A Wizard from the Start: The Incredible Boyhood and Amazing Inventions of Thomas Edison

by Don Brown, Don Brown (Illustrator)

Overview

A wizard from the start, Thomas Edison had a thirst for knowledge, taste for mischief, and hunger for discovery—but his success was made possible by his boundless energy. At age fourteen he coined his personal motto: “The More to do, the more to be done,” and then went out and did: picking up skills and knowledge at every turn. When learning about things that existed wasn't enough, he dreamed up new inventions to improve the world.
 
From humble beginnings as a farmer’s son, selling newspapers on trains and reading through public libraries shelf by shelf, Tom began his inventing career as a boy and became a legend as a man. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547773117
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/03/2010
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
Lexile:	AD940L (what's this?)
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 7 Years

About the Author

Don Brown is the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction and Sibert Honor–winning author and illustrator of many nonfiction graphic novels for teens and picture book biographies. He has been widely praised for his resonant storytelling and his delicate watercolor paintings that evoke the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. School Library Journal has called him “a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies.” He lives in New York with his family.

booksbybrown.com

Instagram: @donsart

Editorial Reviews

Gr 2–4—Focusing on the great inventor's youth, roughly from age eight to mid-20s, this anecdotal picture-book biography is both engaging and accessible. The concise narrative is sprinkled with original quotes and is well suited as a read-aloud. Youngsters will find much to relate to, from Tom's being misunderstood at school—his mother decided to homeschool him—to the science experiments he and a friend performed in the basement. Not surprisingly, there is also much to inspire and admire; Edison was a voracious reader and a hard worker—by age 12 he worked 14 hours a day as a "news butch," selling newspapers, candy, and cigars on the Detroit commuter train. After heroically rescuing the young son of a telegraph operator from an approaching train, he was rewarded with telegraph lessons. When he was 21, he took a job in Boston and found his calling. Despite some early failures as well as losing his hearing, Edison earned 1093 patents in his lifetime but insisted that, "I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun." Brown's signature sketches combine digital imagery and watercolors and reflect the period costume and key moments in Edison's early life. This title is for a younger audience than Michael Dooling's Young Thomas Edison (Holiday House, 2005).—Barbara Auerbach, PS 217, Brooklyn, NY

School Library Journal

Thomas Edison's mother yanked him out of school when his teacher called her forever-daydreaming son "addled." Homeschooled from that day on, Tom devoured books and experimented in his chemistry lab until Mrs. Edison worried the family would be blown up. In this narrowly focused biography, readers will learn-despite the book's title-that there was nothing magical about the man who patented 1,093 inventions. Edison was a hard worker who was curious about everything, studied diligently for years and was passionate about inventing, especially marketable objects (such as the phonograph and motion-picture cameras) he knew the world needed. Brown's scratchy pen-and-ink drawings with muted watercolors successfully evoke the 19th-century American setting and reveal the industrious young Tom in action-pulling carrots in Michigan, selling newspapers on the Detroit train, printing his own newspaper, haunting telegraph offices, tinkering and, finally, gazing at his 1879 creation, the electric light bulb. This glimmer of the future inventor in his youth-sprinkled with quotations from Edison himself-may inspire a few daydreamers to get to work. (author's note, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)

Kirkus Reviews