American inventor born in 1847, one of the greatest inventors of all time. Edison began to work at an early age and continued to work right up until his death. Thought out his long career he had more than 1000 patents. Some of his bigger inventions were the electric light, the motion picture camera and the phonoghraph. In this paper I will talk about the more important inventions there pourpse and there affect on society.
             Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. He attended school for only three months, in Port Huron, Michigan. When he was 12 years old he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway, devoting his spare time mainly to experimentation with printing presses and with electrical and mechanical apparatus. In 1862 he published a weekly, known as the Grand Trunk Herald, printing it in a freight car that also served as his laboratory. For saving the life of a station official's child, he was rewarded by being taught telegraphy. While working as a telegraph operator, he made his first important invention, a telegraphic repeating instrument that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second line without the presence of an operator.
             When Edison was in his 20's he knew how the telegraph system worked and used that to reinvent the stock ticker, one of his first patents. This wasn't the first stock ticker but Edison eliminated the attendant that had been needed in the past. This was a big because anyone one could know how the market was doing without having a big investment to put down, which lead to the expansion of middle class investments. For the next five years of his life he was known to spend 18 hours a day in his workshop.
             In 1876, Edison established a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first laboratory dedicated to industrial research in the world. This is were Edison did some of his most significant works. Edison's first major achievement at Men...