thomas edison

Storied-brand Detroit Electric is teasing an electric vehicle that will take on the Tesla.

"After an absence of over 70 years, Detroit Electric...has returned to the legendary Motor City, promising job creation and a range of exciting 100% electric vehicles for the mass market," the company said in a press release.

The first model will be "a limited-edition two-seat sports car," the company said.

And it will be assembled in Michigan with production to start in August. "We are proud to become the fourth car manufacturer born out of Detroit," according to the … Read more

The LP was invented in 1948, and judging by the sales surge over the past few years, LPs won't be going away anytime soon. Amanda Ghassaei's "3D Printed Record" project demonstrated vinyl's continuing relevance in the 21st century. Years ago when I saw an early demonstration of 3D printing, I knew the technology would eventually lead to printing LPs, but now it's a little closer to becoming a reality. First, however, there are major sound-quality issues to overcome with 3D printed LPs (though they can play tunes with fidelity that's far below MP3 … Read more

What does a 120-year-old Thomas Edison cylinder record player have in common with a brand-new $299 Big Jambox Bluetooth speaker? Both play music in monophonic sound. Everything old is new again.

Home audio was strictly a single-speaker pursuit from the dawn of recorded sound through the late 1950s, when stereo changed the way we listen to music. Multichannel home theater's popularity peaked in the late 1990s, but starting with iPods and sound-bar speakers, mono was back in style. More recently sales of battery-powered, mono Bluetooth speakers started to take off. While these lo-fi systems may contain stereo pairs of … Read more

A group of 1,000 young people consider the world's greatest innovator to be Thomas Edison, whose crowning left the late Steve Jobs in second place.

Edison, the creator of the light bulb and phonograph, among many other inventions, earned the top title among 52 percent of those polled by Lemelson-MIT, a program that tries to honor inventors who have improved our lives and gauge peoples' perceptions about innovation.

Often lauded for his spirit of creativity, especially following his death, Jobs took second place with 24 percent citing him as the greatest innovator of all time.

The results surprised … Read more

You can now listen to the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice that time and technology had left mute.

The recording of the first stanza from the nursery rhyme "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," believed to have been produced for a talking doll sold by Thomas Edison, was rediscovered in 1967.

But age had taken its toll. The ring-shaped cylinder phonograph record, which was made in 1888, was bent to the point where it no longer worked with a conventional stylus that required physical contact.

However, a group of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used a new imaging technique to play the 12-second clip without needing to actually touch the record.

After creating a digital model of the record's surface using a three-dimensional optical scanning technology, researchers then saved the audio stored on the record as a .WAV audio file. The sound of the recording is faint and the first syllable of the first word of the recording is missing, but after more than a century, the sound of a human voice comes through. … Read more

Why did home theater buyers readily accept surround sound, but consistently reject multichannel music formats? From Thomas Edison's very first phonograph in 1877 through the late 1950s, monophonic sound was the only way people heard music at home.

Stereo arrived in the late 1950s on LP and analog reel-to-reel tape, and stereo has remained the most popular music format to this day. Quadraphonic (four-channel surround) debuted in the early 1970s, but didn't survive the end of the decade. People didn't want to plant four speakers in their living rooms, and the Quadraphonic Wars ensured the format's … Read more

WEST ORANGE, N.J.--I have come to the mountaintop of invention.

Today, this is the Thomas Edison National Historic Park, but for decades, it was the laboratory complex where the great innovator and the many people he employed did their work. For a geek, it doesn't get much better than this.

As part of Road Trip 2010, I'm paying a visit to a complex that, when it was fully operational, comprised dozens of buildings and employed hundreds of people. And I have to say that, while I'm no Edison scholar, this was definitely one of the … Read more

Legend has it that on December 4, 1877, Thomas Edison was the first person to record and play back the human voice. Maybe not.

The Video Interchange site notes that "a possibility exists that Edison himself, in fact, might not have been the very first person to have recorded and played back the human voice. This was most likely made by his two key assistants: Charles Batchelor, his chief assistant, and John Kruesi, his head machinist."

You can see Edison's machine on the Video Interchange Web site. And while you're there, check out a few of the fascinating but obscure audio formats on display.

Video Interchange offers transfer services for a vast range of ancient and recent audio formats. For example, Video Interchange can transfer 78 rpm records to CD.

… Read more

I suggested the other day that perhaps we've been looking for money in the wrong places on the Web, and particularly Web 2.0. I still believe that's the case, but Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, may offer an alternative argument:

Perhaps there really is no money in Web 2.0, at least, for the inventors of all the gee whiz services like Digg that give it life.

I say this because I was reminded by a recent program on National Public Radio that Thomas Edison saw roughly $0.00 from his invention of the phonograph, despite it being a roaring social success. Even as his invention lit up parties everywhere, Edison got nothing.

In fact, he got worse than nothing. Because of his failure to capitalize on the phonograph, investors went frigid on investing in his next innovation, the light bulb.

Society turned out fine and the world has since made lots of money around Edison's inventions. But it's telling that Edison, himself, saw little from his work. This may be an unfortunate lesson for those building out the future of the Web: instead of the untold riches you and your VCs expect to make, you could very well be taking a vow of poverty, the more innovative and game-changing your technology may be.

The focus, then, must be on innovating both technology and business models for monetizing it.

In a recent Businessweek the CMO for Travelocity says of advertising on MySpace, "We love our MySpace page, but we're not going to spend money just to acquire more friends for the gnome," referring to Travelocity's "Roaming Gnome" mascot. Ultimately, businesses care about what drives revenue, not what drives downloads (open source) or eyeballs (Web 2.0). There must be money flowing or your cool new invention will fund someone else's retirement, not yours.

The open-source world has recognized this and has largely moved on from obsessing over the technology, and instead splits its time between technology and business. The Web 2.0 crowd needs to do the same, moving on from shiny baubles to give equal or greater time to shiny bank accounts.… Read more