Thomas Edison

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Term Paper Title	Thomas Edison
# of Words	1013
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.05

Thomas Edison
     Thomas Edison, without the benefit of a formal education, became one of Americas best known inventors.  Inspired by a book on physical science and by writings from an early journal on electricity, Edison eventually set up his own laboratory and begin his life as an inventor.
     Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847.  He was the youngest of 7 children.  His parents were Samuel and Nancy Edison.  When Edison was 7, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan.  Thomas received only 3 months of formal schooling because the schoolmaster expelled him as łretarded˛.  For three years his mother, a former schoolteacher, tutored him.  At 10 years old his mom gave him a physical science book, which led him to set up a small chemical laboratory in his cellar.  Edison played pranks that frustrated his father, who would regularly beat him.  He had middle ear deafness, a result from scarlatina.  At the age of 12, Edison sold newspapers and candy on the new railroad between Port Huron and Detroit.  Later he installed his laboratory in a baggage car nearby his stand.  When his stand was not busy, Edison trained himself in telegraphy.  After Edison learned telegraphy he roamed around the Midwestern and Southern cities as a łtramp telegrapher˛.  His earnings went mostly for electrical equipment and chemicals.  In 1868 he obtained a position in Boston as an expert night operator for Western Union Telegraph Company.
     On his 21st birthday he bought a used copy of Michael Farudayšs journals called Experimental Researches in Electricity.  He read it without stopping.  Edison preformed all of Farudayšs experiments.  His experimental work became more painstaking and he began to keep laboratory notebooks of his findings. After borrowing a small sum of money from an acquaintance, he left his job in the fall of 1868, and became a free-lance inventor.
     His first invention, the electrical vote recorder, worked very well when exhibited before a committee of Congress, but no one bought it.  In the summer of 1869 Edison lived in New York, sleeping in a basement below Wall Street.  At a moment of crisis Edison was called in to try to repair the officešs new telegraphic gold-price indicator, he did it so well, he was given a job as the machinešs supervisor.  Soon he had remodeled the machine to such an effect that the owners, the Western Union Telegraph Company, commissioned him to improve the crude stock ticker just coming into use.  Edison did this by cre...

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