Thomas Alva Edison

Like Ben Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison was both a scientist and an inventor. Born in 1847, Edison had very little formal education as a child, attending school only for a few months. By the teacher, he was unpotensial student and his ability was below average (did you know that he was a kid who has dyslexia). Finaly, he was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother. Edison would see tremendous change take place in his lifetime. He was also to be responsible for making many of those changes occur.

When Edison was born, society still thought of electricity as a novelty, a fad. By the time he died, entire cities were lit by electricity. Much of the credit for that progress goes to Edison. In his lifetime, Edison patented 1,093 inventions, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the "kinetoscope," a small box for viewing moving films.

He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a day. Edison was quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." In tribute to this important American, electric lights in the United States were dimmed for one minute on October 21, 1931, a few days after his death.