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 o...