Who Was Thomas Edison?

1. Milan, Ohio and the deaf schoolboy

Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the seventh and last child, and the fourth surviving, of Samuel Edison Jr. and Nancy Elliot Edison. His father was a shingle maker and a political activist, and his mother had been a schoolteacher. In 1854 the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where his father became a lighthouse keeper and carpenter. As a child Edison developed hearing problems, which have been variously attributed but were most likely due to a familial tendency to mastoiditis, an infection of the bone behind the ear. Whatever the cause, his partial deafness strongly influenced his behaviour and his career, and he later said that it helped him to concentrate, because it shut out distractions.

He attended school in Port Huron for only a few years, and he was, by his own account, bored by rote learning and labelled a misfit by his teachers. His mother, who had been a teacher, took over his education at home, and he became an avid and omnivorous reader, working through histories, science books and the works of great writers. His lack of formal schooling was not unusual for the time: at the start of the Civil War the average American had attended school for little more than two years in total. But Edison's education was unusual in its breadth, and it gave him a habit of teaching himself whatever he needed to know, a habit that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

In 1859, at the age of twelve, he began working as a trainboy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron, selling newspapers, sweets and magazines to passengers. He used the train's baggage car as a laboratory, conducting chemical experiments until one of them set the car on fire, and he published a small newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, which he printed on the train. The work gave him an income, an education in business and an introduction to the telegraph, which the railroad used to control its trains. In 1863 he became an apprentice telegrapher, and for the next six years he worked as an itinerant telegraph operator across the Midwest, the South, Canada and New England.

2. Telegraph operator and inventor

Telegraphy was the high technology of its day, and Edison learned it thoroughly. The early telegraph received messages as dots and dashes inscribed on a strip of paper, and his partial deafness was no handicap in reading them. But receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, which required the operator to read messages by ear, and the change left Edison at a disadvantage. He compensated by devoting his energy to improving the equipment and inventing devices that would make the work easier, and by January 1869 he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph, a device that could transmit two messages simultaneously on one wire, and with a printer that converted electrical signals into letters, that he abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.

He moved to New York, where he worked in partnership with Frank Pope, a noted electrical expert, and then in Newark, New Jersey, where he worked between 1870 and 1875 in the fiercely competitive telegraph industry, which was dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company. He was an independent entrepreneur, available to the highest bidder, and he played both sides against the middle, working for Western Union's rivals as well as for Western Union itself. During this period he worked on an automatic telegraph system, and he devised the quadruplex, a device capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire. The quadruplex was bought from under Western Union by the railroad baron and financier Jay Gould, who paid Edison a large sum in cash, bonds and stock, one of the largest payments for any invention up to that time. Years of litigation followed, and the episode showed Edison's skill as a businessman as well as an inventor.

The telegraph years taught Edison two lessons that shaped his career. The first was that invention was a business, and that a patent was only valuable if it could be sold or licensed. The second was that a laboratory, staffed by skilled assistants and organised around a problem, could produce inventions more reliably than a lone inventor working in isolation. Both lessons were applied at Menlo Park, the laboratory he built in 1876, which became the model for the industrial research laboratory and the foundation of his fame.

3. Menlo Park and the phonograph

In 1876 Edison built a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, a two-storey building with a machine shop, a library and a staff of assistants, including the skilled machinist Charles Batchelor and the mathematician Francis Upton. It was the world's first industrial research laboratory, a place where invention was organised as a collective enterprise rather than a solitary pursuit, and it became the model for the research laboratories of the twentieth century. Edison's famous remark that genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration was a description of how Menlo Park worked: systematic experiment, careful record-keeping and a willingness to try hundreds of approaches to a single problem.

The phonograph was the first great product of Menlo Park, and it made Edison famous around the world. In December 1877 he unveiled a device that could record sound on a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil and play it back, by means of a stylus following a groove on the rotating cylinder. The public's amazement was immediate: a machine that could speak, sing and play music seemed like magic, and Edison was projected into worldwide prominence and dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park. The phonograph was the first device that could record and reproduce sound, and it became the foundation of the recording industry. It was also the invention of which Edison was proudest, because it was the most original, and because it had come from his work on the telegraph and the telephone rather than from a request by a customer.

