Elizabeth > Elizabethtown Union New Jersey United States

Berkeley and Carteret try to entice more settlers to New Jersey in 1665 by granting land to settlers and by passing the Concession and Agreement, a document granting religious freedom to all inhabitants of New Jersey; the British Church of England allows no such religious freedom.

It is issued as a proclamation for the structure of the government for the colony written by the two proprietors.

In return for land, settlers pay annual fees known as quitrents.

The proprietors appoint Philip Carteret, George Carteret’s cousin, as the first governor of New Jersey, who designates Elizabethtown as the colony's capital.

Most settlement in East Jersey between 1664 and 1674 has been from other parts of the Americas, especially New England, Long Island, and the West Indies.

Elizabethtown and ...

...Newark in particular have a strong Puritan character.

South of the Raritan River, ...

...Elizabethtown, ...

Thomas Edison's first patent is for the electric vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646), which is granted on June 1, 1869.

Edison, who was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, is the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871).

Edison reports being of Dutch ancestry.

In school, the young Edison's mind had often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him "addled", ending Edison's three months of official schooling.

His mother taught him at home.

Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy.

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 had 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 had 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.

This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures, as he discovered his talents as a businessman.

These talents will eventually lead him to found fourteen companies, including General Electric, which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

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 nineteen, Edison had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire.

Edison had requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting.

Eventually, the latter preoccupation 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 had followed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home.

Some of Edison's earliest inventions are related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker.

Philip H. Diehl, in mounting a fan blade on a sewing machine motor and attaching it to the ceiling, inventing the ceiling fan, which he patents in 1887, a few years after the invention of the electric fan by Schuyler Skaats Wheeler in 1882.

Diehl, born in Dalsheim, Germany, had emigrated in July 1868 to New York City, where he had worked in several machine shops before finding work as an apprentice with the Singer Manufacturing Company.

He had been transferred to Chicago in 1870 or 1871 and had worked at the Remington Machine Company until 1875, losing all of his possessions in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and marrying Emilie Loos in Chicago in 1873.

Diehl had moved in 1875 to Elizabeth, New Jersey and had taken charge of experimental work improving sewing machines at the Singer plant.

His daughter, Clara Elvira, was born April 2, 1876.

While working at Singer in Elizabeth, Diehl had experimented at work and n the basement of his home on Orchard Street.

This had resulted in several inventions.

Together with Lebbeus B. Miller, Diehl has invented and patented the "oscillating shuttle" bobbin driver design and a sewing machine build around it.

Diehl's work at Singer to improve the sewing machine leads to developments in electric motors, first to power sewing machines and later for other uses as well.

In 1884, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Diehl had demonstrated a dynamo, modeled after his smaller motor, which generates a current for arc lamps, sewing machine motors and incandescent lamps, all covered by his patents.

The judicial committee at the exhibition had judged it to be one of the best dynamos exhibited.

Diehl has invented a lamp that is different from the incandescent electric lamp patented by Thomas Edison in 1879.

Diehl's lamp has no lead-in wires.

In 1882, Diehl had obtained the first patent on this induction incandescent lamp.

The base of the lamp contains a wire coil that couples with a primary coil in the lamp socket, causing current to flow through the lamp without the need for lead-in wires.

Two additional patents had been granted in 1883, followed by patents for electrical lighting systems in 1885 and 1886.

Diehl had erected the city's first arc light in front of the Corey Building, which still stands at 109 Broad Street.

Diehl's invention of the induction lamp is used by George Westinghouse to force royalty concessions from Thomas Edison.

The Westinghouse Company buys Diehl's patent rights for twenty-five thousand dollars.

Although Diehl's lamp cannot be made and sold at a price to compete with the Edison lamp, the Westinghouse Company uses the Diehl bulb to force the holders of the Edison patent to charge a more reasonable rate for the use of the Edison patent rights, thus lowering the price of the electric lamp.