SHAMS TABRIZI By Er. Sajad Ahmad Rather

SHAMS TABRIZI

Shams al-Din Mohammad bin Ali bin Malik-e Dad or Shams al-Din Tabrizi (meaning "the Sun of Faith from Tabriz") was a Persian Sufi saint who is best known for his intense spiritual relationship with Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi. He is credited for wholly transforming Mawlana Rumi's life and thought after arriving in Konya in 642/1244.

Hazrat Shams left a single work in prose known as Maqalat (Discourses) which reveal him to be highly proficient in philosophy, theology and spirituality. He was an engaging speaker whose words were both simple and profoundly moving.

Early Life and Family

Hazrat Shams was born at some point in the 1180s in Tabriz (present-day Iran). Tabriz was popular among Sufis and many great Sufi saints such as Hazrat Ahmad Ghazali, Hazrat Najmuddin Kubra and Abu Najib al-Suhrawardi had spent some time there. During his early years, it is said that a group of seventy saints were living in Tabriz.

From a young age, he was gifted with spiritual abilities which his parents could not comprehend.

His father was said to be a good man of generous nature, although he was not on the spiritual path and thus Hazrat Shams was unable to reveal his mystic visions to him. This resulted Hazrat Shams feeling estranged from his father and others because he could not explain his spiritual sensibilities to those around him. He says in his Maqalat:

“

My father didn't understand me at all. I was a stranger in my own town. My father was a stranger to me and my heart recoiled from him. I thought he might fall upon me. He'd speak kindly to me, but I thought he'd beat me and expel me from the house. (Maqalat 740)

”

When his father would tell him that he didn't understand his ways, Hazrat Shams would answer by telling him that they were not "cut of the same cloth".

For about thirty or forty days just before he reached adolescence, his progress on the spiritual path made him averse to food, and he would hide food in his sleeve whenever it was offered to him.

Education

Hazrat Shams was a Shafi'i and he studied fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) extensively. One of the five major Shafi'i legal texts he specifically mentions he studied was al-Tanbih fil fiqh al-Shafi'i, written by Hazrat Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi (d. 1083), one of the leading Shafi'i jurisprudents of the eleventh century and one of the first teachers of the famous Baghdad Nizamiya College.

He always supported the scholarly study of religion and he did not like the pretense of those who prided themselves solely on the spiritual path:

“

At first I wouldn't mix with jurists, only with the dervishes. I'd say that the jurists are ignorant of dervish-hood. Now that I have realized what dervish-hood is and where they are, I find myself more eager for the company of jurists than dervishes, because the jurists have struggled to attain something. These others boast that we are dervishes. But where is the true dervish? (Maqalat 249)

”

He was thus very educated, although he hid this fact from religious scholars to an extent that his peers were confused about whether he considered himself to be a faqih (scholar of the law) or a faqir (Sufi ascetic). He says:

“

Someone asked my friend about me, "Is he a faqih or a faqir?" "Both faqih and faqir," he replied. He asked, "Then why do all speak of his fiqh?" He answered, "For his poverty is of such a nature that it cannot be spoken about with that group... he speaks beyond the boundaries of knowledge and speaks of mysteries in a knowledgeable way in the cloak of knowledge." (Maqalat 326)

”

Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi described Hazrat Shams as being unrivaled in his knowledge of alchemy, astronomy, astrology, logic, theology and philosophy, although he kept this fact hidden in the company of religious people. Hazrat Sultan Walad, Mawlana Jalauddin Rumi's son, describes him as "a man of learning and wisdom and eloquence and composition".

Meeting with Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi

On November 29 1244, Hazrat Shams arrived in Konya. According to Mevlevi tradition, he was over sixty years old when he arrived in the town. Upon arriving, he stayed at an inn and it was outside the inn, at a little shop or pavilion, where he met Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi. This area was often a meeting point for the notables of the city at the time.

