Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He had only a few months of school and was taught mostly by his mother. As a boy he sold newspapers on trains and became a telegraph operator; he was partly deaf from childhood. His first successful inventions improved the telegraph and stock ticker. In 1876 he opened a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, one of the first places devoted to organized invention, with a team of workers. There he invented the phonograph, the first machine to record and play back sound, in 1877, and developed a long-lasting electric light bulb in 1879 after testing thousands of materials. He then built a whole electric system, with power stations, wires and meters, opening the Pearl Street Station in New York in 1882. Later he worked on motion picture cameras, batteries and mining. He received 1,093 U.S. patents and worked long hours alongside his staff, often sleeping in the laboratory. He died in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1931.

Faith: Faith not well documented in detail; he defended Thomas Paine's deism. Source: Wikipedia