WPCNR MILESTONES. February 11, 2014: 

Was Thomas Edison America’s greatest entrepreneur?

He was born today in Milan Ohio in 1847, the seventh child. He was homeschooled by his mother, Nancy Matthews Elliot. His father was Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr.

Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio.  His parents were Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. and Nancy Matthews Elliott. Thomas was their seventh child. He started school late due to a childhood illness and was thrown out of school three months after he started. Teachers said his mind wandered, and his teacher called him “addled.”

His mother home-schooled him and taught him to read and encouraged him to experiment.

He was partially deaf and his first job was as a telegraph operator after he saved the child of a railroad official from being hit by a train. J.U. Mackenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan the father of the child made Edison an apprentice and taught him to operate a telegraph.

Edison drifted to various railroad towns as a telegrapher, eventually coming to the metropolitan area where he created his first invention, an improved stock ticker, for which he was paid $40,000

Greatest inventions

His inventions include:

• Electrographic vote recorder, which was Edison’s first patent, through a “yes” and “no” switch
• Simplified telegraph, which didn’t require manually tapping out the message at the receiving end
• Faster electric telegraph, which had faster signal speeds than earlier models
• Stencil pen, which is the predecessor to tattoo pens
• Phonograph, which recorded and reproduced audible sounds using metallic foil on a cylinder
• Carbon transmitter, which became the basis of telephone transmitters for more than a century
• Practical electric lamp, as Edison’s carbon filament light bulb was the first commercially viable electric light. Previous versions weren’t as durable, and used more expensive materials, such as platinum
• Electric lighting system, which was designed to maintain the same amount of electricity throughout the device
• Motor that regulates electricity, controlling the supply of electricity between devices such as lamps
• Fruit preserver, sucking oxygen out of glass jars, producing vacuum-sealed jars of fruit
• Electro magnetic brake, which was designed to stop vehicles on a railroad
• Incandescent chandelier, which is the grouping of several incandescent lamps to create the candelier
• Turn table for electric railway, which is an electric current that ran through the rails to reduce the chances of a short circuit
• Ore separator, which separates magnetic and non-magnetic materials
• Kinetographic camera, which showed successive photos in a rapid speed so as to make them appear to be moving
• Rock crusher, using 2 hard rollers to crush rocks
• Alkaline battery, which produced an longer-lasting battery
• Fluorescent electric lamp, which used tungsten of calcium and strontium
• Improved automobile, designing an automobile whose wheels were better aligned with the car

Family

On December 25, 1871, he married Mary Stilwell, and they had three children, Marion Estelle Edison, Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., and William Leslie Edison. His wife Mary died in 1884. On February 24, 1886, he married 19 year old Mina Miller. They had an additional three children, Madeleine Edison, Charles Edison (who took over the company upon his father’s death) and Theodore Edison.

Edison, who made the famous quote, “genius is 99% perspiration; 1% inspiration” eventually invented the light bulb:

WPCNR TALK OF TEATOWN. February 11, 2014:

Letter to the Editor:

Last weekend illustrated vividly some of the incredible juxtapositions of life in our community.

People from near and far traveled to Croton Point Park and nearby locations to attend Teatown’s 10^th Annual Hudson River EagleFest to celebrate the re-emergence of bald eagles in the Hudson Valley.

At the same time, the sponsor of that event, Teatown Lake Reservation, a 875-acre nature preserve in the towns of Yorktown and Cortlandt, was completing a three-week deer baiting program, and, the night before Eaglefest, began a program of hiring sharpshooters to kill 75 white tail deer.

Since the deer baiting/killing program had never been made public, visitors to Eaglefest were shocked and dismayed to learn of it there because of a rally by animal lovers at Croton Point Park during the event.

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Marc Bekoff, Ph.D.,  former Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, writes about the problem and how it is being handled in a nearby village in the Hudson Valley, Hastings on Hudson:

“Urban deer have become a “problem” in many different communities across the United States because there are simply too many of them.

“Many communities have resorted to “humanely” killing deer but now there’s an option that I hope will be widely adopted. In a recent essay in the New York Times called, “A Kinder, Gentler Way to Thin the Deer Herd” by Lisa Foderaro, Hastings-on Hudson’s (New York) Mayor Peter Swiderski “has settled on a less violent approach: birth control. In an experiment to be undertaken with assistance from Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, Hastings hopes to become the first suburb in the United States to control deer through immunocontraception, using the animal’s own immune system to prevent it from fertilizing offspring.”

“Dr. Alan Rutberg, the director of Tuft’s center, calls the idea “brilliant.” He has successfully used immunocontraception in self-contained areas such as Fire Island and elsewhere resulting in a 50% decrease in deer numbers over five years. Dr. Rutberg notes, “Deer have entered our backyards and essentially become unruly guests … We are bound by suburban rules in dealing with them, and violence is not how we deal with neighbors we don’t like.”

“…Peaceful coexistence needs to be the way in which we live with urban neighbors and birth control is a wonderful alternative to killing these magnificent animals.”

Teatown’s refusal to seek less violent alternatives, the lack of public information or opportunity for input casts a big shadow over their mission  and reputation going forward;   more than 1300 people have signed a petition to have the bait/kill  program stopped. ( http://chn.ge/1dzcmrV)

Linda Conte

Croton-on-Hudson, NY