The phonograph also raises the question of credit, which runs through Edison's career. He was not the first person to record sound: the French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had made recordings with his phonautograph in 1857, twenty years earlier, but his device could record sound and not play it back. Edison's achievement was to make a machine that could do both, and to turn it into a commercial product. The distinction matters, because it shows how Edison worked: he took an existing idea, made it practical, and built a business around it. His defenders say that is what invention means; his critics say that it means he was a businessman rather than a discoverer. Both views are part of the story.

4. The electric light

Edison's most famous invention, the practical incandescent lamp, was the product of the same method. The idea of an electric light was not new: other inventors had made lamps that glowed, but they burned out quickly or were too expensive to use. Edison set out to make a lamp that would last long enough and cost little enough to be practical, and he tested hundreds of materials for the filament, the thread inside the bulb that glows when current passes through it. In October 1879 he produced a lamp with a carbonised cotton thread that burned for more than thirteen hours, and he went on to develop a lamp with a carbonised bamboo filament that lasted much longer. The achievement was not a single flash of insight but a programme of systematic experiment, carried out by Edison and his team at Menlo Park.

The lamp was only part of the system. Edison understood that a light bulb was useless without a way of generating electricity, distributing it to homes and businesses, and charging for it, and he built the whole system at once. In September 1882 he opened the Pearl Street station in New York City, the first commercial electric light and power system, which supplied direct current electricity to customers in lower Manhattan. The station was a marvel of engineering, with generators, cables and meters, and it showed that electric lighting could be a business, not only a demonstration. Within a few years, electric lighting was spreading through American cities, and Edison's company was at the centre of it.

The light bulb also raises the question of priority. In Britain, Joseph Swan had demonstrated an electric lamp before Edison, and the two men were rivals until their companies merged in Britain in 1883, forming the Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company. Edison's defenders argue that his lamp was the first practical one, because it lasted long enough and was part of a complete system; Swan's supporters argue that Swan had the idea first and that Edison's fame owed more to publicity than to priority. The fair account is that the incandescent lamp was the work of several inventors, and that Edison's contribution was to make it practical and to build the system that made it useful. He did not invent the light bulb alone, and the legend that says he did is a simplification.

5. The war of the currents

The war of the currents was the fiercest business fight of Edison's career, and it is the episode that most damages his reputation. Edison's power system used direct current, in which electricity flows in one direction, and it worked well over short distances but lost power over long ones. George Westinghouse, a rival industrialist, backed alternating current, in which the direction of the current reverses many times a second, and which could be transmitted over long distances using transformers. Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-born inventor who had worked briefly for Edison, had developed the alternating current motor and the polyphase system that made alternating current practical, and he worked with Westinghouse to promote it.

Edison fought back with a campaign that was, by any standard, ruthless. He argued that alternating current was dangerous, and he staged public demonstrations in which animals were electrocuted with alternating current to show its dangers. He also promoted the electric chair, first used in 1890, which used alternating current supplied by a Westinghouse generator, as a way of associating his rival's system with death. His defenders argue that he genuinely believed alternating current was unsafe, and that he was protecting the public as well as his investment. His critics argue that the campaign was a deliberate attempt to destroy a competitor by frightening the public, and that the electrocutions were cruel and unnecessary. The historical record supports the critics more than the defenders, and the episode is now taught as an example of how not to conduct a business rivalry.

Alternating current won. It was cheaper to transmit over long distances, and it became the standard for electric power systems around the world. Edison's company eventually adopted it, and the direct current system survived only in limited uses. The war of the currents is a reminder that Edison was not only an inventor but a businessman, and that his business methods were sometimes at odds with the image of the kindly Wizard of Menlo Park. It is also a reminder that the best technology does not always win, but that in this case it did, and that Edison's defeat was, in the long run, a victory for the public, who got cheaper and more reliable electricity.

6. Motion pictures and later work

Edison's later work included the motion picture, an industry he helped to create and then tried to control. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, working with his assistant W. K. L. Dickson, he developed the Kinetoscope, a device for viewing moving pictures, and the Black Maria, the first film studio, a tar-paper building in West Orange, New Jersey, that could be rotated to follow the sun. The first films were short, single-shot scenes, and they were shown in parlours where customers paid to look through a viewer. Edison's company made hundreds of them, and he held patents on the camera and the film that he used to sue competitors and to control the industry. The legal battles lasted for years, and they were eventually resolved against him, but they showed the same pattern as the war of the currents: an inventor who tried to use the law to protect his position.

