When he was younger he was fascinated by telegraph machines. One day he rescued a child from an oncoming train. The baby’s father just happened to be a telegraph operator. He wanted to reward him somehow, and Edison requested that he teach him how to be a telegraph operator. Edison’s mind was always at work, and he thought he could improve the telegraph. So he ended up inventing a writing telegraph. Westward Union asked him to sell his ideas. Edison, thinking that they were worth about $3,000, was amazed when they offered him $30,000! And that is when Edison became an inventor. …show more content…
But there were many other inventions that led up to this one, such as Humphry Davy inventing the first electric light in 1802. And Warren de La Rue who enclosed a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it in 1840. In 1850, Joseph Wilson Swan created a light bulb by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. On July, 1874, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans built their lamps with different shapes and sizes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filed with nitrogen. Being unsuccessful in their attempt to commercialize their lamp, they eventually sold their patent to Edison in 1879. All of these inventions fell through