(1847- ), an American electrician and inventor, born at Milan, Ohio. He received a common school education and began work as a train boy on the Grand Trunk Railway. He learned printing and edited and printed the Grand Trunk Herald in the baggage car of the train on which he was employed. A station master whose child he had rescued taught him telegraphy, and he soon became a very rapid and skillful operator. He was employed by the Western Union Telegraph Company, and there he began the series of inventions which have brought him fame and fortune. After brief sojourns in several Western cities he settled in Boston. Carrying on his experiments there, he was able to overcome the difficulties connected with sending two messages in opposite directions at the same time over the same wire, and invented the duplex telegraph, which has proved a highly valuable improvement. In 1868 Edison happened to be in New York when the indicator at the Gold and Stock Exchange broke down. He volunteered his services and succeeded in adjusting the instrument. His laboratories were first located at Menlo Park, N. J., and later he established headquarters at Orange, N. J., where he afterward lived. A score of skilled investigators were employed in his factories until 1876, when Mr. Edison, because of declining health, gave up his manufacturing interests. He took out nearly four hundred patents. He devoted himself mainly to electricity, but had marked success in other lines. Some of his most valuable inventions, patented in other countries as well as in America, are the phonograph, an instrument for making permanent records of articulate sounds; the microphone, which detects the faintest sound; the megaphone, by the aid of which ordinary sounds can be heard at a great distance; the microtasmeter, which records minute variations in temperature. His incandescens lamp combines purity, steadiness, safety and simplicity and is the most widely used of all of his inventions. The kinetoscope, which is one of his latest inventions, is an apparently moving panorama, or machine for throwing moving pictures. Edison clearly holds the foremost position among inventors of the nineteenth century. His influence on the industries and commerce of America cannot be overestimated.