Edison

 
Like most people who change the world, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) was not expected to do much with his life. The last of seven children, he was a frail, distractible child with bad hearing whose father thought he might be dim-witted. However, the endlessly curious Edison was a habitual inventor and voracious reader from an early age. A driven entrepreneur, at twelve he was already hawking newspapers and candy on a train while simultaneously operating stores in two train stations. These two personality traits, the businessman and the scientist, combined with a burning ambition to make Edison the most important inventor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
In Edison, science writer David J. Kent (Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity) tells how the inventor:

• Feuded with other great inventors, like Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse
• Changed how the world experienced darkness with the incandescent light bulb
• Used an elephant named Topsy for a dramatic example of the power of electricity
• Established the world’s first modern technology company and first movie studio
• Was awarded over 1,000 patents in the United States alone
• Created everything from an electrographic voting machine to the phonograph

Vividly written and packed with colorful and rare illustrations, Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World is the fascinating story of how a self-taught boy from Ohio who loved to invent new gadgets ended up changing the world.