With over 1,000 U.S. patents to his name, Thomas Edison is considered by many to be America's greatest inventor, developing several revolutionary devices that changed the world. Edison possessed a brilliant mind and was undeterred by failure, viewing his failed attempts as learning experiences that paved the way for success. While working countless hours in his laboratory, Edison frequently enjoyed tobacco in the form of cigars and chew, indulging in both while creating new forms of innovative technology that amazed the public and rapidly increased society's progress. Edison's work greatly impacted the modern industrialized world and his lasting influence continues to be felt today.

Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio but was raised in Port Huron, Michigan where he was taught reading, writing, and math by his mother, a former teacher. Edison was a naturally inquisitive child who enjoyed reading and was fascinated by technology, spending hours tinkering and experimenting at home. By age 13, he had a job with the Grand Trunk Railway where he quickly developed entrepreneurial sensibilities and his optimistic personality.

Six months after starting with Grand Trunk, Edison opened and managed two stands in his hometown, a newspaper stand and one that sold fruits and vegetables, earning him $50 a week. Edison's experience selling newspapers offered valuable lessons that he would later use to market himself and his inventions, learning from a young age how powerful and influential the press can be. He used the profits from his stands to purchase equipment for electrical and chemical experiments, often conducting them in the cellar of his family's home.

Edison's hearing problems developed when he was a young child and has been attributed to scarlet fever and recurring ear infections that went untreated. A doctor who examined him later in life believed it was a congenital degenerative disorder brought on by some form of trauma at an early age. For most of his life, Edison was completely deaf in one ear and could hardly hear out of his other, which is truly remarkable considering he went on to invent the phonograph. Edison once claimed that his deafness was due to a conductor helping him on the train, saying that he "took me by the ears and lifted me. I felt something snap inside my head, and my deafness started from that time and has since ever progressed." (Israel, pg. 17). Throughout his life Edison viewed his poor hearing as an advantage, allowing him to block out nearby distractions and deeply concentrate.

Edison was a naturally inquisitive child who enjoyed reading...

Even before he started to work, Edison had begun to learn telegraphy and came to understand its importance further while employed on the Grand Trunk, seeing how vital it was to transmitting news and controlling railway traffic. After saving an operator's young son from a runaway train, Edison was given formal telegraphy lessons and greatly refined his skills. He quickly mastered the telegraph and during the American Civil War years, Edison traveled from city to city as an itinerant operator, constantly lured by the promise of higher pay and better job opportunities. His fellow operators frequently gambled, used foul language, and drank excessively, though "Edison appears not to have indulged in such excesses, except in developing a taste for chewing tobacco and cigars." (Israel, pg. 23).

Whenever he had time, Edison studied telegraphic equipment and the principles of electricity, gradually developing ideas on how to improve the telegraph. Shortly after the war ended, telegraphy became a major communication tool, with wires traversing the coasts of the United States. In contrast to the booming telegraphy business, Edison struggled during this time, spending "most of his money on batteries and equipment to conduct his experiments, while living in rat-infested boarding houses, existing on coffee, apple turnovers and cigars." (Gillen, 1997).

Edison viewed his poor hearing as an advantage, allowing him to block out nearby distractions and deeply concentrate.

After moving to New York City in 1869, Edison visited Samuel Laws Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company on Broadway to find the company panicking over a jammed general transmitter. After examining the machine's internal engineering, Edison found a contact spring snapped off and fell between two gear wheels. While other employees frantically ran around the financial district resetting branch indicators, Edison removed the spring and successfully repaired the machine. Within two hours the entire system was running normally and Edison was immediately hired as an operator-mechanic, earning $100 a month. Having earned a stable job, Edison worked at a hectic pace, sometimes up to 20 hours a day and said at the time, "I'll never give up for I may have a stroke of luck before I die." (Morris, 2019). By the end of August of 1869, Edison was appointed as superintendent of the company's manufacturing plant and received three times his starting salary.

Edison then began working on improving the design of a stock printer his boss, Samuel Laws, had developed but could not patent as it replicated several elements of a device designed by Edward Calahan. Essentially, Edison had created a new stock printer that was much simpler, smaller, and ran significantly smoother compared to what was already being used. Western Union recognized Edison's brilliance and paid him a large annual salary to support his printing telegraph experiments and for his shop to be used for manufacturing printers.

