name	Mark Twain
birth name	Samuel Langhorne Clemens
pseudonym	Mark Twain
birth date	November 30, 1835
birth place	Florida, Missouri, U.S.
death date	April 21, 1910
death place	Redding, Connecticut, U.S.
occupation	Writer, lecturer
nationality	American
genre	Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism
signature	Mark Twain Signatures-2.svg
notableworks	''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'', ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer''
spouse
children	Langdon, Susy, Clara, Jean }}

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876), and its sequel, ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Tom Sawyer''. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.

He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

He lacked financial acumen, and, though he made a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he squandered it on various ventures, in particular the Paige Compositor, and was forced to declare bankruptcy. With the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers he eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain worked hard to ensure that all of his creditors were paid in full, even though his bankruptcy had relieved him of the legal responsibility.

Twain was born during a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."

Early life[link]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He was the son of Jane (née Lampton; 1803–1890), a native of Kentucky, and John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), a Virginian by birth. His parents met when his father moved to Missouri and were married several years later, in 1823. He was the sixth of seven children but only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brother Orion (1825–1897), Henry, who died in a riverboat explosion (1838–1858), and Pamela (1827–1904). His sister Margaret (1833–1839) died when he was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832–1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at six months. Twain was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet.

When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' and ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''. Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing. Twain's father was an attorney and judge. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was organized in his office in 1846. The railroad connected the second and third largest cities in the state and was the westernmost United States railroad until the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. It delivered mail to and from the Pony Express.

In 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the ''Hannibal Journal'', a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers union, and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school. Clemens came from St. Louis on the packet Keokuk in 1854, and lived in Muscatine during part of the summer of 1855. The Muscatine newspaper published eight stories which amounted to almost 6,000 words.

On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby inspired Twain to become a pilot himself. As Twain observed in ''Life on the Mississippi'', the pilot surpassed a steamboat's captain in prestige and authority; it was a rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month. A steamboat pilot needed to know the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots. Twain studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. This occupation gave him his pen name, Mark Twain, from "mark twain," the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms. While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the ''Pennsylvania'', exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a dream a month earlier, which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research. Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.

During the Civil War, Missouri was considered by many to be part of the South and was represented in both the Confederate and Federal governments. Twain wrote a sketch, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," which claimed he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding their company.

Travels[link]

Twain joined Orion, who in 1861 became secretary to James W. Nye, the governor of Nevada Territory, and headed west. Twain and his brother traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. The experiences inspired ''Roughing It'' and provided material for "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper, the ''Territorial Enterprise''. Here he first used his pen name. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account ''"Letter From Carson – re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music"'' with "Mark Twain."

Twain moved to San Francisco, California in 1864, still as a journalist. He met writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and Dan DeQuille. The young poet Ina Coolbrith may have romanced him.

His first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published in a New York weekly, ''The Saturday Press'', on November 18, 1865. It brought him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the ''Sacramento Union''. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.

In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were later compiled as ''The Innocents Abroad'' in 1869. It was on this trip that he met his future brother-in-law, Charles Langdon. Both were passengers aboard the ''Quaker City'' on their way to the Holy Land. Langdon showed a picture of his sister Olivia to Twain; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight.

Upon returning to the United States, Twain was offered honorary membership in the secret society Scroll and Key of Yale University in 1868. Its devotion to "fellowship, moral and literary self-improvement, and charity" suited him well.

Marriage and children[link]

Throughout 1868, Twain and Olivia Langdon corresponded but she rejected his first marriage proposal. Two months later, they were engaged. In February 1870, Twain and Langdon were married in Elmira, New York, where he had courted her. She came from a "wealthy but liberal family," and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women's rights and social equality," including Harriet Beecher Stowe (his next-door neighbor in Hartford, Connecticut), Frederick Douglass, and the writer and utopian socialist William Dean Howells, who became a long-time friend. The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the ''Buffalo Express'' newspaper and worked as an editor and writer. While living in Buffalo, their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months. They had three daughters: Susy (1872–1896), Clara (1874–1962) and Jean (1880–1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904. All of the Clemens family are buried in Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery.

Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873, he arranged the building of a home (local admirers saved it from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned it into a museum focused on him). In the 1870s and 1880s, Twain and his family summered at Quarry Farm, the home of Olivia's sister, Susan Crane. In 1874, Susan had a study built apart from the main house so that her brother-in-law would have a quiet place in which to write. Also, Twain smoked pipes constantly, and Susan Crane did not wish him to do so in her house. During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874–1891) and over twenty summers at Quarry Farm, Twain wrote many of his classic novels, among them ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876), ''The Prince and the Pauper'' (1881), ''Life on the Mississippi'' (1883), ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1885) and ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' (1889).

Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book ''A Tramp Abroad''. His tour included a stay in Heidelberg from May 6 until July 23, 1878, and a visit to London.

Love of science and technology[link]

Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory.

Twain patented three inventions, including an "Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments" (to replace suspenders) and a history trivia game. Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook; a dried adhesive on the pages only needed to be moistened before use.

His book ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. This type of storyline would later become a common feature of a science fiction sub-genre, alternate history.

In 1909, Thomas Edison visited Twain at his home in Redding, Connecticut and filmed him. Part of the footage was used in ''The Prince and the Pauper'' (1909), a two-reel short film.

Financial troubles[link]

Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he lost a great deal through investments, mostly in new inventions and technology, particularly the Paige typesetting machine. It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent $300,000 (equal to $}} today) on it between 1880 and 1894, but before it could be perfected, it was made obsolete by the Linotype. He lost not only the bulk of his book profits but also a substantial portion of his wife's inheritance.

Twain also lost money through his publishing house, which enjoyed initial success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, but went broke soon after, losing money on a biography of Pope Leo XIII; fewer than two hundred copies were sold.

Twain's writings and lectures, combined with the help of a new friend, enabled him to recover financially. In 1893, he began a 15-year-long friendship with financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil. Rogers first made Twain file for bankruptcy. Then Rogers had Twain transfer the copyrights on his written works to his wife, Olivia, to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all the creditors were paid.

Twain embarked on a year-long, around-the-world lecture tour in July 1895 to pay off his creditors in full, although he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so. It would be a long, arduous journey and he was sick much of the time, mostly from a cold and a carbuncle. The itinerary took him to Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, South Africa and England. Twain's three months in India became the centerpiece of his 712-page book ''Following the Equator''.

In mid-1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." He then returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.

Speaking engagements[link]

Twain was in demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks similar to what would become stand-up comedy. He gave paid talks to many men's clubs, including the Authors' Club, Beefsteak Club, Vagabonds, White Friars, and Monday Evening Club of Hartford. He was made an honorary member of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. In the late 1890s, he spoke to the Savage Club in London and was elected honorary member. When told that only three men had been so honored, including the Prince of Wales, he replied "Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine." In 1897, Twain spoke to the Concordia Press Club in Vienna as a special guest, following diplomat Charlemagne Tower, Jr.. In German, to the great amusement of the assemblage, Twain delivered the speech "''Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache''" ("The Horrors of the German Language"). In 1901, Twain was invited to speak at Princeton University's Cliosophic Literary Society, where he was made an honorary member.

Later life and death[link]

Twain passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom. On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the ''North American Review''. In April, Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all she owned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith, George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session. Initially resistant, Twain admitted that four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him.

Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight."

Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters (D.Litt.) in 1907.

In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:

His prediction was accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.

Upon hearing of Twain's death, President William Howard Taft said:

:"Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."

Twain's funeral was at the "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church in New York. He is buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. His grave is marked by a 12-foot (i.e., two fathoms, or "mark twain") monument, placed there by his surviving daughter, Clara. There is also a smaller headstone. Although he expressed (e.g. in Life on the Mississippi) a preference for cremation, he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word.

Writing[link]

Overview[link]

Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with ''Huckleberry Finn'', he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger," which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.

A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain's works is an ongoing process. Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995.

Early journalism and travelogues[link]

While writing for the Virginia City newspaper, the ''Territorial Enterprise'' in 1863, Clemens met lawyer Tom Fitch, editor of the competing newspaper ''Virginia Daily Union'' and known as the "silver-tongued orator of the Pacific." He credited Fitch with giving him his "first really profitable lesson" in writing. In 1866, Clemens presented his lecture on the Sandwich Islands to a crowd in Washoe City, Nevada. Clemens commented that, "When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard." Fitch told him, "Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin—the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced." It was in these days that Twain became a writer of the Sagebrush School, and was known later as the most notable within this literary genre.

Twain's first important work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was first published in the ''New York Saturday Press'' on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was that his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.

After this burst of popularity, the ''Sacramento Union'' commissioned Twain to write letters about his travel experiences. The first journey he took for this job was to ride the steamer ''Ajax'' in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco ''Alta California'' newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while, Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser ''Quaker City'' for five months. This trip resulted in ''The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress.''

In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, ''Roughing It'', as a semi-sequel to ''Innocents''. ''Roughing It'' is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that ''Innocents'' critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work kept ''Roughing It'''s focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled ''The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today'', it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.

Twain's next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. ''Old Times on the Mississippi'', a series of sketches published in the ''Atlantic Monthly'' in 1875, featured Twain's disillusionment with Romanticism. ''Old Times'' eventually became the starting point for ''Life on the Mississippi.''

''Tom Sawyer'' and ''Huckleberry Finn''[link]

Twain's next major publication was ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'', which drew on his youth in Hannibal. Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

''The Prince and the Pauper'', despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and literature today, was not as well received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. ''Pauper'' was Twain's first attempt at historical fiction, and blame for its shortcomings is usually put on Twain for having not been experienced enough in English society, and also on the fact that it was produced after a massive hit. In between the writing of ''Pauper,'' Twain had started ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (which he consistently had problems completing) and started and completed another travel book, ''A Tramp Abroad'', which follows Twain as he traveled through central and southern Europe.

Twain's next major published work, ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'', solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. ''Huckleberry Finn'' was an offshoot from ''Tom Sawyer'' and had a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind ''Huckleberry Finn'' is the young boy's belief in the right thing to do though most believed that it was wrong. Four hundred manuscript pages of ''Huckleberry Finn'' were written in mid-1876, right after the publication of ''Tom Sawyer.'' Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on ''Huckleberry Finn'' in tandem with ''The Prince and the Pauper'' and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of ''Huckleberry Finn'' is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experienced, as critic Leo Marx puts it, a "failure of nerve." Ernest Hemingway once said of ''Huckleberry Finn'':

If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.

Hemingway also wrote in the same essay:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ''Huckleberry Finn''.

Near the completion of ''Huckleberry Finn,'' Twain wrote ''Life on the Mississippi,'' which is said to have heavily influenced the former book. The work recounts Twain's memories and new experiences after a 22-year absence from the Mississippi. In it, he also states that "Mark Twain" was the call made when the boat was in safe water – two fathoms ().

Later writing[link]

After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing projects. Twain focused on President Ulysses S. Grant's ''Memoirs'' for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" for ''The Century Magazine''. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a Confederate militia during the Civil War. The name of his publishing company was ''Charles L. Webster & Company,'' which he owned with Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage.

