Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. Largely self-taught after leaving school at age seven, he went on to establish the first industrial research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and develop the phonograph, the practical incandescent light bulb, and early motion picture technology, fundamentally reshaping daily life and industry.
Edison's teachers reportedly considered him a poor student, easily distracted and hard of hearing, a condition that worsened throughout his life. His mother, a former schoolteacher, pulled him out of formal education and taught him at home instead, feeding him books on science and history that he devoured with an obsessive curiosity.
By his twenties he was already a working telegraph operator with a habit of tinkering, and by 1876 he had built the Menlo Park laboratory, often called the 'invention factory,' where he promised to produce 'a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.' He mostly delivered: the phonograph in 1877 stunned even Edison himself, who hadn't expected it to work on the first try. He would end his life holding 1,093 U.S. patents, still the most of any American inventor, though his true genius lay less in solitary brilliance than in organizing teams of engineers toward relentless, iterative testing.