homas Alva Edison learned the value of innovation as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad in Michigan during the Civil War. The telegraph, he saw, was the key to increasing his newspaper sales. Edison got the idea as he watched crowds gather around telegraph office bulletin boards on Apr. 6, 1862, eager for news of the Battle of Shiloh. He offered the Detroit telegraph operator a few free newspaper and magazine subscriptions if the operator would telegraph the war news ahead to all the train stations on Edison's route.

     Next, he talked his way into the editor's office at the Detroit Free Press, persuading the editor to give him 300 copies of the paper on credit, instead of the usual 100. (Edison had no money to pay for the extras.) As the train pulled into each station, Edison found a crowd waiting for newspapers. He raised the price from 5¢ to a dime and sold his last few papers at the end of the run for a quarter apiece. The next day, young Tom Edison began to study telegraphy and printing.

     He went on to earn 1,093 U.S. patents in a career that continued until his death in 1931. Many of the most important innovations of the 20th century are dependent upon Edison's groundbreaking work. Yet his style of invention, resting heavily on intuition and only loosely on academic study, has been eclipsed. Edison paved the way for the great industrial laboratories of the century, such as Bell Laboratories and the research facilities of General Electric. But with increasing specialization in science, it is unlikely that a figure like Edison will ever be seen again.

     Edison, from his earliest days, was both an inventor and an industrialist. In 1869, when he was only 22 years old, he established a partnership to produce stock-ticker and telegraphy equipment. As he began to make key advances in telegraphy, he expanded his telegraphy equipment business. His inventions extended to important components of the telephone, the electric light, the phonograph, an electric railroad, and a system of electric power generation. At the same time, he established a railroad company, a lighting business, and a phonograph company, and he opened the Pearl Street generating station in New York. This was not a man to let others profit from his inventions.

     Although he went to school as a young man, Edison preferred to read, study, and learn from the world and from his experiments. At his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, he seldom went home, preferring to take catnaps under his desk. In the middle of the night, he would sit at the organ and play with two fingers. He was a visionary. And above all, he was a thinker. "The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasures in life," Edison said. "My business is thinking."

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VIDEO: Thomas Edison
Featuring movie pioneer and inventor Thomas Edison with his early camera, the 1894 kineticscope later displayed by his widow on the fiftieth anniversary of the motion picture (TRT: 0:23 min.)

PHOTO CA. 1890: CORBIS/HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION