20th Century Genius - Essay Example

(Beals, G., 1999). Thomas Edison was born to a middle-class family in the port town of Milan in Ohio, on February 11, 1847. His inquisitive nature, made him badger his teacher with questions, till the teacher ran out of patience with him. His mother promptly withdrew him from school at the age of seven, and taught him reading, writing, arithmetic, and the bible by herself at home. When he was eleven year old, to satiate his quest for knowledge, his parents introduced him to the local library, and he soon became adept at using the resources at the library, which led to the start of his self-learning process.

There was still an inadequacy in his quest for scientific knowledge, and to fill this gap his parents hired a tutor. Edison was disillusioned with the language and difficult terminology that was used to explain the scientific knowledge, but was taken up with the scientific laws. His lack of proper formal schooling, as well as a hearing defect that he was born with, prevented him from taking up secondary education. However, his perseverance was to stand him in good stead, and he continued to imbibe knowledge through his own efforts.

It was at the age of twelve that Edison displayed the acumen for business in him. He initially started selling newspapers, snacks, and candy on the local railroad, which was to expand into selling fruits and vegetables. By the age of fourteen he had developed a small newspaper business of his own too, with a customer base of three hundred. He happened to save the child of the stationmaster from going under the wheels of a train, and the grateful father taught Edison the use of the Morse code.

It was not long before Edison mastered the Morse code, and became a telegraph operator at the age of fifteen, as the Civil war caused a lot of vacancies. It was here that Edison started experimenting and came up with his first invention by the age of sixteen, in the form of the “automatic