Marriages and children

On December 25, 1871, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell (18551884), whom he had
met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children:

Marion Estelle Edison (18731965), nicknamed "Dot"[20]

Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (18761935), nicknamed "Dash"[21]
William Leslie Edison (18781937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at
Yale, 1900.[22]
Mary Edison died at age 29 on August 9, 1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain
tumor[23] or a morphine overdose. Doctors frequently prescribed morphine to women in those
years to treat a variety of causes, and researchers believe that her symptoms could have been
from morphine poisoning.[24]
Edison generally preferred spending time in the laboratory to being with his family.[25]

Mina Miller Edison in 1906

On February 24, 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller
(18651947) in Akron, Ohio.[26] She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of
the Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three
children together:

Madeleine Edison (18881979), who married John Eyre Sloane.[27][28]

Charles Edison (18901969), Governor of New Jersey (19411944), who took over his
father's company and experimental laboratories upon his father's death.[29]
Theodore Miller Edison (18981992), (MIT Physics 1923), credited with more than 80
patents.
Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.[30][31]

Beginning his career

Photograph of Edison with his phonograph (2nd model), taken in Mathew Brady's Washington, DC studio
in April 1878.

Mary Had a Little Lamb

MENU

0:00
Thomas Edison reciting
"Mary Had a Little Lamb"

Problems playing this file? See media

help.

Edison began