Like most people who change the world, Thomas Alva Edison (1847--1931) was not expected to do much with his life. The last of seven children, he was a frail, distractible child with bad hearing whose father thought he might be dim-witted. However, the endlessly curious Edison was a habitual inventor and voracious reader from an early age. A driven entrepreneur, at twelve he was already hawking newspapers and candy on a train while simultaneously operating stores in two train stations. These two personality traits, the businessman and the scientist, combined with a burning ambition to make Edison the most important inventor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vividly written and packed with colorful and rare illustrations, Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World is the fascinating story of how a self-taught boy from Ohio who loved to invent new gadgets ended up changing the world--