9781422277669

Chapter The Young Inventor 1 Some men have the luck to live at exactly the right time. Thomas Alva Edison was one of them. In 1847, America was largely a farming country with a population of 20 million. By Edison’s death in 1931, it had grown into the richest and most technologically advanced nation in the world with a population of 120 million. Edison’s genius for invention helped to make that growth possible. He was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. His father, Samuel Edison, was a tall, lean, jack-of-all-trades of Dutch stock. As a tavern keeper at Vienna in Ontario, Canada, he had married Nancy Elliott, a village schoolteacher. In 1837, he joined a rebellion against the Canadian government and, when it failed, fled across the border to America, settling in Milan, which at the time was a rapidly growing port on the Huron Canal. There he was joined by his wife and four children. He made a fair living as a lumber merchant. In Milan, three more children were born. The youngest was Thomas Alva. He was an odd-looking boy with a large head, a round face, fair hair, and blue eyes. He was always asking questions and he would, whenever possible, test out the answers for himself. When told that geese hatched out their eggs by sitting on them, he made a nest in the barn, put some eggs in it, and sat on them for hours. His father, Sam, thought him stupid. Both he and Mrs. Edison frequently whipped him with a birch switch, but Thomas still got into scrapes.

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