11 February: Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was born on this date in 1847. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio and was the youngest of seven children. The family had been living in Canada, but his father had been involved in protests against British rule and fled to the USA to avoid being prosecuted.
2. At the age of 12, Edison got a job selling Newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad. At the same time he set up a chemistry lab and a printing press in a baggage car. He used the latter to print his own newspaper, which he called The Grand Trunk Herald. While he was doing that job, he saved the station master’s three year old son from being run over by a train. James U. Mackenzie, the station master, offered to teach Edison how to use a telegraph machine, which led to his first adult job, as a telegraph operator. This job inspired the nicknames of his two oldest children – he called them “Dot” and “Dash”.
3. After a while, Edison decided that he was going to be an inventor. The first of his many patents was for a machine to count votes. When Edison patented his Electrographic Vote-Recorder machine in 1869, he thought it would speed up the voting process in American legislatures. It didn’t catch on with the politicians, however, as it ruled out the possibility of last minute deals.
4. Edison set up a company to manufacture and promote his inventions. Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford were among the company's employees. However, most of the college graduates he took on left a lot to be desired, so he made the interviews for prospective workers very difficult. He’d ask questions on subjects like Opera, astronomy and US Presidents to test the interviewees’ knowledge and response to stress, since it was said that “only a walking encyclopedia” could get all the questions right.
5. Edison didn’t actually invent the Light bulb. Electric lamps had been around since 1802, and sold commercially since 1840, but they were expensive, not very bright and didn’t last long. What Edison did was come up with a cheap, long-lasting incandescent bulb that didn’t require much Electricity to function.
6. Videos of Cats are all over The Internet now, but one of the first cat films ever made was by Thomas Edison, who filmed two cats fighting in boxing gloves. As well as pioneering projection devices, Edison worked on sound recording and invented a doll with a phonograph inside it to make it talk. However, the doll didn’t catch on, partly because it was expensive and partly because it scared children. He even invented a battery for an electric car, which almost caught on. In fact, by 1912, there were more than 33,000 electric cars on American roads, which were luxurious and built to customer specifications, rather like the high end electric cars of today. However, the cars were rather slow, even for those days, and the battery life wasn’t very long.
7. Edison lost most of his hearing when he was twelve. Edison blamed it on an incident in which he was grabbed by his ears and lifted onto a train. Other theories include being boxed on the ears by a train conductor for causing a fire in the baggage car or a bout of scarlet fever when he was a child. It’s said that in his later years as his hearing got even worse, he could only listen to Music by clamping his teeth on the wood of a Piano and feeling the vibrations in his head. While his lack of hearing might have made him more shy and reticent, Edison saw it as an advantage, because he could concentrate on his work and not be distracted by background noise. 
8. In 1920, Edison claimed in a magazine interview that he was working on a device which could communicate with dead people using completely scientific means rather than supernatural ones. Several other papers took up the story. However, Edison later admitted that he couldn’t think of anything to say to the interviewer so decided to have a bit of a joke with him, and made the whole thing up.
9. Edison was a pacifist and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, refused to work on anything other than weapons used purely for defence. "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill," he would later say. His commitment to non-violence extended to animals, too – he was a vegetarian.
10. He died from diabetes complications on 18 October 1931 at his home in West Orange, New Jersey at the age of 84. His last words were, “It is very beautiful over there.” It’s said that one of Edison’s sons captured his last breath in a test tube and gave it to Henry Ford, and this is still kept in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. The truth is more likely that there happened to be a load of test tubes in Edison’s bedroom and one of them was given to Ford as a memento.

See Also: Thomas Edison Quotes

Character birthday

Juliette Mountainfairy: Minor character who appears in Secrets and Skies and Closing the Circle. Juliette is a resident of Sprawling, Innovia in the Infinitus dimension. She is one of President Jack Ward’s support team and a good friend of Shanna Douglas. She is a devotee of the Innovian New Age faith, and has therefore adopted the name of her guardian nature spirit. She has no powers and has never travelled to our dimension.

Secrets and Skies

Jack Ward, President of Innovia, owes his life twice over to the enigmatic superhero, dubbed Power Blaster by the press. No-one knows who Power Blaster is or where he comes from - and he wants it to stay that way.

Scientist Desi Troyes has developed a nuclear bomb to counter the ever present threat of an asteroid hitting the planet. When Ward signs the order giving the go ahead for a nuclear test on the remote Bird Island, he has no inkling of Troyes' real agenda, and that he has signed the death warrants of millions of people.

Although the island should have been evacuated, there are people still there: some from the distant continent of Classica; protesters opposed to the bomb test; and Innovians who will not, or cannot, use their communication devices.

Power Blaster knows he must stop the bomb from hitting the island. He also knows it may be the last thing he ever does.

Meanwhile in Innovia, Ward and his staff gather to watch the broadcast of the test. Nobody, not even Troyes himself, has any idea what is about to happen.

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