Edison is a world-renowned inventor with over a thousand inventions, including the light bulb, gramophone, and movie camera. However, due to his family's poverty during his childhood, he only received a few years of schooling and began selling newspapers on trains at the age of twelve. Unable to continue his formal education, he turned to self-study. He had a profound passion for learning, making the most of his time between selling newspapers to read books and conducting experiments.
Edison's father was a strict disciplinarian who required the whole family to turn off the lights and go to bed by 11:30 PM. However, Edison often returned home from selling newspapers at 11:00 PM, leaving him almost no time to pursue his beloved experiments. For the inquisitive Edison, this was hard to bear. Thus, he thought long and hard and finally came up with a clever way to gain his father's support for his scientific exploration.
One day, Edison used copper wires to set up a line between trees, connecting it directly to a friend's house, and left some unsold newspapers and a telegraph machine there. When he returned home that night, his father wanted to read the newspaper, but Edison said they were all sold out. Initially, his father wasn't particularly concerned. To pique his interest, Edison began to describe the exciting news in the paper so vividly that it seemed a great pity not to read it. Captivated by his storytelling, the father asked if there was any way to get a copy. Edison suggested that his friend Gayle still had one and that he could transmit the news via telegraph. Having become eager to read the news, the father readily agreed.
When Edison's father saw that his son's homemade telegraph actually worked, he was delighted and thought to himself that the boy was truly remarkable. From then on, he no longer prevented Edison from conducting telegraph experiments at night. Through such persistent effort and ingenuity, Edison eventually became one of the world's greatest scientists.
