Thomas Edison once said,” There is no substitute for hard work.” Edison is most famous for developing a more efficient lightbulb and inventing the phonograph. He was a lifelong learner and received a total of 1,093 patents. Thomas Edison had a life that has inspired people for years.
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. His parents were Samuel and Nancy Edison. Edison was the youngest of seven children in his family. When he was very young, he caught scarlet fever and many ear infections. This caused him to have hearing problems as a child and to be nearly deaf as an adult. In 1854, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where he went to a public school for twelve weeks. His teacher thought that he was a very difficult student, so his mother quickly pulled him out of school. She began to homeschool him.
By age 11, Edison showed a love of knowledge and read books on a wide range of subjects. He convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers along the Grand Trunk Railroad a year later. Edison began publishing his own small paper, The Grand Trunk Herald, which was loved by passengers. His father taught him how to operate a telegraph as a reward for when he saved a three-year-old from being run over by a train.
In 1866, he moved to Louisville, Kentucky and began working for the
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He was paid $40,000 for it, so he quit his job in order to devote all of his time to inventing. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, which brought him worldwide fame. He also founded the Edison Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned electric utility. The Edison Illuminating Company later became the General Electric Corporation. On April 23, 1896, he became the first person to project a motion picture. Edison was rivals with Nikola Tesla. They didn’t agree on the use of direct current electricity. Thomas Edison died of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home in