Edison

“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 WestinghouseChanged how the world experienced darkness with the incandescent light bulbUsed an elephant named Topsy for a dramatic example of the power of electricityEstablished the world’s first modern technology company and first movie studioWas awarded over 1,000 patents in the United States aloneCreated everything from an electrographic voting machine to the phonographVividly 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.