...Edison installed the first reliable, durable electric lights in his own labs, and later built the first public power station, in Manhattan's financial district (1882). However, Edison's DC-current system had only a three-mile range, and was later superseded by Westinghouse's and Tesla's AC-current system.
By that time, Edison had built a new and much bigger research complex (now a National Monument) in West Orange, New Jersey. There his first project was to redesign his phonograph, in light of recent improvements by others. Edison soon marketed a wax-cylinder phonograph as a dictation machine (1888), and later, as a musical home entertainment system (1896). These commercial efforts were, by and large, failures, but Edison continued to refine his favorite invention into the 1920s.
In 1889, an associate, William Dickson, working at Edison's direction, invented the celluloid-strip motion picture camera and projector (1889) --- whose silent movies were viewed inside the machine, through a peephole. Although Edison later broke with Dickson, George Eastman and others helped Edison to establish the basis of the motion picture industry.
After 1911, Edison was mainly dissatisfied in his work, feeling that many of his ideas were being ignored or worse yet, stolen. Throughout the '20s, he also had poor health. He died on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84.
In total, Edison accumulated 1,093 US patents. Only a few inventors have earned half as many. Edison inventions not mentioned above include: the printing telegraph, the electric "stencil pen," a magnetic mining process, an electrical torpedo, a synthetic rubber, and improved alkaline batteries, cement mixers, and microphones.
It must be said that Edison used other inventors' ideas much more freely than he shared his own. For example, the wax cylinder phonograph was first patented by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter (1886), whose offer of a joint venture Edison rejected; the disc "gramophone" was first patented by Emile Berliner (1887); and even the so-called "Edison Effect," the observed emission of electrons from a hot filament, was actually discovered by an Edison engineer named William J. Hammer (1883).
But nothing can gainsay the tremendous effect that Edison's career as a whole has had on our everyday lives. By the volume, variety and spectacularity of his inventions, Edison more than any other person made it seem like no miracle was beyond the reach of modern American technology. As an inspiration to aspiring engineers and inventors, then as now, Edison is peerless. Indeed, above all others, as his Congressional Medal of Honor certificate declared: "He illuminated the path of progress by his inventions."
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Originally Posted by Kathianne
However, no one made an 'idiot' out of Edison, that's a non-starter.
