Tuesday 27 March 2012

Grow up with.... Thomas Alva Edison

(February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)


Let there be light!

CAN YOU imagine a world without lights that come on at the touch of a switch? Well, that’s the way it was in the world until a little over a hundred and fifty years ago. At that time, there were no lights to be switched on ~ only smoky, weak lamps till, one day, an American boy was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847.

He was not only frail, but very dull, too. Thomas Alva Edison, with more than a thousand inventions to his credit, “would never amount to two pins,” said his neighbours.

But his mother, Nancy, decided her son would be a credit. When he failed at school, she taught him at home, answering his questions and encouraging his often unusual experiments. How did she know so much? That’s because she was a former teacher!

Can you guess what kind of models young Thomas built? Among them were a working sawmill and a railway engine, both powered by steam.

Once, when he was quite young, Thomas ran in from the garden, breathless. “Mama, why is the goose sitting on her eggs?” he asked in a rush.

“To hatch them,” replied his mother.

“What’s hatching?”

After his mother had explained, Thomas ran back to the barn to wait for the goslings. Suddenly, a thought struck him ~ he was bigger than the goose and could keep the eggs warmer! So, he shooed the goose away and sat on the eggs.

You can imagine what happened next…

But his other experiments, in his laboratory in the cellar of their house, were quite successful ~ he even made two tiny machines which would generate electricity.

Thomas was only 12 when the Grand Trunk Railway across the United States reached his town of Port Huron. The excited boy immediately volunteered to sell newspapers, sweets and sandwiches on the train between Port Huron and Detroit. Guess what he did with the money he earned in this way? He invested part of it in his little laboratory at home.

Soon, however, he had a lab set up in the luggage cabin of the train. When the American civil war broke out, Thomas wrote the Weekly Herald, a newspaper, and printed it on a small hand-printing press, which he set up on the train ~ the first newspaper ever to be printed on a train.

One day, a stick of phosphorus fell as the train bumped on its way. Can you guess what happened next? The wooden cabin caught fire!

Though the train’s conductor rescued Thomas at the next station, he was off-loaded ~ press, lab, newspapers and all!

This curious, accident-prone boy 15-year-old boy saved the son of a telegraph operator from the path of a railway carriage. The grateful operator gave Thomas telegraph lessons, which resulted in amazing progress for humankind. Later, Thomas began working as a telegraph operator for the large Western Union at Port Huron.

This young boy grew up to be known at the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’ where, in the spring of 1876, he set up a huge laboratory outside Newark. From within its walls came inventions like the telephone transmitter, the cylinder phonograph, the filament light bulb!

If you just remain curious enough and ask zillions of questions, perhaps you’ll be walking in the footsteps of Thomas Alva Edison! Don’t give up on your experiments, will you?



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