Thomas Alva Edison had rebelliousness and nonconformity in his blood. His father, Samuel Ogden Edison Jr., was a descendant of Dutch and English immigrants who settled first in the United States, and then – after supporting the British during the American Revolution – moved to Canada. Samuel, born in Digby, Nova Scotia, in 1804, grew up on a farm in Ontario and became a skilled carpenter and tailor and eventually ran a tavern. His wife, Nancy Matthews Elliott, whom he married in 1828, was born in central New York State, the daughter of a Baptist minister and a former schoolteacher. She acted as the disciplinarian in their expanding family. By 1836, after eight years of marriage, Samuel and Nancy had four children: Marion, William, Harriet, and Carlile.

In 1837, Samuel joined an insurrection launched by William Lyon Mackenzie, the mayor of Toronto, who planned to overthrow the British-controlled Canadian government and replace it with democratic self-governance. When the rebellion was crushed by Canadian troops, Samuel left his wife and children behind and fled on foot through the snowy wilderness to the other side of the border; he landed in Port Huron, Michigan.

Over the next year, Samuel moved from place to place before settling in Milan, Ohio. It was an opportune time to be living there: On July 4, 1839, the Milan Canal opened, connecting the town to the Huron River, which fed Lake Erie, creating new business opportunities for those in the community. With financial help from his Canadian relatives, Samuel set up a mill to make wooden shingles and opened a store that sold feed grain. Soon, Nancy and the children joined him, and in 1840, their fifth child, Samuel Ogden Edison III, was born. Their sixth, Eliza, came along in 1843.

Though the Edisons prospered financially, they were repeatedly struck by tragedy. Three of their six children - Carlile, Samuel, and Eliza - had died from illness by the time their seventh child, Thomas Alva Edison, was born on April 11, 1847.

“Little Al,” as he was called, was a curious, observant child who watched with interest the activity swirling around him in Milan: farming, lumbering, shipbuilding, and other trades. The inquisitive boy asked shipbuilders so many questions that one of them told his father, “It would save time to hire a man especial to answer your young one’s questions.”

Sadly, Milan’s economic boom did not last long; its canal-based industries went into decline as the railroads advanced west. When Thomas was seven, Samuel moved the family back to Port Huron, Michigan, where he set up shop as a grain, timber, and grocery vendor. The family also maintained a ten-acre commercial vegetable garden, which young Thomas tended with pride. As he recalled years later, “About eight acres were planted in sweet corn, the balance in radishes, onions, parsnips, beets, etc; I was very ambitious about this garden and worked very hard. My father had an old horse and wagon and with this we carried vegetables to the town which was 1 1/2 miles distant and sold them from door to door. One year, I remember turning in to my mother $600 from the farm.”

While the Edison family was relatively comfortable for most of Little Al’s childhood, it eventually fell victim to the fluctuations of the rapidly industrializing American economy. Shortly after the Panic of 1857, the world’s first global recession, Samuel’s grocery business failed. It was the first of a series of financial calamities that would beset the family. While Samuel may have passed along many things to his son – most notably his restless intellect – acumen in business was not one of them.

The family’s financial crisis may have contributed to Thomas’s inconsistent attendance at school. Whatever the reason, he was primarily home-schooled by his mother until he was a teenager. “My mother taught me how to read good books quickly and correctly,” Edison later said. “I have always been very thankful for this early training.”

If his mother taught him how to read, it was his father who showed him what to read. Samuel introduced his son to the passionate polemics of Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbon’s histories of the Roman Empire, and David Hume’s philosophical treatises. These erudite Enlightenment writers, who had nurtured Samuel’s freethinking politics, shaped Thomas’s worldview as well. Paine, in particular, had a lasting impact on him, helping to form what he called his “scientific deism” - his belief that a “supreme intelligence” guided the world but without kindness, mercy, or love. “Paine educated me then about many matters of which I had never before thought,” he wrote. “I remember very vividly the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine’s writings.”

The mid-nineteenth century culture Thomas Edison grew up in was adamant in its belief that scientific discovery could - and would - lead to a better life. After more than a century of experiments, electricity and steam were poised to power a new era of manufacturing. Railroads were muscling their way across the country, and telegraph wires were transmitting messages at unprecedented speeds. America was a nation on the move.

