It was a long way from the ten-year-old Al Edison—who fed a friend Seidlitz powders in the expectation that he would become lighter than air and be able to fly—to the world-famous inventor, Thomas Alva Edison—who received universal acclaim at the peak of his career. 

From his earliest years in Port Huron, Michigan, young Al Edison was engaged in experimentation of one sort or another. He had a lab at home and another in the baggage car of the train on which he sold candy and newspapers. Each night after coming home from the run he and another boy practiced talking to each other by Morse code over a homemade telegraph wire. It was not long before he put this training to good use by getting a job as a railroad telegrapher, after being thrown off the train for setting fire to it with one of his many experiments.

After a few years he went to New York where he made the first step in his phenomenal career by inventing a simple stock ticker machine, for which he was offered the immense sum of $40,000! Now he really got down to work and in the years to come, developed the talking machine, the electric light, the moving picture and many other important inventions.

Miss Meadowcroft has vividly recreated here for every girl and boy the fascinating life of one of America’s and the world’s most distinguished pioneers in the field of science. 

From the dust jacket