Who was Thomas Alva Edison Part 7
Although Edison’s shares in the new company remained, the decision-making power passed to JPMorgan. In all of this, Edison’s last hope was to win a contract for electric supplies at the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. The exhibition was held on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the United States. If General Electric had been awarded the contract to lighten the exhibition, which took place in 1839 , some fees could have been saved for Edison.
Because General Electric was still using Edison’s DC current. But obviously this current was much more expensive than AC. So when it came time to bid for the power supply , General Electric bid 1 million, while Westinghouse Electric bid only 500,000. This was the last defeat of Edison’s DC current, but it was death. After that Edison got out of the electricity business and General Electric also started shifting its plants to AC current.
All of this was the result of Edison’s stubbornness and stubbornness. If he had been flexible in his behavior and had already started using AC current instead of DC , he would not have been out of the electricity business. ۔ But his ego had defeated him. For the first time, Edison suffered the brunt of the defeat in the fierce business competition, and he too was forced to quit his job at the hands of his own employee, as if for a few dollars.
Now Edison’s lights go out and he can’t start a new big project. But there are still many ideas left in the wizard’s box of Manlo Park. He reached into the box and pulled out a video camera. The eyes of the beholders were wide open again. Edison once again sold the old technology. Video camera technology was outdated. Many people, including the British scientist Moe Bridge, had been working on it since 1880.
When the images taken by the cameras were rotated in a circle, these images seemed to move. That is why they were also called motion pictures. But sometimes it took a lot of cameras to collect these pictures. Or the pictures had to be taken out and put together separately. Edison had now developed a camera that would run on electricity and take pictures on a single strip of celluloid in a single camera.
This camera was named Kinetograph. A kinetic scope device was invented to play the images taken from this camera in the form of video. A celluloid strip with pictures would be placed in this device. The device would then play these images in video format. To watch the video, the eye had to be moved close to the lens attached to it. Edison also set up a studio called Black Maria in West Orange New Jersey, 21 miles from his Main Low Park laboratory.
A large number of videos were recorded here in 1899. Edison wanted to make videos or motion pictures a luxury, an entertainment for the people. So he set up a network of kinetoscope studios all over the United States. In these studios, a person could use a kinetoscope for 25 cents to watch a video. This invention made Edison popular in the United States again, and his business took four months, but now the same problem has arisen here as in the case of electricity.
That is, just as he had begun to sell the camera better, so did his camera and kinoscope in an effort to improve his competitors. When one tries, the result is bound to come. So that was something Edison’s camera team understood. The team suggested a job to Edison. The idea was to create a projector that would allow multiple people to watch videos at the same time.
But Edison’s thinking was different. He was thinking that now people pay separately to watch videos in Kinetoscope because one person at a time can watch the video through the small lens of Kinetoscope but if the videos start playing on the big screen then at a time.