Twain next focused on ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'', which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. Written with the same "historical fiction" style of ''The Prince and the Pauper'', ''A Connecticut Yankee'' showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of King Arthur. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.

Twain had begun to furiously write articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, but it was not enough. He filed for bankruptcy in 1894.

His next large-scale work, ''Pudd'nhead Wilson'', was written rapidly, as Twain was desperately trying to stave off the bankruptcy. From November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote 60,000 words for the novel. Critics have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the novel's rough organization and constant disruption of continuous plot. There were parallels between this work and Twain's financial failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a different person.

Like ''The Prince and the Pauper'', this novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life. Considering the circumstances of Twain's birth and Halley's Comet, and his strong belief in the paranormal, it is not surprising that these "mystic" connections recur throughout his writing.

The actual title is not clearly established. It was first published serially in ''Century Magazine'', and when it was finally published in book form, ''Pudd'nhead Wilson'' appeared as the main title; however, the disputed "subtitles" make the entire title read: ''The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins''.

Twain's next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called ''Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc'' and dedicated to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work he was most proud of, despite the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream of his since childhood. He claimed he had found a manuscript detailing the life of Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent. This was another piece Twain was convinced would save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, quashed that idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was published nonetheless.

During this time of dire financial straits, Twain published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. He famously derided James Fenimore Cooper in his article detailing Cooper's "Literary Offenses." He became an extremely outspoken critic not only of other authors, but also of other critics, suggesting that before praising Cooper's work, Professors Loundsbury, Brander Matthes, and Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it."

Other authors to fall under Twain's attack during this time period (beginning around 1890 until his death) were George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In addition to providing a source for the "tooth and claw" style of literary criticism, Twain outlines in several letters and essays what he considers to be "quality writing." He places emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism (he complains that Cooper's ''Deerslayer'' purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings). Ironically, several of his works were later criticized for lack of continuity (''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'') and organization (''Pudd'nhead Wilson'').

Twain's wife died in 1904 while the couple were staying at the Villa di Quarto in Florence, and after an appropriate time Twain allowed himself to publish some works that his wife, a ''de facto'' editor and censor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works, ''The Mysterious Stranger'', depicting various visits of Satan to the Earth, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime. There were three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal, Eseldorf, and Print Shop versions. Confusion between the versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original versions as Twain wrote them become available.

Twain's last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-chronological order. Some archivists and compilers have rearranged the biography into more conventional forms, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book. The first volume of autobiography, over 736 pages, was published by the University of California in November 2010, 100 years after his death as Twain wished. It soon became an unexpected best seller, making Twain one of very few authors publishing new best-selling volumes in all 3 of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Friendship with Henry H. Rogers[link]

While Twain credited Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive, with saving him from financial ruin, their close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial. When Twain lost three of his four children and his beloved wife, the Rogers family increasingly became a surrogate family for him. He became a frequent guest at their townhouse in New York City, their 48-room summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and aboard their steam yacht, the ''Kanawha''.

The two men introduced each other to their acquaintances. Twain was an admirer of the remarkable deafblind girl Helen Keller. He first met Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan at a party in the home of Laurence Hutton in New York City in the winter of 1894. Twain introduced them to Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for Keller's education at Radcliffe College. Twain is credited with labeling Sullivan, Keller's governess and companion, a "miracle worker." His choice of words later became inspiration for the title of William Gibson's play and film adaptation, ''The Miracle Worker''. Twain also introduced Rogers to journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who interviewed him for a muckraking expose that led indirectly to the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust. On cruises aboard the ''Kanawha'', Twain and Rogers were joined at frequent intervals by Booker T. Washington, the famed former slave who had become a leading educator.

While the two famous old men were widely regarded as drinking and poker buddies, they also exchanged letters when apart, and this was often since each traveled a great deal. Unlike Rogers' personal files, which have never become public, these insightful letters were published. The written exchanges between the two men demonstrate Twain's well-known sense of humor and, more surprisingly, Rogers' sense of fun, providing a rare insight into the private side of the robber baron.

In April 1907, Twain and Rogers cruised to the opening of the Jamestown Exposition in Virginia. Twain's public popularity was such that many fans took boats out to the ''Kanawha'' at anchor in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. As the gathering of boats around the yacht became a safety hazard, he finally obliged by coming on deck and waving to the crowds.

Because of poor weather conditions, the steam yacht was delayed for several days from venturing into the Atlantic Ocean. Rogers and some of the others in his party returned to New York by rail; Twain disliked train travel and so elected to wait and return on the ''Kanawha''. However, reporters lost track of his whereabouts; when he failed to return to New York City as scheduled, ''The New York Times'' speculated that he might have been "lost at sea." Upon arriving safely in New York and learning of this, the humorist wrote a satirical article about the episode, offering to "...make an exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious public." This bore similarities to an earlier event in 1897 when he made his famous remark "The report of my death was an exaggeration," after a reporter was sent to investigate whether he had died. In fact, it was his cousin who was seriously ill.

Later that year, Twain and Rogers's son, Henry Jr., returned to the Jamestown Exposition aboard the ''Kanawha''. The humorist helped host Robert Fulton Day on September 23, 1907, celebrating the centennial of Fulton's invention of the steamboat. Twain, filling in for ailing former U.S. President Grover Cleveland, introduced Rear Admiral Purnell Harrington. Twain was met with a five-minute standing ovation; members of the audience cheered and waved their hats and umbrellas. Deeply touched, Twain said, "When you appeal to my head, I don't feel it; but when you appeal to my heart, I do feel it."

In April 1909, the two old friends returned to Norfolk, Virginia for the banquet in honor of Rogers and his newly completed Virginian Railway. Twain was the keynote speaker in one of his last public appearances, and was widely quoted in newspapers across the country.

A month later, Twain was ''en route'' from Connecticut to visit his friend in New York City when Rogers died suddenly on May 20, 1909. Twain arrived at Grand Central Terminal to be met by his daughter with the news. Stricken with grief, he uncustomarily avoided news reporters who had gathered, saying only "This is terrible...I cannot talk about it." Two days later, he served as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral in New York City. However, he declined to join the funeral party on the train ride for the interment at Fairhaven. He said "I cannot bear to travel with my friend and not converse."

Views[link]

Twain's views became more radical as he grew older. He acknowledged that his views changed and developed over his life, referring to one of his favorite works:

Anti-imperialist[link]

In the ''New York Herald'', October 15, 1900, he describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist":

Before 1899 Twain was an ardent imperialist. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands. In the mid-1890s he explained later, he was "a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming over the Pacific." He said the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought. In 1899 he reversed course, and from 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members." He wrote many political pamphlets for the organization. The ''Incident in the Philippines'', posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.

Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In ''Following the Equator'', Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes." He was highly critical of European imperialism, notably of Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the British Empire, and of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. ''King Leopold's Soliloquy'' is a stinging political satire about his private colony, the Congo Free State. Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered, until the movement forced Brussels to call a halt.

During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote a short pacifist story entitled ''The War Prayer'', which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of love are incompatible with the conduct of war. It was submitted to ''Harper's Bazaar'' for publication, but on March 22, 1905 the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Daniel Carter Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Twain could not publish ''The War Prayer'' elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923. It was republished as campaigning material by Vietnam War protesters.

Twain acknowledged he originally sympathized with the more moderate Girondins of the French Revolution and then shifted his sympathies to the more radical Sansculottes, indeed identifying as "a Marat." Twain supported the revolutionaries in Russia against the reformists, arguing that the Tsar must be got rid of, by violent means, because peaceful ones would not work. He summed up his views of revolutions in the following statement:

Civil rights[link]

Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and emancipation, even going so far to say “Lincoln's Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.” He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying “I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature....but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him.” He paid for at least one black person to attend Yale Law School and for another black person to attend a southern university to become a minister.

Mark Twain was a staunch supporter of women's rights and an active campaigner for women's suffrage. His "Votes for Women" speech, in which he pressed for the granting of voting rights to women, is considered one of the most famous in history.

Helen Keller benefited from Twain's support, as she pursued her college education and publishing, despite her disabilities and financial limitations.

Twain's views on race were not reflected in his early sketches of Native Americans. Of them, Twain wrote in 1870:

As counterpoint, Twain's essay on "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper" offers a much kinder view of Indians. "No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them." In his later travelogue ''Following the Equator'' (1897), Twain observes that in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by "whites" in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey"; his conclusion is that "there are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."

Labor[link]

Twain wrote glowingly about unions in the riverboating industry in ''Life on the Mississippi'', which was read in union halls decades later. He supported the labor movement, especially one of the most important unions, the Knights of Labor. In a speech to them, he said:

Vivisection[link]

Twain was opposed to the vivisection practices of his day. His objection was not on a scientific basis but rather an ethical one. He specifically cited the pain caused to the animal as his basis of his opposition.

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. ... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

Religion[link]

Although Twain was a Presbyterian, he was sometimes critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. He wrote, for example, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so," and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian." Nonetheless, as a mature adult he engaged in religious discussions and attended services, his theology developing as he wrestled with the deaths of loved ones and his own mortality. His own experiences and suffering of his family made him particularly critical of "faith healing," such as espoused by Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. His more inflammatory works on religion require a nuanced understanding of his theological arguments and criticism.

Twain generally avoided publishing his most heretical opinions on religion in his lifetime, and they are known from essays and stories that were published later. In the essay ''Three Statements of the Eighties'' in the 1880s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages, revelations, holy scriptures such as the Bible, Providence, or retribution in the afterlife. He did state that "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works," but also that "the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws," which determine "small matters," such as who dies in a pestilence. At other times he wrote or spoke in ways that contradicted a strict deist view, for example, plainly professing a belief in Providence. In some later writings in the 1890s, he was less optimistic about the goodness of God, observing that "if our Maker ''is'' all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind." At other times, he conjectured sardonically that perhaps God had created the world with all its tortures for some purpose of His own, but was otherwise indifferent to humanity, which was too petty and insignificant to deserve His attention anyway.

In 1901 Twain criticized the actions of missionary Dr. William Scott Ament (1851–1909) because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Twain's response to hearing of Ament's methods was published in the ''North American Review'' in February 1901: ''To the Person Sitting in Darkness'', and deals with examples of imperialism in China, South Africa, and with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. A subsequent article, "To My Missionary Critics" published in ''The North American Review'' in April 1901, unapologetically continues his attack, but with the focus shifted from Ament to his missionary superiors, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work that was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably ''Letters from the Earth'', which was not published until his daughter Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding. The anti-religious ''The Mysterious Stranger'' was published in 1916. ''Little Bessie'', a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection ''Mark Twain's Fables of Man''.

Despite these views, he raised money to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada in 1864, although it has been argued that it was only by his association with his Presbyterian brother that he did that.

Twain created a reverent portrayal of Joan of Arc, a subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing. In 1900 and again in 1908, he stated, "I like ''Joan of Arc'' best of all my books, it is the best."

Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond."

Mark Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final Autobiography, which was published 100 years after his death, in November 2010. In it, he said,

Twain was a Freemason. He belonged to Polar Star Lodge No. 79 A.F.&A.M.;, based in St. Louis. He was initiated an Entered Apprentice on May 22, 1861, passed to the degree of Fellow Craft on June 12, and raised to the degree of Master Mason on July 10.

