 
The Wizard From Ohio
Thomas Alva Edison, born in 1847 in Milan, became
the world's most famous inventor, with more than 1,000 patents. Edison's
inventions included the incandescent electric lamp, phonograph, and the
motion-picture projector. His genius launched hundreds of new industries and
changed the world forever.
Less well known, however, are Edison’s
contributions in inventing the framework that generations of other inventors
used in systematically researching and developing their new products. Edison
invented the first true industrial research and development (R&D) center. He
built the "Invention Factory" in 1887 in West Orange, NJ, that consisted of a complex of brick buildings,
each devoted to a different part of the invention process. There were buildings
devoted to chemical research, physics, and metallurgy, for instance. A research
library allowed Edison and his team to avoid wasting time trying to reinvent
the wheel. Instead, they stood on the shoulders of giants from the past, giving
old ideas new life. A pattern shop and machine shop changed ideas into
prototypes of marketable products. That was Edison’s goal, and it remains the
bottom line for industrial R&D today: To take ideas to market and bring back a
profit. Edison designed his Invention Factory to develop "useful things every
man, woman, and child in the world wants at a price they could afford to pay."
 In
the R&D complex, Edison and his team worked out the basics for the phonograph
and motion pictures. One of their longest and most difficult projects resulted
in the alkaline storage battery, which vastly improved on existing batteries and
became a standard in the battery industry. Perfecting the storage battery took 10 years,
but that battery became
Edison’s single most profitable invention.
Edison also integrated R&D into production. Prototypes, or working models, of
products went from the Invention Factory to a complex of real factories that
Edison built nearby in 1888. Workers produced Edison’s inventions in huge
quantities to sell around the world.
In 1882 Edison made another tremendously
important, but often-forgotten, contribution. He discovered that an electric
current would flow between two wires separated by empty space in a vacuum. The
discovery of this phenomenon -- known as the Edison effect -- led to development
of "vacuum tubes." These devices, which amplified and changed electric
signals in other ways, were used in early radios, televisions, and other
electronic devices before invention of the transistor. Applications of the Edison Effect
eventually led to foundation of the global electronics industry.
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