Thomas Edison House is a historic house located in the Butchertown neighborhood of

Louisville, Kentucky Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border ...

. The house is a shotgun duplex built around 1850.

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventi ...

took up residence in the same neighborhood, possibly even at this location, a part of the time he lived in Louisville from 1866 to 1867. The house features a museum that honors Edison and his inventions.

Edison's time in Louisville

In 1866, at age 19, Thomas Edison, a skilled

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

er, came to Louisville to work for

Western Union The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company cha ...

, which at that time had an office on the corner of Main and Second Streets. In August 1866, Edison left briefly, intending to take a trip to

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

but was turned back at

New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans

because the waterway was shut down. So, he returned to work in Louisville and found lodging in a shotgun duplex on East Washington Street in what is now Butchertown. In 1867, while working the night shift, Edison, already the experimenter, was working with a battery when he spilled

sulfuric acid Sulfuric acid (American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphuric acid ( Commonwealth spelling), known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is a mineral acid composed of the elements sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen, with the molecular fo ...

onto the floor and his boss' desk on the floor below. The next day, he was fired, and left town for good. Sixteen years later, in 1883, one of Edison's new inventions, the

incandescent light bulb An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb with a vacuum or inert gas to protect the filament from oxi ...

, was demonstrated in the largest installation to date in Louisville at the

Southern Exposition The Southern Exposition was a five-year series of world's fairs held in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, from 1883 to 1887 in what is now Louisville's Old Louisville neighborhood. The exposition, held for 100 days each year on immediately south ...

References

19th-century buildings and structures in Louisville, Kentucky Houses in Louisville, Kentucky Historic house museums in Kentucky Edison, Thomas Museums in Louisville, Kentucky Houses completed in 1850 1850 establishments in Kentucky

House A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air cond ...

{{Louisville-struct-stub

Edison's time in Louisville

See also

References