His later inventions included the storage battery, which he developed for electric vehicles and for industrial use, and work on cement, on rubber and on a host of other products. He remained active into his eighties, working in his laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, where he had moved after Menlo Park, and he continued to file patents until the end of his life. He was a friend of Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer, and the two men were part of a circle of American industrialists who shaped the country's economy. Edison's later years were less dramatic than his Menlo Park period, but they showed a man who never stopped working, and who believed, to the end, that invention was a matter of persistence.

He died on 18 October 1931 at his home in West Orange, New Jersey, at the age of 84. His death was marked around the world, and the lights were dimmed in his honour. He had held 1,093 United States patents, a record for an individual inventor, and he had created the world's first industrial research laboratory, the phonograph, the practical electric light and the first commercial power system. The list is extraordinary, and it is the reason he is remembered as one of the greatest inventors in history. But the list is also the reason his legacy is argued about, because the question of how much of it was his alone has never been settled.

7. Priority disputes and the other side of the legend

The disputes about Edison's credit are not a footnote to his career; they are central to it, and they deserve a fair hearing. The light bulb was also the work of Joseph Swan, and the two men settled their dispute by merging their British companies. The alternating current system was the work of Tesla and Westinghouse, and Edison fought it rather than inventing it. The motion picture camera was developed by Edison's assistant Dickson as much as by Edison himself, and the phonograph built on the work of Scott de Martinville. In each case, Edison's contribution was to make the invention practical and to build a business around it, and his critics argue that the history books have given him too much credit for the work of others.

His defenders make a different argument. They say that invention is not the same as discovery, and that the person who makes a thing work, and who brings it to the public, deserves the credit. They point to Menlo Park, where Edison organised a team of skilled men and women, and to the sheer scale of his output: more than a thousand patents, covering telegraphy, telephony, electric lighting, sound recording, motion pictures and batteries. They argue that no other inventor of the period matched his range, and that the disputes about priority are a normal part of the history of invention, in which several people often arrive at the same idea at the same time. The argument is a reasonable one, and it is supported by the record of what Menlo Park produced.

The fair judgement is that Edison was a great inventor and a great organiser of invention, and that the legend of the lone genius is a simplification. He worked with a team, he built on the work of others, and he sometimes fought unfairly to protect his position. He also created things that changed the world, and he created the institution, the industrial research laboratory, that produced most of the inventions of the twentieth century. The Tesla article on this site tells the other side of the story, and the two together give a fuller picture than either alone. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; the judgement of his credit will continue to be argued, and it should be, because it is an argument about how invention actually happens.

8. Death and legacy

Edison's legacy is the modern world of electricity, recorded sound and moving pictures. The phonograph became the recording industry, the electric light became the power grid, and the motion picture became the cinema. The industrial research laboratory, which he invented at Menlo Park, became the model for the research departments of every large company, and the idea that invention could be organised, funded and managed became one of the foundations of the modern economy. His name is on schools, streets and awards, and his laboratory at Menlo Park and his home at West Orange are preserved as historic sites.

There is also a legacy in the way Americans think about invention. Edison became the model of the inventor as a folk hero: the self-taught, hard-working, practical man who changed the world through persistence rather than through theory. The image is powerful, and it has inspired generations of young people to take up science and engineering. It is also, as this article has shown, a simplification, because Edison was also a businessman, a litigant and a controversial figure. The simplification is understandable, because the legend is more appealing than the reality, but the reality is more interesting, and it is the reality that this site tries to present.

As with all the figures on this site, the judgement of Edison depends on what is counted. If invention is measured by patents, he is the greatest inventor in American history. If it is measured by originality, his record is more mixed. If it is measured by impact, he is among the greatest figures of the industrial age, because the systems he built are still in use today. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; the argument about his place in history will continue, and it should, because it is an argument about what invention means and about who deserves to be remembered for it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Thomas Edison
• Wikipedia — Thomas Edison
• National Park Service — Thomas Edison National Historical Park
• Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park

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• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.