Who Was Thomas Alva Edison 爱迪生Chapter 5 Turning on the Light

It was the summer of 1878. Tom had been working hard for a long time. He was thinking about taking a vacation. Then a friend invited him to join a group of scientists. They were traveling by train to Wyoming to see an eclipse of the sun.



Tom decided 1 to go. He had been working on a machine he called a tasimeter for measuring temperature. He saw the trip as a chance to try it out.



Tom enjoyed talking to other scientists. After the eclipse, he and his friend traveled on together by train. It is said that Tom persuaded the train engineer to let him ride on the cowcatcher—the metal grate on the front of the train. This way Tom had the best view of the spectacular scenery until the train came to a tunnel and he had to get back inside the car.



At this point in his life, Tom wasn’t sure what he would work on next. On this trip out west, he stood and looked at the Platte River rushing by. He wondered out loud to his friend why the power of the river’s flow couldn’t be used to provide electricity to miners nearby. They were drilling for ore by hand, and it was obviously slow, hard work.



Tom’s friend told him about a man he knew in Connecticut who had found an interesting way to use the power of electricity. He could send enough electricity to light up not just one arc light, but eight. An arc light makes light when an electric current jumps across the space between two carbon rods. The problem is that the light is harsh and bright. Arc lights also threw off sparks and could start a fire indoors. They were better suited for using outdoors.



Up to now, indoor lighting 2 came from candles, oil lamps, or gas lamps. None of them gave off enough light to do much after dark. Gaslight had been around since the early 1800s. But it was expensive. Gas lamps made walls black and dirty. Sometimes its smell caused headaches. Gas could be dangerous, too, if it leaked or exploded. Fires might start. Still, gaslight was popular because it was the best light available.







It could be found in homes, offices, factories, and outdoors in larger towns and cities around the country.



Tom was eager to see how the man in Connecticut was using electricity to light up his eight arc lights. He was surprised and interested to find out that the man was not using batteries, but a small generator 3 made of a magnet and coils of wire.



Tom was very impressed with the eight arc lights. But he went home knowing that if he was to succeed with electric light he had to develop a simple lightbulb, which gives off a bright, soft glow from a heated filament 4, or material, inside the bulb. This was known as incandescent 5 lighting.



Tom was all fired up to work on electric light. He knew that other people around the world were working on this too. He wanted to be the first to succeed. But he knew that inventing a working lightbulb wasn’t enough. He had to invent one that could be sold at a price people could afford.







Tom also knew that he would have to figure out how to provide the electrical power to light up whole neighborhoods, whole cities—in fact, the whole country. That meant building power plants to provide the electricity.



Never shy about talking about his inventions, Tom wrote in his notebook: “The electric light is the light of the future, and it will be my light unless some other fellow gets up a better one.”



It wasn’t long before Tom was boasting to reporters that he would have his electric light ready in weeks. Not only that, he would build a power station on Pearl Street in Manhattan. It would bring electric light to a whole section of New York City! The area he chose was in the center of the city’s financial district.



Why would Tom make such an announcement? He still had no idea how he would do this. Maybe he wanted to scare off other inventors. Maybe he did it to attract investors 6. Tom needed a lot of money to make this all happen.



Well, he got the money from rich men in New York City. Maybe this genius was about to put the gas companies out of business. The new electric lights might make lots of money. They didn’t want to be left out. So before Tom even had anything to show, investors founded the Edison Electric Light Company.



Tom always loved having visitors at his lab in Menlo Park. He loved showing off his inventions, especially to reporters.



Now all that changed. He didn’t want anyone coming over. He had bragged 7 about electric light almost as if it existed already. And it didn’t! He hadn’t even applied 8 for patents to protect his ideas.



Tom and his “Boys” settled in for some long, hard work.



First, and most importantly, they had to make a bulb that was a vacuum. That meant no oxygen—a gas in the air we breathe—could be left inside the bulb. A filament will glow much longer if it heats up in a vacuum.



Tom hired a fantastic glassblower who could give him almost perfect, hollow bulbs. And, luckily, at about this time, a vacuum pump had been invented. It could suck almost all the air out of the bulbs.



The hardest task turned out to be finding the right filament, or material, that would carry the electric current and glow for a long time inside the bulb.



There were other problems too. The lights could not be wired in a series, or one to the other along the same wire. Why? If one went out, they all did.



Six weeks came and went. What about that neighborhood in New York, the one Tom said he was going to light up? Newspapers began writing stories accusing Tom of bragging 9.



Tom was still searching for the right filament. He tried so many materials—fish line, bamboo, spiderwebs, even the hair from one of his workers’ head. For a while he thought that platinum 10 was going to work. But even if it had, it would be too expensive to use.



Sometimes Tom would take time out to play a tune 11 with two fingers on the organ he had put in the laboratory. Maybe it helped him think.



The “Boys” kept testing everything they could think of—over three thousand materials in all. Tom knew that finding out what did not work was as important as finding what did. A year and a half went by. Nothing.



But Tom did not give up, and one day he hit upon the answer. It was simple sewing thread covered in carbon and baked to just the right temperature.



On October 22, 1879, Tom’s lightbulb glowed for thirteen and a half hours. The next one glowed for over a hundred hours. Tom and his team were ecstatic. They had done it! Tom was only thirty-two years old.



Tom set up electric lights in Menlo Park for the December holiday season. They were powered by a new generator in the machine shop. It had two five-foot-high magnets and weighed over five hundred pounds.



Over three thousand people poured into Menlo Park to see what the “Wizard” had done now. They came by train and walked along the boardwalk to the laboratory. They looked up in amazement 12 at the one hundred lamps glowing all along the way. Once inside, they were stunned 13 by the rooms lit with electric lights.



Now Tom turned to lighting up part of New York City He needed a power plant, lines running underground, switches, meters, light fixtures 14, and many other things to keep his promise.



It would take another two and a half years, but on September 4, 1882, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a switch was thrown at the central station on Pearl Street. In the Wall Street offices of one of his important investors, Tom turned on all 106 new office lamps for the very first time. Tom knew that this was only a beginning. One day his electric light would be used all over the world.

GASLIGHT



IN 1816, COAL GAS LAMPS LIT UP A STREET IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND. IT WAS THE FIRST AMERICAN STREET TO HAVE GASLIGHTS. LATER, LAMPS WERE USED INDOORS.



NATURAL GAS COMES RIGHT OUT OF THE GROUND. A WELL TWENTY-SEVEN FEET DEEP WAS DRILLED IN FREDONIA, NEW YORK, IN 1820. GENERAL LAFAYETTE, A HERO OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, VISITED AND WAS SERVED A DINNER COOKED ON A GAS STOVE IN A ROOM LIT BY GASLIGHT. IT WAS A MARVEL 15 IN ITS DAY!

ARC LIGHT



LIGHT IS PRODUCED WHEN AN ARC OF ELECTRICITY JUMPS BETWEEN TWO CHARGED CONDUCTORS. IT WAS TOO BRIGHT, SMELLY, AND EXPENSIVE FOR USE IN HOMES AND OFFICES.