Who Was Thomas Alva Edison?

By Margaret Frith, Who HQ and John O'Brien

One day in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch that lit up lower Manhattan with incandescent light and changed the way people live ever after. The electric light bulb was only one of thousands of Edison’s inventions, which include the phonograph and the kinetoscope, an early precursor to the movie camera. As a boy, observing a robin catch a worm and then take flight, he fed a playmate a mixture of worms and water to see if she could fly! Here’s an accessible, appealing biography with 100 black-and-white illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
• Release date: Dec 29, 2005
• ISBN: 9781101639924

Margaret Frith

Margaret Frith is the author of Who Was Thomas Alva Edison? and Who Was Franklin Roosevelt? She lives in New York City.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Always Curious

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, on a cold snowy night in Milan, Ohio. His parents, Nancy and Samuel, named him Thomas after his great-uncle and Alva after Captain Alva Bradley, a good friend of his father. The family didn’t call him Tom or Tommy. They called him Al.

Little Al wanted to find out everything about the world around him. He went about it like a scientist doing an experiment. He didn’t just ask questions; he liked to find out the answers himself.

Once Al broke open a bumblebee’s nest to see what was inside.

Another time he watched birds eat worms and fly off. So Al made a mixture out of water and mashed worms. Then he gave it to a neighbor girl to drink. He wanted to see if eating worms would make her fly. But it just made her sick, and Al got a licking with a birch branch.

Nothing stopped Al—not bees, not a licking, not even falling into a grain-storage bin. He was walking around the rim of the bin when he fell in. Luckily someone pulled him out by the legs just before he was buried under the wheat.

Al’s father owned a small grain and timber mill in Milan. Boats like Captain Alva Bradley’s carried timber down from Canada across Lake Erie, down the Huron River and through the Milan Canal. There it was cut into logs and planks at mills like Mr. Edison’s.

Trucks and cars had not yet been invented, and trains didn’t come to Milan. But one day a railroad line was built. Trains started chugging into town, and the canal wasn’t so important anymore. The railroads were faster and easier to use for carrying things around the country. So when Al was seven, the family moved to a new home in Port Huron, Michigan, more than a hundred miles north of Milan.

They lived in a big house on the St. Clair River. Al’s father did lots of things to earn a living. He worked as a carpenter. He ran a grocery store. He had a vegetable garden. He tried farming. He even built a 100-foot tower overlooking the river. For twenty-five cents, anyone could climb up and watch the boats go by.

The Edisons had only been there a short time when Al caught scarlet fever. It was a serious illness back then without the medicines used today. He ran a high fever. A red rash broke out on his skin. Al got better, but he realized that he couldn’t hear as well as he used to, probably because of the scarlet fever.

In school, the teacher complained that Al didn’t pay attention. He would drift off. Maybe he was bored, or maybe he just couldn’t hear everything.

[kslack3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book. I believe it did a very successful job on educating the reader on King Tut. The main idea of the book was to inform readers on King Tut and what his major accomplishments were. One of the things I liked the most about this book was the illustrations. Since it was a chapter book the illustrations were very few and far between, but when a picture, map, diagram, etc., was used, it helped solidify the information being told by the text. For example in the chapter Gifts of the Nile there was a map of the surrounding region. Not all readers will have background on Ancient Egypt so I found this particular illustration important to build a foundation. I also liked how the chapter book was organized. Although all the text was informative and pertinent to King Tut, the way it was broken down into chapters chunked off the information in meaningful ways. The chapters had clear distinct focuses for example King Tuts’ father, King Tut as a boy, him as Pharaoh, on the afterlife, etc. I found this helpful also because it allowed me to know where certain information was when going back through the book.

[jessicaedelman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this children's biography of King Tut. I enjoyed the writing and illustrations. I enojoyed how the book was divided into sections such as "Who Was King Tut?" as an introduction, "The Boy King" about Tut's early life, and "An Early Death" which was about when Tut died. The sections helped organize the information presented in the text.
Although this book is not considered a picture book it still contained various illustrations that I enjoyed. The illustrations greatly enhanced the text. There were diagrams, maps, and illustrations of people introduced in the text. I thought that the illustration of the funeral parade was extremely beneficial and helped organize the information presented about King Tut's funeral procession.
The main idea of this text is to inform readers about King Tut and Egyptian history.