History of Milan, (Erie County) Ohio United States of America

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Biographies:

Moses K. Armstrong, representative, was born at Milan, O., Sept. 19, 1832. He received his education at Huron institute and Western reserve college, O., and removed to Minnesota in 1856, where he was elected surveyor of Mower county, and in 1858 was appointed surveyor of United States lands. On the admission of Minnesota as a state he removed to Yankton on the Missouri river, and on the organization of Dakota in 1861 was elected to the legislature of the territory, being re-elected in 1862 and 1863, serving as speaker during the last year. In 1864 he was editor of the Dakota Union. He was also territorial treasurer, clerk of the supreme court in 1865, a member of the territorial senate 1866, and in 1867 president of that body. In 1872 he was elected president of the first national bank of the territory. He was a representative from his district in the 42d and 43d congresses, and was also employed by the U.S. government in the boundary survey of South Dakota, and as secretary of the peace commission sent to the Sioux Indians. He became president of the Old bank of St. James, Minn., and published "History of Dakota "(1866).

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor

Thomas Alva Edison, inventor, was born in Milan, Erie county, Ohio, Feb. 11, 1847; son of Samuel and Nancy (Elliott) Edison. On the paternal side he descended from Dutch ancestors, who came from Amsterdam to the new world in 1737, and settled in New York where John Edison, the great-grandfather of Thomas was a banker. His maternal ancestry was Scotch. He attended school for a few months only, being educated at home by his mother, a women of superior ability and attainments. The boy was an apt scholar, showing preference for historical and scientific subjects. In 1854 his father removed to Port Huron, Mich., where at the age of twelve the son engaged in various commercial enterprises in which he employed other boys, working himself as newsboy on a train running to Detroit. He occupied his leisure hours while in Detroit in reading and in studying qualitative analysis, making his experiments in a baggage car of the Grand Trunk railway, in which he also established a miniature printing-office, where he set up and printed The Weekly Herald, the paper being written and issued by him without assistance. The Herald had been published for forty weeks, and had a subscription list of nearly five hundred, when the young experimenter upset a bottle of phosphorus and set the car on fire. He thus lost the use of his improvised laboratory. He soon afterward obtained the monopoly of the news business on the Grand Trunk railway and employed several boys to act as assistants. During this time he took every occasion to watch the operations of the telegraph at the various stations and soon constructed a telegraph between his father's house in Port Huron and that of a neighbor. He was rewarded for his bravery in rescuing the child of a telegraph operator from the track in front of a moving train, by lessons on the keyboard, and he gave up the news business to become an itinerant telegrapher. He worked in the various larger cities of the United States and Canada, meanwhile devoting himself to the study of electrical science, then little understood. At this time he invented, while working in New Orleans, La., the automatic repeater, and in 1864 he conceived the idea which he afterward perfected of the system of duplex and vibratory telegraphy. While in Boston, Mass., operating the New York wire, he continued his experiments, but not till 1872, after he had been in New York city for one year, did he put his duplex telegraph in practical operation. He was made superintendent of the Gold & Stock telegraph company through an incident demonstrating his skill. He wandered, a stranger, into the operating room of the company and readily repaired the apparatus with which they sent out stock quotations, thus securing his position. He afterward invented the printing telegraph for stock quotations and sold his patent to the company for $40,000. He manufactured his instruments in Newark, N.J., till 1876, meanwhile making about fifty separate inventions and improvements in telegraphic communication. He then removed his works and laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J., devoting his whole time to scientific research, especially to the perfection of his incandescent light, to electric motors for street cars and to the construction of the telephone, experiments with which led to the invention of the phonograph. He exhibited his first phonograph at the Paris exposition of 1878 and afterward sold his patent for $1,000,000. At Paris in 1881 his electrical display included lighting by incandescent lamps, the disc dynamo-electric machine, the microtosi-meter, the oderscope and the electro-monograph. He made a similar display at the Crystal Palace, London, and in various exhibitions in America. Having outgrown the laboratory at Menlo Park, he removed in 1885 to Llewellyn Park, N.J., where he erected an extensive private laboratory, the largest in the world. He organized manufacturing plants at Harrison, N.J., Schenectady, N.Y., Sherbrooke, Conn., and lesser ones at other points where he manufactured lamps, motors, dynamos, telephones, etc. In 1889 the Edison general electric company was formed with a capital stock of $12,000,000, controlling the Edison patents. In 1889 he expended over $100,000 in preparing his exhibit at the Paris exposition and at its close he was created a commander of the Legion of honor. Union college conferred upon him the honorary degree of Ph.D. in 1887. His principal inventions include: The duplex and quadruplex telegraph, sending various messages in opposite directions over the same wire, which he sold to the Western Union telegraph company for $30,000, and which the company reported had up to 1879 saved them over $14,000,000; the quadruple autographic, harmonic, multiplex, automatic and phonoplex telegraphs; telegraphing from moving trains without the use of a special wire; the carbon rheostat; the pressure or carbon relay; the Edison dynamo; the pyro-magnetic motor; the pyro-magnetic generator; the simeter; the odo-roscope; the Edison microphone; the incandescent lamp; the Edison meter; the weight volt-meter; the Edison electric pen; the Edison mimeograph; the Edison vote recorder; the magnetic ore-separator; the magnetic bridge; the dead-beat galvanometer; the phonometer; the Edison-Sims torpedo beat; the phonograph; telephone transmitters; the electro-motograph; the motograph receiver; the telephnograph; the magnaphone; the check battery; the kineto-scope; the vitoscope, and the fluorescope. On the lists in the patent office at Washington in 1895, 600 inventions were credited to his name. He had to defend his patents in innumerable lawsuits and injunctions and only succeeded in sustaining his patent for the incandescent light by the favorable decision of the U.S. supreme court handed down, Nov 11, 1895. In 1896 he publicly declared that he would have been at least $600,000 better off if he had never taken out a patent or defended one, and that all the money he ever made was made by manufacturing his inventions or in their practical use. In 1896 he established in the village of Edison, N.J., in the very centre of an iron deposit sufficient to supply the needs of the United States for half a century, a plant [p.394] for the magnetic separation of iron from the rock with which it is associated in the mines, the process being purely automatic. He first invented a crusher capable of reducing ten tons of rock to dust every minute; he then invented apparatus whereby the iron ore was separated from the dust by means of a magnet, and after six months' trial was able to compress this iron ore dust into brisquettes easily handled and transported to the blast furnace. He had this vast plant in active operation in the summer of 1897. He was mar tied in 1873 to Mary G. Stillwell, who had been for a time an employee in his establishment in Newark, N.J. The Life and Inventions of Thomas A. Edison, by Dixon, was published in 1894.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor