Entrance to Glenmont (West Orange, New Jersey) features the Grand Staircase.
The Edison Main Dining Room showing Christmas tree in background.
Ten foot Christmas tree is displayed in Edison Den.
Gifts for the Edison children, provided by F.A.O. Schwartz.
Peeking over the decorated fireplace mantle into the Edison Bedroom.
Hands down….chemistry was Thomas Edison’s favorite subject. So enamored with its seemingly magical processes, he once said….“I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator.” Were he here today to see what is being done with chemistry, especially reverse osmosis and its application to desalination, Edison would be very happy indeed.
We think nothing of it every day as we routinely open the sink faucet and draw a glass of water. It is just another aspect of our high standard of living. However, the availability of clean, fresh drinking water is a problem for over one billion people on our planet, a serious impediment to economic development. Sadly in Africa alone, over 50,000 people a year die because they ingested contaminated water.
GE engineers are helping to remedy this problem and have implemented a high-tech desalination plant in Algeria. Using reverse osmosis, a technology stemming directly from GE’s pioneering work in the 1950’s with membrane based water purification technologies, the Hamma Desalination Plant is completely functional, providing millions of gallons of clean, fresh water. Take a look at the recently operational GE Hamma Desalination Plant below, a 53 million gallon per day facility, and enjoy the short video about GE’s work. GE chose reverse osmosis technology because it is energy, cost, and space efficient compared to other desalination methods.
The technological magic of reverse osmosis occurs along the length and cross-section of the long, white tubes pictured here below. This is a typical reverse osmosis stage in a desalination plant. After the salt water enters the tubes, high pressures are applied to it. This forces the fresh water through openings in a special membrane filter that inhibits the passage of dissolved salt and other minerals in the raw sea water—so only fresh water is collected on the other side. The clean water flows out of the center of each tube assembly and is then collected and stored. [see Editor’s Deep Dive below]
The central electric generating stations and distribution systems originally envisioned by Thomas Edison in the 1880s is what today provides the large amounts of electricity needed to operate desalination plants. Now as the world looks toward natural energy sources like the sun and wind, we will no doubt see desalination plants powered by solar panels and maybe even land and offshore wind turbines. Clean water, courtesy of the sun.
Speaking of the sun, an MIT team just announced a design [below] for a solar-powered reverse osmosis desalination system that could be rapidly deployed in crisis situations to produce drinking water; or used in small scale applications like farms, villages and remote hamlets in developing countries.
A prototype built by the Departments of Mechanical and Aeronautics and Astronautics can produce 80 gallons of water a day in a variety of weather conditions. A larger version is estimated to be able to provide about 1,000 gallons of water per day. The MIT team envisions such units delivered in quantity via large transport planes.
Tom Edison would like all this innovation a great deal. He always felt the sun’s power should be tapped; and he believed that…. way back in 1929.
Editor’s Deep Dive {Links & More}
“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” – Thomas Edison
The story of the growth of home schooling has been nothing short of amazing. Starting in 1985 when only about 50,000 students were home schooled, that number in the last few years has been rising about 8% per year. The US Department of Education estimated that as of 2007about 1,500,000 students were home schooled. Dr. Brian Ray, President of the National Home Education Research Institute, believes that as of the Spring of 2008, that number was over 2,000,000. There also are some very serious local benefits with home schooling as well—savings to local school construction and operating budgets, probably measured in billions of dollars. With this in mind, let’s talk about another home school success.
The world’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, was home schooled by his mother, Nancy Elliot Edison. After performing poorly in the traditional one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear, his mother refused to believe the teacher’s assessment that young Tom’s “brains were addled” (mentally slow). Clearly Tom was experiencing the world quite differently from his classmates, and mother Nancy knew her son had quite a bit of capability from the things he was doing and experimenting with around the house. Through a great deal of nurturing and leadership, she gave him the basic tools to learn, both in the form of process and content; and empowered him to learn.
Nancy Edison encouraged her son to have both a head and hands approach to learning, allowing him to have his own laboratory in their small basement-a place where his father became quite concerned as various small explosions emanated, along with strange smells. Nancy endured over dad’s protests and imbued Tom with four life-long pillars of learning:
In later years, a grown and very successful Thomas acknowledged that his mother’s discipline for a focused life was responsible for his great success. Today we hear a great deal of classroom interest in involving children in a head and hands learning environment. Renovated and new museums almost always involve head and hands exhibits or hands-on themes for learning.
Tom obviously learned differently from the standard rote learning and recitation of the day. It was fundamentally necessary for Edison to have a visceral feel for the information he was learning, especially for a need to experiment and react to the results of those experiments. Throughout his life Edison developed a love for literature and could quote many great poems and passages.
His life-long learning style motivated his strenuous recording of experiments, thoughts, and observations in thousands of detailed laboratory notebooks, which scholars are still mining today, 79 years after his death. So intense was his love of information, communications, and learning that he placed his own corporate office in his beautiful and well-stocked library. To him, a corporation was a continuous learning environment. In our Information Revolution today, symbolized by the ubiquitous Internet, Edison would be one very happy fellow!
Many modern-day home schoolers who visit the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey agree whole-heartedly. Young Edison fans come to the site to see and hear first-hand the story of the great inventor, responding very well to hands-on activities at the site. A recent summer camp for young folks ages 4-11 drew many home school parents and children. As they were making wet cell batteries in response to that morning’s program, I could not help but remember Edison’s famous quote….”Fail Your Way to Success!”
For you home school parents out there, check into our website at www.thomasedison.org where you can find lots of information about Edison and plenty of educational resources as well. Let us know what you think about Mr. Edison and the educational tools we have made available.
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” ~ Thomas Edison Quote
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