Identifier: edisonhislifeinv00dyer (find matches)
Title: Edison : his life and inventions
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Dyer, Frank Lewis, 1870-1941 Martin, Thomas Commerford, 1856-1924
Subjects: Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847-1931
Publisher: New York : Harper
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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broughtin grain. This square is still covered with fineprimeval forest trees, and has at its centre a hand-some soldiers monument of the Civil War, to whichfour paved walks converge. It is an altogether pleas-ant and unpretentious town, which cherishes with nosmall amount of pride its association with the nameof Thomas Alva Edison. In view of Edisons Dutch descent, it is rathersingular to find him with the name of Alva, for theSpanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the worsttyrant ever known to the Low Countries, and hisevil deeds occupy many stirring pages in Motleysfamous history. As a matter of fact, Edison wasnamed after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his 21 EDISON: HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS father, and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes.Captain Bradley died a few years ago in wealth, whilehis old associate, with equal ability for making money,was never able long to keep it (differing again fromthe Revolutionary New York banker from whom hissons other name, Thomas, was taken).
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CHAPTER III BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN THE new home found by the Edison family atPort Huron, where Alva spent his brief boyhoodbefore he became a telegraph operator and roamedthe whole middle West of that period, was unfortu-nately destroyed by fire just after the close of theCivil War. A smaller but perhaps more comforta-ble home was then built by Edisons father on someproperty he had bought at the near - by village ofGratiot, and there his mother spent the remainderof her life in confirmed invalidism, dying in 1871.Hence the pictures and postal cards sold largely tosouvenir - hunters as the Port Huron home do notactually show that in or around which the eventsnow referred to took place. It has been a romance of popular biographers, basedupon the fact that Edison began his career as anewsboy, to assume that these earlier years werespent in poverty and privation, as indeed they usuallyare by the newsies who swarm and shout theirpapers in our large cities. While it seems a pity to

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