Thomas Alva Edison的貢獻

In 1874, he opened his first complete testing and development laboratory in Newark, New Jersey.

In 1879, extremely disappointed by the fact that Bell had beaten him in the race to patent the first authentic transmission of the human voice, Edison now "one upped" all of his competition by inventing the first commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb...

In 1883 and 1884, while beating a path from his research lab to the patent office, he introduced the world's first economically viable system of centrally generating and distributing electric light, heat, and power.

By 1887, Edison was recognized for having set up the world's first full fledged research and development center in West Orange, New Jersey. An amazing enterprise, its significance is as much misunderstood as his work in developing the first practical centralized power system.

In 1890, Edison immersed himself in developing the first Vitascope, which would lead to the first silent motion pictures.

By 1892, his Edison General Electric Co. had fully merged with another firm to become the great General Electric Corporation, in which he was a major stockholder.

At the turn-of-the-century, Edison invented the first practical dictaphone, mimeograph, and storage battery. After creating the "kinetiscope" and the first silent film in 1904, he went on to introduce The Great Train Robbery in 1903, which was a ten minute clip that was his first attempt to blend audio with silent moving images to produce "talking pictures."

By now, Edison was being hailed world-wide as The wizard of Menlo Park, The father of the electrical age," and The greatest inventor who ever lived." Naturally, when World War I began, he was asked by the U. S. Government to focus his genius upon creating defensive devices for submarines and ships.

By the 1920s Edison was internationally revered.