So here is her report although it did not copy and paste over in perfect format:
Thomas Edison- Inventor
Thomas Edison is the person I chose to do a report on. As an inventor and innovator, his life and legacy has changed the lives of all generations, despite an uncooperative start.
Thomas Edison was born February 11, 1847 to Nancy Elliot and Sam Edison JR., a school teacher and a lumberman. Thomas Edison started his education in a grammar school in Milan, Ohio, although he only spent 12 weeks there due to a teacher that thought of him as confused and self centered. His mother decided to home school him; which lead her to discover that his hearing was very poor due to an accident with a train conductor, and he had Attentive Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. These discoveries convinced his mom to continue to home school him as best as she could periodically for five years, until he was twelve years of age.
After removing him from his initial school and the periodically home schooling, Tom Edison was never enrolled in a formal school environment. Instead, he got his first job as a salesman selling his own newspaper: The Grand Trunk Herald, as well as fruits, vegetables, and candy on a railroad platform and proudly, and as the Civil War started he signed up to become a powder monkey, serving his role model.
Thomas Edison’s role model was Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States of America, who helped put an end to slavery and believed in improving America, which fit with Thomas Edison’s own belief in striving for something better.
After the Civil War, Thomas Edison decided to find a safe and inexpensive light to replace the current gas lamps. Despite previous misconceptions, Thomas Edison was not the first to invent the light bulb, but he was the first to invent a light bulb using a carbon filament. It took Edison three years to invent a light bulb that would be a “safe, mild, and inexpensive light to replace the gaslight”. To do so he experimented with different threads of bamboo, string, and other materials until deciding that a carbon filament, placed inside a vacuum bulb not only lasted the longest but produced light without being a fire hazard. This allowed him to beat out his biggest competitors in inventing the carbon filament, Willis Whitnew, Joseph Swan, and William David Coolidge. In 1877, Edison also invented the phonograph “that would record and reproduce sound” accidentally while trying to figure out how to improve two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone.
The phonograph took his mechanic only thirty hours to build but was the beginning of bringing music into peoples homes via recordings on a wax or tin foil cylinder. His two major inventions, one created from failure was only a small example of the brilliance of his mind. As a forward thinking man he met with failure often such as an attempt to design, manufacture, and sell concrete items such as cabinets and doors, and wanting to improve the status quote of mining iron ore he spent many years trying to find the illusive, quicker, and more practical way. This forward thinking, creative successes and failures created one of the largest corporations know today.
In Thomas Edison’s adult life he was offered the opportunity to join forces with British physicist Joseph Swan, an early competitor, to create General Electric in 1919. This company at the time allowed for both of their inventions to grow beyond their personal limitations. Today it is hard to find an appliance in a home that has not be influenced or made by General Electric.
Looking at the vast skylines of New York City lit up at night you are gazing at the illumination of general electric wiring. As more people take to the air and fewer homes out of the way of aircraft flight patterns General Electric is entering a new frontier of trying to find a way to make planes fly quieter, and emit fewer emissions. As his company and his personal belief that things can always be improved upon lead him to be an exceptionally caring person, wanting not only better things, but a better life for others.
Between his caring nature and financial success, he helped his family financially. His mother owed the hospital money from bills and his father was worrying that their house would be foreclosed because they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Tomas Edison who had earned $40,000 from an invention of a device that would find faults in the stock market ticker, and with the profits, he immediately rode home and paid off the mortgage and hospital bills.
Thomas Edison was one of the most famous inventors of all times. As an inventor and innovator, his life and legacy has changed the lives of all generations.
