The familiar photographs of Thomas Edison show a handsome man, with heavy eyebrows, craggy features, and rumpled clothes. Of all his features, it was the determined and forthright jut of his chin that hinted at the fighter inside him. “I get what I want,” he once said. What he neglected to note was that he often had to do battle to get it. Defeat was a possibility he rarely acknowledged and seldom faced.

In the 1880s, he fought two tough battles for his inventions: one to keep control of the phonograph, the other to gain acceptance of the centralized system he had introduced at his Pearl Street power station. Edison, so often spurred by competition, fought his formidable rivals with all the talent and skill he could muster. In the battle for the phonograph, he defended his rightful market share and won. In the fight for acceptance of his centralized power station, he was defeated, largely by the intrinsic nature of electricity and the limitations of the direct current he had chosen for his distribution system. But once Edison realized that another system, alternating current, was going to prevail, he embraced it.

Edison had called the phonograph, which he invented in December 1877 and patented in February 1878, his “baby.” While he worked off and on to improve the phonograph’s design, he was slow to recognize the machine’s potential as a vehicle for in-home entertainment. Difficult to operate and temperamental, the phonograph, despite the public’s initial amazement, failed to find a permanent market. Beyond being a novelty at country fairs and city arcades, the device appeared to have no purpose.

As Edison turned his attention to other projects, notably the electric light, work on the phonograph went by the wayside. His creation remained old-fashioned - still relying on a stylus etching grooves into tin-foil stretched around a cylinder turned by a hand crank. Edison, the world’s foremost electrical engineer, hadn’t even bothered to hook up his invention to an electric motor.

Alexander Graham Bell, who had never forgiven himself for allowing Edison to invent the phonograph, stepped into the void. “It is the most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention slip through my fingers,” he confessed to a friend.

To compensate for his earlier failure, in 1881, Bell set out to build a machine that could compete with Edison’s. With his nephew, Chichester, a chemist, and Charles Sumner Tainter, a skilled instrument maker, Bell produced a prototype, which, despite modifications, such as replacing the tinfoil covering the cylinder with a tough wax surface and installing a free-floating stylus, was essentially a reworking of Edison’s phonograph. Bell named his machine a graphophone.

In May 1886, the Bell team applied for and received a patent for its machine. At this point, four years after they had begun to make revisions to the graphophone, Bell and Tainter approached Edison privately and suggested forming a partnership between their company and Edison’s largely dormant Edison Speaking Phonograph Company. Edison’s new private secretary A.O. Tate (Insull was now an executive in charge of the Edison Machine Works in Schenectady, New York) summarized their proposals:

“They said that they fully recognized the fact that Mr. Edison was the real inventor of the ‘talking machine,” that their work was merely the projection and refinement of his ideas, and that they now wanted to place the whole matter in his hands and turn over their work to him without any public announcements that would indicate the creation of conflicting interests.” The two men proposed to provide all the capital for this new enterprise, and agreed to drop the name “graphophone” and revert to Edison’s original name, gramophone. In exchange, they wanted 50 percent ownership of the venture and its profits.

Edison was livid. He examined the graphophone and determined that Bell and Tainter were trying to steal his invention. Several months later, the pair tried to recruit Edison’s longtime London agent, George Gouraud, to represent the Graphophone Company in Britain. When Gouraud cabled Edison with the news, Edison responded with venom: “Have nothing to do with them. They are a bunch of pirates.” Then he added: “Have started improving phonograph.”

Spurred by the public display of the graphophone in New York in the spring of 1887, Edison set about nursing his neglected baby back to commercial health. He spent much of 1887 experimenting on his machine, which he still envisioned would be used mostly for business, not for entertainment. “I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes,” he announced. “It is not a toy. I want it sold for business purposes only.” He reorganized and recapitalized the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, and appointed Ezra Gilliland president.

Edison, convinced that the phonograph had commercial value, planned to improve it and then mass produce it at his West Orange plant. Realizing that he was in a race with Bell and Tainter to market the phonograph, Edison and Charles Batchelor temporarily set up shop in the Edison Lamp Company in Harrison, New Jersey, before moving into the West Orange lab in the fall of 1887. The two men, determined to win the race, launched a full-scale attack on the enemy. Edison spent two years working furiously on his more advanced design.

In the race to the finish, Edison closed Menlo Park to visitors and refused to speak with reporters. He and his men worked around the clock for five days. Even though journalists were barred from the Edison compound, newspapers posted daily bulletins on the inventor’s progress, describing his efforts as an “orgy of toil” and a “frenzy.”

As usual, Edison faced financial problems. In an attempt to lure investors, he invited a group to listen to his “perfected phonograph,” as he liked to call it. To his dismay, the demonstration was a flop; due to a technical error, the machine produced no sound at all.

Badly in need of funds, Edison began negotiating to sell the marketing rights to the improved phonograph to a Pittsburgh glass manufacturer, Jesse H. Lippincott, who had already signed a licensing agreement with the Volta Graphophone Company. Edison planned to retain the manufacturing license, knowing that these rights were often the most lucrative.

Lippincott, in the meantime, formed the North American Phonograph Company to market both Edison’s and Bell’s machines. At a time when trusts were common, Lippincott had every intention of monopolizing the market. In June 1888, he began selling Bell’s graphopone, prompting Edison’s camp to protest that Lippincott had infringed on its patents.

Edison put the negotiations with Lippincott in the hands of Ezra Gilliland and his new lawyer, John Tomlinson. Edison expected to receive $1 million for the phonograph rights, but Gilliland and Tomlinson told him he’d be getting only half that amount; without telling Edison, the two had made a separate deal with Lippincott that would pay Gilliland $250,000 for North American marketing rights. For Gilliland, who had invested none of his own money in the phonograph business, this was an incredible windfall, even after he gave a third of it to Tomlinson as a commission. Lippincott also agreed to pay the pair a kickback of $50,000 for conducting the negotiations, but at the last minute, had second thoughts about these clandestine arrangements and revealed the whole scheme to Edison.

Edison was incensed. Throughout his career, he had fought many battles against rivals and had quarreled with his own investors, but he had never been duped by a close friend and his own lawyer. On September 11, 1888, Edison sent a terse note to Gilliland, terminating their partnership: “I just learned you have made a certain trade with Lippincott of a nature unknown to me, as you did not have permission to sell from Company. I have this day abrogated your contract and notified Mr. Lippincott of the fact and that he may pay any further sum at his own risk. Since you have been so underhanded I shall demand refunding of all money paid you & stopping of further payments, and I do not desire you to exhibit phonograph in Europe.”

The press picked up the story. “The Wizard Swindled,” was the headline in the Wilmington, Delaware, Journal on January 19, 1889. “Thomas A. Edison Robbed of $250,000. Two Ungrateful Employees.”

What stung Edison most was being betrayed by a friend. He told Mina and Marion that he “would never trust anyone again.” When Gilliland and Tomlinson refused to return the money Lippincott had paid them, Edison sued, alleging fraud. The parties settled out of court.

Although production of the “perfected phonograph” began in January 1889, Edison continued to experiment with the machine, which was still far from perfect. Like Bell, he no longer used tinfoil, but a tough wax compound Gilliland had developed before his exile. Edison had designed a new diaphragm and stylus, but the technological intricacies of recording required endless experimenting and rebuilding.

The battle between the two machines, at the time technologically almost equal, developed into a fight for market share. To keep his “perfected phonograph” in the news, Edison invited the public - including a few journalists - into his lab to view the new device.

Like Edison, Lippincott had no interest in the home entertainment market and focused his efforts instead on business customers. Even though Edison’s phonograph was more reliable than Bell’s, businessmen complained that it was too complicated to use. As business sales lagged, however, the popularity of the machine as an entertainment vehicle grew. By 1891, salesmen were selling them in arcades as “coin-in-the-slot” forerunners to the jukebox. At last seeing the market potential, Edison quickly developed ways to manufacture duplicate records, a trade, he judged accurately, “that will net us ten thousand dollars a year.”

Working in a specially built factory in West Orange, Edison and his assistants continued to enhance their product. He designed a wooden cabinet for home use and improved the acoustics. In three years - from 1888 to 1890 - he filed for seventy-five patents. As he had done with his Pearl Street power station, he invested his own money to keep the phonograph afloat, spending more than $500,000.

Still pursuing the business community, Lippincott made little headway. Stenographers didn’t like the phonographs, and neither did their bosses. The cylinder records lasted only two minutes; the stylus points quickly grew dull, and the small motors that powered the machines were unreliable. Lippincott failed to recognize the importance of the growing entertainment market. A Washington D.C. outfit called Columbia Phonograph Company (the forerunner of Columbia Records and the Columbia Broadcasting Company) became the first to sell recorded music for phonographs. Lippincott never made or sold a single record.

Due to his shortsightedness, Lippincott, who bought the machines on credit, couldn’t meet his obligations to Edison. As North American Phonograph’s largest creditor and shareholder, Edison gained control of the foundering company, which he put into bankruptcy, and recovered the marketing rights to his invention. As a result of the legal battles that ensued - litigation initiated primarily by licensees to whom Lippincott had granted franchise rights - Edison was barred from selling his own phonographs in the United States for three years.

Still free to pursue sales of his invention in other countries, Edison focused his attention on European sales. George Gouraud, during his years representing Edison’s interests in England, had established important contacts throughout London and now persuaded some of them - including poet Robert Browning, composer Arthur Sullivan, and even Prime Minister William Gladstone - to lend their voices to a promotional campaign for the phonograph.

Edison ultimately found success with the phonograph, at home and abroad. In the 1890s, sales of the phonograph as a popular entertainment medium began to soar. As bars, amusement arcades, and restaurants began installing early versions of jukeboxes to entertain their customers, Edison’s machines gained a dominant position in the market.

While Edison was wrestling with the phonograph, he took an important step to put his various businesses - and himself - on firmer financial footing. Edison, who in 1883 had proclaimed that he was going to become a “business man,” had given his name to a sprawling network of loosely affiliated companies tied together by their connections to Edison Electric Light, the central holding company that owned his crucial electricity patents. But by now, Edison had sold most of his shares in Edison Electric Light to finance his manufacturing companies, including Edison Lamp and Edison Machine Works, which he co-owned with a small group of partners, notably Charles Batchelor, Samuel Insull, Francis Upton, and Sigmund Bergmann.

These companies, known as “the shops,” had been selling their products to newly formed local utilities who paid them in notes and stocks, leaving them chronically short of capital - so much so that they didn’t have the funds to expand fast enough to meet the demand for their lamps and generators.

In 1889, Henry Villard, Edison’s stalwart financial patron, came up with a solution. Edison Electric Light and all the operating companies would be consolidated into a conglomerate called Edison General Electric. Shares in the new entity would be distributed to Villard and other investors in the original J. P. Morgan syndicate - who stood to make a hefty profit on their original investment - as well as to Edison and his partners. Villard, Edison, and the Morgan partners agreed on the terms, and the Edison General Electric Company was incorporated in New York on April 24, 1889. As part of the transaction, Edison received $1,750,000 in stock and cash for his stakes in the operating companies. Edison General Electric, with Villard as its first president, raised an additional $4 million by issuing new shares.

Edison’s money worries were at last behind him. Shortly after the deal was finalized, he wrote a letter to Villard expressing his relief: “I have been under a desperate strain for money for twenty-two years, and when I sold out, one of the greatest inducements was the sum of cash received, so as to free my mind from financial stress, and thus enable me to go ahead in the technical field.”

In the summer of 1889, Edison took a trip to Europe, his first since 1873. Mina, concerned about her husband’s health, had finally persuaded him to take a vacation. He needed one. Still licking the wounds inflicted from Gilliland’s and Tomlinson’s treachery and Lippincott’s incompetence, the forty-two-year-old Edison was tired. On August 3, Mr. and Mrs. Edison set sail for France on the ocean liner La Bourgogne. The trip, which would also take them to Germany and Britain, became a kind of victory lap for Edison, who was highly esteemed in Europe.

Everywhere they went, from the moment they landed at Le Havre, the Edisons were met by official dignitaries and adoring crowds. At the Élysée Palace, President Marie François Sadi Carnot draped a red sash on Edison as he made him a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. While Edison seemed embarrassed by the fuss, Mina, then just twenty-two, reveled in all the attention.

Marion Edison, who was now seventeen and studying in Geneva, joined her father and step-mother for part of the trip. The relationship between the two young women in Thomas Edison’s life – his second wife and his teenage daughter – remained tense. Marion ended up staying in Europe for two years, in part, she later confessed in a letter to Mina, because she didn’t feel like she would be welcomed back in New Jersey: “I have always thought that you would much rather not have me at home and this alone was the basis upon which all my feelings toward you were founded.”

When Edison returned from his extended vacation in October 1889, he contacted his West Orange lab to get a progress report on his latest invention, one that wasn’t yet ready to be seen by the public. While he was away, his assistants had been conducting experiments on a new kind of machine, which they were now ready to demonstrate for him. Projected on a screen in a darkened room, he saw the grainy, flickering, moving image of W. K. L. Dickson, one of his researchers, moving his lips, while the sound of his voice emanated from a nearby phonograph. “Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you are back,” said the on-screen Dickson. “I hope you are satisfied with the kineto-phonograph.” In the coming years, this strange device would become known as a motion picture camera.

Edison also picked up where he had left off with the endless legal battles to protect his most important invention: electric lighting. Between 1885 and 1900, Edison Electric Light Company and its successor, Edison General Electric, filed 200 lawsuits, spending some $2 million in the process, to protect Edison’s patents. The beleaguered Edison wasted valuable hours testifying - time he would have preferred to have passed in his lab.

Few could rival Edison’s mastery of the patent process. He understood the value of applying for patents on even incremental advances in technology. But he came to resent a legal system that, in his eyes, allowed thieves to thrive. “After a thing is perfected and commercially introduced so as to show there is money in it half a dozen parties start to infringe it,” he told a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer. “The theory upon which they act is, that it will be several years before I can get a final decision, and in the meantime they make money, and when I get a decision it is probable that no damages can be collected as they have covered their tracks by organizing an irresponsible corporation. . . .

“There is bound to be a delay; why not give the benefit of this delay to the man who has the patent and has worked the thing up to a practical success and not to the infringer who comes after and has no patent. In other words, give the man with the patent the preliminary justice until the Court has time to decide the case. Madame Justice has got this thing reversed it seems to me.”

Edison out-invented, outsmarted, and outlasted most of his rivals, but he met his match in George Westinghouse. Their dispute was more than a patent fight - it was a disagreement over the fundamental nature of electricity itself. The conflict came to be known as the Battle of the Currents, with Edison favoring direct and Westinghouse set on alternating.

Edison was an ardent believer in the superiority of direct current, the method he used for both his central power stations and his individual generators. Direct current relied on low voltage, which decreased over distance. Edison believed that increasing the voltage to allow it to travel further would be dangerous and expensive. Without boosting the voltage, however, a DC generating station could supply current to an area only about two square miles. While direct current could adequately serve customers in a populous urban area, it was of limited use for rural or suburban service.

Alternating current, which reversed direction many times per second, could be transmitted over much greater distances by stepping up the voltage and then cutting it back to household level before it reached the customer. The big breakthrough in AC came in 1883, when Lucian Gaulard, a French scientist, and John Dixon Gibbs, a British engineer, came up with transformers that could satisfactorily “step down” high voltage AC current to low voltage before it reached its final destination. By the late 1880s, a consensus was forming in the industry that AC was clearly the most efficient and cost-effective way to transmit electricity.

Edison disagreed. The year the lab at West Orange opened, he conducted many tests and experiments on alternating current and found it unsatisfactory. At Edison’s request, in 1886, Francis Upton went to Europe to examine another version of a step-down transformer called a ZBD transformer, named after the three German engineers working at an Edison power station in Budapest who invented it. Upton bought an option on the American rights to the ZBD transformer for the bargain price of $5,000, which gave Edison Electric Lighting three years to decide whether to acquire the rights in full for an additional $20,000. But Edison - convinced that alternating current would cause fires and kill people - told his managers to let the option lapse.

Like Edison, George Westinghouse was an inventor and entrepreneur, best known for creating air brakes and other innovations for trains. After establishing his Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Air Brake Company, he became interested in electricity. Convinced that he could develop a system that would transmit a strong alternating current whose voltage could be raised and lowered by transformers, he acquired the American rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs step-down transformer in 1883. Two years later, Westinghouse engineer William A. Stanley improved the reliability and efficiency of the transformer. Comfortable that he had what he needed to launch an AC system, Westinghouse opened his first AC generating station in Buffalo in 1886. For his incandescent lights, Westinghouse relied on patents he had acquired from Edison rivals William Sawyer and Albon Man - whose technology Edison had claimed infringed upon his own.

Edison believed that Westinghouse was using stolen technology - copycat versions of his incandescent lamps. In Edison’s view, Westinghouse was doubly guilty for connecting these lights to a transmission system that was a threat to human life. Edison’s opinion was reinforced in November 1886 when he received a report from engineers who had worked with the ZBD transformer in Europe. They agreed with Edison that the ZBD system was unreliable, costly, and dangerous. “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size,” Edison wrote to Edward Johnson, who was now president of Edison Electric Light. “He has got a new thing and it will need a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically. It will never be free from danger. . . .”

“None of his plans worry me in the least,” Edison added somewhat disingenuously. “[The] only thing that disturbs me is that Westinghouse is a great man for flooding the country with agents and travelers. He is ubiquitous and will form numerous companies before we know anything about it.”

In his attempt to expose the dangers of alternating current, Edison found an unlikely ally in a little-known New York engineer named Harold Brown, who became the public face of the anti-AC campaign. In June 1888, after several New Yorkers had been killed by accidentally touching live electrical wires, Brown wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post (owned - perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not - by longtime Edison investor Henry Villard). The letter, which the paper headlined, “Death in the Wires,” called for alternating current to be banned altogether: “Several companies who have more regard for the almighty dollar than for the safety of the public have adopted the ‘alternating’ current for incandescent service . . . The ‘alternating’ current can be described by no adjective less forcible than damnable. . . . The only excuse for the use of the fatal ‘alternating’ current is that it saves the company operating it from spending a larger sum for the heavier copper wires, which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is, the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend.”

Brown’s letter got the attention of the New York City Board of Electrical Control, a regulatory body not known for its sharp teeth, which invited him to testify. The board also summoned George Westinghouse, who didn’t immediately reply. What Westinghouse did do was write a private letter to Edison, inviting Edison to visit him in Pittsburgh: “I believe there has been a systematic attempt on the part of some people to do a great deal of mischief and create as great a difference as possible between the Edison Company and the Westinghouse Electric Company, when there ought to be an entirely different condition of affairs.”

The press had already reported rumors that the two great electrical companies were exploring a merger, but Westinghouse quickly put that notion to rest. He didn’t want a merger, or some kind of grand electrical trust, but he did want a reconciliation. He didn’t spell out his peace terms, and Edison, in any event, declined Westinghouse’s invitation to meet in Pittsburgh, saying he was too busy with his experiments: “My laboratory work consumes the whole of my time and precludes my participation in directing the business policy of the [Edison Electric Light] Company.”

Unable to reach an understanding with Edison, Westinghouse took his case public, with a forceful letter to the New York City Board of Electrical Control. His company, he said, had built 128 AC generation stations, ninety-eight of which were in operation. There hadn’t been a single fire in a Westinghouse plant, he said, while there had been numerous fires at Edison stations. Westinghouse, who didn’t mention Edison by name, condemned the tactics and rhetoric of the anti-AC camp for a “method of attack which has been more unmanly, discreditable, and untruthful than any competition which has ever come to my knowledge.”

The battle was far from over. Harold Brown, who had been absent from the electricity board meeting where Westinghouse’s letter was read, now appealed directly to Thomas Edison, a man he had never met. Edison invited Brown to West Orange to personally conduct experiments that would show that alternating current was dangerous.

Brown picked up an avenue of research that Edison and his assistants, notably Charles Batchelor, had already begun. In order to demonstrate how lethal alternating current could be, Edison and Batchelor would nudge a dog or cat along a piece of metal to which wires from an AC generator would be attached until the creature was killed by the current.

Brown gave this practice a gruesome twist. In lecture halls in New York he publically electrocuted animals as a way of demonstrating that death from AC was so fast and so painless that it should be used to execute convicted criminals - a more “humane” death, he said, than the current practice of hanging. In 1888, the New York State Legislature passed a law adopting this new means of capital punishment - and hired Brown to be a consultant. He promptly purchased three Westinghouse generators to supply the power for the state’s first electric chairs.

In November 1889, Edison wrote a long article for the North American Review titled “The Dangers of Electric Lighting.” The passage of alternating current “through any living body means instantaneous death,” he wrote. There was no way to make AC safe, not even by burying the high-tension transmission wires underground. “There is no plea which will justify the use of high-tension and alternating currents, either in a scientific or a commercial sense,” he said. “They are employed solely to reduce investment in copper wire and real estate.” If AC use continued unregulated, he concluded, the public could expect “a multiplication of the casualties.”

Edison was right in thinking that alternating current was potentially lethal. But he was wrong in his insistence that it could not be made safe. According to Edison biographer Matthew Josephson, the inventor admitted his mistake twenty years later, when he met the son of William Stanley, the scientist who had improved Westinghouse’s transformers. “Oh by the way,” Edison said to the younger Stanley, “tell your father I was wrong.”

It may have taken Edison two decades to admit his science was misguided, but it took him much less time to concede that Westinghouse had beaten him. Always a pragmatist, Edison knew when to surrender. As the acceptance of alternating current grew in the United States, Edison gradually converted his own systems to AC and began designing and manufacturing his own AC equipment.

Edison eventually scored a victory against Westinghouse, although at a great cost. After years of expensive legal battles, Edison finally prevailed against Westinghouse and his affiliated company, Thomson-Houston, when a Federal court in New York ruled that Edison’s carbon-filament lamp patents took primacy over all other incandescent lamp patents, including the Sawyer-Man patents used by Westinghouse. The decision was a serious blow to Westinghouse and Thomson-Houston, and it led to a peace treaty, in the form of a merger orchestrated by Henry Villard.

While Villard negotiated with investors, Edison began to step back from the lighting business. The legal struggles had taken their toll. He told Villard: “I will ask you not to oppose my gradual retirement from the lighting business, which will enable me to enter into fresh and congenial fields of work.”

On April 15, 1892, Edison General Electric merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company, marking the unofficial end of the War of the Currents. The new company dropped the name Edison and became known as General Electric. The change in title was more than symbolic - it marked a new era. The ever-active J. P. Morgan ousted Edison’s allies, including Villard himself.

Even though Edison had wanted out, he was bitter about the way it ended. “Something had died in Edison’s heart,” A. O. Tate recalled in his memoirs. “His pride had been wounded. He had a deep-seated, enduring pride in his name. And this name had been violated, torn from the title of the great industry created by his genius through years of intensive planning and unremitting toil.”

In the two years preceding the General Electric merger, Edison was already distancing himself not only from the company that bore his name but from the field of electricity itself. He took an entirely different tack: He went into the mining business. In the Delaware River Valley, about sixty miles west of Newark, he set up shop in an abandoned mine and experimented with new ways to mine precious metals, using magnets attached to machines he had designed. To support Edison’s endeavors, an industrial village sprang to life. Edison had been interested in finding new ways to extract metal from ore since he started building generators. As a consumer of iron and steel, he knew how expensive it was.

At its peak, Edison’s mining operation had enough orders to sustain 400 workers. But the inventor of the electric light bulb was not destined to become a mining magnate. His iron ore separator frequently broke down, and the quality of the output was erratic. Although Edison consistently lost money, he spent five years working intently on this enterprise and didn’t shut it down until 1898. All told, he had sunk $2 million into the mine and had sold virtually all of his General Electric shares to finance it - stock that had appreciated enormously in value.

Despite that, Edison relished his time away from the War of the Currents and all the other tiresome battles he had fought. “I never felt better in my life than during those five years I worked here,” he told one of his early biographers, T. Comerford Martin. “Hard work, nothing to divert my thoughts, clear air, simple food made life very pleasant.”

Plus, the prolific Edison had one more great invention to unveil to the world.

Edison called the motion picture camera, which he had begun developing in 1888 his “toy.” He continued to tinker with it during the next decade, even while he was preoccupied with crushing rocks at his mine.

The idea of manipulating images so they appear to show movement was not new. Edison said he was inspired by the zoetrope, a device invented in the 1830s that used a series of drawings on paper depicting some kind of activity – a boy skating, for example - that were loaded onto a cylinder with tiny openings. As the cylinder spun, it created the illusion that the boy was in motion. In the 1870s, a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took pictures of horses running around a race track, which he displayed on a device similar to a zoetrope.

Muybridge visited Edison in 1886 and proposed a partnership to develop what he called the zoopraxiscope, a device that gave the illusion of motion by sliding sequential images around the edge of a glass disc. Edison deemed the device impractical and declined the offer, but it got him thinking. He wanted to develop a camera that actually recorded motion, not a device that merely simulated it. In October 1888, he filed an official caveat in which he declared: “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.” He named the machine the kinetoscope, from the Greek kineto, movement, and scopos, to view. He assigned William Dickson, one of his best experimenters, to make it a reality.

Motion pictures work on the “persistence of vision” theory - the eye’s tendency to keep seeing an image for a fraction of a second after it disappears. If a sequence of photos is shown, each with an image slightly different from the last, the viewer perceives the figure as moving. Dickson’s kinetoscope achieved this effect with a rotating drum of sequential images, lit briefly by a light shining through a narrow slit in a rotating shutter and viewed from above through a peephole. It worked, but only for the second or so it took for the drum to rotate.

Other scientists began coming up with new media for displaying the photographs, notably George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who pioneered the use of celluloid film, which he used in a rapid-action camera he called the Kodak. Eastman’s film - long, thin and strong - could be coated with emulsion to record sequential images. Edison sent Dickson to Rochester and persuaded Eastman to make strips of film fifty feet long for his kinetoscope.

In the summer of 1889, before Edison left for Europe with Mina, he and Dickson developed a mechanism for feeding a strip of film into the kinetoscope at a constant speed, simulating motion. By the time Edison returned from Europe in October, Dickson had improved the device, but it could still handle no more than twelve seconds of film at a time.

Edison wanted to be able to produce images and sounds simultaneously, which is what Dickson demonstrated to him when he returned from Europe. The phonograph and the projector, both powered by the same motor, were supposed to work in sync with each other. But early results were not encouraging. As Dickson recalled, “The establishment of harmonious relations between kinetoscope and phonograph was a harrowing experience, and would have broken the spirit of inventors less inured to hardship and discouragement than Edison.”

By 1891, Dickson and Edison had produced a working kinetoscope that could project moving pictures with a long strip of film on a sprocket that moved the sequential frames past the light, the shutter, and the peephole. The Edison team also invented the kinetograph, a camera that could capture motion in real time, one frame at a time, using an escapement - like those used in watches and clocks - to start and stop it forty-six times a second.

The kinetoscope made its public debut in New York City in May 1891, with a three-second film of Dickson bowing, smiling, and tipping his hat. By 1894, Edison’s studio was producing brief films for a battery of peephole kinetoscopes in the first commercial movie house, at Broadway and 27th Street in New York. Despite the outrageous admission fee of twenty-five cents, it was an unqualified success, and the demand for peephole arcades multiplied. In eleven months, the kinetoscope garnered Edison $85,000 from sales of films, machines, and equipment. Some kinetoscopes included a phonograph, but the films and sound were not synchronized; it wasn’t until 1919 that a practical method was found to include a sound strip on the film itself.

In 1894, kinetoscopes were sent to Britain and France, where the Lumière brothers went on to develop the first movie projection system for mass audiences. At first, Edison would have no part of it, arguing that the potential market would be no more than ten theaters in the whole country and that mass screening would doom the profitable peep-show trade. “Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” he wrote.

Later, however, Edison joined in several attempts to develop projecting systems, including one which synchronized images with a phonograph behind the screen. The device was hailed for its sophisticated design, but only skilled technicians were trained to operate it, making it of limited use. As projected films curtailed revenues from the kinetoscopes, Edison’s studio kept supplying new movies.

Theater owners ruthlessly stole each other’s films, and Edison was no exception. In 1902, his agents bribed a London theater owner for a copy of George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon and made hundreds of copies which he showed in New York, paying Méliès nothing. Méliès had been counting on recouping the movie’s cost by taking it to the States; Edison’s move effectively bankrupted him.

After the turn of the century, most of the money Edison made from the movies came from royalties he received from his patents. In 1907, he won an important Federal court case in Chicago, upholding his original motion picture patents from 1891. Following that decision, the industry set up a trust to pool all the relevant patents, giving competitors access to all the technology and paying royalties to the inventors. Though the Supreme Court finally ruled this patent trust illegal in 1917, the royalties, while they lasted, kept Edison financially comfortable.

With a surplus of money, Edison looked for a new project and found one in the quest for a suitable battery for use in electric cars. At the time, the two methods for powering motor vehicles – electricity and gasoline – were in vigorous competition. Although the internal combustion engine ultimately won that contest, Edison’s batteries were widely used in the industry for two decades, during which time Edison forged an enduring friendship with automotive kingpin Henry Ford.

Edison first met Ford in New York in 1896 at a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, a trade organization of electrical utilities. Tall, thin, and intense, Ford, then thirty-four, was the chief engineer of Detroit Edison and had, in his spare time, built a working model of a gasoline-powered automobile. Edison, who was introduced to the younger man by a mutual acquaintance, listened with great interest as the normally taciturn Ford described his car. Edison, whom Ford idolized, urged him to follow his dream: “Young man, that’s the thing! You have it! – the self-contained unit carrying its own fuel. Keep at it.” He did. Two years later, Ford opened his first automotive factory. He would remain forever grateful for that pep talk from a man he would always refer to as “Mr. Edison.”

While Edison was pursuing his work on the storage battery, he managed to salvage some of the machinery from his iron ore fiasco to produce Portland cement, the fine grey powder used to bind sand and gravel to form concrete. Edison’s cement was widely used for buildings, dams, and the original Yankee Stadium.

In 1912, Edison, at age sixty-five, turned his attention back to the phonograph. In a round-the-clock sprint that recalled the epic quest for the carbon-filament lamp, Edison and his team came up with a new type of phonographic record, one made out of hard, smooth plastic instead of wax. His phonograph business surged, spurred by the national passion for ragtime.

The phonograph company was just one of the thirty or so Edison was involved with during the final decades of his life, which he now consolidated into one corporation called Thomas A. Edison Inc. His son Charles became Edison’s chief deputy. In December 1914, father and son suffered a massive setback when a chemical fire engulfed the West Orange manufacturing complex. Edison immediately started rebuilding, aided by a generous interest-free loan from Henry Ford.

In the later years of Thomas Edison’s life, Henry Ford became not just his closest friend but also the unofficial guardian of Edison’s legacy as America’s greatest inventor. After their initial encounter in 1896, the two men did not meet again in person until 1909, when Ford visited Edison at his West Orange lab. In February 1914, Ford and his wife Clara were guests of Tom and Mina for a long visit at Seminole Lodge, the Edisons’ winter retreat on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Meyers, Florida. Edison had built the rambling home on land he purchased in 1885, and he and Mina spent long stretches of every winter there. Ford was so enchanted by his stay with the Edisons that he purchased the home next door, “The Mangoes,” in 1916, and the two men passed many hours together on their adjoining estates over the ensuing years.

In the summer of 1916, Edison, along with tire-making magnate Harvey Firestone, and a naturalist named John Burroughs took a motoring and camping trip through New York State and northern New England. Ford was supposed to join them but had to back out at the last minute. The men weren’t totally roughing it. They had drivers and servants and a truck to haul their tents and equipment. As he had done years earlier in his mining adventure, the sixty-nine-year-old Edison thrived in the outdoors. “It was a great pleasure to see Edison relax and turn vagabond so easily, sleeping in his clothes and dropping off to sleep like a baby, getting up to replenish the fire at daylight or before, [washing] at the wayside creek or pool,” wrote Burroughs.

The three men took another camping excursion in 1918, to the Great Smoky Mountains, this time accompanied by Ford. Much to Burroughs’s chagrin, the groups was followed by journalists, who were intrigued with the spectacle of three of America’s most celebrated industrialists traipsing through nature. Edison, though, took the attention in stride. “He can rough it week in and week out and be happy,” Burroughs observed.

