Thomas Edison is born in Milan, Ohio
On this day · 11 February 1847
The future holder of a record 1,093 patents arrived in a small Ohio canal town, three years before his family moved on.
Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the youngest of seven children. The family soon relocated to Port Huron, Michigan, where a restless, hard-of-hearing boy taught himself by reading voraciously and selling newspapers on the railroad.
Edison’s genius lay less in lone flashes of insight than in organized invention. In 1876 he opened a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey — widely called the first true industrial research lab, an “invention factory” staffed to churn out new devices on schedule.
The results came fast. In 1877 he built the phonograph, the first machine to record and replay sound, and two years later produced a practical incandescent light that could burn for hours. Singly or jointly he was eventually granted a world-record 1,093 U.S. patents.
He reportedly framed genius as “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
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