Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities
Introduction HOMAS EDISON was one of the most important Americans in the nation's history He was an inventor and a businessman and his products and ideas made the world cleaner safer and easier to live in Yet he never held public office wrote a book or taught a class His parents were ordinary people without much money and he didn't spend much time in school People often wonder why Edison was such a huge success As a child he got into trouble a lot and seemed unable to learn or so a teacher said As a teenager he drifted around working as a telegrapher without
earning much money or being able to settle down When he made his first invention the vote counting machine no one wanted it Later in his inventing career others sometimes copied and stole his ideas or sued him Some investors even pushed him out of his own company He spent years in court and plenty of money protecting his rights as an inventor He lost money on some projects and at times couldn't pay his workers because he had not been paid himself But he didn't give up So why did Edison succeed How was he able to take simple ideas and make them into machines that played music recorded voices or flickered real life images on a wall How did he become the most famous person of his day Thomas Edison was born at a time when technol ogy was changing rapidly when inventions were common and when people were eagerly applying new advances in steam engines telegraphy photogra phy and electricity Thomas Edison worked on inven tions in nearly every field He perfected many ideas that others had come up with turning them into products that could be manufactured and distributed to everyone His story is about the importance of learning experimenting and never giving up It's about how an ordinary boy grew up to change the way everyone lived and worked for the rest of the century There are hundreds of books about Thomas Edi
son yet no one book can tell all there is to know about him He left crates of notebooks filled with ideas and reflections as well as thousands of labora tory records Hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories were written about him while he was alive So many records exist that his papers have still not been completely studied by historians This book will describe what Thomas Edison's life was like some of his inventions and a few of his setbacks and successes The activities will give you an idea of the scientific concepts Edison was explor ing as he pushed his experiments on to success Edi son's success clearly began in his childhood Many of Edison's inventions are rooted in the lessons from his schoolbooks and from experiments he did in his boyhood lab in the basement of the family home His life was his work and it began while he was young studying what he saw around him and applying knowledge and effort to create things nobody had created
