LEVELED BOOK • U

Thomas
Edison

R •U
O •

Written by Joanne C. Wachter

www.readinga-z.com
Thomas
Edison

Written by Joanne C. Wachter

www.readinga-z.com

Focus Question
What traits describe Thomas Edison,
and how did they affect his actions?
 Words to Know
apprenticeship manufacture
discouraged models
filament patent
for-profit peephole
invented sketched
investors technology
Photo Credits:
Front Cover, page 8 (top): © Bettmann/Getty Images; title page: © ullstein bild/
Getty Images; page 3: © Hulton Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images; page 4:
© Print Collector/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; page 6: courtesy of Library
of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-55326]; page 7 (top):
© SPL/Science Source; page 7 (bottom): © Prisma/Universal Images Group/
Getty Images; page 8 (bottom): © Chris Hunter/Schenectady Museum; Hall
of Electrical History Foundation/CORBIS/Getty Images; page 9 (left): © AFP/
Getty Images; page 9 (right, all): courtesy of Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers
University; page 10 (top): © Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL/Getty
Images; page 10 (bottom): INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo; page 11: © Hulton
Archive/Getty Images; page 12: Early light bulbs: left: first commercial light
bulb, right: electric filament lamp made by Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in
1879 (glass & wood)/Science Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Images; page 13:
© Roger Viollet/Getty Images; page 14 (left): © Topical Press Agency/Hulton
Archive/Getty Images; page 14 (right): © Universal History Archive/Universal
Images Group/Getty Images; page 15: © FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Thomas Edison
Level U Leveled Book Correlation
© Learning A–Z LEVEL U
Written by Joanne C. Wachter
Fountas & Pinnell Q
All rights reserved. Reading Recovery 40
www.readinga-z.com
DRA 40
 Table of Contents
A Curious Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Young Al . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Edison the Inventor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

A New Lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Important Inventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

A Special Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Other Exciting Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

A Remarkable Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Thomas Edison • Level U 3

Thomas Alva Edison in 1914

A Curious Boy
From an early age, Thomas Edison loved to
question things . He spent his whole life exploring
why and how things worked . Once he understood
how things worked, he tried to figure out how to
make them work better .

Thomas Edison invented or improved over

a thousand things, some of which we use every
day . Many people consider him one of the greatest
American inventors of all time .

4
 Young Al
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11,
1847 . He was the youngest of seven children, four
of whom survived to adulthood . Al, as he was
called as a boy, lived in Ohio with his family until
1854, when they moved to Michigan .

Although smart and curious, Al did not do

well in school . In those days, students memorized
and recited facts and didn’t have the opportunity
to explore and ask their own questions, which
is what Al loved to do . Al’s mother eventually
removed her son from school and taught him at
home . She taught him to love to read . His father
encouraged his reading by giving him ten cents
for every classic book he read .

Al’s parents allowed him to take a job with

the railroad when he was just twelve years old .
He sold food and newspapers to the passengers .
Al used the money he earned to buy books and
science supplies . He was allowed to set up a
science lab in a baggage car until an accidental
fire ended his experiments .

Also around this time, Al lost most of his

hearing . As an adult, he would say someone
grabbed him by the ears and pulled him onto
a train . The story could not be confirmed .

Thomas Edison • Level U 5

 Thomas Edison at fourteen years old

When Al was fifteen, he saved a young boy’s

life . The boy was about to be run over by a boxcar
when Al grabbed him and carried him to safety .
The child’s grateful father, who was a telegraph
operator, offered Al an apprenticeship .

As Al grew older, he traveled around the

country as a telegraph operator . He now preferred
to be called Tom . He continued to be interested in
science and spent much of the money he earned
on books and supplies . He liked to work the night
shift and use his days for experiments .

6
Edison’s improved telegraph

Edison the Inventor

After a few years, Thomas Edison decided that
he wanted to become a full-time inventor . Some
of his early inventions were improvements on the
telegraph machine . For example, he found a way
to send two messages and receive
two messages at the same time .
Earlier telegraphs could only send
or receive one .

Edison received his first patent,

for an electric vote counter, in 1869 . Edison’s electric
The invention did not do well . voting machine

Edison continued to invent . He once said, “I

never allow myself to become discouraged under
any circumstances .”

Do You Know?
The telegraph let people communicate before the
invention of the telephone. It used a code of dots and
dashes, or short and long beeps, to form letters.

Thomas Edison • Level U 7

Edison at work in his Menlo Park lab (top) and the outside of the lab (bottom)

A New Lab
Edison found business partners and began
to manufacture some of his inventions . In 1876,
he built a lab for his science experiments in
Menlo Park, New Jersey . It was the first for-profit
research lab in the world . People called it the
“invention factory” since multiple inventions
could be worked on at once . There, Edison worked
tirelessly for many hours each day, and many of
his employees worked just as hard .

8
Edison writing in a notebook (main) and
some pages from his notebooks (right)

Edison sketched his ideas

in notebooks and gave the
sketches to his twenty-five
workers, who then made
working models . In all, Edison
filled 3,500 notebooks with
ideas for inventions . Not all
of those ideas worked, but
Edison said, “Negative results
are just as valuable to me as
positive results . I can never
find the thing that does the
job the best until I find the
ones that don’t do it .”

