Thomas Edison

His father fled Ontario for Ohio after joining a failed rebellion, and the family moved on to Port Huron, Michigan, when Alva was seven. His mother, a former schoolteacher, taught him at home. He attended school for a few months in his whole life and read his way through everything else. Around 12 his hearing started to go — his biographer Paul Israel puts it down to scarlet fever and untreated middle-ear infections — and he ended up deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other. By then he was working the trains as a news butcher between Port Huron and Detroit, sitting in with telegraph operators until he could work a key, and from 1863 he took night shifts across five states.

The lamp, the phonograph, the Pearl Street station and the West Orange laboratory that put discovery on a factory schedule are BriefHistory's subject, and it has them whole. What that record leaves out is how much of the working life was rock and chemistry. The quadruplex telegraph, four messages down one wire, paid him 30,000 dollars in 1874. He spent the 1890s crushing boulders for iron ore in New Jersey, lost the money, and rebuilt the wrecked plant as a cement works whose royalties ran into the 1920s. A nickel-iron storage battery followed in 1901.

Mary Stilwell was 16 when he married her on Christmas Day 1871 and 29 when she died in August 1884, of causes her doctors never established after two years of worry about her mental health. He had neglected her for most of the marriage, preferring the laboratory, and did much the same to the second family. Tesla, no friend of his, said only Mina Miller's efforts kept him alive. His son Thomas Jr. drifted into patent-medicine frauds until his father paid him to stop using the name. The hardest bill came due elsewhere. Clarence Dally, a glassblower who tested Edison's X-ray tubes on his own hands, lost the left hand, then four fingers of the right, then both arms, and died of cancer in 1904 at 39. Edison dropped fluoroscopy for good.

Alternating current won, and he was pushed to the edge of his own business: the 1892 merger with Thomson-Houston produced General Electric and took his name off the door. His diabetes worsened and he died at Glenmont on October 18, 1931. His body lay in the West Orange library for two days and 40,000 people came. At Herbert Hoover's request the country turned its lights off for one minute at 9:59 on the night of October 21 — a tenth of New York went dark and the Statue of Liberty's torch went out. Charles Edison had test tubes sealed at the bedside. Henry Ford kept one, labeled as his last breath, and it sits in the museum at Dearborn.

Thomas Edison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Quadruplex telegraph invention
  Four messages on one wire — it paid him 30,000 dollars 1874
• Menlo Park laboratory building
  The place the industrial research laboratory was invented 1876
• Carbon telephone microphone invention
  The transmitter that made a telephone usable over distance 1877
• Edison Portland Cement Company company
  Built out of the wreckage of his iron-ore venture, with 150-foot kilns 1899
• Nickel-iron storage battery invention
  Begun as a battery for electric cars 1901
• Motion Picture Patents Company company
  The Edison Trust — nine studios under one patent pool 1908

• 1854 aged ~7 The family settles at Port Huron, Michigan
• 1863 aged ~16 Starts six years of night-shift telegraphy across five states Ontario, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Massachusetts. His tinkering repeatedly got in the way of the job.
• 1869 aged ~22 Moves to New York and works out of a colleague's basement in New Jersey
• December 25, 1871 aged 24 Marries Mary Stilwell, an employee at one of his shops, two months after meeting her He was 24 and she was 16.
• 1876 aged ~29 Opens the Menlo Park laboratory
• August 9, 1884 aged 37 Mary Edison dies at 29 of causes her doctors could not name
• 1892 aged ~45 Edison General Electric merges with Thomson-Houston and his name comes off it He emphasized the money in public and had privately lost interest in the lighting business.
• 1904 aged ~57 Clarence Dally dies of cancer at 39 after testing X-ray tubes on himself Thought to be the first American killed by radiation experiments. Edison abandoned the work.
• October 21, 1931 aged 84 The country turns off its lights for one minute in his memory Hoover asked for it. The Statue of Liberty's torch went dark and the subways stopped.

• Nikola Tesla 1856–1943
  Serbian-American inventor who developed alternating current electrical systems and numerous electrical innovations. rival in the War of Currents
• George Westinghouse 1846–1914
  Engineer and industrialist who championed alternating current and founded the Westinghouse Electric Company. rival in the War of Currents
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. former employee and lifelong friend
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. improved his transmitter
• Herbert Hoover 1874–1964
  Engineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression. ordered the lights dimmed for him