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    Thomas Edison
    Thomas Edison
    Thomas Edison
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Thomas Edison

    By David Colbert

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    You're about to be an eyewitness to the top ten days in Thomas Edison's life, including:
    • An instinctive moment of bravery that launched a career
    • A lucky break that freed him for a life of invention
    • An incredible boast that he quickly proved true
    • A flash of insight that lit the world
    • And the creation of our favorite pastime, the movies.

    These days and five others shook Edison's world - and yours.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAladdin
    Release dateJun 2, 2009
    ISBN9781416998907
    Thomas Edison
    Author

    David Colbert

    David Colbert is the author of New York Times bestseller Michelle Obama: An American Story. In addition to the 10 Days series, he wrote the acclaimed Eyewitness series of first-person history and the Magical Worlds series for children. More than two million copies of his books are in print in almost thirty languages.

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      Book preview

      Thomas Edison - David Colbert

      BUILT FOR SPEED

      Mt. Clemens, Michigan.

      On this fall day—historians aren’t sure of the exact date, although Edison and two of the other people present remained friends for the rest of Edison’s life—fifteen-year-old Tom Edison is at the train station in this Great Lakes town. A train station is where Edison is happiest. It’s where he’s connected to the rest of the world. Starting just a few years before Edison’s birth on February 11, 1847, and continuing through his childhood, two breakthroughs in technology, the railways and the telegraph, have been creating an international network of people and ideas.

      The whole world isn’t wired yet. Most people still travel on foot or horseback or by boat. For many Americans, canals and rivers are more important than roads. Faster, too. But for people who are near a railway station or a telegraph office, the whole world seems within reach.

      Adults are having trouble keeping up with the changes. For Edison’s generation, each step forward is natural, easy, and thrilling.

      This new era began for Edison when the Grand Trunk Railway, a Canadian line, reached his town of Port Huron, Michigan, three years earlier. The line runs all the way east to the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles away. Because it runs a daily train of European immigrants traveling from eastern seaports to the Midwest, more new faces—and new ideas—pass through Port Huron in a day than a resident would have encountered in a year before the railway arrived.

      David Rumsey / Cartography Associates

      The western half of the Grand Trunk Railway

      Moving even faster than the trains are the clicks on the new telegraph lines that run alongside the tracks. Although the telegraph is only a few years older than Edison himself, it has already changed the world. By tapping out messages in a combination of short and long signals—dots and dashes—telegraph operators relay text messages from station to station through the network, just like a modern-day e-mail or text message is passed from one computer server to another until it reaches its destination.

      Library of Congress

      Thomas Edison at age 14. Family and friends called him Al, which was short for his middle name, Alva.

      Because the relaying is done by operators rather than machines, the speed is slower than what we expect over the Internet; but compared to what existed before the telegraph, the change is more astonishing than what the Internet brought to the modern era. Four years before this day, mail between the eastern United States and California could take months to reach its destination. A year earlier, the transcontinental telegraph was completed, and now a message can cross the country in hours.

      Every day the telegraph network grows. Local networks all over the world are being linked together. Four years earlier, when Edison was eleven, the world witnessed the nineteenth-century equivalent of putting astronauts on the moon: A telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean to link Europe with North America. Queen Victoria of Great Britain and U.S. President James Buchanan exchanged messages, and both countries had huge celebrations with parades and fireworks. Britain already has short undersea cables to France and the Netherlands, linking it to a network that spreads across Europe. Undersea cables are being prepared to link Arabia with India, and China with Australia. (In modern times, Internet traffic runs along cables that follow many of the same routes as these original telegraph lines.)

      ALTHOUGH THE FIRST

      TRANSATLANTIC CABLE WAS DAMAGED SOON AFTER

      COMPLETION, A REPLACEMENT CABLE WAS

      SUCCESSFULLY CONNECTED IN 1866.

      Text messaging via telegraph has already changed the Civil War, which has been underway for about a year. President Abraham Lincoln has more control over his field officers than any president before him. He gets news from the field in time to direct an immediate response, and with his generals in Washington he can coordinate parts of the army that don’t have direct communication with one another. His telegraph messages—one historian cleverly calls them t-mails—are essential to the Union’s efforts. He’s even learned to change his writing style to adapt to the technology. Instead of long instructions, he sends short, punchy text messages.

      Library of Congress

      Songs were written to celebrate the completion of the 1858 transatlantic telegraph cable. This one is dedicated to Cyrus W. Field, head of the company that undertook the challenge.

      In this regard, Lincoln is the exception. For the most part, even those adults who make use of the railways and telegraph don’t truly understand them. They rely on people like Edison—younger people for whom the technology is perfectly normal. Edison is happy to oblige. Although he’s still a young teenager, Edison is already a businessman.

      Library of Congress

      An 1869 map of existing and proposed telegraph routes that link the continents

      ON THE MOVE

      A few years earlier Edison’s mother began teaching him at home, which has helped him develop confidence and his natural independent streak. The little time he spent at the local school wasn’t as successful as her lessons. Some stories blame his schoolteacher, but other reasons are more likely. His curiosity led him to ask a lot of questions and pursue subjects in his own way. He was also partially deaf, which made it difficult for him to follow

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