Thomas Edison is an American scientist who has made it his life-work to make practical use of the great force of electricity. He was born in 1847 and is still living and still working. He was the son of a hard-working laborer. His mother had been a school teacher and she gave her son as good an education as she could. When only twelve years old, he started out to earn his own living as a news-boy on the Grand Trunk Railroad. He was a business-like, enterprising youngster. When there was exciting news in his papers, he telegraphed the fact to stations in advance and bought extra supplies of papers which he disposed of at a good price. He decided that he would like to print a paper of his own, so he got some old type and fitted up part of a freight-car as an office. Here he published a weekly paper, “The Grand Trunk Herald,” which became popular with railroad people. He undertook a second paper called the “Paul Pry” but for some personal remarks in it he was severely punished and he soon after gave up journalism. He now became interested in chemistry. He bought cheap apparatus and some chemicals and in his freight-car office devoted himself to experiments. Unfortunately, an over-turned bottle of phosphorus set the floor on fire; the conductor put the young editor and scientist, with his printing press and chemical outfit, off the car. When Edison was about fifteen, he saved the life of a two-year-old child, dragging it from in front of the engine at risk of his own life. The grateful father was a station agent and he offered to teach Edison telegraphy. The boy became a rapid operator, but was too fond of experimenting to devote himself to work and he drifted from one place to another. Finally he went to New York City. For his inventions of stock-printing and other telegraph appliances, he received forty thousand dollars and this enabled him to establish a laboratory to work out his ideas. For many years Edison was laughed at because he believed that a telegraph wire can be made to carry two messages at once; by his duplex system he made it do so, and later by his quadruplex system he made it carry four messages. He added some improvements to the telephone invented by Bell, invented a phonograph to record and repeat the sound of the human voice, and a megaphone to carry the sound to a distance, and the kinetoscope. His greatest work, however, was in connection with the electric light. He worked on it a long time before he succeeded. The chief trouble was in securing a good non-conducting filament. He sent men to search in China, Japan, South America, and Ceylon for bamboo and other plants which would answer his purpose. Out of three thousand specimens of vegetable fiber, he found three or four which would do. In 1880 the light which is now used all over the world was perfected and exhibited.