Thomas Edison • Level U 9

 Important Inventions
Edison also improved other
inventions . Alexander Graham
Bell had invented the telephone
in 1876 . The first versions required
people to yell into the receiver
to make themselves heard . The
farther away the telephones were,
the worse it was . In 1877, Edison
and his team developed a way to
make a caller’s voice louder and A1877telephone from
with Edison’s
clearer, even over long distances . improvements

Thomas Edison with Madeleine,

Mina, Theodore, and Charles

Edison’s Family
Edison married Mary Stilwell in 1871. They had three
children—Marion, Thomas Jr., and William. Mary died in
1884. Edison married his second wife, Mina Miller, in 1886.
They had three children—Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore.

10
Edison working on an early version of the phonograph

From his work on the telephone and telegraph,

Edison had an idea . He wanted to record words
and play them back . This idea led to the creation
of the phonograph . The first thing Edison
recorded was the nursery rhyme “Mary Had
a Little Lamb .” To everyone’s amazement, the
machine played back the words . Some people
didn’t believe it—they thought someone was
talking in another room!

The phonograph was very simple compared to

modern music players, but it was very exciting to
people in the 1800s . Edison became famous, but he
had a difficult time figuring out what to do with
his invention . He experimented with different
ideas, such as putting a phonograph inside a doll
to make it “talk,” but the toy soon broke . Years
later, after many improvements to the technology,
the phonograph became popular as a way to
record and listen to music .

Thomas Edison • Level U 11

 A Special Project
Edison wasted no
time starting his next
project . For many years,
people had tried to find
a practical way to use
electricity to make light .
Many inventors created
light bulbs, but the
bulbs either burned
too brightly or dimly,
or burned out too fast .
In 1878, Edison became
determined to solve this
problem and sought out
investors to help him .

Edison and his team

worked around the clock . One of Edison’s first electric
light bulbs
The first challenge was
to find a material for the filament—the part of
a light bulb that glows . Edison’s workers tried
thousands of different materials until they found
one that worked . Edison opened the lab for
visitors to see his team’s accomplishments .
People were astounded when they walked up
a path and entered the lab, which was brightly
lit with electric lights . Soon, everyone wanted
electric lights .

12
 The second challenge was creating an electrical
system that could light a building and even a city .
In 1881, Edison moved to New York City to help
start the first electric power plant . Eventually,
power plants in hundreds of communities were
making it possible for people to switch from gas
and oil lamps to electric lights .

Nikola Tesla

The War of the Currents

In the 1880s and 1890s, Edison and his electric companies were
involved in fierce competition with another electric company led by
George Westinghouse. Edison’s method of delivering electricity was
called direct current, or DC. Westinghouse claimed another method
called alternating current, or AC, which was invented by Nikola
Tesla, was a better, safer method. AC eventually became dominant.

Thomas Edison • Level U 13

The Kinetograph (left) and Kinetoscope (right)

Other Exciting Ideas

In 1887, Edison moved into a larger lab in West
Orange, New Jersey . Around that time, he was
shown a machine that played multiple still images
in very quick succession . The things in the images
appeared to be moving!

Edison requested that one of his workers,

William Dickson, work on a machine that could
record images and also a machine that could
project them . Dickson and Edison would invent
the Kinetograph, a motion picture camera, and
the Kinetoscope, a projector that would allow one
person to watch the movie through a peephole .
Edison also tried to link sound with the images
of this new invention . He found it too difficult to
get the sound and pictures to match, so his films
were silent .

14
 A Remarkable Man
Edison continued to pour ideas into his
notebooks and work with his team to turn his
ideas into reality . Some of his other inventions
included machines for mining, improved
batteries, and new uses for cement .

Throughout his life, Edison obtained

1,093 patents, which was a record at the time .
He continued to work until he was more than
eighty years old .

Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931 .

President Herbert Hoover asked everyone in
the country to turn out the lights for a short
time to honor Edison . Sitting in the dark for a
few moments, people could think about the great
changes Thomas Edison had made in their lives .

As Edison once said, “If we did all the things

we are capable of doing, we would astound
ourselves .”

Edison conducting an experiment in 1910

Thomas Edison • Level U 15

 Glossary
apprenticeship (n.) a period of training during which
a person learns a skill or trade from
a skilled professional (p . 6)

discouraged (adj.) not feeling courageous, confident,

or enthusiastic about something (p . 7)

filament (n.) a thread or threadlike object that

conducts electricity, such as that
found in a light bulb (p . 12)

for-profit (adj.) set up or done to make money (p . 8)

invented (v.) created, designed, or built something

that did not exist before (p . 4)

investors (n.) people, companies, or organizations

that buy something or put money into
a business hoping to make a profit
(p . 12)

manufacture (v.) to make finished goods or products

from raw materials (p . 8)

models (n.) smaller versions of an object made

to look like the real thing (p . 9)

patent (n.) a document granting the right to

make money from an invention (p . 7)

peephole (n.) a small hole through which a person

looks (p . 14)

sketched (v.) made a rough drawing or outline

of something (p .9)

technology (n.) the use of scientific knowledge or

tools to make or do something (p . 11)

16
 Thomas Edison
A Reading A–Z Level U Leveled Book
Word Count: 1,248

Connections
Writing
Research to learn more about one
of Thomas Edison’s inventions. Create
a brochure about the invention to share
with your classmates.
Social Studies
Make a timeline of Thomas Edison’s life.
Include at least five of his inventions
on your timeline.

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