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Thomas Alva Edison "The Wizard of Menlo Park" Thomas Alva Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention. Edison invented The Telegraph in 1874 and sold the patent rights to The Western Union for $10,000. Edison’s first big financial success. The invention which first gained him fame was the phonograph in 1877. By 1879 Edison had developed a commercially practical incandescent light bulb that would burn for hundreds of hours. Some of his early fortune came from the stock ticker. He holds many patents including the motion picture camera and the Kinetoscope installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films.

In 1855, John Roebling, the owner of a wire-rope company and a famous bridge designer proposed a suspension bridge over the East River after becoming impatient with the Atlantic Avenue-Fulton Street Ferry. Roebling worked out every detail of the bridge, from its massive granite towers to its four steel cables. He thought his design entitled the bridge "to be ranked as a national monument… a great work of art."