Pen names[link]

Twain used different pen names before deciding on "'Mark Twain". He signed humorous and imaginative sketches as "Josh" until 1863. Additionally, he used the pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.

He maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating safe water for passage of boat, was measured on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two". The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]," that is, "The water is deep and it is safe to pass."

Twain claimed that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In ''Life on the Mississippi'', he wrote:

Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them "MARK TWAIN," and give them to the ''New Orleans Picayune''. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; ... At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands – a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

Twain's story about his pen name has been questioned by biographer George Williams III, the ''Territorial Enterprise'' newspaper, and Purdue University's Paul Fatout. The claim is that "mark twain" refers to a running bar tab that Twain would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in Virginia City, Nevada.

Honors[link]

Twain's legacy lives on today as his namesakes continue to multiply. Several schools are named after him, including Mark Twain Elementary School in Houston, Texas, which has a statue of Twain sitting on a bench, and Mark Twain Intermediate School in New York. There are several schools named Mark Twain Middle School in different states, as well as Samuel Clemens High School in Schertz, near San Antonio, Texas. There are also other structures, such as the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge.

Mark Twain Village is a United States Army installation located in the Südstadt district of Heidelberg, Germany. It is one of two American bases in the United States Army Garrison Heidelberg that house American soldiers and their families (the other being Patrick Henry Village).

Awards in his name proliferate. In 1998, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts created the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually. The Mark Twain Award is an award given annually to a book for children in grades four through eight by the Missouri Association of School Librarians. Stetson University in DeLand, Florida sponsors the Mark Twain Young Authors' Workshop each summer in collaboration with the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal. The program is open to young authors in grades five through eight. The museum sponsors the Mark Twain Creative Teaching Award.

Buildings associated with Twain, including some of his many homes, have been preserved as museums. His birthplace is preserved in Florida, Missouri. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri preserves the setting for some of the author's best known work. The home of childhood friend Laura Hawkins, said to be the inspiration for his fictional character Becky Thatcher, is preserved as the "Thatcher House." In May 2007, a painstaking reconstruction of the home of Tom Blankenship, the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn, was opened to the public. The family home he had built in Hartford, Connecticut, where he and his wife raised their three daughters, is preserved and open to visitors as the Mark Twain House.

Asteroid 2362 Mark Twain was named after him.

On December 4, 1985, the United States Postal Service issued a stamped envelope for "Mark Twain and Halley's Comet," noting the connection with Twain's birth, his death, and the comet. On June 25, 2011, the Postal Service released a Forever stamp in his honor.

Depictions[link]

Twain is often depicted wearing a white suit. While there is evidence that suggests that, after Livy's death in 1904, Twain began wearing white suits on the lecture circuit, modern representations suggesting that he wore them throughout his life are unfounded. However, there is evidence of him wearing a white suit before 1904. In 1882, he sent a photograph of himself in a white suit to 18-year-old Edward W. Bok, later publisher of the ''Ladies Home Journal'', with a handwritten dated note on verso. It did eventually become his trademark, as illustrated in anecdotes about this eccentricity (such as the time he wore a white summer suit to a Congressional hearing during the winter). McMasters' ''The Mark Twain Encyclopedia'' states that Twain did not wear a white suit in his last three years, except at one banquet speech.

Actor Hal Holbrook created a one-man show called ''Mark Twain Tonight'', which he has performed regularly for about years. The broadcast by CBS in 1967 won him an Emmy Award. Of the three runs on Broadway (1966, 1977, and 2005), the first won him a Tony Award.

Twain was portrayed by Fredric March in the 1944 film ''The Adventures of Mark Twain''.

Bibliography[link]

See also[link]

American Literary Regionalism

American realism

''Christian Science (essay)

Bernard DeVoto (historian)

List of premature obituaries

''Mark Twain's Library of Humor'' (anthology)

''Warsaw Signal'' (newspaper)

Translation

Thomas S. Hinde, friend who corresponded with Mark Twain throughout his life.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Lucius Beebe. ''Comstock Commotion: The Story of the Territorial Enterprise and Virginia City News.'' Stanford University Press, 1954 ISBN 1-122-18798-X

Louis J. Budd, ed. ''Mark Twain, Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1891–1910'' (Library of America, 1992) (ISBN 978-0-94045073-8)

Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan, and Geoffrey C. Ward, ''Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography.'' New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 (ISBN 0-3754-0561-5)

Gregg Camfield. ''The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 (ISBN 0-1951-0710-1)

Guy Cardwell, ed. ''Mark Twain, Mississippi Writings'' (Library of America, 1982) (ISBN 978-0-94045007-3)

Guy Cardwell, ed. ''Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It'' (Library of America, 1984) ISBN 978-0-940450-25-7

James M. Cox. ''Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor.'' Princeton University Press, 1966 (ISBN 0-8262-1428-2)

Everett Emerson. ''Mark Twain: A Literary Life.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000 (ISBN 0-8122-3516-9)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ed. ''A Historical Guide to Mark Twain.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 (ISBN 0-1951-3293-9)

Susan K. Harris, ed. ''Mark Twain, Historical Romances'' (Library of America, 1994) (ISBN 978-0-94045082-0)

Hamlin L. Hill, ed. ''Mark Twain, The Gilded Age and Later Novels'' (Library of America, 2002) ISBN 978-1-931082-10-5

Jason Gary Horn. ''Mark Twain: A Descriptive Guide to Biographical Sources.'' Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999 (ISBN 0-8108-3630-0)

William Dean Howells. ''My Mark Twain.'' Mineloa, New York: Dover Publications, 1997 (ISBN 0-486-29640-7)

Fred Kaplan. ''The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography.'' New York: Doubleday, 2003 (ISBN 0-3854-7715-5)

Justin Kaplan. ''Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography.'' New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966 (ISBN 0-6717-4807-6)

J. R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson, eds. ''The Mark Twain Encyclopedia.'' New York: Garland, 1993 (ISBN 0-8240-7212-X)

Jerome Loving, ''Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens'' (University of California Press; 2010) 491 pages, ISBN 978-0-520-25257-8; Draws on newly discovered archival materials in a detailed biography

Bruce Michelson. ''Mark Twain on the Loose.'' Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995 (ISBN 0-8702-3967-8)

K. Patrick Ober. ''Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure."'' Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003 (ISBN 0-8262-1502-5)

Albert Bigelow Paine. ''Mark Twain, A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.'' Harper & Bros., 1912. ISBN 1-84702-983-3

Ron Powers. ''Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain.'' New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. ISBN 0-306-81086-7

Ron Powers. ''Mark Twain: A Life.'' New York: Random House, 2005. (0-7432-4899-6)

R. Kent Rasmussen. ''Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work.'' Facts On File, 2007. Revised edition of ''Mark Twain A to Z'' ISBN 0-8160-6225-0

R. Kent Rasmussen, ed. ''The Quotable Mark Twain: His Essential Aphorisms, Witticisms and Concise Opinions.'' Contemporary Books, 1997 ISBN 0-8092-2987-0

External links[link]

;Works by Mark Twain

Mark Twain Classics – Twain's Speeches, Essays, Stories, and Quotes.

Mark Twain Project Online

38 Facsimile copies of 1st editions

. More than 60 texts are freely available.

''Mark Twain's letters'' ed. by Albert Bigelow Paine (2 vol 1917) vol 2 online

Mark Twain Library, University of California Press. This series re-prints texts from the Papers and Works for students and the general reader.

The Works of Mark Twain, University of California Press. This series prints authoritative critical editions of Mark Twain's published works.

Mark Twain Papers, University of California Press. This series publishes Mark Twain's private papers–his letters, notebooks, unpublished literary works, and autobiography.

Jumping Frogs: Undiscovered, Rediscovered, and Celebrated Writings of Mark Twain, University of California Press. The Jumping Frogs series of books brings neglected Mark Twain treasures—stories, tall tales, novels, travelogues, plays, imaginative journalism, speeches, sketches, satires, burlesques, and much more—to readers.

A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It. From The Atlantic Monthly. Nov. 1874: 591–594. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., November 1874. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., November 1874.

;Academic studies

The Mark Twain Papers and Project of the Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. Home to the largest archive of Mark Twain's papers and the editors of a critical edition of all of his writings.

Buffalo Library Mark Twain Room, which houses the manuscript of ''Huckleberry Finn''

Mark Twain Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

;Life

Full text of the biography ''Mark Twain'' by Archibald Henderson

Obituary in San Francisco Call

Mark Twain's Mississippi at Northern Illinois University Libraries

Mark Twain at C-SPAN's ''American Writers: A Journey Through History''

;Other

Literary Pilgrimages – Mark Twain sites

PBS Twain Interactive Scrapbook and San Francisco Chronicle article documenting that Clemens did not say "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco."

The Fountain Pens used by Mark Twain

Images of First Appearances of Mark Twain Works

article and rare pictures of Mark Twain and photographer Napoleon Sarony

Google map with placemarks for places in America associated with Twain

Category:1835 births Category:1910 deaths Category:American humorists Category:American memoirists Category:American novelists Category:American satirists Category:American short story writers Category:American travel writers Category:Alternate history writers Category:American autobiographers Category:American people of Cornish descent Category:Clemens family Category:Writers from Connecticut Category:Writers from Missouri Category:Writers from Nevada Category:Holy Land travellers Category:People of the Philippine–American War Category:People of the California Gold Rush Category:People from Elmira, New York Category:People from Hannibal, Missouri Category:People from St. Louis, Missouri Category:People from Monroe County, Missouri Category:Lecturers Category:Critics of Christian Science Category:Pseudonymous writers Category:American Presbyterians Category:19th-century novelists Category:Sagebrush School

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Birthname	Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr.
Birth date	February 17, 1925
Birth place	Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Culver Academies
Alma mater	Denison University
Residence	Beverly Hills, California,McLemoresville, Tennessee
Home town	South Weymouth, Massachusetts
Television	Lincoln,The Bold Ones: The Senator
Notable works	''Mark Twain Tonight'', ''Into the Wild'', ''The Fog'', ''All the President's Men'', ''Water for Elephants'', ''Fletch Lives'', ''Magnum Force'', ''The Star Chamber'', ''Capricorn One'', ''The Firm''
Known for	Abraham Lincoln,Mark Twain
Occupation	Actor
Yearsactive	1954–present
Spouse	Ruby Holbrook (m. 1945–65)Carol Eve Rossen (m. 1966–79)Dixie Carter (m. 1984–2010; her death)
Children	6
Awards	Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Primetime Emmy Award
Signature	}}

Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook, Jr. (born February 17, 1925) is an American actor. His television roles include Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series ''Lincoln'', Hays Stowe on ''The Bold Ones: The Senator'' and Capt. Lloyd Bucher on ''Pueblo''. He is also known for his role in the 2007 film ''Into the Wild'', for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. He has also performed a one-man show as Mark Twain since 1954.

