Who Was Thomas Alva Edison? – Margaret Frith – Penguin Random House

A curious child who fed worms to a friend to see if she would fly like a bird A boy who left school at the age of twelve and was hard of hearing all his life The man who changed the world when he invented the electric lightbulb One day in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch that lit up lower Manhattan with incandescent light and changed the way people live ever after. The electric light bulb was only one of thousands of Edison's inventions, which include the phonograph and the kinetoscope, an early precursor to the movie camera. As a boy, observing a robin catch a worm and then take flight, he fed a playmate a mixture of worms and water to see if she could fly! Here's an accessible, appealing biography with 100 black-and-white illustrations.