Accounts differ as to exactly what happened at this first meeting between the two, but it was a life-changing experience for Mawlana Rumi. The most frequently repeated account of what happened is related by Ahmed Aflaki in Manaqib al-'Arifin:

“

One day, as he [Shams] was seated at the gate of an inn, Rumi came by, riding on a mule, in the midst of a crowd of students and disciples on foot. Shams arose, advanced and took hold of the mule’s bridle, addressing Rumi in these words, 'Exchanger of the current coins of deep meaning, who knows the Names of God! Tell me, was Muhammad ﷺ the greater servant of God, or Bayazid Bistami?' Rumi answered him, 'Muhammad ﷺ was incomparably the greater – the greatest of all prophets and saints.' 'Then,' rejoined Shams, 'how is it that Muhammad ﷺ said, "We have not known Thee, O God, as Thou ought to be known," whereas Bayazid said, “Glory unto me! How great is my glory."?’ On hearing this question, Rumi fainted. On regaining his senses, he took the questioner to his home.

”

An exchange ensued between the two men, with Mawlana Rumi finally saying that Hazrat Bayazid’s spiritual thirst was quenched after one drink, he spoke of being full and so he stopped seeking. However, the Prophet’s ﷺ thirst was never quenched and he went on seeking, aspiring to be drawn closer to the Divine. It was for this reason that he said, 'We have not known Thee as Thou ought to be known.' Hearing this, it was Hazrat Shams that fainted.

This account is supported by Hazrat Shams in his own writings who says:

“

The first thing I spoke about with him was this: How is it that Abayazid did not need to follow [the example of the Prophet], and did not say "Glory be to Thee" or "We worship Thee?" And Rumi completely understood the full implications of the problem and where it came from and where it was leading to. It made him ecstatic on account of his purity of spirit, for his spirit was pure and cleansed and it shone within him. I realised the sweetness of this question from his ecstasy, though I had been previously unaware of its sweetness. (Maqalat 685)

”

This account is the most reliable of the meeting between the two although other perhaps less accurate accounts are given.

Hazrat Muhiyuddin Abdul Qadir Ibn Abi al-Wafa al-Qurayshi (d.1373) gives one account of the meeting:

“

Rumi was sitting in his library with some books and his pupils gathered around him. Shams came along, greeted them, sat down and gesturing toward the books, asked: "What are these?" Rumi replied, "You wouldn't know." Before Rumi finished speaking, the books and the library caught on fire. "What's this?" cried Rumi. Shams retorted, "You wouldn't know either," and got up and left. Rumi got up, leaving his position and family behind, and followed after him, captivated and extemporizing poems, from city to city, but never caught up with him again.

”

Others such as the great Sufi Hazrat Abdur Rehman Jami tell a slightly different version of this encounter, where water is substituted for fire:

“

Rumi was sitting near a garden pool with a few books when Shams arrived and asked, "What's this?" Rumi replied, "These are called debates, but you needn't bother with them." Shams touched them and threw them in the water. Rumi got upset at the ruin of these rare and precious books. Shams reached in the water and retrieved them one by one. Rumi saw that there was no trace of water damage on them. "What secret is this?" he asked. Shams replied, "This is spiritual inclination and entrancement, what would you know of it?".

”

First Meeting

In his discourses, Hazrat Shams alludes to the fact that he had briefly encountered Mawlana Rumi 16 years prior to their meeting in Konya, perhaps during a lecture or debate:

“

I don't mix much with anyone. Even with one so great (sadr) that though you sift the whole world you won't find another like him, sixteen years passed during which I said only "hello" and he left. (Maqalat 290) The outward aspects vary, but the reality is one. I remember about Mawlana from sixteen years ago - he would say that creatures are just like clusters of grapes. The individual numbers are the outward aspect. When you squeeze them in a bowl, are there individual grapes? (Maqalat 690)

”

He indicates that although he perceived a special quality in Mawlana Rumi at their first encounter, he felt he had not yet reached a level of spiritual maturity which would allow him to receive Hazrat Shams favourably. After waiting for 16 years, he felt it was his mission to release Mawlana Rumi in order to unlock his spiritual greatness. He tells Mawlana:

“

I was strongly inclined to you from the beginning, but I saw in the opening of your speech that at that time you were not ready for this secret. Even if I had told you, it would not have been destined at that time, and we would never have attained this present moment together, for at that time you didn't have this spiritual state. (Maqalat 618-619) They have sent me because that precious servant is caught in the company of crude people; it's a pity that they should squander him. (Maqalat 622)

”

Ahmed Aflaki in Manaqib al-'Arifin mentions that the brief encounter between the two took place in the square of Damascus, whilst Mawlana Rumi was a student there.

Resting Place

Due to the fact he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, it is not known for certain where his resting place lies. According to Iranian scholar Mohammad-Ali Movahhed, he probably died in the city of Khoy (modern-day Iran) on his way to Tabriz shortly after leaving Konya. There is indeed a site in Khoy on the road from Konya to Tabriz, associated with the name of Shams-e Tabrizi that dates back to at least 1400.

Rumi by Er. Sajad Ahmad Rather

Rumi
by Er. Sajad Ahmad Rather

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī  more popularly simply as Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a 13th-century Persian Sunni Muslim poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best selling poet" in the United States.

Rumi's works are written mostly in Persian, but occasionally he also used Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, in his verse. His Masnavi (Mathnawi), composed in Konya, is considered one of the greatest poems of the Persian language. His works are widely read today in their original language across Greater Iran and the Persian-speaking world. Translations of his works are very popular, most notably in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the United States, and South Asia. His poetry has influenced not only Persian literature, but also Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani, as well as the literature of some other Turkic, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan languages including Chagatai, Urdu and Pashto. A deep grasp of his original poetry requires excellent command of modern Persian, and an equally good command of Islamic prophetic traditions, and the Qur'an. With such command, one may succeed in peeling back the multitude layers of meaning.

Childhood

Jalaluddin Rumi was born on September 30, 1207, in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan). His father, Bahaduddin Walad, was a theologian, jurist and a mystic, while his mother was Mumina Khatun. When Mongols invaded Central Asia, between 1215 and 1220, Rumi left Balkh with his family and a group of disciples. The migrating caravan traveled extensively in Muslim lands, including Baghdad, Damascus, Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri and Nigde. After performing pilgrimage in Mecca, they eventually settled in Konya, located in the present-day western Turkey. At that time, Rumi’s father was an Islamic theologian, a teacher and a preacher.

Career

Rumi was a disciple of Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, one of his father’s students. Under the guidance of Sayyed Termazi, he practiced Sufism and acquired a lot of knowledge about spiritual matters and secrets of the spirit world. After the demise of Bahaduddin, in 1231 AD, Rumi inherited his father’s position and became a prominent religious teacher. He preached in the mosques of Konya. By the time Rumi reached the age of 24, he had proven himself as a well-informed scholar in the field of religious science.

Turning Point Of Rumi’s Life

Rumi was already a teacher and a theologian, when in 1244 AD he came across a wandering dervish named Shamsuddin of Tabriz. The meeting proved to be a turning point in his life. Shamsuddin and Rumi became very close friends. Shams went to Damascus, were he was allegedly killed by the students of Rumi who were resentful of their close relationship. Rumi expressed his love for Shamsuddin and grief at his death, through music, dance and poems.

For nearly ten years after meeting Shamsuddin, Rumi devoted himself in writing ghazals. He made a compilation of ghazals and named it Diwan-e-Kabir or Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Thereafter, Rumi encountered a goldsmith - Salaud-Din-e Zarkub - whom he made his companion. When Salaud-Din-e Zarkub died, Rumi befriended one of his favorite disciples named Hussam-e Chalabi. Rumi spent most of the later years of his life in Anatolia, where he finished six volumes of his masterwork, the Masnavi.

Popular Works

• Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi: Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (or Diwan-e-Kabir) is one of the masterpieces of Rumi. It is a collection of ghazals named in the honor of dervish Shamsuddin, who was Rumi’s great friend and inspiration. It also contains an assortment of poems arranged according to the rhyming scheme. Diwan-e-Kabir has been written in ‘Dari’ dialect. It is regarded as one of the greatest works of Persian literature.
• Mathnawi: Mathnawi is a compilation of six volumes of poetry, written in a didactic style. The poems are intended to inform, instruct as well as entertain the reader. It is believed that Rumi started the work of Mathnawi at the suggestion of his then companion, Husam al-Din Chalabin. Mathnawi attempts to explain the various facets of spiritual life.

