The American inventor and businessman whose Menlo Park laboratory became the first private laboratory built to produce patentable commercial inventions — an 'invention factory' that produced the phonograph, an early motion-picture system, and, most consequentially, the first practical incandescent light and the whole electrical system to power it, including the Pearl Street central station of 1882. Edison did not invent the light bulb alone; his genius was as a systems-builder and organizer who industrialized invention itself, and he was also a ruthless competitor whose camp waged the cruel propaganda of the War of Currents against alternating current.
Thomas Edison is remembered as the lone genius who invented the light bulb. He was neither lone nor the bulb's sole inventor. Others had made glowing filaments before him; what Edison's team built was the first commercially practical bulb, and around it the wires, meters, and generators of a whole power system, switched on for paying customers in lower Manhattan in 1882. His deeper invention was the place where such work happened: a laboratory in rural New Jersey where dozens of workers turned ideas into products on schedule, like a factory. He called himself a hard worker more than a genius, and he ran invention as a business. He was also ruthless. When a rival current threatened his electrical empire, his side staged the public electrocution of animals to brand it as deadly. He gave the modern world the phonograph, early motion pictures, and the electric night, and he showed that invention could be organized, financed, and sold like any other industry.