There’s no question that Thomas Edison was a prodigy. One of the most remarkable aspects of Edison’s life is that he had only three months of formal education. He attended school briefly in Port Huron, where his teacher, the Reverend G. B. Engle, thought the seven-year-old boy was an inferior student who asked too many questions. When Edison was bored by Engle’s lectures, he would doodle or doze off. “I heard the teacher tell the visiting school inspector that I was addled, and it would not be worthwhile keeping me in school any longer,” Edison recalled. Enraged at the reverend’s assessment, his mother resolved to educate him at home. Far from being a hindrance to his education, studying independently brought out the boy’s natural curiosity. For the rest of his life, Edison was a voracious, self-motivated reader.

Which is not to say that Little Al was bookish or reclusive. He went swimming with his friends, and as a nine-year-old, spent hours organizing a “secret service,” inspiring his cohorts to design an underground clubhouse with access through a camouflaged trap door. They furnished their hideout with a table, chairs, paper, games, and vegetables appropriated from his father’s garden.

Growing up on farms, Edison and his pals had easy access to hazardous materials, including gun powder. One of his childhood friends, James Clancy, wrote to Edison years later, reminiscing about their sometimes risky behavior: “You remember what chances you and I used to take at your old home and how your good mother used to talk to us and say we would blow our hands off.”

Clancy recalled the time the boys bored a hole in the trunk of a big pine tree near the Edisons’ ice house and stuffed it with a plug of powder. Tom persuaded a boy named Mike to put his hat over the plug and then lit it with a match. The cap went flying, and the force of the explosion “blew the side out of the ice house.”

“The wonder,” Clancy wrote, “is that you did not kill Mike and myself as we had many narrow escapes, but we got through it all.”

Edison embarked on many of his juvenile pranks in the name of scientific experimentation. As a toddler in Milan, he noticed that birds fed on earthworms and concluded that their diet was the reason they could fly. To test his theory, he persuaded a neighborhood girl to consume a concoction of mashed worms and water. She ended up retching, and he received a whipping from his mother, who kept a birch switch in a corner of her kitchen for just these occasions.

From an early age, Edison was a tinkerer. A popular textbook he came across when he was nine, Natural and Experimental Philosophy, recounted the experiments performed by a Boston high school teacher named Richard Parker. Edison didn’t just read about the experiments; he tried them himself in a science lab he had built - at his parents’ encouragement - in the family basement.

In 1859, the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada reached Port Huron, connecting it with the main line to Detroit. With his mother’s grudging permission, the twelve-year-old Edison began riding the rails every day, selling newspapers, magazines, candy, peanuts, sandwiches, cigars, guidebooks, and ten-cent novels. The train left Port Huron at 7:00 a.m. and remained in Detroit for five hours before returning.

Edison spent much of his idle time in Detroit at the library of the Young Men’s Society, where he read science books, including Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. He also used the train car as a rolling laboratory to conduct scientific experiments but was forced to curtail his activities after one of his projects burst into flames.

Unfazed, young Thomas expanded his entrepreneurial horizons. He bought fresh fruits and vegetables in Detroit and hired a boy to sell them from a stand in Port Huron. Since railroad officials allowed him to bring his purchases back to Port Huron free of charge, he made a tidy profit.

As the Civil War raged, Edison found that reports from the front lines increased the sales of his newspapers. In April 1862, he saw crowds of people in Detroit gathering around public bulletin boards to read headlines about the heavy casualties at the Battle of Shiloh. The scanty information spurred the demand for the more complete coverage available only in newspapers. Recognizing that what had happened in Detroit could happen in other towns, Edison convinced a telegraph operator to wire the news from the bulletin boards to all the stations along the line from Detroit to Port Huron. “I knew,” he wrote decades later, “that if the same excitement was attained at the various small towns along the road and especially at Port Huron that the sale of papers would be great.”

Edison usually sold about 300 papers on each trip, but he thought he could probably sell three times that many. Lacking the money to buy more newspapers himself, he persuaded the editor of the Detroit Free Press to front him an additional 1,000 copies of the paper.

“The first station called Utica,” Edison recalled, “was a small one where I generally sold two papers. I saw a crowd ahead on the platform, thought it some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold thirty-five papers.” At the next stop, he doubled his price from five to ten cents. When he arrived in Port Huron, he sold his few remaining copies for a quarter each, making what he considered “an immense sum of money.”

With the profit from his newspaper venture, Edison created his own weekly publication called the Grand Trunk Herald, which he printed in the baggage car of the train using a small press he bought from a junk dealer and printing supplies he scavenged from the Detroit Free Press. In addition to national events and news of the war, the Herald carried items of interest to the railroad community - births and marriages and such. Edison was soon selling 300 copies to crewmen, station personnel, and commuters, netting $10 a week. At its peak, the paper had 500 regular subscribers, each paying eight cents a month.

