Thomas A. Edison: The Making of an Inventor
Have you ever felt like a total outsider? Well, one of our most famous inventors felt the same way growing up. Thomas A. Edison invented some of the most popular inventions including the phonograph, motion picture camera, power utilities, sound recording and the electric light bulb throughout his life. Edison came a long way from where he grew up and worked very hard to achieve everything he did. That means you can too. If you want to invent something to change the world go for it and don’t let anyone stop you. This essay is about Edison’s life and what drove him to be an inventor.
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in the small town of Milan, Ohio, close to Lake Erie. Edison was the seventh child, and his mother, Nancy Edison, feared that he would die an infant like three of Edison’s other siblings. Their family had a doctor that lived close by and he said that Edison might have “brain fever” (Carlson 1), because the newborns head was larger than most infants. Those words scared Nancy, but baby Thomas was a healthy newborn, born on that snowy February day.
Thomas was often very lonely because his brothers and two sisters were much older then he, and so one by one they would get married and Thomas was eventually the only child who lived at home. But that didn’t stop Thomas from exploring and discovering new things to play with. Thomas was very curious and always wanted to learn something new. But school was a whole different story. He felt trapped everyday sitting in one room for hours. Thomas was often daydreaming or talking out of turn, so his teacher like many others thought he could beat knowledge into him and so he got paddled very often and hated school even more.
Nancy thought that enough was enough and took him out of school and let him run his own education, most of the time she taught Thomas herself. She used to be a teacher before she married Thomas’s father,...