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He made rapid progress. By ten, he was reading, or was having read to him, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , the Dictionary of Sciences and much of Shakespeare and Dickens. He seems to have had little affection for his father. “My mother was the making of me,” he said later. Without realizing it, Thomas was also educating himself. He was passionately interested in electricity and had a simple laboratory in the cellar. Here he carried out one of his earliest experiments. Hoping to generate electricity, he tied two cats together, attached wires to their legs, and rubbed their backs. The attempt failed but it is a good example of the enterprise, originality, and insistence on practical experiment that was to make him one of the greatest inventors in history. Sam Edison’s business did not flourish in Michigan. To help the family budget, Mrs. Edison allowed Thomas to take a job on the Grand Trunk Railroad when he was only twelve. He became a “candy butcher” on the daily train linking Port Huron with Detroit, the state capital, which then had a population of 25,000. Thomas was not paid; his income came from the profit on the sweets, popcorn, and newspapers he sold to the passengers. Each morning, Thomas joined the train at seven a . m . and arrived at Detroit some three hours later. After replenishing his stocks, he studied books on

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