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    Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities
    Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities
    Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities
    Ebook331 pages3 hours

    Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities

    By Laurie Carlson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Thomas Edison, one of the world's greatest inventors, is introduced in this fascinating activity book. Children will learn how Edison ushered in an astounding age of invention with his unique way of looking at things and refusal to be satisfied with only one solution to a problem. This book helps inspire kids to be inventors and scientists, as well as persevere with their own ideas. Activities allow children to try Edison's experiments themselves, with activities such as making a puppet dance using static electricity, manufacturing a switch for electric current, constructing a telegraph machine, manipulating sound waves, building an electrical circuit to test for conductors and insulators, making a zoetrope, and testing a dandelion for latex. In addition to his inventions and experiments, the book explores Edison's life outside of science, including his relationship with inventor Nikola Tesla, his rivalry with George Westinghouse, and his friendship with Henry Ford. A time line, glossary, and lists of supply sources, places to visit, and websites for further exploration complement this activity book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChicago Review Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2006
    ISBN9781613743041
    Thomas Edison for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities

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      except he did nothing...Tesla did all that "Ideas"

    Book preview

    Thomas Edison for Kids - Laurie Carlson

    1-2

    1

    Off to a Quick Start

    WHAT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TODAY, MAY NOT BE TOMORROW.

    —THOMAS EDISON

    Thomas Alva Edison’s Boyhood

    ATERRIFIC SNOWSTORM blanketed the small village of Milan, Ohio, the night before Thomas Alva Edison was born. It was 1847 and the Edison home, like others, was heated with a coal- or wood-burning stove or fireplace. Candlelight or the flickering flame from lamps lighted the darkness. Lamps were simple—a piece of wick stuck in whale oil or vegetable oil.

    Dr. Lehman Galpin lived down the street from the Edison family and arrived to help with the baby’s birth. He thought the newborn boy might have brain fever because the infant’s head was larger than most newborns’ usually are. It’s hard to tell what he meant by brain fever, but his words struck fear in Nancy and Samuel Edison, who worried that their new baby might have health problems. Nancy had already borne seven children, but only three had lived. Those children were teenagers now, about to set out on their own. But the baby, named Thomas after an ancestor and Alva after Captain Alva Bradley, a Great Lakes ship owner and family friend, was a healthy newborn.

    U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site

    Thomas Alva Edison at 14 years of age. Everyone called him Al.

    As a child, everyone called the boy Alva, or Al. His two sisters and a brother were much older, so Al spent a lot of time playing by himself. His parents had been married nearly 20 years when little Al was born, and they seldom played with him. Samuel Edison, Thomas’s father, was born in Canada, where his father, John, had fled after the American Revolution. The older Edison was a Loyalist and refused to fight alongside the patriots. He remained loyal to Britain, but the British lost the war. The revolutionaries took his home and business, and he was forced to move his family to Canada after the war ended. When Samuel became an adult, he eventually moved to the Canadian side of the Great Lakes region, where he led a rebellion against the British government—this time he wasn’t going to make his father’s mistake. But the rebels failed, and Canadian government troops moved to arrest him, so he fled into the United States—the country his father had fled from a generation earlier. Samuel and his wife Nancy settled in Milan, Ohio, a few miles from the southern shore of Lake Erie, where he earned a living selling lumber, roof shingles, and animal feed.

    Though Al spent much time alone, he did have friends, and together they enjoyed swimming in the canal, building toy roads and wagons, and learning the songs of the lumber and canal workers.

    When Al was young, Milan was a bustling trade center where farmers brought grain to be shipped out by canal to the Great Lakes and beyond. Most people were farmers in the early 1840s, and their crops were transported by oxcart. But new technology—canals—enabled the moving of products to market faster, on barges and steamboats. The Erie Canal in New York State was completed in 1824, allowing farm products and lumber to be shipped from places like Milan, Ohio, across the Great Lakes, down the Erie Canal, and to New York City. Long lines of wagons waited to load and unload their goods, and the Edison house was near the canal, right in the center of the action.

    Al was like many children who strayed off into mischief, sometimes with scary consequences. He once fell into a nearby canal and had to be rescued, his clothes dripping and his lungs coughing up water. Another time he fell into the pit of a tall grain elevator tank and was nearly smothered in the pile of wheat that closed over him. After secretly playing with fire in his father’s barn, the wooden barn ignited and burned to the ground.

