Thomas Edison’s Patent Application for the Light Bulb (1880)

Thomas Edison propelled the United States out of the gaslight era and into the electric age. From the time he was a boy, he was mesmerized by the mechanics of the universe and, with virtually no formal education, brought forth innovations that continue to dominate our lives. Out of his New Jersey laboratories, which were themselves inventions—thoroughly equipped and fully staffed—came 1,093 patented inventions and innovations that made Edison one of the most prolific inventors of all time.

Three of his most famous inventions, the phonograph, a practical incandescent light bulb, and the moving picture camera, dazzled the public and revolutionized the way people live throughout the world. His thundering dynamos transformed the United States into the world’s greatest industrial superpower.

In 1878 the creation of a practical long-burning electric light had eluded scientists for decades. With dreams of lighting up entire cites, Edison lined up financial backing, assembled a group of brilliant scientists and technicians, and applied his genius to the challenge of creating an effective and affordable electric lamp. With unflagging determination, Edison and his team tried out thousands of theories, convinced that every failure brought them one step closer to success. On January 27, 1880, Edison received the historic patent embodying the principles of his incandescent lamp that paved the way for the universal domestic use of electric light.

(Information excerpted from American Originals by Stacey Bredhoff; [Seattle and London; The University of Washington Press, 2001] p. 62–63.

The Telegraph and Morse Code History

Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse developed a code (bearing his name) that assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines. In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland; by 1866, a telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean from the U.S. to Europe. Although the telegraph had fallen out of widespread use by the start of the 21st century, replaced by the telephone, fax machine and Internet, it laid the groundwork for the communications revolution that led to those later innovations.

Task: Write your name on the board using Morse Code!

Pavlov's Dogs and Classical Conditioning

One of the most revealing studies in behavioral psychology was carried out by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) in a series of experiments today referred to as 'Pavlov's Dogs'. His research would become renowned for demonstrating the way in classical conditioning (also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning) could be used to cultivate a particular association between the occurrence of one event in the anticipation of another.

Pavlov came across classical conditioning unintentionally during his research into animals' gastric systems. Whilst measuring the salivation rates of dogs, he found that they would produce saliva when they heard or smelt food in anticipation of feeding. This is a normal reflex response which we would expect to happen as saliva plays a role in the digestion of food.

However, the dogs also began to salivate when events occurred which would otherwise be unrelated to feeding. By playing sounds to the dogs prior to feeding them, Pavlov showed that they could be conditioned to unconsciously associate neutral, unrelated events with being fed.

After studying the dogs’ behavior, Pavlov concluded that human behaviors are also a series of connected conditioning reflexes.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur started out as an average student. He loved the study of chemistry, and eventually became a professor at the University of Strasbourg. When three of his five children died of typhoid fever while they were young, he became determined to find cures for diseases.

He didn’t take any time off. He spent most of his days working and his nights writing research papers. He only slept a few hours a night, and didn’t speak much at home. Some stories say that he was a germophobe, someone who is afraid of germs, and wouldn’t shake anyone's hand.

When he was 32 he was a dean of science and professor at the University of Lille. He was demanding, and most of the students didn’t like him. He spent hours at the University of Lille studying samples under a microscope.

Pasteur invented the process of pasteurization when the emperor of France was upset about contaminated wine. Pasteur discovered that microbes in the wine were making people sick, and heating it could kill the germs. We now use this process to make milk safe for people to drink.

Pasteur also came up with a vaccine for rabies. He was the first to create vaccines to prevent diseases. Because of Louis Pasteur, people began to be cured of infectious diseases. His work with vaccines was a major advance in medicine of the time period.

Henry Ford’s Assembly Line

In 1927, Henry Fordhad produced the most popular and cheapest car in the world, the Model A. While he did not invent the automobile, he did produce the first automobile that was affordable for the average American. For 18 years prior, his Model T dominated the automobile market, and he sold more than 15 million vehicles. The Model T outlasted other cars and undersold its nearest competitor by more than $100. Between 1921 and 1926, it accounted for 40% of the automobile market. The key to Ford’s success was his masterful use of the assembly line, a production system in which the item being built moves along a conveyor belt to various workstations, where each worker had a specific job.

The Model A was a definite improvement over the Model T. The new Ford was lower, faster, and more comfortable than the old Model T. It could reach a top speed of 65 miles an hour compared to the 40 miles an hour of the older car. The Model A was the only low-priced car with hydraulic shock absorbers to give it a smooth ride instead of the bone shaking discomfort of the Model T. The price of the new car was nearly the same price as the old.

