Thomas Edison Inventions: What Did He Invent?

Edison earned his nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park" in 1877 when he invented the world's first method of recording and playing back sound. His work on the telegraph and telephone helped make the phonograph possible.

He hypothesized that you could record messages using the same principles behind the telegraph. He enlisted his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build a machine based off of a sketch.

Thirty hours later, Edison tested the phonograph with a nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the machine successfully played the words back to him.

He took the phonograph to New York City to show it to the staff of Scientific American. By the end of 1877, the magazine reported, "Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night."

We may know Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but it was Edison who invented a microphone that turned the telephone from a promising gadget into an indispensable machine with real, practical applications.

This invention has some controversial roots. Both Edison and German inventor Emile Berliner filed a patent for the carbon microphone. Bell, who realized the potential of the invention, bought the patent from Berliner.

However, this started a legal battle between Berline and Edison. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of Edison: "The [carbon microphone] is, beyond controversy, the invention of Edison."

Without a doubt, the light bulb is Edison's most famous invention. Scientists and inventors had been racing against each other for years trying to invent artificial light. While there's some debate around the details of who invented the light bulb, Edison cinched the win by creating an incandescent bulb with a carbon filament that could be practically reproduced.

Once the world had light, it needed a way to power that light. In the tiny town of Brockton, Massachusetts, Edison set out to construct one of the world's first three-wire electrical power plants as a way to show the world that electric power was safer and more efficient than gas power.

Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, first invented the Kinetoscope, a boxlike contraption that enabled a single viewer to watch a motion picture short through a peephole.

People could record films with a motion picture camera called the Kinetograph — and later, the Kinetophone attempted to add sound to moving pictures.

Before the popularization of steam- and gasoline-powered engines, batteries powered some of the world's first automobiles. Edison's nickel-iron batteries were an improvement, both in terms of ecological impact and charging time, over the more commonly used lead-acid batteries of the day.

While not an invention in itself, Menlo Park in New Jersey is part of Edison's legacy. At Menlo Park Laboratory, the first industrial research laboratory, Edison helped shape the process of modern invention.

At this lab, Edison developed the phonograph and the incandescent light bulbs. After he established the Edison Electric Light Company, he started experimenting with electricity in other applications at his lab.

Eventually, when his operations grew bigger, Edison moved to New York City and opened a new facility in West Orange, New Jersey.

Aside from the Edison laboratory, he started several companies that helped put his inventions into use, including the Edison Storage Battery Company and Edison Portland Cement Company.

To run the electric lighting system, he founded a few companies, such as the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York and the Edison Lamp Works.