Edison was consumed by work and the need to invent, often spending long hours in his laboratory experimenting and chewing on cigars, letting them go out and eventually lighting them again. He once remarked that he smoked so many cigars that "holding a heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip; it has a sort of Havana curl." (Gillen, 1997).

As the telegraph industry began to grow, Edison's inventions greatly saved on labor and eventually caught the attention of the infamous Jay Gould, one of the most notorious Robber barons of the Gilded Age. Having control of Edison's patents on new telegraph technology was highly lucrative and several investors eagerly awaited his new designs, which also meant Edison had to watch out for competitors who could potentially steal his ideas. While Edison was under contract with Western Union, he would often sell inventions to other companies if Western Union couldn't agree to his terms. This notably caused a lengthy legal battle between Western Union and the Gould-owned Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company over Edison's quadruplex telegraph, which allowed four separate signals to be transmitted and received on a single wire at the same time. It was Edison's most important telegraph invention and saved money by greatly increasing the number of messages that could be sent without building new lines.

Edison was consumed by work and the need to invent, often spending long hours in his laboratory experimenting and chewing on cigars...

The money Edison made from his groundbreaking work went towards establishing an industrial research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which at the time was a sparsely populated rural area and the site of a failed residential development. The facility, also dubbed the "invention factory," was designed with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. It was at Menlo Park that Edison began work on improving Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent and experimenting with the idea of being able to record the sound of the human voice.

In 1877, Edison introduced the phonograph, a machine that allowed a person to speak into a diaphragm that was attached to a pin that made indentations on a paper wrapped around wood. One day, while experimenting with a diaphragm — a cup-shaped device with a thin metal bottom — Edison noticed it would vibrate when he shouted into it and theorized that if attached a needle to the metal bottom of the diaphragm he could record the vibrations of his words on a flat surface. A lab assistant then built a small cylindrical device to spin a scroll of wax paper beneath the tip of the needle. Edison loudly recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the mouthpiece, and the needle etched what was being said into the wax paper, effectively creating a retractable record of the nursery rhyme.

...the "invention factory," was designed with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation...

Edison later recounted the momentous occasion when speaking to a biographer, saying, "I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of." The phonograph made Edison a celebrity and he received enormous praise for his invention, with Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Sciences calling Edison "he most ingenious inventor in this country ... or in any other." Edison developed a worldwide reputation and was dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park," with an 1878 issue of The Washington Post calling Edison a "genius" and noting that his phonograph presentation before several Congressmen and President Rutherford B. Hayes would be "a scene ... that will live in history."

According to the late Edison biographer Edmund Morris, the inventor overcame his hearing problems by listening with his teeth. In his 2019 book Edison, Morris explained that to hear sounds from a music player or piano, Edison would bite down on the wood and absorb the sound waves into his skull. The sound would then pass through the cochlea and into the auditory nerve, allowing him to hear the melody.

Shortly after the phonograph, Edison introduced an improved telephone by developing a carbon microphone and followed that with a more reliable and long-lasting incandescent light bulb. A 2019 article from The Atlantic summarized the impressiveness of Edison feats, writing, "He did all this by the time he was 33, despite almost no prior experience in acoustics, telephony, or illumination technology."

...the inventor overcame his hearing problems by listening with his teeth.

In the years following Edison's introduction of a viable electric light bulb suitable for commercial use, he founded the Edison Illuminating Company and later patented a system for electricity distribution. While Edison worked on expanding his large-scale, low-voltage direct current (DC) delivery system, he faced significant challenges from companies that were installing high-voltage alternating current (AC) systems. This signaled the beginning of what is referred to as "the war of the currents," leading to competition between Edison's company and George Westinghouse's business. The DC plants Edison owned couldn't supply electricity to customers farther than one mile and for smaller cities and rural areas that weren't able to afford an Edison designed system, AC companies stepped in to fill the gap. Edison frequently expressed his opinion that AC was "inefficient, uneconomical, unreliable, and dangerous." (Israel, pg. 325). After a series of deaths in the spring of 1888 attributed to high-voltage AC lines, Edison launched a propaganda campaign and went to great lengths to change public perception regarding AC. Edison's stockholders didn't support the inventor's tactics and he was essentially forced out of controlling his own company after a large merger initiated by J.P. Morgan to create a new company named General Electric.

Edison's other inventions were quite remarkable and revolutionary, including the first commercially available fluoroscope, a machine that utilized X-rays to take radiographs. Edison also showed interest in developing an ore-milling process that would extract various metals from ore, though he abandoned the project as there was no substantial market for his idea at the time. Creating a lighter, more efficient rechargeable battery was another device Edison worked on, viewing it as something that could be used to power phonographs and perhaps even electric automobiles.

