Thomas Alva Edison: The Most Influential American

Thomas Alva Edison is undoubtedly the most influential American from the 20th century. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio in 1847 (Hart 222-225). When he first began school, “Edison’s teacher thought he was addled” (Allaby and Gjertsen 13), and his mother soon pulled him out. As a homeschooled child, Edison became an avid entrepreneur at a young age (Allaby and Gjertsen 14-23). He sold newspapers on a train as well as candy and fruit to supplement his earnings. When Edison found an empty train car, he used his savings to purchase a printing press and publish his own newsheet from there. The paper’s current articles were a hit with the passengers and Edison sold hundreds of copies. Thomas also used the empty train car to conduct experiments, one of which resulted in a chemical fire that got him kicked off of the train. His curiosity also led him to build a working telegraph in his home so he could analyze how it functioned. By the age of sixteen, Edison was already working as a telegraph operator and would continue to do so at a variety of different places for the next five years. Edison was working in Boston at the time that he decided to focus on his inventions and used his salesmanship skills to get several investors to fund his inventions ("Thomas Edison and Menlo Park"). A year later, he patented his electric vote recorder, which allowed a button to be pressed to record a vote, and a stock ticker that received and displayed numerous pieces of current stock information (Hart 222-225). When the master ticker tape machine at the New York Gold Indicator …show more content…
Very few people know that GE, a company that had an estimated net worth of $350 billion by the end of the 1990s, was created by a merger between Thomson-Houston Company and Edison’s own, Edison General Electric Company. Edison served as the director of the company until 1894. GE became hugely successful and still is today