Thomas Edison

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is still used today in telephone speakers and microphones.
Many of ’s inventions including the carbon transmitter were in response to demands for new products and improvements. In 1877, he achieved his most unique discovery, the phonograph. During the summer of 1877 Edison was attempting to devise for the automatic telegraph a machine that would transcribe a signals as they were received into a form of the human voice so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. Some researchers had theorized that each sound, if it could be graphically recorded, would produce a distinct shape resembling short hand, or phonography, as it was known then. Edison hoped to make this concept real by employing a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of paraffined paper. To his amazement, the barley visible indentations generated a vague sound when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus.
In December 1877 Edison unveiled the tinfoil phonograph, which replaced ...

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that he would invent a safe, mild, and inexpensive electric light that would replace the gaslight.

Inventors had been attempting to devise the incandescent light bulb for fifty years, but Edison’s reputation and past achievements commanded respect for his bold prediction. As a result, a group of leading financiers, including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, established the Edison Electric Light Company, and advanced him $30,000 for his research and development. Edison’s idea was to connect his lights in a parallel circuit by subdividing the current so that the failure of one light bulb would not cause the whole circuit to fail. Some well-known scientists predicted that such a ...

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