of his own. No one had yet come up with a way of recording and playing back a person’s voice. Tom was about to do it. His invention was called the phonograph.
THE TELEPHONE
THE FAMOUS INVENTOR OF THE TELEPHONE, ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, WAS BORN IN SCOTLAND LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER EDISON WAS BORN. HIS MOTHER, A TALENTED PIANIST AND PAINTER, WAS ALMOST TOTALLY DEAF. HIS GRANDFATHER, HIS FATHER, AND BELL HIMSELF TAUGHT DEAF PEOPLE. HIS FATHER INVENTED “VISIBLE SPEECH,” AN ALPHABET OF SYMBOLS, WHICH HELPED THE DEAF LEARN TO TALK.
BELL MOVED TO BOSTON IN 1871. HE WAS INTERESTED IN ELECTRICITY AND, LIKE EDISON, WORKED SUCCESSFULLY ON IMPROVING THE TELEGRAPH. THIS LED HIM TO THE INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE IN 1876. HE SPOKE THE FIRST WORDS TO HIS ASSISTANT, WHO WAS IN ANOTHER ROOM. “WATSON, COME HERE. I WANT YOU.” |