Steve Jobs Who Lived During The Industrial Revolution

“I want to put a ding in the universe.” -Steve Jobs. This was the mentality of Steve Jobs, an entrepreneur, industrial designer, and the co-founder of Apple. Jobs worked for the majority of his life to create and push along the evolution of communication through technology by creating various devices and programs. One person that he embodies and was inspired by is Thomas Edison. Edison, who lived during the Industrial Revolution, also had many technological achievements, one being the phonograph. Both of these men, who were innovators of their time, saw a cause, contributed to the evolution of communication through technology, and had lasting effects on the way the world communicates today.
In both time periods, Edison and Jobs were working
America’s economy was flourishing. Cities were being built, and the population realized that not everyone had to be working on farms. There was enough money and resources for people to have a surplus of basic necessities and to focus on more extraneous ideas. Because of this, many individuals began to create new ways of working. (Engelman). Edison saw all of these changes and began his career inventing. After he worked on a design of the telephone to improve Alexander Graham Bell’s design of it, Edison was inspired to create something new. “Edison’s experiments with the telephone also got him thinking about ways to record telephone messages so they could be copied later… But then Edison turned the problem in a new direction and started to think about recording sound--any sound-- as something separate.” (Bedi). Edison was able to build off of his previous inventions, expand on his ideas, and create a new piece of technology that worked in a way that no one had ever seen before; he was able to carve into metal cylinders (“Phonograph Patent”) and record sound with the device he called the
Even though very different inventions, there was one major overlap between the phonograph and the iPhone; both products inspired many following years of new updated inventions. The phonograph, Edison’s invention, was a very new idea when it was first created. As soon as it went out on the market, people were intrigued. No one had ever been able to capture noise and record it to play back at another time. On the advertisements to purchase a phonograph, it said that “the only perfect reproductions of sound are obtained by using Edison Records on the phonograph- For Sale Here.” (“The Phonograph” Advertisement). Because of the high demand that Edison saw with his patented design of the phonograph, he started brainstorming new products that he could create and sell now that he had been successful with designing a piece of communicative technology. One idea that he had was to take his ability to record sound and expand on that idea. He began working with motion pictures. “Edison’s initial work in motion pictures ... resembled his phonograph, with a spiral arrangement of 1/16 inch photographs made on a cylinder. Viewed with a microscope, these first motion pictures were rather crude, and hard to focus. Edison then developed the Strip Kinetograph, using George Eastman’s improved 35 mm celluloid film. Cut into continuous strips and perforated