2 Chapter 1 Always Curious

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