The Herald was notable more for its pluck and promotional endeavors than its breaking news - or its spelling and grammar. An excerpt from one of the surviving editions sings the praises of Grand Trunk engineers: “We have rode with Mr. E.L. Northrup, one of Engineers and we do not believe you could fall in with another Engineer, more careful, or attentive to his Engine being the most steady driver that we have ever rode behind . . . always kind and obliging, and ever at his post.”

Edison was fascinated by the power and potential of the telegraph, which was still a developing technology; it had been in commercial use only since the 1840s. He ingratiated himself with telegraph operators along the Grand Trunk line, who began sharing with him the secrets of their trade. In 1862, Edison was sitting in the telegraph office at the Mount Clemens station when he saw the three-year-old son of operator James MacKenzie playing on the tracks - and a freight train barreling down on him. Edison jumped onto the tracks and pulled the boy to safety. “His mother saw the operation and fainted,” Edison later wrote. MacKenzie showed his gratitude by offering to teach his son’s rescuer the art of sending and receiving messages over an electric wire.

With MacKenzie’s training, Edison soon became a skilled telegrapher and was hired by Western Union to operate a wire in a Port Huron book and jewelry store. When he wasn’t telegraphing, Edison was tinkering with the instruments and gears the proprietor kept in the shop to repair clocks and watches. “He was no good to wait on customers, so he had plenty of time to experiment and tinker,” the store owner recalled. “And in so doing, he was a great annoyance to my workmen.”

Telegraphy provided Thomas Edison a trade - and membership in a geeky fraternity. Operators shared jokes, anecdotes, and insider gossip over the wires. As in many clubs, they were bound by a strict hierarchy: At the top stood the press telegraphers who took down newspaper stories coming over the wire; newcomers, known as “plugs,” were at the bottom.

The more experienced operators often hazed novices by forcing them to receive messages at a breakneck speed until they “broke.” Edison viewed these dares and pranks as an extension of the “secret service” culture of his boyhood and quickly learned to thrive in this environment. Still, while he joined in the jokes and gossip - even the revelries of his companions - his restless mind drove him to continue his scientific exploration. He spent his free time reading books on technology in general and electricity in particular.

Since it was easy to find jobs in the expanding industry, telegraphers were often nomads, moving from one place to another whenever the urge struck. Edison followed suit, becoming an itinerant craftsman in a nation that was now making the transition to a peacetime economy after four long, bloody years of civil war. Edison’s first job away from home was in Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway; he also worked in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, and Louisville.

In 1866, when he was nineteen, he got a job on the Associated Press newswire in Louisville as a Western Union employee. Characteristically, he requested the night shift, which gave him plenty of time for reading and scientific experiments. But one night, while working with a lead-acid battery, he spilled sulfuric acid, which ran through the floorboards onto his boss’s desk in the room below. He was fired the next morning. His subsequent wanderings lasted three years.

Jobs may have been plentiful, but the pay was low. Edison lived in the cheapest boarding houses, where the food was usually meager and sometimes barely edible, the heating inadequate, and the vermin abundant. Still, the lifestyle offered Edison a practical education, and nothing he endured could dampen his enthusiasm for life. In Cincinnati, he even found time to attend the theater, seeing mainly Shakespearean productions; his favorite was Othello.

He experimented endlessly with the telegraph. In Indianapolis in 1864 and 1865, he worked to improve telegraphic repeaters, which are installed at intervals on long lines to amplify the waning signal. In Cincinnati, where he was promoted to telegraph operator first class, he ran tests on self-adjusting relays, the electromagnets that produce the clicks to transmit messages in Morse code. One invention, which he refined and patented some years later, improved the accuracy of receiving incoming messages. Usually, messages came in at forty words a minute, which the operator was expected to transcribe at the same speed. To address this need, Edison designed a backup recorder, which repeated the words at the rate of twenty-five to thirty words per minute, allowing the operator to catch anything he had missed on the first run. It was during those years at Western Union when he was not yet out of his teens that Edison committed himself to being an inventor.

In October 1867, Edison returned home to Port Huron, ragged and penniless. His parents were no better off; his mother was showing signs of mental illness, his father had impetuously quit his latest job, and the bank was threatening to foreclose. Edison decided that the best he could do was go back to work and try to make some serious money.

Learning from a fellow telegrapher that there were jobs in Boston, he left town again. His arrival on the East Coast was inauspicious. After a four-day train trip through a raging blizzard, he was exhausted and broke. But he was a master telegrapher, and Western Union gave him a job immediately. He was not yet twenty-one.