When Edison was born, there was no such thing as electricity, but by the time he died entire cities were lit by electricity (www.minot.k12.nd.us/edison.html). Thomas Edison was born February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio. He was one of the seven children of Samuel Edison, Jr. and Nancy Elliot Edison. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father did many things from, running a mill to real estate. When Thomas was seven, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison started school here in Michigan. At this point in his childhood he did not like math. His teacher told his mother that he could not be taught. This angered his mother and made her decide to home school him (Josephson 354).

Edison loved to read. Before he was twelve, he had read novels by Dickens, Shakespeare, a

In World War One, Edison was the head of the Naval Consulting Board for the government. He directed research on torpedoes and antisubmarine devices. In 1920, Congress established the first Naval Research Laboratory (Compton’s Encyclopedia 76). During Edison’s life he had two wives. He married his first wife, Mary G. Stillwell, in 1871. He met her while she was working in his laboratory. He had hoped that she would be his partner in inventing but she could not invent anything. While they were married they had three children, Marion, Thomas, and William. Thomas nicknamed his first two children “Dot” and “Dash”. Mary Stillwell died in 1884.

As Edison grew older, he never quit learning our experimenting. His hands were permanently stained from the chemicals he had used over the years. He still rushed into his research, doing experiments as fast as they came to him. Edison became very controlling of his inventions in his later years. He learned that people would turn up the speed on the phonograph to make the music faster than normal. This angered Edison so he made his manufacturing department put a speed on controls on the phonograph to keep this from happening.

nd Gibbon. When he was nine, he read a science book that his mother had given him. This book told how to do various experiments. He did every experiment in the book and his mother gave him more science books to look at.

He became fascinated in chemistry so much, that he spent all of his spare money on chemicals. He also collected bottles, wires, and other things to use in his experiments. By age ten, Thomas built his first laboratory in the basement of his house (Compton’s Encyclopedia 74). When Edison was twelve, he had his first job as a train boy on the Grand Trunk Railway. Thomas sold newspapers and candy to the passengers. He also printed a weekly paper called the Weekly Herald. He spent all of the money he earned on supplies for his laboratory. During the year he was there he got permission to move his lab to a baggage car. This let him work on his experiments during the five-hour layover.

Two years after Edison invented the phonograph, he bragged that he would invent a safe and inexpensive electric light before any other scientist. He searched for the best material that would give off light when electricity ran through it. He tried materials like baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. After he spent almost forty thousand dollars, performing twelve hundred experiments, he found that carbonized thread worked. He used sewing thread that had been burned to ash in his light bulb. This light bulb burned for two days. He was now a

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