father had taken the King's side and had lost his home; Samuel would
make no such error. So, when the Canadian Rebellion of 1837 broke out,
Samuel Edison, aged thirty-three, arrayed himself on the side of the
insurgents. This time, however, the insurgents lost, and Samuel was
obliged to flee to the United States, just as his father had fled to
Canada. He finally settled at Milan, Ohio, and there, in 1847, in a
little brick house, which is still standing, Thomas Alva Edison was
born.

When the boy was seven the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan.
The fact that he attended school only three months and soon became
self-supporting was not due to poverty. His mother, an educated woman
of Scotch extraction, taught him at home after the schoolmaster reported
that he was "addled." His desire for money to spend on chemicals for a
laboratory which he had fitted up in the cellar led to his first
venture in business. "By a great amount of persistence," he says, "I
got permission to go on the local train as newsboy. The local train from
Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles, left at 7 A.M.
and arrived again at 9.30 P.M. After being on the train for several
months I started two stores in Port Huron--one for periodicals, and
the other for vegetables, butter, and berries in the season. They were
attended by two boys who shared in the profits." Moreover, young Edison
bought produce from the farmers' wives along the line which he sold at
a profit. He had several newsboys working for him on other trains; he
spent hours in the Public Library in Detroit; he fitted up a laboratory
in an unused compartment of one of the coaches, and then bought a
small printing press which he installed in the car and began to issue a
newspaper which he printed on the train. All before he was fifteen years
old.

But one day Edison's career as a traveling newsboy came to a sudden end.
He was at work in his moving laboratory when a lurch of the train jarred
a stick of burning phosphorus to the floor and set the car on fire. The
irate conductor ejected him at the next station, giving him a violent
box on the ear, which permanently injured his hearing, and dumped his
chemicals and printing apparatus on the platform.

Having lost his position, young Edison soon began to dabble in
telegraphy, in which he had already become interested, "probably," as
he says, "from visiting telegraph offices with a chum who had tastes
similar to mine." He and t