Did You Know That Thomas Edison Was Almost Deaf?
He Couldn't Hear How He Changed the World And He Liked It That Way
Image Description: Close-up of a row of incandescsent light bulbs hanging from a ceiling in a large room.
I wrote this article on September 4, the anniversary of the day in 1882 when Edison’s incandescent light bulb received its first wide scale testing from a small building he owned in Manhattan’s financial district.
Gives new meaning to “You light up my life”, doesn’t it?
Named for the street on which it was located, on this day in history the Pearl St. Station started generating enough energy to power approximately 400 lamps to 85 customers in a very small area around the building. Getting to this point had required years of planning and testing. But, as we all know, it was just the very beginning.
“That’s nice,” I hear you say. “But what does it have to do with disability?”
Hear me out.
Some of what we’ll cover in these daily sessions are people that everyone’s heard of, that have done amazing things, but that very few people seem to know are/were disabled.
I knew this time last year that Edison:
Invented the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera (and a whole bunch of other things)
Worked in a bunch of fields before he was even 19 years old, doing chemistry experiments on the side
I didn’t know, until I started doing research for these stories, that Edison was completely deaf in one ear and could barely hear out of the other, starting at approximately age twelve. He told different people different stories about what caused it, eventually admitting none of them were true, but historians speculate that scarlet fever and ear infections might have actually been the cause.
Edison Making the Most of It
It’s difficult to imagine how, in a world where only very few people knew about sign language, someone almost unable to hear could manage. Edison used writing and lip reading to communicate. He’d also tap telegraphy codes onto a person’s body, and sometimes his wife tapped out Morse code on him to convey what others were saying.
All sources seem to agree that, whatever hardships it might have presented, Edison actually appreciated the effect that his hearing disability had on his life. He felt that being able to easily tune out environmental noise made him a better worker. He liked being able to easily shorten conversations, so he could get more done in a day. Not being able to hear made reading or thinking without distraction easy to do.
Reframing the effects of disability as positives like that is a handy thing to be able to do, at least for me. I have a weak left arm and leg, and a seizure disorder. These disabilities have made some things more difficult than they used to be, but there are gifts, too. It’s a good thing to remember.
Cheers, Thomas Edison. You’re all right.