Legacy

Rumi’s popularity has gone beyond national and ethnic borders. He is considered to be one of the classical poets, by the speakers of Persian language in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For many years, he had a great influence on Turkish literature. The popularity of his works inspired many artists, including Mohammad Reza Shajarian (Iran), Shahram Nazeri (Iran), Davood Azad (Iran) and Ustad Mohammad Hashem Cheshti (Afghanistan), to give classical interpretation for his poems. Rumi’s works have been translated to many languages across the world, including Russian, German, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish.

Death

Rumi departed from the world on 17^th December 1273 AD, in Konya, within the Seljuk Empire's territory (currently it's within Turkey). He was buried beside his father in Konya. A tomb named Mevlana mausoleum was built in Konya, commemorating the great Sufi poet. It consists of a mosque, dervish living quarters and a dance hall. The sacred site is visited by his admirers coming from different parts of the world.

JOHANNES GUTENBERG: THE MAN BEHIND PRINTING PRESS BY ADNAN MANZOOR, CIVIL, 2ND SEMESTER

JOHANNES GUTENBERG: THE MAN BEHIND PRINTING PRESS

BY ADNAN MANZOOR, CIVIL, 2ND SEMESTER

Who knows “ Jhonnaes Gutenberg ”  not many, but the sad part of it is that even the educated people from different parts of the world don’t know this name. The man often credited with the  invention of printing press without which of our so called modern life would not have been as it is . Gutenberg was born in 1400 AD in the city of Mainz Germany. A blacksmith, goldsmith, & publisher by profession, Gutenberg is the man who introduced printing to Europe. He was the youngest son of the upper class merchant Gensfeisch Laden and his second wife Else Wyrich.

   

In 1411, there was uprising in Mainz against the Patricians (Aristocrats)  & more than a hundred families were forced to leave. As a result, Gutenberg  with his family moved to Eltville. He is assumed to have studied at the University located somewhere in Berlin. Although not much is known about his life, but his contribution as is recognized universally was developing a movable type of printing press. Gutenberg developed a metal alloy printing press which was much improved than earlier versions and he used oil based printing ink for it.

   

Before Gutenberg, Chinese and Koreans had excelled in the field of printing but he is important principally because he combined all the elements of printing into an effective system of production. Now when we think of mass production in printing, Gutenberg was no less than a genius here he too what he developed was not a single gadget or device, but a complete manufacturing process which could print hundreds of copies at a time.

  

Gutenberg died at the age of 60 in the same city where he was born. His work, “Gutenberg’s Bible”, was printed in 1454 AD.

  

“ The measure of a man’s greatness is not the number of servants he has, but the number of people he serves.”

THOMAS ALVA EDISON BY NASSER AHMAD AND JUNAID RAMZAN, E&C, 2ND SEMESTER

THOMAS ALVA EDISON

BY NASSER AHMAD AND JUNAID RAMZAN, E&C, 2^ND SEMESTER

Thomas  Alva Edison, best known for his invention of the phonograph and incandescent electric light, Edison took out 1,093 patents in a variety of fields, including electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy, and sound recording. His public image as a homespun, untutored genius actually concealed a thinker who was quite systematic and methodical and who collaborated closely with machinists, designers, and scientists in his laboratory at Menlo Park, N.J.

Edison was the quintessential American inventor in the era of Yankee ingenuity. He began his career in 1863, in the adolescence of the telegraph industry, when virtually the only source of electricity was primitive batteries putting out a low-voltage current. Before he died, in 1931, he had played a critical role in introducing the modern age of electricity. From his laboratories and workshops emanated the phonograph, the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone, the incandescent lamp, a revolutionary generator of unprecedented efficiency, the first commercial electric light and power system, an experimental electric railroad, and key elements of motion-picture apparatus, as well as a host of other invention.

