Thomas Alva Edison

“There’s a better way to do it,” was Thomas Edison’s lifelong motto. Edison proved that motto at his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and his staff created a steady stream of new devices.

Born in poverty, Edison had very little formal schooling. But he read widely to satisfy his enormous curiosity. Whatever money he could earn as a teenager he spent on science books or on equipment for his laboratory. He was just 21 years old when he produced his first major invention---a stock ticker for printing stock-exchange quotations.

Edison liked to boast that his laboratory turned out a new invention every few days. Thomas Edison was awarded over 1,000 patents in his lifetime. One after another they appeared; the first successful lightbulb, a system for distributing electricity from power stations, the first phonograph, and improved telephone, a fluoroscope for medical research, an electric storage battery, a mimeograph machine, a moving-picture machine. The list of achievements was staggering, and it made Eidson one of the most admired men of his time. He was a prime example, people said, of the American dream of success achieved through talent and hard work.