ur own Edison may be called "the Yankee
Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of
nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of
invention no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an
imaginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the domain
of Art.

Yet Edison is in no respect a graceful or romantic figure such as
Leonardo was. He reminds us rather, by the weird and cosmic nature
of his speculations and inventions, of some one of the beings
created by the Norse mythologists: a nineteenth century gnome,
rough, shaggy, uncouth, wholly absorbed in his search among the
secrets of nature, and, while working always for the good of
mankind, dwelling in a world apart, and with neither time nor
inclination to mix in human affairs.

Thomas Alva Edison was born at Milan, Erie County, O., February 11,
1847. He started in life hampered by poverty, by want of teaching
and training, without friends outside his own home circle to
encourage him in pushing his fortunes, and with small opportunity,
in the little village where his lot had been cast, for bettering his
condition. On his father's side he came of sturdy Dutch stock: the
old man, who was still living in 1879 at the age of seventy-four,
reckoned among his immediate ancestors one who lived to be one
hundred and two years old, and another who reached one hundred and
three. He would appear to have been, like pioneers in general,
ready, if not obliged, to turn his hand to any employment that might
yield a living, that must be scanty at the best; and we read of him
as in turn a tailor, a nurseryman, a dealer, first in grain and then
in lumber, and an agent for the sale of farm-lands. He seems to have
been unable to do much for his boy beyond teaching him to read and
write, stimulating his taste for reading by paying him small sums of
money for every book he read through; he had no need to insist that
the reading should be done thoroughly, for it was the boy's way to
do thoroughly everything he undertook. His mother, also, helped
Thomas in learning: she was of Scotch extraction; but, though her
parents were from the old country, she herself was born in
Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This,
then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was
the limit of young Edison's education--to use the conventional
term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could
do with mater