During the 1890s, Edison was granted his patent for the Kinetogprah, the world's first motion-picture camera, which was largely developed by Edison's employee, William Kennedy Dickson. Edison opened his own production studio in 1895 and helped produce several landmark pieces such as the first film adaptation of Frankenstein and the legendary silent Western film The Great Train Robbery, which demonstrated the effectiveness of films as storytelling devices.

Though Edison frequently smoked cigars and used chewing tobacco, some sources suggest he strongly disliked cigarettes. Edison was once asked by his friend Henry Ford for a supportive written opinion that was backed by a scientific rationale so that Ford could forbid factory workers from smoking cigarettes. According to an article published by the Los Angeles Times, Edison "obliged with a letter claiming that burning cigarette paper formed a substance toxic to brain cells, and stated, 'I employ no person who smokes cigarettes.' In fact, Edison never had banned cigarettes from his lab or factories, but after writing the letter, he hurriedly had signs posted at his plants: Cigarettes Not Tolerated. They Dull The Brain." (Rutten, 2007).

One notable tobacco story involving Edison occurred in the late 19th century when tobacco merchant S.P. Carr asked the inventor to experiment with various methods of bleaching tobacco to produce the rich, yellow hue that yielded high prices for wrappers. If he succeeded, Carr offered to give Edison a substantial share of the profits. To make the deal more attractive, Edison would also be allowed to keep his process a secret by sending a man of his choosing to lead the manufacturing. Over the course of the tobacco experiments, Edison reportedly spent $355 (nearly $10,000 today).

American historian Paul Israel mentioned the story in his 1998 book Edison: A Life of Invention:

In his later years, specifically during World War I, Edison became an outspoken proponent of military preparedness as he recognized how new technologies were dramatically altering how wars can be fought. In an interview with The New York Times, Edison noted, "Science is going to make war a terrible thing — too terrible to contemplate. Pretty soon we can be mowing men down by the thousands or even millions almost by pressing a button."

He advocated for the stockpiling of munitions, battleships, and airplanes, and for a large army of reservist recruits to be trained by private industries. Edison's statements were noticed by U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, who asked Edison to lead an advisory board to evaluate technical ideas the public submitted to the Navy. "Edison agreed, provided that he would not have to handle administrative matters and would be free to pursue his own war-related research." ("Thomas Edison and Military Preparedness," 2018).

During the 1890s, Edison was granted his patent for the Kinetogprah, the world's first motion-picture camera...

The Naval Consulting Board carried out an array of technical research, offering improvements for airplanes and submarines, remote-control devices for aerial bombs, and developing improved contact mines and torpedo fuel. The majority of Edison's research throughout 1917 was spent finding ways to protect surface ships against submarine attacks, studying camouflage methods, and utilizing electrical instruments capable of detecting submarines by sight, sound and magnetic field. After carrying out research, Edison learned the United States and its allies were still using prewar shipping routes which made it easier for enemy submarines to attack ships, especially during daylight hours, and he immediately suggested shipping schedules be changed.

Edison proposed the Navy establish a permanent research laboratory and in 1916, Congress allocated $1 million to the construction of what would become the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory near the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The laboratory opened in 1923, thanks in large part to Edison's efforts and opinion that technological advances were vital to national security.

Throughout the 1920s, Edison's health continually worsened, with his diabetes and recurring stomach problems causing him the most trouble. After falling into a brief coma, Edison quietly passed away on October 18, 1931, surrounded by his family. Edison's death quickly became global news, with an article from The New York Times noting, "Newspapers worldwide were filled with eulogies and remembrances for many days afterward. Words alone were not enough to express the nation's grief. Heeding President Herbert Hoover's request, many Americans briefly turned off their electric lights at 10 o'clock Eastern time on the night of Edison's funeral." (Stross, 2011).

Thomas Edison was a brilliant innovator who changed the world with his inventions, averaging one patent every ten to twelve days of his adult life. While some view Edison with disdain based on how he conducted business and his antiquated racial views, he was a complex figure who established a clear directive at a young age to create only what was practical and profitable. His contributions greatly enhanced human life and altered the daily lives of millions of people, solidifying his reputation as one of history's most important figures and an iconic tobaccophile.

While several motivational quotes are attributed to Edison, I found this relatively obscure passage to be particularly powerful: