by Kamalakannan (India)

Another famous deaf person is Thomas Alva Edison who was born on February 11, 1847. He was an American scientist, inventor, and businessman.

However, many people don’t know that Edison had a hearing loss since childhood and reportedly lost more of his hearing and became technically deaf in his early teens.

Thomas Edison had a laboratory in West Orange where he had a team of workers that helped him create inventions for profit on a regular basis.

In the 1860s, Edison became a telegraph operator. Some of Edison’s earliest inventions were related to electrical telegraphy. One of these inventions was a stock ticker. Edison applied for his first patent on October 28, 1868 for an electric vote recorder.

The tin foil phonograph was Edison’s first great invention. When Edison was working to improve a telegraph transmitter, he noticed that when played at a high speed, the machine’s tape gave off a noise that resembled spoken words. He then wondered if he could record a telephone message.

Edison experimented with the diaphragm of a telephone receiver by attaching a needle to it. He figured that the needle could prick paper tape to record a message. These experiments led Edison to try using a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder. To his great surprise, this played back a short message he recorded which was “Mary had a little lamb.” This was the first machine that could record and reproduce sound.

Thomas Edison is world renowned and held a world record for 1,093 patents. He is also credited with inventing electricity, the light bulb, and Edison Motion Pictures.

Comments:

by Anonymous: Edison didn’t quite invent electricity, but he did did a lot more with it than just about anyone else before him. That aside, his hearing loss makes his ability to run a workshop of that magnitude even more impressive, and it also explains a particular trend of some of his experiments and inventions!