a mill to real estate. When Thomas was seven, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison started school here in Michigan. His teacher was Reverend G. B. Engle, who considered Edison a dumb student. He did not like math and annoyed his teacher with his many questions. His teacher told his mother that he could not be taught. This angered his mother and made her decide to home school him (Josephson 354).

Edison loved to read. Before he was twelve, he had read novels by Dickens, Shakespeare, and Gibbon. When he was nine, he read a science book that his mother had given him. This book told how to do many experiments at home. He did every experiment in the book and his mother gave him many morescience books to look at. He loved Chemistry so much that he spent all of his spare money on chemicals. He also collected bottles, wires, and other things to use in his experiments. At age ten, Thomas built his first laboratory in the basement of his house (Compton’s Encyclopedia 74).

When Edison was twelve, he had his first job as a trainboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. Thomas sold newspapers and candy to the passengers. He also printed a weekly paper called the Weekly Herald. He spent all of the money he earned on supplies for his laboratory. During the year he was there he got permission to move his lab to a baggage car. This let him work on his experiments during the five-hour layover. One day the