Teagan's Books

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Welcome, my chuckaboos!  If you weren’t here last week, back in the Steam and Victorian Eras, “Chuckaboo” was slang for dear friend.  Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge (CFFC) and the prompt is Gizmos and Gadgets.  Dan Antion, the host, posted a lot of modern-day tools.  The tools I’m featuring go back a ways.   I’m sorry that some of the photos are so small. I suppose that’s because they are from such old sources.

Speaking of slang, we’re visiting the timeframe of 1847 — 1931 to check out the tools of someone you might not know was considered (by modern slang) a big tool.   Yes, all of the tools in this post were created by a tool… allegedly.  And I don’t mean AI.

You might say he was the Tool of Tools.  

Thomas Alva Edison is widely considered the most prolific inventor of useful, commercialized tools, holding 1,093 U.S. patents.  These inventions established major industries, including the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera.  Edison also established the first investor-owned electric utility in 1882, basing its infrastructure on DC power.  While a few people might have been even more prolific, Edison’s inventions had a profound, immediate impact on daily life and on industrialization.

I only included a few of Edison’s inventions in my little encyclopedia of weird inventions of yesteryear.  It’s called Real Steampunkery Tech: True Contraptions of the Steam and Diesel Eras, and it mainly focused on stranger things than Edison typically created.  

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Let’s begin with phonograph cylinders, also called Edison cylinders, or wax phonograph cylinders.  The earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound, and were for use on a on a mechanical cylinder phonograph.  In their heyday (c. 1896–1916) they were known as “records” — a name which has been passed on to the disc-shaped successor.

They were hollow cylindrical objects with audio recording engraved on the outside surface, which can be reproduced when they are played.  The first cylinders were wrapped with tin foil, but the improved version made of wax was created a decade later.  They remained the dominant commercial audio medium until the 1910s.

The electric pen.  Patented in 1876, Edison’s electric pen was the first, and arguably one of the most successful, early commercial electric appliances, paving the way for mimeographs and tattoo machines.  It operated as an early copying machine, allowing users to create stencils to produce up to 5,000 copies of documents.  How did it work?  A small electric motor at the top of the pen powered a needle that moved up and down at high speed, creating a series of small holes in paper as the user wrote.  The device was powered by two wet-cell batteries connected by wires.

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Wax paper.  In 1872, Edison came up with paraffin paper, or the idea of coating paper in wax to keep it from getting wet, to use in the telegraph. This is a commonly used household object today, and its origins began with wrapping candy. Paraffin paper was also used to help Edison invent his favorite device, the phonograph.

Hmmm… he doesn’t look like such a cranky tool in the photo above.  You can’t believe everything you read.  But then again, in that picture he’s also a guy with his new car…

The alkaline storage battery. Patented in 1901 and 1906, Edison invented a rechargeable Nickel-Iron battery. It was designed to be a durable, lightweight, and long-lasting alternative to lead-acid batteries. Using a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, it aimed to power electric vehicles, though it eventually found success in industrial uses like mining lamps and train signaling.

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Those are just a few of the inventions of Thomas Edison that still have an influence on our everyday lives.  If you want to know what his spirit telephone was, or his contribution to how to answer the telephone, you can find those in Real Steampunkery Tech.  Thanks for visiting.  Friendly comments are welcome.  Hugs.

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Here’s the obligatory shameless self-promotion.

Real Steampunkery Tech: True Contraptions of the Steam and Diesel Eras

E-book:  relinks.me/B0DHC6JFVT

Paperback:  relinks.me/B0DHD9BSJB

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This post is all-human written.   Furthermore, the author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training AI technologies to generate text.  This is a work of fiction.  Characters, names, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2026 by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene

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