1878, THOMAS ALVA EDISON PATENTS THE PHONOGRAPH

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Thomas Alva Edison, the American inventor who patented the phonograph on a day like today in 1878.

 

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847-October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman.

 

He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.

 

These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was raised in the American Midwest; early in his career, he worked as a telegraph operator, which inspired some of his earliest inventions.

 

In 1876, he established his first laboratory facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where many of his early inventions were developed. He later established a botanical laboratory in Fort Myers, Florida, in collaboration with businessmen Henry Ford and Harvey S. Firestone, and a laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, that featured the world's first film studio, the Black Maria.

 

He was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as patents in other countries. Edison married twice and fathered six children.

 

He died in 1931 of complications of diabetes.

 

More information: Rutgers

A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone, as a trademark since 1887 as a generic name in the UK since 1910, or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound.

The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a record. To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound.

 

In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.

 

The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record.

In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems.

 

More information: Library of Congress

The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio recording format throughout most of the 20th century.

 

In the mid-1960s the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction of digital music distribution in the 2000s.

However, records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors, and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone a revival since the 2000s.

Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to invent a device that could both record and reproduce sound. The phonograph's predecessors include Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, and Charles Cros's paleophone.

 

Recordings made with the phonautograph were intended to be visual representations of the sound, but were never sonically reproduced until 2008.

 

Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the phonograph in 1877.

 

More information: The New York Times

 

 The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

Thomas A. Edison

THOMAS ALVA EDISON & THE INCANDESCENT LIGHTING

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of her closest friends Claire Fontaine, Joseph de Ca'th Lon, Tonyi Tamaki, Tina Picotes and Jordi Santanyí. They have followed the COVID19 rules for reunions and they have spent this New Year's Eve without celebrations to respect all people who are suffering this terrible pandemic but they have enjoyed the possibility of staying together and safe.

Christmas is time of celebration, music, good proposals and light. They have been talking about Thomas Alva Edison, who demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey on a day like today in 1879. Edison wasn't the only inventor to lay claim to the light bulb and the history of this invention has as inventors as guests had The Grandma on a day so special.

An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows.

The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb to protect the filament from oxidation. Current is supplied to the filament by terminals or wires embedded in the glass. A bulb socket provides mechanical support and electrical connections.

Incandescent bulbs are manufactured in a wide range of sizes, light output, and voltage ratings, from 1.5 volts to about 300 volts.

They require no external regulating equipment, have low manufacturing costs, and work equally well on either alternating current or direct current. As a result, the incandescent bulb became widely used in household and commercial lighting, for portable lighting such as table lamps, car headlamps, and flashlights, and for decorative and advertising lighting.

Incandescent bulbs are much less efficient than other types of electric lighting, converting less than 5% of the energy they use into visible light. The remaining energy is lost as heat. The luminous efficacy of a typical incandescent bulb for 120 V operation is 16 lumens per watt, compared with 60 lm/W for a compact fluorescent bulb or 150 lm/W for some white LED lamps.

More information: ThoughtCo

Some applications use the heat generated by the filament. Heat lamps are made for uses such as incubators, lava lamps, and the Easy-Bake Oven toy. Quartz tube lamps are used for industrial processes such as paint curing or for space heating.

Incandescent bulbs typically have short lifetimes compared with other types of lighting; around 1,000 hours for home light bulbs versus typically 10,000 hours for compact fluorescents and 20,000-30,000 hours for lighting LEDs.

Incandescent bulbs can be replaced by fluorescent lamps, high-intensity discharge lamps, and light-emitting diode lamps (LED). Some areas have implemented phasing out the use of incandescent light bulbs to reduce energy consumption.

Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve by use of the Sprengel pump and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

Historian Thomas Hughes has attributed Edison's success to his development of an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.

Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp in 1878.

Edison filed his first patent application for Improvement in Electric Lights on 14 October 1878.

After many experiments, first with carbon in the early 1880s and then with platinum and other metals, in the end Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on 22 October 1879, and lasted 13.5 hours.

Edison continued to improve this design and by 4 November 1879, filed for a US patent for an electric lamp using a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected... to platina contact wires.

More information: History

Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways, Edison and his team later discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last more than 1200 hours.

In 1880, the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company steamer, Columbia, became the first application for Edison's incandescent electric lamps, it was also the first ship to use a dynamo.

More than 95% of the power consumed by a typical incandescent light bulb is converted into heat rather than visible light. Other electrical light sources are more effective.

For a given quantity of light, an incandescent light bulb consumes more power and gives off more heat than a fluorescent lamp. In buildings where air conditioning is used, incandescent lamps' heat output increases load on the air conditioning system. While heat from lights will reduce the need for running a building's heating system, in general a heating system can provide the same amount of heat at a lower cost than incandescent lights.

Halogen incandescent lamps will use less power to produce the same amount of light compared to a non-halogen incandescent light. Halogen lights produce a more constant light-output over time, without much dimming.

More information: The New York Times

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.

Thomas Alva Edison