Chapter 1. LIFE STORY OF A MIDDLE AMERICAN
Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847 in the up-and-coming Ohio town of Milan. When he was six, he and his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, another Midwestern village just entering the first flush of a prosperity born of vigorous commerce with the rest of the country, to which it was linked by the Grand Trunk Western Railway via the industrial metropolis of Detroit, which in turn communicated by lake to all the wide world beyond.
Popular culture, including a host of Horatio Alger–style juvenile biographies and two enduring film classics, Young Tom Edison (with Mickey Rooney in the title role) and Edison the Man (starring Spencer Tracy)—both released in 1940—have portrayed the inventor as a maverick ...
Get Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
