Thomas Alva Edison

Born February 11, 1847, in Ohio, Thomas Alva Edison became one of the world's most celebrated and prolific inventors. His childhood fascination with scientific experiments led to a career as an inventor, and he received his first patent, for an electric vote recorder, in 1869. Further successes allowed him to create in Menlo Park, New Jersey, a facility that prefigured the modern industrial research and development (R&D) laboratory. His most far-reaching accomplishment was the largescale commercial distribution of electric light and power.

• Edison amassed over a thousand patents during his lifetime.
• He created the phonograph by combining his laboratory's first major invention, a carbon telephone microphone, with his telegraph repeater to record sound.
• Electric light bulbs had existed since 1802 but were short-lived and expensive. In 1879, after thousands of experiments, Edison's workshop produced a bulb that burned for 40 hours; further experiments yielded one that would burn for a thousand.
• Described as "an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear," Edison's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope opened the way for the film industry.
• The statue shows the inverted cone-shaped bulb known as the Edison light bulb; a similar bulb appears in a 1911 photograph of Edison.
• He died of complications from diabetes on October 18, 1931, at his home in West Orange, New Jersey, and his remains are buried behind the home.