Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11th, 1847 in Ohio. When he was seven he moved to Port Huron, Michigan. His nick name was "Little Al" because his middle name was Alva. When he was ten he loved science so much he built his own chemical laboratory in the basement of his house. In 1859 he became a newsboy and candy butcher for the Grand Trunk Railway. The train went from Port Huron to Detroit. When Thomas was not on the train he was in a one school room with thirty nine other students. He was in school for twelve months, but then his teacher left the school so he had no one to teach him.

He was the first person ever to print and publish a newspaper on a moving train. A couple of years after he began his newsboy job he learned telegraphy. He strung a telegraph line from the Port Huron station to the Port Huron Village and worked in the local telegraph office.

By fifteen Thomas Edison had mastered the basics of telegraphy. In 1968 that is when he came up with his first invention, an electrical vote recorder. One year later he received his first payment for one of his inventions. The check amount was for forty thousand dollars. A few years later he assisted Sholes on the invention of the typewriter. The money he received for selling his invention he was able to open his own laboratory in Newark. In his laboratory he completed many important inventions the monograph and automatic telegraph systems such as the quadruplex, sextuplex, and multiplex telegraphs. Edison also invented paraffin paper, (what is used to wrap candies), the carbon rheostat and the electric pen. He also discovered an unknown electric phenomena, that he called the "Etheric Force." The Phenomena was recognized twelve years later as electric waves in free space.

October 21st, 1879 was the actually day Thomas Edison invented the first iridescent light bulb. It took thousands of tries to invent it and Edison became famous on that day. Then he thought of a way to hold it up and came up with the lamp, they called the lamp the "Edison modern incandescent lamp." They named it that because it stayed lite for forty hours straight. That wasn't his greatest achievement, the world's first economically viable system of centrally, generating and distributing electric light, and power was his greatest achievement.

On October 18th 1931 Thomas Alva Edison died at age 84 in New Jersey. Think if Thomas Edison never lived we would probably not have the light bulb or any other invention he designed. He was a great man and he still plays a big role in our lives today.