FAMILY BACKGROUND & SCHOOLING:

Edison was the seventh and last child—the fourth surviving—of Samuel Edison, Jr., and Nancy Elliot Edison. At an early age he developed hearing problems, which have been variously attributed but were most likely due to a familial tendency to mastoiditis. Whatever the cause, Edison’s deafness strongly influenced his behavior and career, providing the motivation for many of his invention.

Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and it quickly became the most popular home-entertainment device of the century. Seeking to provide a visual accompaniment to the phonograph, Edison commissioned Dickson, a young laboratory assistant, to invent a motion-picture.

In 1854 Samuel Edison became the lighthouse keeper and carpenter on the Fort Gratiot military post near Port Huron, Michigan, where the family lived in a substantial home. Alva, as the inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for five years. He was imaginative and inquisitive, but because much instruction was by rote and he had difficulty hearing, he was bored and was labeled a misfit. To compensate, he became an avid and omnivorous reader. Edison’s lack of formal schooling was not unusual. At the time of the Civil War the average American had attended school a total of 434 days—little more than two years’ schooling by today’s standards.

In 1859 Edison quit school and began working as a train boy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Four years earlier, the Michigan Central had initiated the commercial application of the telegraph by using it to control the movement of its trains, and the Civil War brought a vast expansion of transportation and communication. Edison took advantage of the opportunity to learn telegraphy and in 1863 became an apprentice telegrapher.

Messages received on the initial Morse telegraph were inscribed as a series of dots and dashes on a strip of paper that was decoded and read, so Edison’s partial deafness was no handicap. Receivers were increasingly being equipped with a sounding key, however, enabling telegraphers to “read” messages by the clicks. The transformation of telegraphy to an auditory art left Edison more and more disadvantaged during his six-year career as an itinerant telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada, and New England. Amply supplied with ingenuity and insight, he devoted much of his energy toward improving the inchoate equipment and inventing devices to facilitate some of the tasks that his physical limitations made difficult. By January 1869 he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph (a device capable of transmitting two messages simultaneously on one wire) and a printer, which converted electrical signals to letters, that he abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.

Edison moved to New York City, where he initially went into partnership with Frank L. Pope, a noted electrical expert, to produce the Edison Universal Stock Printer and other printing telegraphs. Between 1870 and 1875 he worked out of Newark, New Jersey, and was involved in a variety of partnerships and complex transactions in the fiercely competitive and convoluted telegraph industry, which was dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company. As an independent entrepreneur he was available to the highest bidder and played both sides against the middle. During this period he worked on improving an automatic telegraph system for Western Union’s rivals. The automatic telegraph, which recorded messages by means of a chemical reaction engendered by the electrical transmissions, proved of limited commercial success, but the work advanced Edison’s knowledge of chemistry and laid the basis for his development of the electric pen and mimeograph, both important devices in the early office machine industry, and indirectly led to the discovery of the phonograph. Under the aegis of Western Union he devised the quadruple, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire, but railroad baron and Wall Street financier Jay Gould, Western Union’s bitter rival, snatched the quadruple from the telegraph company’s grasp in December 1874 by paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds, and stock, one of the larger payments for any invention up to that time. Years of litigation followed.

EXPERIMENTS AND INVENTIONS:

Although Edison was a sharp bargainer, he was a poor financial manager, often spending and giving away money more rapidly than he earned it. In 1871 he married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, who was as improvident in household matters as he was in business, and before the end of 1875 they were in financial difficulties. To reduce his costs and the temptation to spend money, Edison brought his now-widowed father from Port Huron to build a 2 1/2-story laboratory and machine shop in the rural environs of Menlo Park, New Jersey—12 miles south of Newark—where he moved in March 1876. Accompanying him were two key associates, Charles Bachelor and John Kruesi. Bachelor, born in Manchester in 1845, was a master mechanic and draftsman who complemented Edison perfectly and served as his “ears” on such projects as the phonograph and telephone. He was also responsible for fashioning the drawings that Kruesi, a Swiss-born machinist, translated into models.

