Thomas Alva Edison was a famous American inventor who lived from 1847 until 1931, contributing greatly to America's Industrial Revolution and living through the Civil War, Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and even the Great War. In the years right before America's entry into the war, Edison, along with others such as Theodore Roosevelt, General Leonard Wood, and secretary of war Henry Stimson, advocated for military preparedness in America. Edison firmly believed that with the current trend of scientific advancements, war will only become more devastating in mortality rates. In October of 1915, Edison told the New York Times, "Science is going to make war a terrible thing –too terrible to contemplate. Pretty soon we can be mowing down men by the thousands or even millions almost by pressing a button." Such a statement would later drive Edison to invest large amounts of time in aiding America in its self-protection during times of war.
Contributing primarily to the US Navy and its defense against foreign attacks on American shores, Edison based his ideas of preparedness on accumulating ammunition and military vehicles. By 1917, Edison fully immersed himself in naval research, conducting various experiments to help US ships detect gun positions on foreign submarines, pinpoint incoming torpedoes, and camouflage merchant ships against enemy attacks. Other small scale inventions also included a telephone system for ships, extension ladders, and protection from smokestack gasses. Among his inventions were storage batteries for submarines and a chemical plant to compensate for new demand for chemicals that were once imported from Germany and England. However, despite the 48 inventions that Edison proposed over the course of eighteen months, the US Navy never truly invested enough time to push these ideas beyond their prototype stage.
Nevertheless, Edison's greatest contribution during this time was his creation of the Naval Research Laboratory, as a result of his firm beliefs in the importance of military innovations. Before such an establishment, the US only saw limited institutions devoted to the advancements of military equipment. Edison's proposal was accepted in the fall of 1915, with Congress funding the research facility with one million dollars, an equivalent of 21.1 million today, although it was still less than the expected five million. Because of America's later involvement in the war and conflict regarding some changes to Edison's original proposal, the laboratory did not begin construction until the 1920s, with its grand opening in 1923. Nevertheless, the laboratory was soon the first permanent facility dedicated to military research and development, opening a new sector of funding for Congress. Parallel to its contributions to the US military, this sector would soon see groundbreaking inventions such as radars, nuclear weapons, GPS, and even the Internet. Among his famous contributions to society such as the invention of the lightbulb and discovery of the uses of electricity, Edison's contributions during the First World War will also leave a lasting legacy in America's military.Sources:
https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/thomas-edison-in-world-war-i.htm
http://edison.rutgers.edu/WWIlists.htm
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/25/the-20-most-influential-americans-of-all-time/slide/thomas-edison/
To add on, some other interesting inventions created by Edison include the kinetoscope. The kinetoscope allowed one person at a time to view a film in which its technology would become the basis of the modern motion picture. People could even pay to watch boxing matches such as the fight between Michael Leonard and Jack Cushing in which over 750 feet of film was used for 30 fps video. This even lead to the first recorded instance of censorship in film
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I thought that your post was very interesting as it talked about some of the lesser known achievements of Thomas Edison. I did not know that he contributed so much to WWI and strongly supported US military protection. To add on to the previous post, Edison also invented the Vitascope. The Vitascope was an early film projector that used light to cast images. The images that are being cast are originally taken by the kinetoscope. The Vitascope could produce 50 frames per second with 3,000 negatives per minute. This eventually lead to the documentation of the first filmed motion picture
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