People often say
Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan , Ohio Michigan ,
where Edison spent the rest of his childhood.
Went to school only a short time. He did so poorly that his mother, a
former teacher, taught her son at home. Al learned to love reading, a habit he
kept for the rest of his life. He also liked to make experiments in the
basement.
He not only played hard, also worked hard. At the age of 12 he sold
fruit, snacks and newspapers on a train as a "news butcher." (Trains
were the newest way to travel, cutting through the American wilderness.) He
even printed his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, on a moving train.
At 15, Thomas roamed the country as a "tramp telegrapher."
Using a kind of alphabet called Morse Code, he sent and received messages over
the telegraph. Even though he was already losing his hearing, he could still
hear the clicks of the telegraph. In the next seven years he moved over a dozen
times, often working all night, taking messages for trains and even for the
Union Army during the Civil War. In his spare time, he took things apart to see
how they worked. Finally, he decided to invent things himself.
After the failure of his first invention, the electric vote recorder,
Edison moved to New York City Newark , New Jersey
During this time he married his first wife, Mary Stilwell, on Christmas
Day, 1871. They had three children -- Marion, Thomas, Jr., and William. Wanting
a quieter spot to do more inventing, Edison moved from Newark
to Menlo Park , New Jersey
The phonograph was the first machine that could record the sound of
someone's voice and play it back. In 1877, Edison
recorded the first words on a piece of tin foil. He recited the nursery rhyme
"Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the phonograph played the words back to
him. This was invented by a man whose hearing was so poor that he thought of
himself as "deaf"!
Starting in 1878, Edison and the
muckers worked on one of his greatest achievements. The electric light system
was more than just the incandescent lamp, or "light bulb." Edison also designed a system of power plants that make
the electrical power and the wiring that brings it to people's homes. Imagine
all the things you "plug in." What would your life be like without
them?
In 1885, one year after his first wife died, Edison
met a 20-year-old woman named Mina Miller. Her father was an inventor in
Edison's home state of Ohio Edison taught her Morse Code. Even when others
were around, the couple could "talk" to each other secretly. One day
he tapped a question into her hand: would she marry him? She tapped back the
word "yes”. They married on February 24,
1886 and had three children: Madeleine, Charles and Theodore.
A year later, Edison built a laboratory in West Orange that was ten
times larger than the one in Menlo
Park Edison 's dreams
into inventions. Once, the "chief mucker" worked for three days
straight, taking only short naps. Edison earned half of his 1,093 patents in West Orange .
Not only did Edison improve the
phonograph several times, but he also worked on X-rays, storage batteries, and
the first talking doll. At West Orange he also
worked on one of his greatest ideas: motion pictures, or "movies."
The inventions made here changed the way we live even today. He worked here
until his death on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84.
By that time, everyone had heard of the "Wizard" and looked up
to him. The whole world called him a genius. But he knew that having a good
idea was not enough. It takes hard work to make dreams into reality. That is
why Edison liked to say, "Genius is 1% inspiration
and 99% perspiration".
