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His father Samuel Edison Jr. ran a shingle mill and grain business. His mother Nancy Elliott Edison, was a schoolteacher before her marriage to Samuel. Thomas Alva was the last of their seven children, three died in childhood.
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Thomas Alva Edison's family moves from Milan, Ohio to Port Huron Michigan because his father Samuel became a dealer in grain and feed.
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His teachers thought that Edison was not very smart. Edison and his mother didn't like that school anyway so his mother decided to teach him at home. During a part of Edison's childhood he started to enjoy reading and could read super fast!
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When Edison was only twelve years old he convinced his parents to let him get a job working by the train selling candy, nuts, and newspapers.
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When Thomas Edison was fourteen he set up a printing press in the back of a baggage car on a train. He got all his information from gossip on and near the train station which he put together and published a newspaper. Later on Edison set up a laboratory in the baggage car when suddenly two chemicals mixed and it caused a fire. The conductor came and poured water and stopped the fire, but struck Edison's ear in anger for the fire, which resulted in Edison losing his hearing in that ear forever.
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At age sixteen Edison jot a job as a tramp telegrapher. A tramp telegrapher is someone who travels throughout the country finding work, to write down messages that were in morse code into English from a telegraph machine. Sometimes there were personal messages for a family or millitary messages for the U.S war department.
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When Edison worked in the telegraph company he couldn't translate the morse code into english that fast, so he invented a machine that could slow down the pace that the morse came in to make it easier to translate to paper.
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At age twenty-two Edison decided to stop roaming the country, and moved to Boston where he got his first patent for an electric vote recorder. He hoped the government would use it for voting, but they weren't interested in buying it. He also improved the stock printer in New York City.
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Edison moves to Newark, New Jersey after becoming well known as an electrical inventory. This helped him get more financial backers, to help him begin his business. He started a partnership with Franklin Pope that eventually ended, so he started his own lab and manufacturing facility. http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1999191,00.html
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Edison met a pretty young lady named Mary Silwell and they soon got married.
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Edison invented the phonograph. The phonograph is an easier way to hear people on the telephone from farther places.
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Edison invented the electical lightbulb that when he first tested it the lightbulb lasted for 13 hours!
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Edison sets up the world's first successful electric power station on Pearl Street in New York City. This led to lights in buildings particularly inthe financial district which increased his investors in his company. Famous businessman J.P. Morgan was one of them.
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Edison's first wife Mary Stilwell, died unexpectedly at the age of 29.
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On February 1886, Edison marries his 2nd wife - Mina Miller who was only 19 at the time. She came from a wealthy and educated family.
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Edison created a box shaped machine that you can look inside a small peep hole and see pictures moving fast so that it will look like a video or a movie.
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The Yankee Stadium was actually built by Edison and construction workers and they were useing the cement Edison made. Edison and his cement also helped build the Panama canal.
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Thomas Alva Edison died at age eighty-four from an illness. On the evening of his funeral at 10:00 p.m everyone in the U.S turned off their electrical lights in honor of Thomas Alva Edison.
" Genius is 1 percent insperation and 99 percent perspiration"
-Thomas Alva Edison