Edison experienced his finest hours at Menlo Park. While experimenting on an underwater cable for the automatic telegraph, he found that the electrical resistance and conductivity of carbon (then called plumbago) varied according to the pressure it was under. This was a major theoretical discovery, which enabled Edison to devise a “pressure relay” using carbon rather than the usual magnets to vary and balance electric currents. In February 1877 Edison began experiments designed to produce a pressure relay that would amplify and improve the audibility of the telephone, a device that Edison and others had studied but which Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent, in 1876. By the end of 1877 Edison had developed the carbon-button transmitter that is still used in telephone speakers and microphones.

Edison invented many items, including the carbon transmitter, in response to specific demands for new products or improvements. But he also had the gift of serendipity: when some unexpected phenomenon was observed, he did not hesitate to halt work in progress and turn off course in a new direction. This was how, in 1877, he achieved his most original discovery, the phonograph. Because the telephone was considered a variation of acoustic telegraphy, Edison during the summer of 1877 was attempting to devise for it, as he had for the automatic telegraph, a machine that would transcribe signals as they were received, in this instance in the form of the human voice, so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. (The telephone was not yet conceived as a general, person-to-person means of communication.) Some earlier researchers, notably the French inventor Léon Scott, had theorized that each sound, if it could be graphically recorded, would produce a distinct shape resembling shorthand, or phonograph (“sound writing”), as it was then known. Edison hoped to reify this concept by employing a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of par affined paper. To his astonishment, the scarcely visible indentations generated a vague reproduction of sound when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus. Thomas Alva Edison demonstrating his tinfoil phonograph, c. 1877.

Edison unveiled the tinfoil phonograph, which replaced the strip of paper with a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil, in December 1877. It was greeted with incredulity. Indeed, a leading French scientist declared it to be the trick device of a clever ventriloquist. The public’s amazement was quickly followed by universal acclaim. Edison was projected into worldwide prominence and was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park, although a decade passed before the phonograph was transformed from a laboratory curiosity into a commercial product.

THE ELECTRIC LIGHT:

Another offshoot of the carbon experiments reached fruition sooner. Samuel Langley, Henry Draper, and other American scientists needed a highly sensitive instrument that could be used to measure minute temperature changes in heat emitted from the Sun’s corona during a solar eclipse along the Rocky Mountains on July 29, 1878. To satisfy those needs Edison devised a “microtasimeter” employing a carbon button. This was a time when great advances were being made in electric arc lighting, and during the expedition, which Edison accompanied, the men discussed the practicality of “subdividing” the intense arc lights so that electricity could be used for lighting in the same fashion as with small, individual gas “burners.” The basic problem seemed to be to keep the burner, or bulb, from being consumed by preventing it from overheating. Edison thought he would be able to solve this by fashioning a microtasimeter-like device to control the current. He boldly announced that he would invent a safe, mild, and inexpensive electric light that would replace the gaslight.

The incandescent electric light had been the despair of inventors for 50 years, but Edison’s past achievements commanded respect for his boastful prophecy. Thus, a syndicate of leading financiers, including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, established the Edison Electric Light Company and advanced him $30,000 for research and development. Edison proposed to connect his lights in a parallel circuit by subdividing the current, so that, unlike arc lights, which were connected in a series circuit, the failure of one lightbulb would not cause a whole circuit to fail. Some eminent scientists predicted that such a circuit could never be feasible, but their findings were based on systems of lamps with low resistance—the only successful type of electric light at the time. Edison, however, determined that a bulb with high resistance would serve his purpose, and he began searching for a suit.

By the summer of 1879 Edison and Upton had made enough progress on a generator—which, by reverse action, could be employed as a motor—that Edison, beset by failed incandescent lamp experiments, considered offering a system of electric distribution for power, not light. By October Edison and his staff had achieved encouraging results with a complex, regulator-controlled vacuum bulb with a platinum filament, but the cost of the platinum would have made the incandescent light impractical. While experimenting with an insulator for the platinum wire, they discovered that, in the greatly improved vacuum they were now obtaining through advances made in the vacuum pump, carbon could be maintained for some time without elaborate regulatory apparatus. Advancing on the work of Joseph Wilson Swan, an English physicist, Edison found that a carbon filament provided a good light with the concomitant high resistance required for subdivision. Steady progress ensued from the first breakthrough in mid-October until the initial demonstration for the backers of the Edison Electric Light Company on December 3.

ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY OF “HAMMER’S PHANTOM SHADOW”:

One of the accidental discoveries made in the Menlo Park laboratory during the development of the incandescent light anticipated the British physicist J.J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron 15 years later. In 1881–82 William J. Hammer, a young engineer in charge of testing the light globes, noted a blue glow around the positive pole in a vacuum bulb and a blackening of the wire and the bulb at the negative pole. This phenomenon was first called “Hammer’s phantom shadow,” but when Edison patented the bulb in 1883 it became known as the “Edison effect.” Scientists later determined that this effect was explained by the thermionic emission of electrons from the hot to the cold electrode, and it became the basis of the electron tube and laid the foundation for the electronics industry.

Edison had moved his operations from Menlo Park to New York City when work commenced on the Manhattan power system. Increasingly, the Menlo Park property was used only as a summer home. In August 1884 Edison’s wife, Mary, suffering from deteriorating health and subject to periods of mental derangement, died there of “congestion of the brain,” apparently a tumour or hemorrhage. Her death and the move from Menlo Park roughly mark the halfway point of Edison’s life.

 

 

THE EDISON LABORTORY:

A widower with three young children, Edison, on February 24, 1886, married 20-year-old Mina Miller, the daughter of a prosperous Ohio manufacturer. He purchased a hilltop estate in West Orange, New Jersey, for his new bride and constructed nearby a grand, new laboratory, which he intended to be the world’s first true research facility. There, he produced the commercial phonograph, founded the motion-picture industry, and developed the alkaline storage battery. Nevertheless, Edison was past the peak of his productive period. A poor manager and organizer, he worked best in intimate, relatively unstructured surroundings with a handful of close associates and assistants; the West Orange laboratory was too sprawling and diversified for his talents. Furthermore, as a significant portion of the inventor’s time was taken up by his new role of industrialist, which came with the commercialization of incandescent lighting and the phonograph, electrical developments were passing into the domain of university-trained mathematicians and scientists. Above all, for more than a decade Edison’s energy was focused on a magnetic ore-mining venture that proved the unquestioned disaster of his career.

The first major Endeavour at the new laboratory was the commercialization of the phonograph, a venture launched in 1887 after Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester, and Charles Tainter had developed the graph phone—an improved version of Edison’s original device—which used waxed cardboard instead of tinfoil. Two years later, Edison announced that he had “perfected” the phonograph, although this was far from true. In fact, it was not until the late 1890s, after Edison had established production and recording facilities adjacent to the laboratory, that all the mechanical problems were overcome and the phonograph became a profitable proposition.

In the meantime, Edison conceived the idea of popularizing the phonograph by linking to it in synchronization a zoetrope, a device that gave the illusion of motion to photographs shot in sequence. He assigned the project to William K.L. Dickson, an employee interested in photography, in 1888. After studying the work of various European photographers who also were trying to record motion, Edison and Dickson succeeded in constructing a working camera and a viewing instrument, which were called, respectively, the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope. Synchronizing sound and motion proved of such insuperable difficulty, however, that the concept of linking the two was abandoned, and the silent movie was born. Edison constructed at the laboratory the world’s first motion-picture stage, nicknamed the “Black Maria,” in 1893.

CONTRADICTORY NATURE:

Edison’s career, the fulfillment of the American dream of rags-to-riches through hard work and intelligence, made him a folk hero to his countrymen. In temperament he was an uninhibited egotist, at once a tyrant to his employees and their most entertaining companion, so that there was never a dull moment with him. He was charismatic and courted publicity, but he had difficulty socializing and neglected his family. His shafts at the expense of the “long-haired” fraternity of theorists sometimes led formally trained scientists to deprecate him as anti-intellectual; yet he employed as his aides, at various times, a number of eminent mathematical physicists, such as Nikola Tesla and A.E. Kennelly. The contradictory nature of his forceful personality, as well as such eccentricities as his ability to catnap anywhere, contributed to his legendary status. By the time he was in his middle 30s Edison was said to be the best-known American in the world.