Ownership of automobiles soared from 26% of American families in 1920 to 60% only ten years later. In 1929, American factories built seven-eighths of the world’s cars and exported 500,000 vehicles each year.

The impact of automobiles was huge. Because of Ford’s success, the assembly line started to be used by many other industries, further improving the nation’s industrial economy. The automobile industry also created plenty of jobs, boosted tourism (road trips!), and gave people a sense of freedom.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany, his father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was a musician. She taught him to music. He didn't speak until he was two years old. When he was six, his father gave him a compass. He was fascinated by the way the needle always pointed north. This experience helped to create a great curiosity in him. He attended a high school called Luitpold Gymnasium Munich. After a year in Italy he went to Zurich, Switzerland. He took a job at the Swiss Patent Office, examining patents for people's inventions. The year 1905 was an exceptional year for Einstein. In that year he published three outstanding papers.

1. He outlined his photoelectric law in which he discussed the behavior of light. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this paper.

2. The second paper, which was his most famous, explored the relation of mass to energy with his formula E=mc2. The formula means that a small amount of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy.

3. The third paper was on the Special Theory of Relativity. He concluded the speed of light is always the same; 186,000 miles a second.

The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey invited him to be their director. He spent the rest of his life in America. Einstein was married two times. He died at the age of 76. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. Einstein's work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.

Wright Brothers

The Wright brothers were innovative thinkers. They were the first inventors to create a sustaining airplane. Believe it or not, humans had already taken flight with hot air balloons, gliders, and even attached themselves to flying kites. All of these pre-airplane flights lacked the ability for continuous flight. The Wright brothers changed flight as we know it.

The Wright brothers were both very creative. They started their own businesses at a young age. Some of their businesses included a printing press and a bicycle repair shop. Through the bicycle repair shop, they met other inventors and hard workers. By meeting other people, they became motivated to work with gliders. Through this, they put all their ideas towards creating the first sustainable airplane.

In the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, the two brothers developed and flew many gliders. The brothers, Orville and Wilbur, designed a new type of wing. These wings were angled and helped create “lift”. Lift is the ability to manipulate air pressure to create flight. Through their design, the Wright brothers’ wing could lift just about anything.

They had many successes and failures. Many of their flights were short, lasting less than one hundred feet. In the early 1900’s, they made an airplane known as "The Flyer”. It had many successful flights in North Carolina. Their wing design is still used today in jets and jumbo airplanes. They made a mark in history.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born in 1867. She is one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and discovered the chemical elements radium and polonium. Curie is the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Other achievements include being the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her father was a maths and physics teacher and was a big influence on Marie’s early education. From an early age Marie was an exceptional student with an amazing memory. She often went without food and sleep to study. Her brilliant mind led her to Paris to study and conduct her research.

She met her future husband Pierre Curie at the university. He considered Marie to be a genius and instantly wanted to work with her. They got married and spent most of their time together in their laboratory studying radioactive materials. Their research led to the discovery of radium, for which they were honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

Pierre was killed in 1906 and Marie was devastated and extremely lonely. She threw herself even deeper into her work and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911. She spent the 1920s raising funds for more research into radium. In 1934 she died from a condition caused by decades of exposure to radiation. No one knew how deadly radium was until years later.

Who Invented the First Telephone?

Did you know that there are more telephones in the world than there are people? Cell phones alone add up to more than 6 billion (there are over 7 billion people in the world)! It’s hard to imagine a world without the telephone, and the person we have to thank for the telephone is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented it in 1876.

Alexander was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a young boy, he was very talented in music, poetry and art, and when he was only 12 years old, he began inventing things. Also, when he was 12, his mother began to lose her hearing and was later to become completely deaf. This greatly affected Alexander, who became very interested in the scientific study of sound and the human voice.

In 1870, at the age of 23, Alexander moved to Canada with his parents where they bought a farm in the province of Ontario. It was there that he built a small workshop to continue his experiments in sound. In 1871, Alexander moved to Boston, in the United States, to teach deaf students, people who could not hear, how to communicate. One of his students was Helen Keller who was unable to see, hear or speak. Starting from 1873, he began to teach less and focus his energy on experiments with sound. On March 10, 1876, while working on his invention, Mr. Bell spoke the first words ever into a telephone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” when he had a small accident in his laboratory. The first telephone, a machine that was able to carry the human voice over long distances, had been invented. By 1886, over 150,000 people in the United States owned one, and our world would never be the same again. Alexander Graham Bell died in Canada in 1922.