    The barn fire not only destroyed the family’s investment, as there was no fire insurance for such a catastrophe, but it threatened to burn the neighboring buildings, too. Fire departments in places like Milan were not equipped to save buildings, and neighbors were angry about the incident. Al’s father held a public spanking of the boy (an acceptable punishment in those days), strapping him soundly in view of everyone.

    Al’s father loved him dearly, but often thought he was a stupid child. His father complained that the boy was always asking foolish questions and getting into trouble. Many of young Edison’s problems came about because he was thinking about something else and not paying attention to what was happening around him. He and a friend had gone swimming in the creek one afternoon, and while Al sat on the bank, deep in thought, the friend drowned in the creek. Coming back to attention, Al figured the friend had already gone home, so he went home and said nothing. Later that evening the townspeople put out a search for the missing boy, his body turned up in the stream, and Al was blamed for the tragedy. His father thought Al was a miserable troublemaker, lacking good sense. Al started to believe it.

    One fellow in Milan fascinated the young Edison boy. Sam Winchester owned a large flour mill powered by a steam engine, which was a new invention at that time. Machinery had previously been moved by waterpower or draft animals, but Winchester’s steam engine used fuel to heat up water, which created steam to move the machinery. It was the age of the steam engine, and Al saw it firsthand. The steam engine was powerful, noisy, and hot, but Winchester had even more interesting projects going on at the mill. Townspeople called Winchester The Mad Miller of Milan because they thought he was crazy to be working on the foolish invention he kept in the mill. He was building a passenger airship. It was a large balloon powered by hydrogen that he hoped to fly someday.

    Seven-year-old Al hung around the mill constantly. His father disapproved and repeatedly punished him for going there. But Al was fascinated by Winchester’s dogged determination to build the airship, which unfortunately burned down the mill when some hydrogen ignited. Not one to give up, Winchester went back to working on the experiment and finally succeeded. It had taken several years, but Winchester went aloft, lifted up into the air by his balloon invention. He drifted slowly out over Lake Erie and was never seen again.

    While the people of Milan weren’t very enthusiastic about air travel, they were completely devoted to the idea of canal transportation. Their local canal had brought many opportunities to the area. They didn’t like the idea of railroads, either. When railroad builders wanted to lay a rail line, the townspeople resisted. They didn’t want a train to interfere with the shipping business they were doing on the canal. That was a big mistake, because in 1854, the Lake Shore Railroad built its rail lines elsewhere, and traffic shifted from the canal to the railroad. Farmers took their products to the newer and faster railroads, leaving Milan and its canal behind. In a few short years, the town was nearly dried up. There was little business, and people started leaving.

    The Edisons sold their comfortable home for very little money and moved about 100 miles (160 km) away, looking for a better situation. Al was seven years old when the family moved to a rented house in Port Huron, Michigan, a thriving town where Al’s father set out on a variety of moneymaking ventures—growing vegetables and selling timber, groceries, and real estate.

    Samuel Edison had one idea that set the family apart in the community. He built a 100-foot-tall (30 m) wooden stairway structure in their yard. For 25 cents, people could climb the stairs to the top, where they could see the view for miles. Neighbors made fun of the Edison Tower, but Samuel claimed it was a joke that paid. Al learned firsthand how to create something of value that people would pay to use. Years later he said people would pay well for entertainment, something he first realized as he helped his father collect coins from the townspeople.

    Al and his parents worked hard in Port Huron. Al worked on the family’s 10-acre farm garden, growing, corn, radishes, onions, parsnips, and beets. He and another boy did the work and then took a horse and wagon loaded with vegetables to town and sold them door-to-door. One year Al gave his mother $600—the equivalent of over $12,000 today—that he earned from the farm garden.

    The Edison family home had six bedrooms, and Al’s mother rented some of the spare rooms to boarders. Al learned the value of money and hard work while he was young, and that knowledge never left him. There was plenty of work to do, but Al’s parents knew he needed to attend school, too. Nancy Edison had been among the first generation of young girls allowed to attend school long enough to become a teacher. But most school boards in those days had regulations stating that once a woman married, she could no longer work as a teacher. Nancy Edison had taught Al to read, write, and sketch. Now, she felt, her youngest child should go to school.

    MAKE A STEAM-POWERED BOAT

    BEFORE STEA M-POWERED engines were invented, machinery was powered by moving water, such as rivers and streams. The water moved waterwheels, which powered equipment like sawmills, flour mills, and weaving looms. The moving water worked great—except when unpredictable weather caused the water to flow either too fast or too slow. And waterpower meant that all factories had to be built right next to waterways.

    After Robert Fulton demonstrated his steam-powered boat in 1807, American industry took off in new directions. Steam power meant machinery could be located wherever there was something to burn, like wood or coal, to fuel the engine. Steamboats and steam locomotives could carry their fuel right along with them. Suddenly, American factories began spreading across the country. Steam power also meant that boats could easily move up rivers for the first time in history, and locomotives could deliver passengers and loads far from waterways.

    Adult supervision required

    YOU’LL NEED

    Utility knife

    Soft plastic bottle (such as the kind used for contact lens solution)

    Small votive candle (the kind that sits in an aluminum cup)

    Duct tape

    1/8-inch (.31-cm) diameter soft copper tubing

    Tubing cutter or hacksaw

    Knife or sandpaper

    Large pen or pencil « Nail

    Body of water (such as a pond or swimming pool)

    Matches or lighter

    Using the utility knife, cut the plastic bottle in half lengthwise. Place the candle near the bow (front) of the boat and secure it in place with a small amount of duct tape. Cut a 12-inch (30.4-cm) length of copper tubing with the tubing cutter or saw, and clean the debris out of the cut with a knife or sandpaper. Gently bend the tubing around a large pen or pencil to form a coil in the center, then remove the pen or pencil. Poke two holes in the stern (back) of the boat with a nail, and force the two ends of the copper tubes through the holes, forming a watertight fit. Carefully bend the tubing so the coil is just above the top of where the candle’s flame will be.

    Now you’re ready to launch your steamboat. Place the boat in a body of water, and fill the copper tube with water by holding one end of the tube underwater and sucking gently on the other end. When the tube is full of water, make sure the boat is resting in the water with both ends of the tubing under the water, and light the candle. When the coil of copper tubing gets hot enough to boil the water inside, the boat will start moving forward. Put your fingers in the water just behind the tubes, and you can feel little pulses of water. These pulses are pushing the boat along.

    How does this work? When the water in the coil boils, the steam expands and pushes the water out of the tube ends, propelling the boat forward. As the steam continues to expand, it encounters the section of tubing that was once full of water. This tubing is cold, and the steam condenses back into water. This causes a vacuum to form, which pulls more water back into the two ends of the tube. These two streams of water meet each other in the coil, pushing the boat forward and reversing any backward motion caused by the water being sucked into the tubes. This pulsing, back-and-forth water motion is rapid enough that the comparatively heavy boat never actually moves backward at all, only forward.

    Unfortunately, before Al could enroll, he caught scarlet fever, an infectious disease common in the 1800s. Scarlet fever is caused by streptococcus bacteria and can be passed by an infected person’s cough or by drinking milk from an infected cow. Scarlet fever causes a high body temperature, sickness, sore throat, and a scarlet rash that spreads over the body, even the tongue. A serious case can cause ear and kidney infections and swollen neck glands. Today, scarlet fever is cured with antibiotics; in the 1850s doctors gave herbal tonics and teas and mercury pills. No one knows how Al caught the disease or how sick he was, but it kept him from attending school until he was eight and a half years old.

    U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site

    This drawing of Reverend Engle’s school was made by a classmate.

    Finally Al’s parents enrolled him in Reverend George Engle’s school, where he attended class with 15 other students. He also took piano lessons from Reverend Engle. The school was expensive, though, so his parents soon switched him to a public school, a crowded one-room school with 40 students between the ages of 5 and 21. But Al was not suited for school—he had difficulty learning his lessons and became easily distracted from his work. Schoolwork in those days meant memorizing facts or poems, then reciting them aloud without mistakes. There was never a chance to do or make anything. Al said he needed to see things with his own eyes, to make and do things and try them out for himself. He said that trying something out for himself was better than learning about something he had never seen.

    Teachers were very strict and often swatted students who made mistakes or misbehaved. The teacher frequently slapped and ridiculed Al in front of the class. One day Al heard the schoolmaster, Mr. Crawford, say that Al was addled and that it was useless to keep him in school. Addled was a term used for students who had problems learning. Al’s feelings were hurt. He rushed home crying and begged his mother not to make him go back to school.

    Mrs. Edison was furious. Edison recalled, I found out what a good thing a mother was; she brought me back to the school and angrily told the teacher that he didn’t know what he was talking about. She was the most enthusiastic champion a boy ever had, and I determined right then that I would be worthy of her, and show her that her confidence had not been misplaced.

    Al’s formal schooling had lasted only three months. From that point on, he was home-schooled by his mother. She finished her housework in the morning, then sat down with Al and went over lessons with him. She had him read books meant

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