Saturday, November 5, 2011

Thomas Edison- One of the Most Prolific Inventors of our Time

Thomas Edison is considered one of the best inventors of all time.  Thomas Edison was one of seven children born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio.  He grew up in Port Huron, Michigan.  He had patents for over 1000 inventions in the United States. 

Thomas attended school for a while but was taken out and home schooled eventually because the teacher didn’t like all of his questions. He was also partly deaf due to a bout of scarlet fever and several ear infections.

Thomas was dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by a reporter.  Now Thomas was famous for many inventions including a telegraph transmitter, the phonograph, the motion picture camera or kinetoscope and his most famous light bulb.

The kinetoscope was a precursor to the movie projector.  It’s what was used to play film so that movies could be projected against a screen or wall. Edison’s kinetoscope used this concept to show a movie inside of a window. 

Eventually this idea became a motion picture projector that showed the movie on a screen so that a large group of people could view the movie at once. It worked by using a collection of many pictures collected on film and then these pictures were shown at a certain speed so that it looked as if the images in the pictures were moving. 





By Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)


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