Hey kids, today we will be learning how Thomas Edison created the lightbulb, and how he became the well known great inventor he is today.

Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 long before us in Milan, Ohio. He started of  his life with his dad getting a job in Port Huron, Michigan as a lighthouse keeper. Edison then started his schooling in Michigan for five years spread out. He was labeled as a misfit when his hearing was not good. The boy started reading to gain more knowledge and to compensate with schooling. 

In 1859 Edison quit school and started working as a train boy on a railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Four years before he got the job the military used telegraphy to control the movement of trains in the United States, and in 1963 four years later Edison became a apprentice telegrapher. The telegraph was a machine that was used to send other people messages over long distances. The telegraph started by being just Morse Code that would be dots and dashes that would be decoded and did not give and problem to Edison's bad hearing, but when they decided to make the telegraph more of business where you had to be able to listen which gave Edison more problems because of his hearing.

He left the telegraphy business when he made enough progress with the duplex telegraph which took two messages and could go through just one wire. After that in 1869 he went to become an entrepreneur. He moved to New York city to join a partnership with Frank L. Pope, a man who was a noted electrical expert. After from 1870 to 1875 where he worked in Newark, New Jersey and he had many different partnerships with many different people, but the telegraph business was hard for a single man when was going up against the Western Union Telegraph Company. In 1874 he created the quadraplex the first way to send four different messages over just one wire, and sold it for 100,000 dollars Cha-Ching. 

Edison was great at getting money and giving money, but he was not so good at keeping money. He frantically spent and gave money to people. Then he married a woman named Mary Stilwell who 16 years old at the time. WOW! 

To reduce how much he wanted to spend his money he made his father build him a two and a half story laboratory and machine shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He moved there in 1876 with a couple of friends to help him with his work. Their names were Charles Batchelor and John Kruesi these men were mostly the ears of Edison's inventions.

Edison had some of his finest times living in Menlo Park. He created some of his greatest inventions, while he was at Menlo Park. He was working to try to make an underwater cable for the telegraph and found out how carbon could help him with something else. This was an amazing discovery at the time and proved to help Edison to make his next invention.

This invention was the carbon button transmitter. It was a machine that helped to control the pressure put on the carbon around the wires on the telegraph. This machine made it so the telephone and microphones connection would be more amplified and better.

In 1877 Edison was trying to create something to go along with the telephone. This project was one of Edison's best inventions. He started to work on the phonograph to create sound writing. This would take the message sent from the telegraph and it would make different sounds. 

The piece of equipment that went into the indents to make the sound was a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter. Even though it was one of his best projects it took ten years to get to the public from his laboratory. This also brought Edison's name into the spotlight.