1900's Science and Technology | Edison, Thomas Alva 1847-1931

INVENTOR

Life and Legend.

The story of Thomas Edison's youth was retold many times around the beginning of the twentieth century and was embroidered with anecdotes that lent a Horatio Alger quality to his biography. His background and many inventions made Edison the best-known scientific figure of the 1900s, a figure of near mythic proportions in a decade fascinated with new technologies. Edison worked as a youth on a train where he set up a chemistry laboratory and printing press on which he published a weekly paper for travelers. He was said to have been taught telegraphy as a reward for saving the life of a telegraph operator's son (the story was only partly true). After working for more than a decade as a telegraph boy, he launched his career as an inventor at the age of twenty-eight with a series of innovations that transformed telegraphy: first the duplex telegraph, which could transmit two messages simultaneously,...