Early life[link]

Holbrook was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Aileen Davenport Holbrook, a vaudeville dancer, and Harold Rowe Holbrook, Sr. He was raised in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Culver Academies and Denison University, where an honors project about Mark Twain led him to develop the one-man show for which he is best known, a series of performances called ''Mark Twain Tonight'' (for which he won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award). Holbrook served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theatre productions such as the play ''Madam Precious''.

Career[link]

According to ''Playbill'', Holbrook's first solo performance as Twain was at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania in 1954. Ed Sullivan saw him and gave Holbrook his first national exposure on his February 12, 1956 show. Holbrook was also a member of the Valley Players (1941–1962), a summer stock theater company based in Holyoke, Massachusetts which performed at Mountain Park Casino Playhouse at Mountain Park. He was a member of the cast for several years and performed ''Mark Twain Tonight'' as the 1957 season opener. The State Department even sent him on a European tour, which included pioneering appearances behind the Iron Curtain. In 1959 Holbrook first played the role Off-Broadway. Columbia Records recorded an LP of excerpts from the show.

Holbrook did a special production for the New York World's Fair (1964, 1965) for the Bell Telephone Pavilion. Jo Mielziner conceived of an innovative audio-visual ride experience and utilized Hal's acting talents on 65 different action screens for "The Ride Of Communications" with the movie itself known as "From Drumbeats to Telstar".

In 1967, ''Mark Twain Tonight'' was presented on television by CBS and Xerox, and Holbrook received an Emmy for his performance. Holbrook's Twain first played on Broadway in 1966, and again in 1977 and 2005; Holbrook was 80 years old during his most recent Broadway run, older (for the first time) than the character he was portraying. Holbrook won a Tony Award for the performance in 1966. ''Mark Twain Tonight'' has repeatedly toured the country in what has amounted to over 2000 performances. He has portrayed Twain longer than Samuel Langhorne Clemens did.

In 1964, Holbrook played the role of the Major in the original production of Arthur Miller's ''Incident at Vichy''. In 1968 he was one of the replacements for Richard Kiley in the original Broadway production of ''Man of La Mancha'', although he had limited singing ability.

Holbrook co-starred with Martin Sheen in the controversial and acclaimed 1972 television movie ''That Certain Summer'' said to be the first television movie to portray homosexuality in a sympathetic, non-judgmental light. In 1976 Holbrook won acclaim for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in a series of television specials based on Carl Sandburg's acclaimed biography. He has also starred in many films and TV programs. He won an Emmy for Lead Actor in a Dramatic Series in the 1970 TV series, "The Bold Ones: The Senator". In 1979 he starred, with Katharine Ross, Barry Bostwick, and Richard Anderson in the made-for-TV movie, "Murder by Natural Causes".

Early in his career Holbrook worked on stage and in a television soap opera, ''The Brighter Day''. He is also famous for his role as the enigmatic Deep Throat (whose identity was unknown at the time) in the film ''All the President's Men''. Holbrook appeared as a featured guest star in a 2006 episode of the HBO series ''The Sopranos'' and the ''NCIS'' episode "Escaped".

Holbrook has appeared in at least seven movies in which he is part of a conspiracy: ''The Fog'', ''Fletch Lives'', ''Magnum Force'', ''The Star Chamber'', ''Capricorn One'', ''All the President's Men'', and ''The Firm''.

Holbrook was the narrator on the Ken Burns' documentary ''Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery'' in 1997.

Holbrook appeared on Fisher Investments' infomercials. In 2000 Holbrook appeared in Men of Honor where he portrayed a racist and hypocritical officer who endlessly tries to fail an African-American diver trainee.

He appeared in Sean Penn's critically acclaimed film ''Into the Wild'' (2007) and received an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role at the 80th Academy Awards. This renders Holbrook, at age 82, the oldest nominee in Academy Award history in the Best Supporting Actor category. On December 20, 2007, Holbrook was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his work in the film. He has also done a one-man show as Mark Twain. In late August 2007 through mid-September he starred as the narrator in the Hartford Stage production of Thornton Wilder's ''Our Town''.

Holbrook appeared with wife Dixie Carter in ''That Evening Sun'', filmed in East Tennessee in the summer of 2008. The film was produced by Dogwood Entertainment (a subsidiary of DoubleJay Creative) and is based on a short story by William Gay. ''That Evening Sun'' premiered in March 2009 at South By Southwest, where it received the Audience Award for Narrative Feature and a special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast. Joe Leydon of ''Variety'' hailed Hollbrook's performance in the film as a "career-highlight star turn as an irascible octogenarian farmer who will not go gentle into that good night." ''That Evening Sun'' also was screened at the 2009 Nashville Film Festival, where Holbrook was honored with a special Lifetime Achievement Award, and the film itself received another Audience Award. On April 22, 2010 Holbrook signed on to portray Katey Sagal's character's father on the FX original series Sons of Anarchy for a four-episode arc in their third season. He also had a multi-episode arc on ''The Event'', an American television series, airing on NBC in the 2010-2011 season.

Holbrook's latest film was ''Water for Elephants'' (2011).

Personal life[link]

Holbrook has been married three times, and has three children. He married Ruby Holbrook on September 22, 1945, and they had two children, Victoria Holbrook and David Holbrook. They divorced in 1965, and on December 28, 1966 he married Carol Eve Rossen. They had one child, Eve Holbrook, and they divorced on June 14, 1983.

He married Dixie Carter on May 27, 1984. Architect Hoyte Johnson of Atlanta redesigned Dixie's family home and created an environment that Hal and Dixie shared with family and friends. Hal has said that the home has the "feel" of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, and that there is no other place to which he feels so ideally suited. Holbrook and Carter remained married until her death on April 10, 2010.

Holbrook grew to love Dixie's home in McLemoresville, Tennessee, and continues to retreat there from the busy life on the road and in Hollywood. The local community responded by building the Dixie Theatre for Performing Arts in nearby Huntington, Tennessee, which features the Hal Holbrook Auditorium.

Filmography[link]

''The Group'' (1966)

''Wild in the Streets'' (1968)

''They Only Kill Their Masters'' (1972)

''Jonathan Livingston Seagull'' (1973) (voice)

''Magnum Force'' (1973)

''All the President's Men'' (1976)

''Midway'' (1976)

''Julia'' (1977)

''Rituals'' (1977)

''Capricorn One'' (1978)

''The Awakening Land'' (1978) (TV)

''The Fog'' (1979)

''When Hell Was in Session'' (1979) (TV)

''Murder by Natural Causes'' (1979) (TV)

''The Legend of the Golden Gun'' (1979) (TV)

''The Kidnapping of the President'' (1980)

''The Killing of Randy Webster'' (1981) (TV)

''Creepshow'' (1982)

''The Star Chamber'' (1983)

''Girls Night Out'' (1983)

''Designing Women'' (1985 - 1989)

''North and South Book I'' (1985) (TV)

''Dress Gray (TV miniseries)'' (1986) (TV)

''North and South Book II'' (1986) (TV)

''Wall Street'' (1987)

''The Unholy'' (1988)

''Fletch Lives'' (1989)

''Evening Shade'' (1990–1994) (TV Series)

''The Firm'' (1993)

''Innocent Victims'' (1996)

''Eye of God'' (1997)

''Cats Don't Dance'' (1997) (voice)

''Hercules'' (1997) (voice)

''Hush'' (1998)

''Walking to the Waterline'' (1998)

''The Bachelor'' (1999)

''Waking the Dead'' (2000)

''Men of Honor'' (2000)

''The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus '' (2000) (voice)

''The Majestic'' (2001)

''The West Wing'' (2001, 2002)

''The Seventh Day documentary about persecution of sabbath keepers by the church'' (2002)

''Country Music: The Spirit of America'' (2003, IMAX)

''Shade'' (2003)

''The Sopranos'' (2006)

''NCIS'' (2006)

''Into the Wild'' (2007)

''ER'' (2008)

''That Evening Sun'' (2009)

''Sons of Anarchy'' (2010)

''The Event'' (2010)

''Water for Elephants'' (2011)

''Lincoln'' (2012)

Awards[link]

Academy Awards

(2008) Nominated - Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role / ''Into the Wild''

Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards

(2008) Nominated - Best Supporting Actor / ''Into the Wild''

Chicago Film Critics Association Awards

(2007) Nominated - Best Supporting Actor / ''Into the Wild''

Online Film Critics Society Awards

(2008) Nominated - Best Supporting Actor / ''Into the Wild''

Screen Actors Guild Awards

(2008) Nominated - Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role / ''Into the Wild''

Primetime Emmy Awards

Outstanding Lead Actor - Miniseries or a Movie -

(1967) Nominated - ''Mark Twain Tonight!''(1971) Nominated - ''A Clear and Present Danger''(1973) Nominated - ''That Certain Summer''(1974) Won - ''Pueblo''(1976) Won - ''Sandburg's Lincoln''(1978) Nominated - ''The Awakening Land''(1969) Nominated - ''The Whole World is Watching''

Outstanding Lead Actor - Drama or Comedy Special

(1978) Nominated - ''Our Town''

Outstanding Lead Actor - Drama Series

(1971) Won - ''The Bold Ones: The Senator''

Outstanding Informational Series

(1988) Nominated - ''Portrait of America'' (segment: New York City)

Outstanding Performance in Informational Programing

(1989) Won - ''Portrait of America'' (segment: Alaska)

Actor of the Year (Retired category)

(1974) Won - ''Pueblo''

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Holbrook, Hal. (1959). ''Mark Twain Tonight! An Actor's Portrait''. New York: Ives Washburn.

Young, Jordan R. (1989). ''Acting Solo: The Art of One-Person Shows''. Beverly Hills: Past Times Publishing Co.

External links[link]

The Seventh Day, a 2002 5-DVD set documentary on the history of the Sabbath. Produced by LLT Productions.

2004 Story on Holbrook from ''NOW''

Biography and 2004 story about his return to Broadway from ''Playbill''

State of Mississippi Resolution

Category:1925 births Category:Actors from Cleveland, Ohio Category:American film actors Category:American impressionists (entertainers) Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:Denison University alumni Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Living people Category:National Humanities Medal recipients Category:People from Norfolk County, Massachusetts Category:Tony Award winners

da:Hal Holbrook de:Hal Holbrook es:Hal Holbrook fr:Hal Holbrook gl:Hal Holbrook it:Hal Holbrook he:האל הולברוק nl:Hal Holbrook ja:ハル・ホルブルック no:Hal Holbrook pl:Hal Holbrook ro:Harold Holbrook ru:Холбрук, Хэл sr:Хал Холбрук sh:Hal Holbrook fi:Hal Holbrook sv:Hal Holbrook tl:Hal Holbrook tr:Hal Holbrook

Dana John Gould (born August 24, 1964) is an American comedian and comedy writer born and raised in Hopedale, Massachusetts. His upbringing and his extended family lent themselves to his stand-up routine, which has been seen on HBO, Showtime, and Comedy Central, among other places.

Career[link]

After high school, he studied communications and theatre at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He eventually moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in comedy. It was there he, along with fellow comedian Alex Reid, founded the San Francisco Comedy Condo in 1986.

