Thomas Alva Edison
Inventor and entrepreneur
American inventor who made the incandescent lamp practical and built electrical networks to power it.
Thomas Edison ran a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and his team developed the phonograph in 1877 and a durable incandescent lamp with a carbon filament in 1879.
He understood that the lamp needed a whole system: generators, wiring, meters and lampholders. The thread of his lampholder, the Edison screw, is still in use.