Thomas Edison

Thomas Paine – June 8, 1809 was an English-American author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Born in... Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense , the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis , a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man , in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics.
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Edward Goodrich Acheson was an American chemist. Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, he was the inventor of the Acheson process, which is still used... to make Silicon carbide and later a manufacturer of carborundum and graphite. Thomas Edison put him to work on September 12, 1880 at his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory under John Kruesi. Acheson experimented on making a conducting carbon that Edison could use in his electric light bulbs. Acheson attended the Bellefonte Academy for three years, 1870-72; this being the totality of his formal education. Acheson began his career as a surveying assistant for the Pittsburgh Southern Railroad. In 1884, Acheson left Edison and became supervisor at a plant competing to manufacture electric lamps. He began working on the development of methods to produce artificial diamond in an electric furnace. After heating a mixture of clay and coke in an iron bowl with a carbon arc light he found shiny, hexagonal crystals attached to the carbon electrode. He called it carborundum.
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