He was born in the USA in 1847, and he was the youngest of seven children. When he was a child, he went to school at home. He read many books to learn about things around him. He started working when he was 12 years old. His first job was selling newspapers on trains. He did this job for two years. When he was 14 years old, he began his own newspaper. He made the newspaper on one of the trains he worked on. No one had ever done anything like that before!
In 1863, when he was 16 years old, he changed jobs. He started working as a telegrapher. In 1863, there were no phones. The telegraph was the only way to send messages a long way. The telegraph works by sending electrical messages down a line. These messages are sent in Morse code. It uses dots and dashes to stand for letters that make up words.
He became deaf when he was a child. He liked working as a telegrapher because he didn't need to hear very well to do his work. His job as a telegrapher helped him to make his first big invention. He invented a telegraph machine that sent more than one telegraph at a time. Many people say that being deaf helped to make Edison a good inventor. They say that he could think better because he couldn't always hear what was going on around him.
Most of his inventions were to do with sound and sending messages. These were the things he missed out on because he was deaf.
In 1872, He set up his own big laboratory. It was in this laboratory that he did some of his best inventing work. He made the first sound recorder in his laboratory. He also worked on ideas that would help other people make phones, radios and moving pictures.
For many years, other inventors had been working on the electric light. In 1879, He became the first person to make the electric light work.
Thomas Edison died in 1931. He was 84 years old. By the time of his death, he had seen how many of his ideas and inventions had changed the world.
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