Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” —Thomas 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.

• Author
• David J. Kent

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 272

• Publisher
• Fall River Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9781435161238

• Genres
• biography

• Release date
• 2016