Where did Thomas Edison grow up and live?

📍Edison birthplace, Milan, Ohio, USA

1847 – 1868

“I was born in Milan, Ohio on the 11th of February 1847, the seventh and last child of Samuel Edison, a Canadian political exile, and Nancy Elliott Edison, a former schoolteacher. Milan was a small canal town and my earliest years there were ordinary enough — but when the railroad bypassed Milan and the town's economy collapsed, we moved to Port Huron, Michigan, and my real education began. I had very little formal schooling — my mother taught me at home after a teacher described me as addled — and the home education she provided, based on serious books and serious questions, was superior to anything the school would have offered. I sold newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railroad and set up a small laboratory in the baggage car. The Ohio birthplace and the Michigan childhood were the foundation: the curiosity, the self-direction, the refusal to accept that something couldn't be done.”

👍 LovedMy mother's home education that trusted my curiosity rather than suppressing it. The self-directed laboratory work from early childhood that taught me how to experiment. The railroad world of my adolescence that gave me both practical knowledge and access to the wider world.

👎 DislikedThe hearing loss that began in childhood and that I always attributed to a railroad incident. The poverty of the early years of invention before any of it paid. The exhausting schedule that my relentless curiosity imposed on everyone around me.

Map showing where Thomas Edison lived — Edison birthplace, Milan, Ohio, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Thomas Edison's home at Edison birthplace, Milan, Ohio, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Israel, P. Edison: A Life of Invention (1998), John Wiley & Sons; Edison, T. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948, edited Runes); Baldwin, N. Edison: Inventing the Century (1995), Hyperion