Thomas Edison's first patent is for the…

Thomas Edison's first patent is for the electric vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646), which is granted on June 1, 1869.

Edison, who was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, is the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871).

Edison reports being of Dutch ancestry.

In school, the young Edison's mind had often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him "addled", ending Edison's three months of official schooling.

His mother taught him at home.

Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy.

Edison developed hearing problems at an early age.

The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections.

Around the middle of his career, Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals.

In his later years, he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.

Edison's family had moved to Port Huron, Michigan, after the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854 and business declined; his life there was bittersweet.

He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income.

He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident prohibited further work of the kind.

He had obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers.

This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures, as he discovered his talents as a businessman.

These talents will eventually lead him to found fourteen companies, including General Electric, which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

Edison became a telegraph operator after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train.

Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator.

Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.

In 1866, at the age of nineteen, Edison had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire.

Edison had requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting.

Eventually, the latter preoccupation cost him his job.

One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid onto the floor.

It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below.

The next morning Edison was fired.

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who had followed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home.

Some of Edison's earliest inventions are related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker.