Thomas Edison Didn't Invent The Light Bulb—but Here's What He Did Do

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Here’s how the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park” achieved such an outsized reputation—and why he is still known as one of the greatest inventors of all time.

A curious young man

Born in Ohio in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison spent his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan, where he received only brief formal schooling. His mother, a former schoolteacher, taught him at home from age seven on, and he read widely. His childhood adventures included ambitious chemistry experiments in his parents’ basement, marked with what his biographer characterized as “near explosions and near disasters.”

Pictured here around the age of 14, the young Thomas Alva Edison had revolutionary ideas—which often distracted him from the mundane tasks of his all-too-everyday jobs as a young man.Photograph via National Park Service

Edison’s curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit led him to a job at the age of 12 as a “news butcher”—a peddler employed by railroads to hawk snacks, newspapers, and other goods to train passengers. Not content to sell the news, he also decided to print it, founding and publishing the first newspaper ever produced and printed on a moving train, the Grand Trunk Herald. He also performed chemistry experiments on the train.

By the age of 15, due to his unique ability to get fired for planning experiments and inventions in his head while on the job, Edison became an itinerant Western Union telegrapher before moving to New York to start his own workshop. The telegraph would ultimately inspire many of his first patented inventions. In 1874, at the age of 27, he invented the quadriplex telegraph, which allowed telegraphers to send four messages simultaneously, increasing the industry’s efficiency without requiring the construction of new telegraph lines.

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