In his youth, the self-taught Edison began to present his technical inventions. In Menlo Park in 1876, not far from New York, he founded the laboratory in which he worked until his death, the same laboratory in which Nikola Tesla worked in 1884 on improving dynamo machines. Edison’s most famous inventions are: the carbon microphone, megaphone, phonograph, writing machine, the telegraph machine which prints letters, quadruplex machine and simple cinematography constructions on the basis of the stroboscopic effect. An important invention was the light bulb with a carbon filament, which was used for lighting for several decades before the invention of the bulb with a metal filament. Edison is known as the fourth greatest inventor of all time, and he had 1093 patents at the American Patent bureau.

Thomas's father, Samuel Edison Junior, was on the defeated side in the Canadian revolution in 1838 and, like his great-grandfather, had to leave the country. He settled down in Milan, Ohio, in the United States, with his wife Nancy Elliott. The youngest child in the Edison family, Thomas Alva, was born on 11 February, 1847. Thomas had a brother, William Pitt, and sisters Harriet Ann and Marian, and they were all much older than him. There were three more children, but all of them died as babies before Thomas was born, which is why his mother was especially caring towards him. Since he had no brothers and sisters of his age, Thomas Edison spent most of his time experimenting and exploring on his own. By the age of six he was already known as a problem child because of his little experiments for which he could not predict the outcome. With the arrival of the railroad in Ohio, life on the canals quickly changed for towns like Milan. The Edisons were among the families who were forced to leave because of a lack of work. In spring 1854, they travelled to Port Huron in Michigan. Thomas's constant loneliness and incessant questions worried his father, who thought Thomas a little strange. Unlike his father, his mother, who was once a teacher and as such understood children better than her husband believed that Thomas was a special and very bright boy.

For a child who was accustomed to playing outside all day, sitting quietly in a school which consisted of only one room, was a big problem. His teacher, a priest named Engle, and his wife forced the children to learn the lessons by heart and then repeat them aloud. When an unfortunate child forgot the answer or had not learned the lesson well enough, the teacher would smack him with a leather belt. His wife warmly approved the use of beatings. The young Edison was very confused by this way of learning. He was not able to learn through fear, nor could he simply sit and memorize. Because of this, his grades were very poor in the first few months, and he learned very little. For this reason his mother began to teach him. Each morning, when she finished the cleaning, she would call Edison to his class. Without coercion, and with a lot of love and encouragement, she taught Edison reading, writing and arithmetic. At nine years old Edison started reading classic literature. However, the book that most influenced him was from the field of physics – School of natural philosophy by R. G. Parker.

Electricity was a topic that especially intrigued Edison. Then, electricity was not part of people's everyday lives, and so little was known about it. Oil lamps were used for indoor lighting, which gave off an unpleasant smell and were more expensive than candles. Wood stoves were the only source of heat for homes. Reading books was the only form of entertainment, as there was no television or cinema. However, there was one useful device then that worked on electricity. It was the telegraph. Electrical impulses were used to transmit Morse code. Edison once saved a boy by moving him from the track in front of a moving train. The boy's father was a telegraph operator, and as a sign of gratitude he taught Edison how to operate a telegraph.

At the age of 12, young Edison took a job selling sweets, newspapers and other necessities in the train which connected Port Huron with Detroit. His free time during the day was a real opportunity for Edison to visit the public library in Detroit. Eager to learn as much as he could, he read a lot during his long stays in the library. Even then it was clear that Edison would become deaf. It could have been due to a number of childhood diseases, including a streptococcal infection. Or maybe it happened when the station chief hit him over the ear when he was annoyed with him. There is another option: he often had to run to catch the train, and on one occasion a worker helped him to climb onto the train and not fall off it onto the tracks while it was in motion by grabbing him by the ear. Although many people consider hearing loss a big disadvantage, Edison saw this as an advantage because his hearing problem made him able to concentrate in a noisy environment.

At 14 years old, he bought a small printing machine and kept it in the train where he worked, in the baggage car. He wrote and printed the Weekly Herald, which he argued was the first newspaper printed in a moving train. After several months spent on the railway he opened two shops in Port Huron, where he sold fruit and vegetables from the family farm. One day, the railway supervisor threw Edison and his things out of the train.

This was followed by him being trained as a telegraph operator, and at 16 years of age he began to work in this job, replacing one of a thousand operators that had gone to fight in the Civil War, which was raging at that time in America.

After working in a number of telegraph institutions, where he carried out many experiments, Edison arrived at his first genuine invention. Known as an automatic repeater, the device had the task of sending telegraph signals between unmanned stations.

Edison returned home virtually penniless in 1868. Unfortunately, his parents were in an even worse state than him: his mother had begun to show signs of madness, and his impulsive father had just left his job. At the same time, the local bank was threatening to repossess the family farm. Edison got to grips with the seriousness of this situation, and after much deliberation decided to go back and try to get rich. He soon accepted an offer from one of his colleagues, Billy Adams, and started working as a telegraph operator in the prestigious company, the Western Union, in Boston. The most important factor influencing his leaving was that Boston was the scientific, educational and cultural center of America at that time. At the beginning of the age of the telegraph, Edison was working 72 hours a week for the Western Union. Meanwhile, he continued to work on his own project, and after 6 months had his first patent. His carefully constructed electric machine for counting votes at elections, nevertheless, turned out to be a complete failure. When he presented it to the Massachusetts legislature, the invention was unanimously rejected due to the persisting political practice of relying on delays caused by manually counting votes, in order to influence voters in the meantime.

Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Because of his great need for money, Edison made a significant shift in his view of the world of business and marketing. His words were: “From now on, I will never waste time inventing things that people do not want to buy”

In Boston, he was at a lecture at Boston Tech, where he heard new ideas about telegraph signals from several colleagues. This new theory and the relevant experiments involved the transmission of the human voice or even crude images over telegraph wires using variable frequency electrical current. The instrument that made this possible was called the harmonic telegraph.

Deeply in debt and on the verge of dismissal from the Western Union because of negligence towards his work, Edison borrowed $ 35 from his colleague Benjamin Bredding, so that he could buy a ticket to New York, a more interesting city for business. In his third week after arriving in the Big Apple, Edison was on the verge of starvation. He had just begged a cup of tea from a street vendor, when he saw the manager of a brokerage in a panic in one of the offices in the financial district of New York because of a broken machine for printing stock exchange quotas. He made his way to the scene of the event and fixed the machine. To the surprise of everyone, except himself, the machine began to work perfectly. The delighted manager decided on the spot to employ Edison to do all of the repairs for them for a monthly salary of $ 300. At night Edison worked on the telegraph, the quadruplex transmitter, and other devices. Soon after, a corporation decided to pay him $ 40,000 for his telegraph, a machine which was able to receive and print every change in the price of gold on the world market.

After this, Edison quickly advanced with his inventions. With the money he received from the sale of an electro engineering firm that owned several of his patents, in 1874 he opened the first complete technological laboratory in Newark, New Jersey. At 29, he began to work on the carbon microphone, which improved the quality of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone enough for it to be put into practical use. After moving his laboratory to Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876, Edison invented the first phonograph. It is interesting that at one point, Edison was very close to inventing the telephone, just as Bell was close to inventing the phonograph.

The phonograph was Edison's favourite creation. It had two needles one for recording and one for reproducing the voice. The machine was an immediate success, but it was difficult to use unless it was used by experts, and the foil which lined the cylinder did not last long. Edison foresaw possible applications of the phonograph: writing letters and dictation, phonographic books for the blind, a family recording, music boxes and toys, clocks that announce the time, educational use, as well as being connected to the phone so as to record communications.

Having invented the telephone, Alexander Bell, with his cousin Chichester, began to work on perfecting the phonograph. They made significant improvements using wax on the cylinder instead of foil. They received a patent for this invention and called it the graphophone. They wanted to work with Edison on improving the machine, but he refused and decided to work alone. His new phonograph directly followed the improvements made by Bell. Deeply disappointed by the fact that Bell had won the race to patent the first authentic transmission of the human voice, in 1879, Edison surpassed all of the competition by inventing the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb.

On 27 January 1880, Thomas Edison received a patent describing the principles of his incandescent bulbs. Thomas Edison had catapulted the United States from the era of gas lighting in the electrical era – so said one of the many headlines which described his accomplishment. Taking into account that there was much intrigue around Edison associated with the theft of patents, it is reasonable to think that this is an example of the same.

The bulb, as a form of electric lighting, had existed for a full 50 years before Edison's patent. However, without electricity the bulb was nothing more than an ordinary vacuum glass tube. It is only because he owned a company responsible for electric power distribution, later known as General Electric, that Thomas Edison was publicly accredited as the one who invented the bulb. Moreover, Joseph Swan, a British inventor, received the first patent for the light bulb in the UK, a full year before Edison. Swan had even publicly presented his light bulb with a carbon filament in Newcastle, in Great Britain, at least 10 years before Edison shocked the world by announcing that he had invented the light bulb. Swan's initial invention of the light bulb with incandescent carbon fibers and its prototype had appeared in an article published in the Scientific American. At best it can be said that Edison invented the light bulb by improving on Swan's design, which had been published, although imperfect.

Swan sued Edison for copyright infringement. A British court sided with Swan's patent of the light bulb, and Edison lost the lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Edison was ordered to make Swan a partner in his British electrical company. Things did not go any better for him in the United States, where the US Patent Office ruled on 8 October 1883 that Edison's bulb patents were invalid, since they were based on the earlier work of William Sawyer. To make matters worse for Edison, Swan sold his patent rights in the US in June 1882 to Brush Electric Company. This series of events took away all of Edison's rights to all of the light bulb patents and left him with no possibility of buying any of them.

Most of today's historians associate Thomas Edison with the light bulb, which he did not invent, and a huge share of the 1093 patented inventions which he did invent. In the meantime, they completely ignore the enormous significance of his first model of an electric power station, which was put into operation in 1879 in Menlo Park.

One year before the final solution, Edison demonstrated how an area of New York could be illuminated with light bulbs. A vast improvement on this unit from Manhattan was his elegant new Brockton prototype, which was constructed in the center of this progressive town.

Today, many authors agree that Edison not only used Hopkinson, Tesla and Swan but that he borrowed ideas and innovations from many of the employees in his company. For example, he never felt obliged to apologize for stealing ideas from his employees: mathematician Francis Upton, engineer Frank Sprague, as well as many others.

Edison's impact on life in the twentieth century was enormous, and the fame of his fertile inventive genius remains unmatched.

He died the age of 84 years on 18 October 1931 in Llewellyn Park in New Jersey.