Despite these occasional spurts of leisure, Edison remained fundamentally a man defined by his work, even well after the age at which most people would have retired. His family was never his highest priority. Edison’s relationship with Mina was certainly closer than the one he had had with Mary. He was openly affectionate with Mina, and she, virtually alone among his inner circle, had the influence to prevail on him to, if not actually change his mind about something, then at least consider an alternative point of view. Still, as Mina told Collier’s Weekly in a long interview in 1925, she and the children knew to “always put his work first.” Her husband, she observed, had few friends, and spent “a great deal of time by himself and in himself, shut out from the contacts open to most men.” Mina, though, said she had no regrets - that her marriage to Edison was “worth it a thousand times over.” The article was headlined: “She Married the Most Difficult Husband in America.”

Edison, one of the world’s most admired citizens, rarely used his exalted position as a soapbox, although he did occasionally decry the shortcomings of the education system. He was an early supporter of Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian physician who developed an experience-based curriculum for young children. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Edison lamented the arms buildup that had, in his opinion, made the conflict inevitable, and he opposed American intervention – although he was not as vehemently isolationist as his friend Henry Ford initially was. Edison declined to join Ford on his “peace ship,” a mission which sailed to Europe in December 1915 in the vain hope of getting the combatants to cease their hostilities.

Edison refused to become involved with the development of offensive weapons. “Making things which kill men is against my fiber,” he said. “I leave that death-dealing work to my friends the Maxim brothers,” a dig at the inventors of the machine gun and former rivals in electric lighting. But he did aid America’s war effort by inventing a synthetic substitute for carbolic acid, which the Germans and other European countries had stopped exporting. He also became head of the government’s Naval Consulting Board, which assessed inventions submitted for military use. Edison was responsible for several defensive breakthroughs, including submarine detectors and techniques for locating enemy guns.

Edison remained active until the end of his life, winning his last patent at the age of eighty-three. He began to relax more, taking long vacations with Mina in Fort Myers. In 1926, at seventy-nine, Edison formally retired, handing the reins of Thomas A. Edison Inc. to Charles, the older of his two sons with Mina. Theodore, their younger son, later became chief technical officer.

After Edison’s health began to fail, he enjoyed reading his fan mail and visiting with friends Henry Ford, Marie Curie, and Charles Lindbergh. In 1927, Ford and Firestone backed Edison’s quest to find a domestic source, or substitute, for rubber, a crucial component in the growing automotive industry. It would be his final scientific adventure.

The year 1929 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s discovery of the electric light, and several organizations were planning celebrations, none of which had consulted Edison himself. When Henry Ford got wind of the situation, he decided to put on a gala event - featuring Edison - that would coincide with the opening of his Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, his tribute to American ingenuity, in Dearborn, Michigan. Edison, who had been ill with pneumonia, arrived in Dearborn in October looking bedraggled, but he was delighted by what he saw. Arrayed before him was a replica of his Menlo Park lab and a lifetime of inventions: telegraph instruments, stock tickers, light bulbs, phonographs, and dynamos. There was even a mock-up of the baggage car where young Tom had conducted his experiments on the Grand Truck Railway.

Among the dignitaries attending the festivities were President Herbert Hoover, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan Jr., Orville Wright, and Marie Curie. As night fell on the first day, the great inventor took the stage to demonstrate how he had made a carbonized filament that came to life all those years ago. “Let there be light,” Edison exalted, as this incandescent too began to glow. A string of tributes followed, beginning with President Hoover. Edison spoke briefly, then collapsed from exhaustion. After a few days of rest at Ford’s home, he quipped: “I am tired of all the glory, I want to get back to work.”

Edison died two years later, on October 18, 1931, at his home in New Jersey. He was eighty-four.

His passing was a global event. His body lay in state for two days in an open casket in the library of his West Orange laboratory. Thousands of people came to pay their respects. The memorial service was held in Glenmont, the house he had lived in since his marriage to Mina. Edison’s family and close friends, including Ford and Firestone, accompanied the casket to Rosedale Cemetery, where New Jersey state troopers maintained an honor guard for forty-eight hours after he was buried.

That evening, at the request of President Hoover, lights were dimmed or momentarily turned off in homes, communities, and businesses around the world. He was hailed as the most influential genius of the past century, and it was widely acknowledged that no one since John Gutenberg had done more to shape the modern world. Edison was not just a prolific inventor - he was the first professional innovator, the first to establish an “invention factory.” He launched entire industries and profoundly altered the way people lived. The most fitting tribute to Thomas Alva Edison after his death was not when the electric lights around the world went dim, but when they came back on – a shining testimony to his lasting genius.