Thomas Edison - AJ

·       Thomas Edison is an American inventor and is one of the greatest inventors of all time. He was born in Milan, Ohio, USA on February 11, 1847. He died on October 18 1933 at the age of 86.

·       Thomas Alva Edison is of Dutch and British ancestry. Edison attended school for 3 months only in Port Huron, Michigan. This was his only formal public education.

·       His mother continued his education, teaching him reading, writing, and arithmetic. She also read to him from well-known English writers, such as Edward Gibbon, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens.

·       When he was 12, his job was selling newspapers, apples, and candy on the Detroit and Port Huron branch of the Grand Trunk Railroad. Edison was partly deaf possibly due to a childhood attack of scarlet fever.

·       Although he considered his partial deafness almost an asset, particularly when he wanted to concentrate on an experiment, he mentioned in his diary that he haven't heard a bird sing since he was 12 years old. At 15, he bought a small secondhand printing press and installed it in a baggage car and started producing the “Weekly Herald”, which he printed, edited, and sold on the Grand Trunk Railroad.

·       In 1862, Edison saved a 3-year-old boy from being run over by a boxcar. The boy was the son of the stationmaster in Mount Clemens, Michigan. In gratitude, the stationmaster offered to teach Edison how to operate the telegraph gladly accepted the offer.