Gould wrote and performed on ''The Ben Stiller Show''; one such sketch features Gould as Otto, Cupid's twisted brother, whose arrows convince a young man to fall madly in love with an elderly woman. Another series of sketches features a heavily disguised Gould as Wilford Brimley advertising "Grady's Oats" (a parody of Brimley's Quaker Oats advertisements). In one, he speaks of his Uncle Ray's hobby of dressing in a pink taffeta gown and filling his panties with oatmeal; in another, he brandishes a revolver through the window at children. He also appeared in an episode of MADtv as Newt Gingrich and on one episode of Seinfeld as "Fragile" Franky Mirman, Jerry's childhood friend (aka "The Summer George"). He co-created and was executive producer on the MTV series Super Adventure Team. In addition Gould's stand up material was featured in Comedy Central's animated series Shorties Watchin' Shorties.

For seven years he wrote for ''The Simpsons'', one episode of which he provided the voice of Don Knotts as Barney Fife (an impression that originated in his standup routine). He left the show in late 2006 in order to focus on his own screenwriting, though he served as co-executive producer on seasons 14 through 18.

Gould had a featured cameo in the 2003 film ''Girls Will Be Girls'', in which he played a hit-and-run victim who admits to his alcohol problem after having a desperate one-night stand with aging C-list actress Evie Harris, the other driver in the car accident. He was also featured in the film ''The Aristocrats'', where, among other commentary, he presents an Amish version of the eponymous joke. His short films, ''Last Man On Earth'', ''Break On Through With J.F.K.'', ''A Night On Java Island'', and ''Soul Mates'' are also available for download on his site. Except for the latter, all feature Gould in acting roles. 2009 saw the release of his new stand up special, "Let Me Put My Thoughts In You" on Shout Factory.

Gould provided the voice for the title character in the U.S. versions of the ''Gex'' video game series and the UK version of the first game. Gould, with his frequent writing partner Rob Cohen, wrote the majority of the jokes for the games.

He was a regular contributor to the Adam Carolla radio show where he did impressions of Huell Howser. He appears occasionally on The Adam Carolla Show podcast. The first episode of Gould's own biweekly podcast, ''The Dana Gould Hour '', was made available on iTunes on January 31, 2012. Recurring guests include comedians like Eddie Pepitone, and each episode revolves around a singular theme (i.e. conspiracy theories or the apocalypse).

In 2010 he appeared in actual form on ''Family Guy'' episode, "Brian Writes a Bestseller".

Personal life[link]

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Sue Naegle, President of HBO Entertainment, and their three children. Each of his daughters was adopted from China.

Discography[link]

"Funhouse (Stand Up! Records)"

"Let Me Put My Thoughts In You (Shout! Factory)"

Filmography[link]

''The Simpsons'' episodes[link]

"Homer the Moe"

"Poppa's Got a Brand New Badge"

"C.E. D'oh"

"The President Wore Pearls"

"Pranksta Rap"

"Goo Goo Gai Pan" ''(under the name Lawrence Talbot)''

"Bart Has Two Mommies"

"I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

"Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson"

''Family Guy'' episodes[link]

"Brian Writes a Bestseller"

References [link]

External links[link]

Review of performance at Comix in New York, October 2008

interviewed on the July 26, 2010, episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast

Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:American television actors Category:American comedians Category:American television writers Category:University of Massachusetts Amherst alumni Category:People from Worcester County, Massachusetts Category:Actors from Massachusetts Category:Writers from Massachusetts

es:Dana Gould fr:Dana Gould

name	Thomas Edison
birth name	Thomas Alva Edison
birth date	February 11, 1847
birth place	Milan, Ohio, U.S.
death date	October 18, 1931
death place	West Orange, New Jersey, U.S.
occupation	Inventor, scientist, businessman
education	School dropout
spouse
religion	Deist
children	Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965)Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935)William Leslie Edison (1878–1937)Madeleine Edison (1888–1979)Charles Edison (1890–1969)Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992) | parents Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896)Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871)
relatives	Lewis Miller (father-in-law)
signature	Thomas Alva Edison Signature.svg
footnotes	}}

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison originated the concept and implementation of electric-power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Manhattan Island, New York.

Early life [link]

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871, born in Chenango County, New York). His father had to escape from Canada because he took part in the unsuccessful Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837. Edison reported being of Dutch ancestry.

In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him "addled". This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His mother taught him at home. Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's ''School of Natural Philosophy'' and The Cooper Union.

Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. Around the middle of his career, Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. In his later years, he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.

Edison's family moved to Port Huron, Michigan after the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854 and business declined; his life there was bittersweet. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income. He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident prohibited further work of the kind.

He obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the ''Grand Trunk Herald'', which he sold with his other papers.

Telegrapher[link]

Edison became a telegraph operator after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator. Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.

In 1866, at the age of 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. Edison requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter pre-occupation cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below. The next morning Edison was fired.

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home. Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker. His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646), which was granted on June 1, 1869.

Marriages and children [link]

On December 25, 1871, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell (1855-1884), whom he had met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children: Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965), nicknamed "Dot" Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. (1876–1935), nicknamed "Dash" William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, 1900.

Mary Edison died at age 29 on August 9, 1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain tumor or a morphine overdose. Doctors frequently prescribed morphine to women in those years to treat a variety of causes, and researchers believe that some of her symptoms sounded as if they were associated with morphine poisoning. On February 24, 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller (1866-1947) in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children together: Madeleine Edison (1888–1979), who married John Eyre Sloane. Charles Edison (1890–1969), who took over the company upon his father's death and who later was elected Governor of New Jersey. He also took charge of his father's experimental laboratories in West Orange.

Theodore Edison (1898–1992), (MIT Physics 1923), credited with more than 80 patents.

Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.

Beginning his career [link]

Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him notice was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey.

His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder, but had poor sound quality and the recordings could be played only a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter. This was one reason that Thomas Edison continued work on his own "Perfected Phonograph."

Menlo Park (1876–1881) [link]

Edison's major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was built with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. After his demonstration of the telegraph, Edison was not sure that his original plan to sell it for $4,000 to $5,000 was right, so he asked Western Union to make a bid. He was surprised to hear them offer $10,000, ($202,000 USD 2010) which he gratefully accepted.

The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success, and Menlo Park became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison was legally attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, began his duties as a laboratory assistant to Edison in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting, and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device. In 1880, he was appointed chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under General Manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Edison, Hammer was "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting".

Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for a 17-year period and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to a 14-year period. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented as describing the first device to record and reproduce sounds.

Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent lamps, including Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans. Others who developed early and commercially impractical incandescent electric lamps included Humphry Davy, James Bowman Lindsay, Moses G. Farmer, William E. Sawyer, Joseph Swan and Heinrich Göbel. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as an extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high electric current drawn, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially.

In 1878, Edison applied the term ''filament'' to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although the English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Swan developed an incandescent light with a long lasting filament at about the same time as Edison, as Swan's earlier bulbs lacked the high resistance needed to be an effective part of an electrical utility. Edison and his co-workers set about the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. In Britain, Joseph Swan had been able to obtain a patent on the incandescent lamp; though Edison had already been making successful lamps for some time, his patent application was incompletely prepared and failed.

Unable to raise the required capital in Britain because of this, Edison was forced to enter into a joint venture with Swan (known as Ediswan). Swan acknowledged that Edison had anticipated him, saying "Edison is entitled to more than I ... he has seen further into this subject, vastly than I, and foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his system".

By 1879, Edison had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application, and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

In just over a decade, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material". A newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels ... silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell ... cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores ..." and the list goes on.

Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quotation: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.

With Menlo Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.

Carbon telephone transmitter [link]

In 1877–78, Edison invented and developed the carbon microphone used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the 1980s. After protracted patent litigation, in 1892 a federal court ruled that Edison and not Emile Berliner was the inventor of the carbon microphone. The carbon microphone was also used in radio broadcasting and public address work through the 1920s.

Electric light [link]

Building on the contributions of other developers over the previous three quarters of a century, Edison made improvements to the idea of incandescent light, and entered the public consciousness as "the inventor" of the lightbulb, and a prime mover in developing the necessary infrastructure for electric power.

After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879; it lasted 13.5 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires".

Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways", it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered a carbonized bamboo filament that could last over 1,200 hours. The idea of using this particular raw material originated from Edison's recalling his examination of a few threads from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the present-day state of Wyoming, where he and other members of a scientific team had traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July 29, 1878, from the Continental Divide.

In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said: "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

Lewis Latimer joined the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884. Latimer had received a patent in January 1881 for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons", an improved method for the production of carbon filaments for lightbulbs. Latimer worked as an engineer, a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation on electric lights.

George Westinghouse's company bought Philip Diehl's competing induction lamp patent rights (1882) for $25,000, forcing the holders of the Edison patent to charge a more reasonable rate for the use of the Edison patent rights and lowering the price of the electric lamp.

On October 8, 1883, the US patent office ruled that Edison's patent was based on the work of William Sawyer and was therefore invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that Edison's electric-light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison's, he and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain.

Mahen Theatre in Brno (in what is now the Czech Republic) was the first public building in the world to use Edison's electric lamps, with the installation supervised by Edison's assistant in the invention of the lamp, Francis Jehl. In September 2010, a sculpture of three giant light bulbs was erected in Brno, in front of the theatre.

Electric power distribution [link]

Edison patented a system for electricity distribution in 1880, which was essential to capitalize on the invention of the electric lamp. On December 17, 1880, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company. The company established the first investor-owned electric utility in 1882 on Pearl Street Station, New York City. It was on September 4, 1882, that Edison switched on his Pearl Street generating station's electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.

Earlier in the year, in January 1882, he had switched on the first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps and several private dwellings within a short distance of the station. On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.

War of currents [link]

Edison's true success, like that of his friend Henry Ford, was in his ability to maximize profits through establishment of mass-production systems and intellectual property rights. George Westinghouse and Edison became adversaries because of Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution instead of the more easily transmitted alternating current (AC) system invented by Nikola Tesla and promoted by Westinghouse. Unlike DC, AC could be stepped up to very high voltages with transformers, sent over thinner and cheaper wires, and stepped down again at the destination for distribution to users.

In 1887, there were 121 Edison power stations in the United States delivering DC electricity to customers. When the limitations of DC were discussed by the public, Edison launched a propaganda campaign to convince people that AC was far too dangerous to use. The problem with DC was that the power plants could economically deliver DC electricity only to customers within about one and a half miles (about 2.4 km) from the generating station, so that it was suitable only for central business districts. When George Westinghouse suggested using high-voltage AC instead, as it could carry electricity hundreds of miles with marginal loss of power, Edison waged a "War of Currents" to prevent AC from being adopted.

The war against AC led him to become involved in the development and promotion of the electric chair (using AC) as an attempt to portray AC to have greater lethal potential than DC. Edison went on to carry out a brief but intense campaign to ban the use of AC or to limit the allowable voltage for safety purposes. As part of this campaign, Edison's employees publicly electrocuted animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC; alternating electric currents are slightly more dangerous in that frequencies near 60 Hz have a markedly greater potential for inducing fatal "cardiac fibrillation" than do direct currents. On one of the more notable occasions, in 1903, Edison's workers electrocuted Topsy the elephant at Luna Park, near Coney Island, after she had killed several men and her owners wanted her put to death. His company filmed the electrocution.

AC replaced DC in most instances of generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the efficiency of power distribution. Though widespread use of DC ultimately lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. Low-voltage DC distribution continued to be used in high-density downtown areas for many years but was eventually replaced by AC low-voltage network distribution in many of them.

DC had the advantage that large battery banks could maintain continuous power through brief interruptions of the electric supply from generators and the transmission system. Utilities such as Commonwealth Edison in Chicago had rotary converters or motor-generator sets, which could change DC to AC and AC to various frequencies in the early to mid-20th century. Utilities supplied rectifiers to convert the low voltage AC to DC for such DC loads as elevators, fans and pumps. There were still 1,600 DC customers in downtown New York City as of 2005, and service was finally discontinued only on November 14, 2007. Most subway systems are still powered by direct current.

Fluoroscopy [link]

Edison is credited with designing and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope, a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs. Until Edison discovered that calcium tungstate fluoroscopy screens produced brighter images than the barium platinocyanide screens originally used by Wilhelm Röntgen, the technology was capable of producing only very faint images.

The fundamental design of Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, although Edison himself abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally. Dally had made himself an enthusiastic human guinea pig for the fluoroscopy project and in the process been exposed to a poisonous dose of radiation. He later died of injuries related to the exposure. In 1903, a shaken Edison said "Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them."

Work relations [link]

Frank J. Sprague, a competent mathematician and former naval officer, was recruited by Edward H. Johnson and joined the Edison organization in 1883. One of Sprague's contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park was to expand Edison's mathematical methods. Despite the common belief that Edison did not use mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his electric lighting system including lamp resistance by an analysis of Ohm's Law, Joule's Law and economics.

Another of Edison's assistants was Nikola Tesla. Tesla claimed that Edison had promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in making improvements to his DC generation plants. Several months later, when Tesla had finished the work and asked to be paid, he said that Edison replied, "When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke."

Tesla immediately resigned. With Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the payment would have amounted to over 53 years' pay and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Another account states that Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week.

Although Tesla accepted an Edison Medal later in life, this and other negative events concerning Edison remained with him. The day after Edison died, the ''New York Times'' contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying:

One of Edison's famous quotations about his attempts to make the light globe suggest that perhaps Tesla was right about Edison's methods of working: "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."

When Edison was a very old man and close to death, he said, in looking back, that the biggest mistake he had made was in not respecting Tesla or his work.

There were 28 men recognized as Edison Pioneers.

Media inventions [link]

The key to Edison's fortunes was telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock ticker, the first electricity-based broadcast system. Edison patented the sound recording and reproducing phonograph in 1878. Edison was also granted a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph". He did the electromechanical design, while his employee W.K.L. Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope, or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891.

On August 9, 1892, Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph. In April 1896, Thomas Armat's Vitascope, manufactured by the Edison factory and marketed in Edison's name, was used to project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City. Later he exhibited motion pictures with voice soundtrack on cylinder recordings, mechanically synchronized with the film.

Officially the kinetoscope entered Europe when the rich American Businessman Irving T. Bush (1869–1948) bought from the Continental Commerce Company of Frank Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus a dozen machines. Bush placed from October 17, 1894, the first kinetoscopes in London. At the same time the French company Kinétoscope Edison Michel et Alexis Werner bought these machines for the market in France. In the last three months of 1894, The Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in Europe (i.e. the Netherlands and Italy). In Germany and in Austria-Hungary the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop Gesellschaft, founded by the Ludwig Stollwerck of the Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co of Cologne.

The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists.

On May 14, 1895, the Edison's Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. The businessman Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative in starting this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In 1898 he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France.

In 1901, he visited the Sudbury area in Ontario, Canada, as a mining prospector, and is credited with the original discovery of the Falconbridge ore body. His attempts to mine the ore body were not successful, however, and he abandoned his mining claim in 1903. A street in Falconbridge, as well as the Edison Building, which served as the head office of Falconbridge Mines, are named for him.

In 1902, agents of Thomas Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of ''A Trip to the Moon'' by Georges Méliès. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City. Méliès received no compensation. He was counting on taking the film to the US and recapture its huge cost by showing it throughout the country when he realized it had already been shown there by Edison. This effectively bankrupted Méliès.

Other exhibitors similarly routinely copied and exhibited each others' films. To better protect the copyrights on his films, Edison deposited prints of them on long strips of photographic paper with the U.S. copyright office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era.

Edison's favorite movie was ''The Birth of a Nation''. He thought that talkies had "spoiled everything" for him. "There isn't any good acting on the screen. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf." His favorite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.

In 1908, Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust). Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, which was founded in 1929.

West Orange and Fort Myers (1886–1931) [link]

Edison moved from Menlo Park after the death of Mary Stilwell and purchased a home known as "Glenmont" in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. In 1885, Thomas Edison bought property in Fort Myers, Florida, and built what was later called Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat. Edison and his wife Mina spent many winters in Fort Myers where they recreated and Edison tried to find a domestic source of natural rubber.

Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Edison at his winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida. Edison even contributed technology to the automobile. They were friends until Edison's death.

In 1928, Edison joined the Fort Myers Civitan Club. He believed strongly in the organization, writing that "The Civitan Club is doing things—big things—for the community, state, and nation, and I certainly consider it an honor to be numbered in its ranks." He was an active member in the club until his death, sometimes bringing Henry Ford to the club's meetings.

The final years[link]

Edison was active in business right up to the end. Just months before his death in 1931, the Lackawanna Railroad implemented electric trains in suburban service from Hoboken to Gladstone, Montclair and Dover in New Jersey. Transmission was by means of an overhead catenary system, with the entire project under Edison's guidance. To the surprise of many, he was at the throttle of the very first MU (Multiple-Unit) train to depart Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, driving the train all the way to Dover.

As another tribute to his lasting legacy, the same fleet of cars Edison deployed on the Lackawanna in 1931 served commuters until their retirement in 1984, when some of them were purchased by the Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts. A special plaque commemorating the joint achievement of both the railway and Edison can be seen today in the waiting room of Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, presently operated by New Jersey Transit.

Edison was said to have been influenced by a popular fad diet in his last few years; "the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every three hours". He is reported to have believed this diet would restore his health. However, this tale is doubtful. In 1930, the year before Edison died, Mina said in an interview about him, "correct eating is one of his greatest hobbies." She also said that during one of his periodic "great scientific adventures", Edison would be up at 7:00, have breakfast at 8:00, and be rarely home for lunch or dinner, implying that he continued to have all three.

Edison became the owner of his Milan, Ohio, birthplace in 1906. On his last visit, in 1923, he was shocked to find his old home still lit by lamps and candles.

Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont" in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina. He is buried behind the home.

Edison's last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventor's room shortly after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask was also made.

Mina died in 1947.

Views on politics, religion and metaphysics [link]

Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker". Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's ''The Age of Reason''. Edison defended Paine's "scientific deism", saying, "He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity." In an October 2, 1910, interview in the ''New York Times Magazine,'' Edison stated:

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.

Edison was called an atheist for those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter: "You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made."

Nonviolence was key to Edison's moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." Edison's philosophy of nonviolence extended to animals as well, about which he stated: "Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages." However, he is also notorious for having electrocuted a number of dogs in 1888, both by direct and alternating current, in an attempt to argue that the former (which he had a vested business interest in promoting) was safer than the latter (favored by his rival George Westinghouse).

Edison's success in promoting direct current as less lethal also led to alternating current being used in the electric chair adopted by New York in 1889 as a supposedly humane execution method. Because Westinghouse was angered by the decision, he funded Eighth Amendment-based appeals for inmates set to die in the electric chair, ultimately resulting in Edison providing the generators which powered early electrocutions and testifying successfully on behalf of the state that electrocution was a painless method of execution.

Tributes [link]

Places and people named for Edison[link]

Several places have been named after Edison, most notably the town of Edison, New Jersey. Thomas Edison State College, a nationally known college for adult learners, is in Trenton, New Jersey. Two community colleges are named for him: Edison State College in Fort Myers, Florida, and Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio. There are numerous high schools named after Edison; see Edison High School.

In 1883, the City Hotel in Sunbury, Pennsylvania was the first building to be lit with Edison's three-wire system. The hotel was renamed The Hotel Edison upon Edison's return to the City on 1922.

Edison was on hand to turn on the lights at the Hotel Edison in New York City when it opened in 1931.

Three bridges around the United States have been named in his honor (see Edison Bridge).

In space, his name is commemorated in asteroid 742 Edisona.

The Russian composer Edison Denisov, whose father was a radio-physicist, was named after the inventor.

Museums and memorials[link]

In West Orange, New Jersey, the 13.5 acre (5.5 ha) Glenmont estate is maintained and operated by the National Park Service as the Edison National Historic Site. The Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Museum is in the town of Edison, New Jersey. In Beaumont, Texas, there is an Edison Museum, though Edison never visited there.

The Port Huron Museum, in Port Huron, Michigan, restored the original depot that Thomas Edison worked out of as a young newsbutcher. The depot has been named the Thomas Edison Depot Museum. The town has many Edison historical landmarks, including the graves of Edison's parents, and a monument along the St. Clair River. Edison's influence can be seen throughout this city of 32,000.

In Detroit, the Edison Memorial Fountain in Grand Circus Park was created to honor his achievements. The limestone fountain was dedicated October 21, 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the lightbulb. On the same night, The Edison Institute was dedicated in nearby Dearborn.

In early 2010, Edison was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.

Companies bearing Edison's name [link]

Edison General Electric, merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric

Commonwealth Edison, now part of Exelon

Consolidated Edison

Edison International

* Southern California Edison

* Edison Mission Energy

* Edison Capital

Detroit Edison, a unit of DTE Energy

Edison Sault Electric Company, a unit of Wisconsin Energy Corporation

FirstEnergy

* Metropolitan Edison

* Ohio Edison

* Toledo Edison

Edison S.p.A., a unit of Italenergia

Boston Edison, a unit of NSTAR, formerly known as the Edison Electric Illuminating Company

WEEI radio station in Boston, established by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company (hence the call letters)

Trade association the Edison Electric Institute, a lobbying and research group for investor-owned utilities in the United States

Edison Ore-Milling Company

Edison Portland Cement Company

Awards named in honor of Edison[link]

The Edison Medal was created on February 11, 1904, by a group of Edison's friends and associates. Four years later the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), later IEEE, entered into an agreement with the group to present the medal as its highest award. The first medal was presented in 1909 to Elihu Thomson and, in a twist of fate, was awarded to Nikola Tesla in 1917. It is the oldest award in the area of electrical and electronics engineering, and is presented annually "for a career of meritorious achievement in electrical science, electrical engineering or the electrical arts."

In the Netherlands, the major music awards are named the Edison Award after him.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers concedes the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award to individual patents since 2000.

Honors and awards given to Edison[link]

The President of the Third French Republic, Jules Grévy, on the recommendation of his Minister of Foreign Affairs Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire and with the presentations of the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Louis Cochery, designated Edison with the ''distinction'' of an'' 'Officer of the Legion of Honour' ''(Légion d'honneur) by decree on November 10, 1881; He also named a Chevalier in 1879, and a Commander in 1889.

In 1887, Edison won the Matteucci Medal. In 1890, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Philadelphia City Council named Edison the recipient of the John Scott Medal in 1889.

In 1899, Edison was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal of The Franklin Institute.

He was named an ''Honorable Consulting Engineer'' at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World's fair in 1904.

In 1908, Edison received the American Association of Engineering Societies John Fritz Medal.

Edison was awarded Franklin Medal of The Franklin Institute in 1915 for discoveries contributing to the foundation of industries and the well-being of the human race.

The United States Navy department awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920.

The American Institute of Electrical Engineers created the Edison Medal in 1923 and he was its first recipient.

In 1927, he was granted membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

On May 29, 1928, Edison received the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 1983, the United States Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law 97—198), designated February 11, Edison's birthday, as National Inventor's Day.

Edison was ranked thirty-fifth on Michael H. Hart's 1978 book ''The 100'', a list of the most influential figures in history. ''Life'' magazine (USA), in a special double issue in 1997, placed Edison first in the list of the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years", noting that the light bulb he promoted "lit up the world". In the 2005 television series ''The Greatest American'', he was voted by viewers as the fifteenth-greatest.

In 2008, Edison was inducted in the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

In 2010, Edison was honored with a Technical Grammy Award.

In 2011, Edison was inducted into the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, and named a Great Floridian by the Florida Governor and Cabinet.

On November 6, 1915, ''The New York Times'' announced that both Edison and Tesla were to jointly receive the 1915 Nobel Prize but it did not occur. The details of what happened are not known but Tesla who had once worked for Edison quit when he was promised a large bonus for solving a problem and then after being successful was told the promise was a joke. Telsa once said that if Edison had to find a needle in a haystack he would take apart the haystack one straw at a time. The Prize was awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays".

Other items named after Edison[link]

The United States Navy named the USS ''Edison'' (DD-439), a Gleaves class destroyer, in his honor in 1940. The ship was decommissioned a few months after the end of World War II. In 1962, the Navy commissioned USS ''Thomas A. Edison'' (SSBN-610), a fleet ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine.

Decommissioned on December 1, 1983, ''Thomas A. Edison'' was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on April 30, 1986. She went through the Navy's Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program at Bremerton, Washington, beginning on October 1, 1996. When she finished the program on December 1, 1997, she ceased to exist as a complete ship and was listed as scrapped.

In popular culture[link]

Thomas Edison has appeared in popular culture as a character in novels, films, comics and video games. His prolific inventing helped make him an icon and he has made appearances in popular culture during his lifetime down to the present day. His history with Nikola Tesla has also provided dramatic tension and is a theme returned to numerous times.

On February 11, 2011, on Thomas Edison's 164th birthday, Google's homepage featured an animated Google Doodle commemorating his many inventions. When the cursor was hovered over the doodle, a series of mechanisms seemed to move, causing a lightbulb to glow.

Novel mentions [link]

In Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel, Thomas Edison is introduced as "The Electrical Wizard", a very handy and intellectual person. In his lifetime he held many different jobs and created many patents and inventions.

See also [link]

Animated Hero Classics – Animated DVD biography series of historical figures, including Thomas Edison

John I. Beggs

List of Edison patents

List of people on stamps of Ireland

Thomas Alva Edison Birthplace

Thomas E. Murray

Thomas Edison National Historical Park

Phonomotor

Joseph Swan

Edison Pioneers

References [link]

Bibliography [link]

External links [link]

;Locations

Menlo Park Museum and Edison Memorial Tower

Thomas Edison National Historical Park (National Park Service)

Edison exhibit and Menlo Park Laboratory at Henry Ford Museum

Edison Museum

Edison Depot Museum

Edison Birthplace Museum

Thomas Edison House

;Information and media

The Diary of Thomas Edison

Edison's patent application for the light bulb at the National Archives.

Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point – Wired Magazine article about Edison's "macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC."

''The Invention Factory: Thomas Edison's Laboratories''

Rutgers: Edison Papers

Edisonian Museum Antique Electrics

"Edison's Miracle of Light"

Edison Innovation Foundation – Non-profit foundation supporting the legacy of Thomas Edison.

The Illustrious Vagabonds

"The World's Greatest Inventor", October 1931, Popular Mechanics detailed, illustrated article

14 minutes "instructional" film with fictional elements The boyhood of Thomas Edison from 1964, produced by Coronet, published by ''archive.org''

''Booknotes'' interview with Neil Baldwin on ''Edison: Inventing the Century'', March 19, 1995.

''Booknotes'' interview with Jill Jonnes on ''Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World'', October 26, 2003.

}}

Category:1847 births Category:1931 deaths Category:People from Milan, Ohio Category:People from Fort Myers, Florida Category:American businesspeople Category:American inventors Category:American people of Canadian descent Category:American people of Dutch descent Category:American people of English descent Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:American scientists Category:Articles containing video clips Category:Businesspeople from Ohio Category:Cinema pioneers Category:Congressional Gold Medal recipients Category:Deaf people Category:Edison family Category:Deists Category:Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Category:National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees Category:Officiers of the Légion d'honneur Category:People associated with electricity Category:People of United Empire Loyalist descent Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Service Medal (United States) Category:Telegraphy Category:Great Floridians

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name	Jack Black
background	solo_singer
birth name	Thomas Jacob Black
alias	Jables, JB
birth date	August 28, 1969
birth place	Santa Monica, California, U.S.
instrument	Vocals, guitar, percussion, keyboard
genre	Rock, comedy rock, hard rock, heavy metal, acoustic rock
occupation	Musician, songwriter, actor, comedian
years active	1982–present
label	Epic, Sony BMG
associated acts	Tenacious D, Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Probot, Foo Fighters, Meat Loaf, Ronnie James Dio
website	www.tenaciousd.com
notable instruments	}}

Thomas Jacob "Jack" Black (born August 28, 1969) is an American comedian, actor and musician. He makes up one half of the comedy and satirical rock duo Tenacious D. The group has three albums as well as a television series and a film. His acting career is extensive, starring primarily as bumbling, cocky, but internally self-conscious outsiders in comedy films. He was a member of the Frat Pack, a group of comedians who have appeared together in several Hollywood films, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe award. He has also won an MTV Movie Award, and a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award as well as hosting the 2006 and 2008 Kids Choice Awards.

Early life[link]

Black was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of two satellite engineers, Judith (née Cohen), who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and Thomas William Black. His mother is Jewish and his father converted to Judaism (Black attended Hebrew school). On ''The Tonight Show'', he said his surname may have come from the occupational name Blacksmith. Black's parents divorced when he was 10; Black moved to Culver City with his father and frequently visited his mother’s home. As a child, Black appeared in a commercial for the Activision game ''Pitfall!'' in 1982, which was later shown during an appearance on ''Jimmy Kimmel Live'' and again on ''The Tonight Show with Conan O' Brien''. When Black entered high school, his parents enrolled him at the Poseidon School, a private secondary school engineered specifically for students struggling in the traditional school system. Black also attended the Crossroads School, where he excelled in drama. He later attended UCLA but dropped out during his sophomore year to pursue a career in entertainment, at which point his father discontinued his financial support. Fellow UCLA alumnus Tim Robbins later cast Black in ''Bob Roberts''. He also had recurring roles on the HBO sketch comedy series ''Mr. Show''.

Career[link]

Acting career[link]

Black's acting career began with prime time television. He played roles on shows including ''Life Goes On'', ''Northern Exposure'', ''Mr. Show'', ''Picket Fences'', and ''The X-Files''. Black appeared in the unaired TV pilot ''Heat Vision and Jack'', directed by Ben Stiller, in which he played an ex-astronaut pursued by actor Ron Silver. He was accompanied by his friend who had merged with a motorcycle, voiced by Owen Wilson.

Black later took on small roles in ''Airborne'', ''Demolition Man'', ''Waterworld'', ''The Fan'', ''Mars Attacks!'', Tim Robbins' ''Dead Man Walking'', and others. He had a small role in ''True Romance'' as a security guard, but the scene was deleted. In 2000, he appeared in ''High Fidelity'' as a wild employee in John Cusack's record store, a role Black considers his breakout.

His career soon led to leading roles in films such as ''Shallow Hal'', ''Nacho Libre'', ''Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny'', ''Year One'' and ''Gulliver's Travels''. He received particular praise for his starring role in the well-received ''School of Rock'', earning critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor - Musical Or Comedy. In a rare move, he starred in a dramatic role as the obsessed filmmaker Carl Denham in Peter Jackson's ''2005 remake of King Kong'', a performance he based on Orson Welles. He voiced the title role in ''Kung Fu Panda'', which grossed $20.3 million on its opening day, June 6, 2008, and ''Kung Fu Panda 2''; it is a role he considers his favourite, with a performance enhanced with the tutoring of co-star and two time Academy Award winner, Dustin Hoffman. His next film, ''The Big Year'', a competitive birdwatching comedy co-starring Owen Wilson, Steve Martin, and JoBeth Williams, was released in October 2011. He is referred to in the media as a member of the Frat Pack, a group of comedy actors who frequently work together, which also includes Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Steve Carell.

He guest-starred on ''The Office'' along with Cloris Leachman, Jessica Alba, and Steve Carell in a movie within the show. He also guest-starred in iCarly, in the episode ''iStart a Fan War''. Black has appeared numerous times on the "untelevised TV network" short film festival Channel101, starring in the shows ''Computerman'', ''Timebelt'', and ''Laserfart''. He also provided an introduction for the unaired sketch comedy ''Awesometown'', donning a Colonial-era military uniform. In the introduction, he claims to be George Washington (and takes credit for the accomplishments of other American Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln). Black also guest starred in the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" show ''Tom Goes to the Mayor'', as a bear-trap store owner.

Black hosted the 2006 ''Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards'' on April 1, 2006 and hosted it again March 29, 2008, and April 2, 2011. He also appeared on the MTV video music awards on August 31, 2006. Black has made five appearances on ''Saturday Night Live'': three times as a host, once as a musical guest (with Kyle Gass as Tenacious D), and another appearance with Tenacious D, not as a host or musical guest. He produced and appeared on VH1's Internet video show ''Acceptable.TV''.

Black voice acted for ''The Simpsons'' episode "Husbands and Knives", which aired November 18, 2007, voicing the friendly owner of the rival comic book store, Milo. Black took part in the ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'' celebrity edition along with Denis Leary, Jimmy Kimmel and others and was handed the prize of US$125,000 in October 2001. On December 14, Jack Black hosted the 2008 Spike Video Game Awards. He provided the voice of the main character, roadie Eddie Riggs, in the heavy metal-themed action-adventure video game, ''Brütal Legend''. In 2009, at the Spike Video Game Awards, he earned the Best Voice award for the voice of Eddie Riggs in ''Brütal Legend''. In April 2009, Black also starred in an episode of the children's show "Yo Gabba Gabba!" on Nick Jr. vocalized funny kid songs such as "It's Not Fun to Get Lost", "Friends" and "The Goodbye Song". He was also voiced as Po on Kung Fu Panda.

