Thomas Edison
American inventor and businessman (1847–1931)
21 dated entries naming Thomas Edison, drawn from 17 separate years between 1868 CE and 1904 CE. Nothing here is written by us: each line is the sentence a Wikipedia year article used, and the link beside it opens the exact revision.
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19th century
- 1868October 28 – Thomas Edison applies for his first patent, the electric vote recorder.source
- 1876August 8 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph.source
- 1877November 21 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record sound, considered his first great invention. Edison demonstrates the device for the first time on November 29.source
- 1878February 19 – The phonograph is patented by Thomas Edison.source
- 1879December 31 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.source
- 1879November 4 – Thomas Edison applies for a patent for his invention of the incandescent light bulb (U.S. Patent 223,898 will be granted on January 27, 1880).source
- 1879October 22 – Using a filament of carbonized thread, Thomas Edison tests his first practical electric light bulb (it lasts hours before burning out).source
- 1880February 24 – The SS Columbia, which will be the first outside usage of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, is launched at the Delaware River Iron Ship Building and Engine Works of John Roach & Sons in Chester, Pennsylvania.source
- 1880January 27 – Thomas Edison is granted a patent for the incandescent light bulb. Edison filed for a US patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires." Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament, including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," Edison and his team later discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last more than 1200 hours.source
- 1880May 13 – In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.source
- 1881January 25 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.source
- 1882September 4 – Thomas Edison flips the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in the United States, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan. This is considered by many as the day that begins the electrical age.source
- 1883January 19 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires begins service in Roselle, New Jersey, United States, installed by Thomas Edison.source
- 1888February 27 – In West Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison meets with Eadweard Muybridge, who proposes a scheme for sound film.source
- 1889October 21 – Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder is recorded by Adelbert Theodor Wangemann, a German associate of Thomas Edison, on wax cylinders via phonograph. The two surviving wax cylinders that are produced make von Moltke, who was born in 1800, the earliest-living human whose voice has been recorded, and the only person born in the 18th century whose voice will be heard into the 21st.source
- 1891May 20 – Thomas Edison's prototype kinetoscope is first displayed at Edison's Laboratory, for a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs.source
- 1892August 9 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for a two-way telegraph.source
- 1893February 1 – Thomas Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey.source
- 1897August 31 – Thomas Edison is granted a patent for the Kinetoscope, a precursor of the movie projector.source