Great American Innovators

Great American Innovators

America has gone through great change from its foundation to present day. Many people have helped to shape the great country in which we proudly call home. Our nation has produced some of the great innovators who shaped the industrial revolution, modern day communications and the use of electric light bulb. The simplest things that we take for granted once were the greatest innovations of their time. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford are three of the greatest men that have contributed directly to a many things that we use in our day to day lives and without these men we would not be the advanced society that we are today.

Reaching for a light switch is something we do every day. This is possible due to the contribution of Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio (Frith 5). He did not attain a formal education due to the poor family in which he was raised instead he started working on the railroad at age 12(Frith 14). Although Edison did not complete school, he continued to learn and experiment. Edison set up a printing press in the baggage car on the train and sold his own newspaper to the passengers (Frith 17). He retold the news from one end of the rail line to the other end of the rail line, allowing the people to be better informed of their neighboring towns. He was also able to have a small lab to perform scientific experiments, at least until his chemicals mixed together and started a fire in the baggage car (Firth 18). Edison then went to work at Western Union as he was fascinated with the telegraph. He was also consulted to improve on a very new technology, the telephone. It was a disappointment to not be the first to discover the telephone, as he had been tinkering with his own ideas on speech delivered over wire (Firth 45). His improvements made it possible to hear and be heard more clearly (Firth 44). He continued to experiment with sound, and invented the phonograph, a device that would allow sound to be recorded and reproduced again and again. He was successful, and his discovery was reported in Scientific America (Firth 49). Edison continued to experiment and at age 32, invented the electric powered light bulb, a great improvement of its early counterpart, gas lights. Edison was one of the great minds of his time and has many inventions that changed the way our country functioned at the time.

Another thing that most people use in their daily life is a telephone. Alexander Bell, born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, made this possible (Carson 3). Bell chose his middle name Graham at age 11 to stand apart from his father and grandfather (Carson 13). Alexander did not have the normal childhood of his time, along with attaining a formal education, he spent most of his time working with his father and grandfather on ways to improve life for the deaf (Carson17). Consequently, He became a teacher at the Weston House Academy for Boys. He was a very unorthodox teacher as he was only sixteen years old; most of his pupils were older than he was. He taught music and speech in exchange for his room, board, tuition, and a salary of ten pounds sterling, equivalent to seventy-five dollars a year (Carson 22). He taught until 1870, when the family immigrated to Canada, and then settled in Boston (Carson 24). Once in Boston, Bell then became a teacher for the deaf. It was a natural position for Bell, as his mother, a concert pianist, was almost completely deaf. Bell's father was the inventor of the Visible Speech, a system that teaches the deaf to enunciate words through pictures of the positions of the mouth (Carson 36). It seemed that young Alexander was following in his father's footsteps, trying to improve the quality of life for the deaf, but he had other plans. Bell was very interested in electricity and the telegraph. (Frith 37). It was this interest that sparked the idea that sounds could be transmitted over wire, just as the dots and dashes of Morse code were (Frith 37). While procuring equipment at a local machine shop Bell met Thomas Watson, and the two formed a friendship after Alexander told him of his idea about transmitting speech over a wire (Carson 46). The first sound was transmitted by accident; a spilled battery caused Bell to shout for Watson. Watson heard it through the receiver in another room (Carson 57). It would not take long for the telephone to be a fixture in every home in America. Today we take the telephone for granted, but once, it was the single greatest evolutionary jump in communications. Previously, the only way to communicate was through the telegraph with Morse code traveling over wire dotting and dashing the message. Bell made it possible to speak and be heard over the wire. Lastly, most Americans depend on an automobile to take them from place to place. This is possible due to Henry Ford, the innovator who put