Michigan, United States. Fourteen-year-old Thomas Alva Edison boards the baggage car of the train from Port Huron, his hometown, to Detroit every morning at 8:00 a.m. He spends the day snooping around and salvaging scraps of brass and iron, and old battery cells, from landfills and elsewhere, which he uses in his nocturnal experiments. Every afternoon, returning to the Michigan Central Depot, he picks up a hundred or so copies of the Detroit Free Press to sell along with candy on the return train. Then, near the Port Huron station, he hops down onto a sandbar and walks the last half-mile, selling the last copies of the paper. This way, he earns a very good living: $40 or $50 a week, allowing him to give his mother $1 a day for his upkeep. Alva reads a lot, especially the works of Thomas Paine, a liberal and libertarian. On November 6, 1861, when the first election results came in with Abraham Lincoln victorious, Thomas Alva Edison “read the results” to his friends, placing his tongue over the telegraph to feel the brief jolts of the dot and dash.
