While middle ear infections (or otitis media) remain a common bane of childhood, what has chanegd since Edison’s era is that infections caused by bacteria can often be easily treated with a course of antibiotics.
Edison 5 facts skin#
A few ear surgeons have retrospectively diagnosed otosclerosis (abnormal growth and remodeling of the tiny bones in the middle ear) or cholesteoma (a destructive skin growth in the middle ear) as the cause of his bilateral conductive hearing loss. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, has suggested that Thomas suffered from numerous ear infections as a child (and, perhaps, a serious bout of scarlet fever) that may have caused or, at least, contributed to his deafness. One of Edison’s biographers, Paul Israel, who is also the director and general editor of the Thomas A. If, indeed, these traumatic injuries had occured, Edison may have developed a disruption of the delicate bones in the ear that might explain his deafness. Years later, he told close friends that neither event actually occurred, but he held to the basic premise that his hearing loss began at age 12. He maintained a chemical laboratory in the train’s baggage car, which also housed a printing press on which the young Edison ran off editions of The Weekly Herald. The pugilistic conductor then threw the young Edison off the speeding train, along with his chemicals and apparatus.Īt 12, Edison was a newsboy and a candy butcher on the Grand Trunk Railroad. In another version, he told of being hit on the ears by a train conductor when his makeshift chemical laboratory in one of the boxcars caught fire. A trainman reached over and grabbed me by the ears and lifted me…I felt something snap inside my head and the deafness started from that time and has progressed ever since….Earache came first, then a little deafness, and this deafness increased until at the theatre I could hear only a few words now and then. I ran after it and caught the rear step, hardly able to lift myself.
Edison 5 facts full#
I was trying to climb into the freight car with both arms full of heavy bundles of papers. For young children reading about the great man, Thomas Edison’s account of the source of his hearing problems remains indelible: He rode the rails selling sandwiches, candy, peanuts and newspapers to the passengers. As a young boy, he took a job as a “news butcher” on the Grand Trunk Railway run between Port Huron and Detroit. Although a long time resident of Menlo Park, New Jersey, he was born in Milan, Ohio and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. The romantic version, one that Edison told many times during his long life, occurred at the age of 12.
Thomas Edison listening to a recording on the phonograph that he invented, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, circa 1880. I read the library.”īut what caused his deafness is still debated by doctors and hearing experts to this day. I started, it now seems to me, with the first book on the bottom shelf and I went through the lot, one by one. As a boy, Edison once noted, “my refuge was the Detroit Public Library. One of the great medical mysteries surrounding Edison’s genius, however, was his profound deafness, which he considered to be a blessing because it allowed him to think and read with total concentration. Several months after the light bulb patent was filed, Edison developed a carbonized bamboo filament that allowed his bulbs to last more than 1,200 hours. 27, 1880, this was, perhaps, the most famous of his 1,093 patents, along with those for the invention of the phonograph and a process for making motion pictures). Patent # 223,898, for an electric lamp using “a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platinum contact wires.” (Approved by the U.S. Tinkering with his bulb, he applied on Nov.
Edison 5 facts how to#
He also figured out how to distribute electricity to people’s homes and buildings from a centralized source - his dynamo-powered electric stations - which was affordable to consumers and profitable for him. What Edison did to best his competitors, and thus get credit for inventing the first economically practical light bulb, was to find an effective incandescent material (a carbonized filament) develop a far better vacuum in his bulbs and create a high level of resistance (a measure of how a material reduces the electric current flow through it).
The world has never been quite as dark ever since.