Music career[link]

Black, also known as JB or Jables, is the lead singer for the rock comedy band Tenacious D. Along with Kyle Gass, they have released three albums, a self-titled debut, the follow-up, ''The Pick of Destiny'', and ''Rize of the Fenix''. One of their songs "The Metal", from their album "The Pick of Destiny" was used in the music video games "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" and "Brütal Legend". "Rock Your Socks" from the album "Tenacious D" was played in the music videogame "Rock Band Unplugged", and "Master Exploder" from "The Pick Of Destiny" went on to be used in music video games "Guitar Hero Van Halen" and "''Rock Band 2''", along with their song "Tribute" from "Tenacious D". "Master Exploder" and "The Metal" featured in the film ''Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny''. The film, directed by Tenacious D veteran Liam Lynch, features recurring characters such as Lee the superfan and Sasquatch. Tim Robbins cameos as does Dave Grohl as Satan. Ben Stiller also makes an appearance as a worker at Guitar Center, and also another appearance in the music video for "Tribute".

Tenacious D helped the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation to raise awareness and funds in San Diego on June 16, 2007. Tenacious D can be seen performing in the Pauly Shore film ''Bio-Dome'' where the duo is performing its song "The Five Needs" at a "Save the Environment" party. Black was also a guest star on an episode of ''The Ellen Degeneres Show'' entitled "Ellen the Musical", alongside Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth and teenage singer-actress Olivia Olson. On the show, besides singing, he discussed his then-upcoming film ''Nacho Libre'' with the host.

Black has also appeared on Dave Grohl's ''Probot'' album, providing vocals for the hidden song "I Am The Warlock", and Lynch's ''Fake Songs'' album, providing vocals for the song "Rock and Roll Whore". Black performed a cover of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" in the last sequence of ''High Fidelity''. He lent his musical abilities to the Queens of the Stone Age song "Burn the Witch" with rhythmic stomps and claps, some performed with his eyes closed. He also provided vocals for The Lonely Island's track "Sax Man" from the album ''Incredibad''.

Black has also recorded a duet on Meat Loaf's new CD Hang Cool Teddy Bear. The song is called Like a Rose. Meat Loaf has also played Black's father in the Pick of Destiny movie. Hang Cool Teddy Bear also features Hugh Laurie, Kara Dioguardi, Brian May, Steve Vai & Patti Russo, produced by Rob Cavallo.

Black has appeared in music videos of Beck "Sexx Laws"; Foo Fighters "Learn To Fly", "Low", and "The One"; The Eagles of Death Metal's "I Want You So Hard (Boy's Bad News)"; Sum 41's "Things I Want"; Dio's "Push"; and Weezer's "Photograph." In October 2010, Tenacious D appeared at BlizzCon 2010, a convention hosted by the game designers, Blizzard Entertainment.

Personal life[link]

In January 2006, Black became engaged to Tanya Haden. She is the daughter of the jazz double bassist Charlie Haden, and sister of violinist and singer Petra Haden. Haden herself is an accomplished cellist. Both attended Crossroads school and met again 15 years after graduating, at a friend's birthday party. Black proposed marriage around Christmas 2005. They married on March 14, 2006, in Big Sur, California. Their son, Samuel Jason "Sammy" Black, was born on June 10, 2006, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. On May 23, 2008, Black and his wife had their second son, Thomas David Black. Black is an atheist.

Filmography[link]

! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes
1992	''Bob Roberts''	Roger Davis
		Augie
	Wasteland Scrap
1994	''The NeverEnding Story III''	Slip, Leader of the Nasties
		DJ at Party
	Craig Poncelet
''Waterworld''	Pilot
	''Bio-Dome''	Tenacious D
''The Cable Guy''	Rick
	Broadcast Technician
''Mars Attacks!''	Billy Glenn Norris
		Devlin
''Crossworlds''	Steve
	Ian Lamont
		Fiedler
''I Still Know What You Did Last Summer''	Titus Telesco	(uncredited)
''Johnny Skidmarks''	Jerry
	''Cradle Will Rock''	Sid
''Jesus' Son''	Georgie
	Fisherman	uncredited
2000		Barry	Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Supporting Actor – Comedy/RomanceNominated – American Comedy Award for Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion PictureNominated – Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting ActorNominated – MTV Movie Award for Best Music MomentNominated – MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Male PerformanceNominated – Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actor
	''Frank's Book''	Performance Hipster	Short Film
''Saving Silverman''	J.D. McNugent
''Shallow Hal''	Hal Larson	Nominated – Teen Choice Award for Film- Choice Actor, Comedy
		Zeke	Voice only
	Lance Brumder
''Run Ronnie Run''	Lead Chimney Sweep	DVD Exclusive Award for Best Original Song in a DVD Premiere
	''Melvin Goes to Dinner''	Mental Patient	uncreditedPhoenix Film Festival Award for Best Ensemble ActingNominated – DVD Exclusive Award for Best Supporting Actor in a DVD Premiere
''School of Rock''	Dewey Finn
	''Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy''	Motorcyclist	uncredited (cameo)
	Nick Vanderpark	Nominated – People's Choice Award for Favorite Funny Male Star
''Laser Fart''	The Elegant Hunter	Video
''Shark Tale''	Lenny	Voice only
		Carl Denham	Nominated – Teen Choice Award for Movies – Choice Sleazebag
''Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie''	Carl Denham	voiceVideo gameSpike Video Game Award – Best Leading Male Performance
	''Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties''	Orson, Booker and Wolf
''The Holiday''	Miles
''Nacho Libre''	Nacho	Nominated – Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Male Movie StarNominated – MTV Movie Award for Best FightNominated – Teen Choice Award for Movies – Choice Actor: ComedyNominated – Teen Choice Award for Movies – Choice ChemistryNominated – Teen Choice Award for Movie – Choice Rumble
''Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny''	Jack "Jables" Black (JB)
	''Margot at the Wedding''	Malcolm	Nominated – Gotham Award for Best Ensemble Cast
''Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story''	Paul McCartney	Uncredited
	''Be Kind Rewind''	Jerry Gerber
''Kung Fu Panda''		Voice onlyKids' Choice Award for Favorite Voice from an Animated MovieNominated – Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Animated Character in a Motion Picture
''The Secrets of the Furious Five''		VoiceShort film
	Jesus Christ	Viral videoshort
''Tropic Thunder''	Jeff "Fats" Portnoy	Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cast
''Tropic Thunder: Rain of Madness''	Jeff "Fats" Portnoy	Video
	''Brütal Legend''	Eddie Riggs	VoiceVideo gameSpike Video Game Award – Best Voice
	Zed
2010		Gulliver	Nominated – Razzie Award for Worst ActorNominated – Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards for Favorite Male Movie Star
	''Kung Fu Panda 2''		Voice onlyNominated – Teen Choice Awards for Choice Movie Animated VoiceNominated – People's Choice Award for Favorite Animation Movie Voice
	Bernie Tiede	Premiered on June 16, 2011 at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
''The Big Year''	Brad Harris
	Himself
		Matt Prior	Filming
''Frank or Francis''	Francis	pre-production

Television work[link]

! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes
1991	''Our Shining Moments''	Teenage Boy	TV Movie
1993	''The Golden Palace''	Taxi Driver	episode "Seems Like Old Times: Part 2"
1993		Skinhead	episode "Incident on Main"
1993	''Marked for Murder''	Car Thief	television film
1993	''Northern Exposure''	Kevin Wilkins	episode "A River Doesn't Run Through It"
1994		Private	television film
1994	''The Innocent''	Marty Prago	television film
1995		Tommy	episode "A Night at the Oprah"
1995		Man	episode "Brenda's Secret"
1995	''The Single Guy''	Randy	episode "Sister"
1995	''Touched by an Angel''	Monte	episode "Angels on the Air"
1995	''The X-Files''	Bart 'Zero' Liqouri	episode "D.P.O."
1995–1996	''Mr. Show with Bob and David''	Various	4 episodes
1995–1996	''Picket Fences''	Curtis Williams	2 episodes
1997–2000		JB	6
1999	''Heat Vision and Jack''	Jack	television pilot
2001	''Space Ghost Coast to Coast''	Himself	episode "Sweet for Brak"
2002	''2002 MTV Movie Awards''	Host
2002	''The Andy Dick Show''	J.D.	episode "Flipped"
2002	''Clone High''	Pusher/Larry Hardcore	episode "Raisin The Stakes"
2002	''Crank Yankers''	Tenacious D	episode "#1.3"
2002	''Jack Black: Spider-Man''	Spider-Man	MTV Movie Awards segment
2002	''Lord of the Piercing''	Jack the Elf	MTV Movie Awards segment''Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition'' easter egg
2002	''MADtv''	Tenacious D	episode "#7.22"
2002	''Panic Room with Will Ferrell''	Himself	MTV Movie Awards segment
2003	''Player$''	Tenacious D	episode "Tenacious D a la Mode"
2003	''Will & Grace''	Dr. Isaac Hershberg	episode "Nice in White Satin"
2003–2004		Computerman	6 episodes
2003–2004	''Time Belt''	Computerman	2 episodes
2004	''Cracking Up''	Brian	episode "Scared Straight"
2004	''Tom Goes to the Mayor''	Trapper JB	episode "Bear Traps"
2005	''Awesometown''	George Washington	television film
2006	''2006 Kids' Choice Awards''	Himself	Host
2007	''The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show''	Jables	episode "Break-Up"
2007	''The Simpsons''	Milo	episode "Husbands and Knives"
2008	''Sesame Street''	Himself	episode "The Golden Triangle Of Destiny"
2008	''2008 Kids' Choice Awards''	Himself	Host
2009		Sam	episode "Stress Relief"
2009	''Yo Gabba Gabba''	Himself	episode "New Friends"
2010		Buddy	episode "Investigative Journalism"
2010	''iCarly''	Aspartamay	episode ''iStart a Fanwar''
2010–2011	''Take Two with Phineas and Ferb''	Himself	2 episodes, "Jack Black" and "Neil Patrick Harris"
2010	"Space Ghost Coast to Coast special gag ad episode"	Himself (cameo)
2011	''Fish Hooks''	Chief	episode "Labor Day"
2011	''Big Time Rush''	Cupid	episode "Big Time Crush"
2011	''2011 Kids' Choice Awards''	Himself	Host, This will be the third time Jack Black has hosted the Kids Choice Awards, the last times being in 2008 and 2006.
2011	''American Idol''	Himself	Performed 'Fat Bottomed Girls' with American Idol contestant Casey Abrams.

References[link]

External links[link]

Margot at the Wedding

Suicide Girls interview

Jack Black in King Kong

The Tao of Jack Black, Steve Ramos, ''Cincinnati CityBeat'', October 8, 2003

Category:1969 births Category:Living people Category:People from Santa Monica, California Category:American atheists Category:American comedians Category:American comedy musicians Category:American film actors Category:American male singers Category:American voice actors Category:American rock guitarists Category:American rock singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:American television actors Category:American television writers Category:Actors from California Category:Jewish actors Category:Jewish American musicians Category:Jewish atheists Category:Musicians from California Category:Tenacious D Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni

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