According to his own retelling, when Thomas Edison was twelve years old, he had a job selling newspapers on a commuter train. He had set up a printing press on the train to make his own newspapers, and thereby increase his profits. He also set up a chemistry lab, to indulge his already well-developed scientific curiosity. One day, as the train went around a particularly tight turn, some of Edison’s phosphorus fell on the floor and started a small fire. As the train came into the station, and the conductor discovered the problem, Tom tried to run away. The conductor pulled him back up into the train by his ears. “I felt something snap inside my head,” Edison said. From that time until his death, he was hard of hearing.
Now, Here’s the Research:
This claim blends real elements of Thomas Edison’s early life with a famous myth that modern historians and medical experts widely dispute.
What Is Accurate
Newsboy on the Train: At age 12 (around 1859), Edison did work selling newspapers, candy, and snacks on the Grand Trunk Railroad between Port Huron and Detroit.
Printing Press and Chemistry Lab: He persuaded the railroad to let him use an empty baggage/box car, where he set up a small chemical laboratory and a printing press to produce his own newspaper, The Weekly Herald.
The Train Fire: While on the train, a jar of phosphorus fell, broke, and set the baggage car floor on fire. The conductor put out the fire, became enraged, and threw Edison, his laboratory, and his printing press off at the next stop.
The Quote: Edison recounted the “ears” story in later interviews, stating:
“A trainman reached over and grabbed me by the ears and lifted me… I felt something snap inside my head and the deafness started from that time…”
What Is Unclear / Factually False
Did the conductor pull him up by his ears because of the fire?
In Edison’s own retellings, he conflated two different anecdotes. In one version, the conductor boxed him on the ears as punishment for the baggage-car fire. In another version, a trainman grabbed him by the ears to pull him onto a moving train when he was running to catch it—not because he was running away from a fire.
Did this incident cause his hearing loss?
No. Medical historians and Edison biographers—such as Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University—agree that trauma from being pulled or boxed by the ears was unlikely to cause progressive, lifelong bilateral hearing loss.
Edison suffered a severe bout of scarlet fever in childhood, along with recurring, untreated mastoiditis and middle ear infections. Medical experts conclude that these infections—not a conductor pulling his ears—were the true medical cause of his severe hearing impairment. In fact, Edison admitted to close friends late in life that his theatrical train-conductor stories were tall tales he enjoyed telling reporters.
More About Thomas Edison
He tried to build a device to talk to the dead. Late in his life, Edison became fascinated by the occult and spiritualism. He admitted in interviews that he was working on a sensitive electronic device designed to detect and communicate with spirit entities if they existed, though no prototype was ever found.
He was almost completely deaf. Edison lost most of his hearing in childhood, likely due to a combination of scarlet fever and a bad bout of mastoiditis. Rather than seeing it as a handicap, he claimed it helped him concentrate on his work by tuning out the distracting sounds of the world.
His famous “lightbulb” wasn’t actually the first. Edison didn’t invent the incandescent light bulb from scratch; dozens of inventors had already created working versions. Edison’s actual breakthrough was developing a long-lasting, commercially viable bamboo carbon filament and an entire electrical distribution system to power it.
He proposed to his second wife using Morse code. After teaching his 20-year-old sweetheart, Mina Miller, how to tap out Morse code, the 39-year-old Edison tapped “Will you marry me?” into her hand while they were riding in a carriage. She tapped back, “Yes.”
He held a record 1,093 U.S. patents. Edison was an extraordinarily relentless inventor and businessman, securing over a thousand patents in his lifetime for everything from the phonograph and motion picture camera to concrete construction methods and battery technology.
His first patent was a commercial failure because politicians hated it. In 1869, Edison patented an electronic vote recorder for legislative bodies to speed up roll-call voting. Congress rejected it, explicitly telling him they preferred slow voting because it allowed time for filibustering and political maneuvering. Afterward, Edison vowed never to invent something unless there was a clear market demand for it.
He tattooed himself using an electric pen. Edison invented the pneumatic stencil pen in 1876 to duplicate documents. While testing it, he experimented by tattooing a series of small, uniform dots on his own forearm. Decades later, Samuel O’Reilly modified Edison’s stencil pen design to create the world’s first modern electric tattoo machine.
His final breath is preserved in a glass test tube. As Edison lay dying in 1931, his close friend and fellow industrialist Henry Ford allegedly asked Edison’s son Charles to trap a vial of air from Edison’s bedroom at the moment of his death. That sealed glass test tube is still on display today at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
He conducted sleep-deprivation experiments using steel balls. Edison believed sleep was a waste of time and relied on micro-naps. To trigger rapid flashes of creativity, he would sit in a chair holding heavy steel balls over a metal pan. As he drifted off to sleep, his muscles would relax, dropping the balls into the pan with a loud clatter to wake him right at the edge of unconsciousness so he could write down his ideas.
He built a creepy talking doll that kids hated. In 1890, Edison created the “Edison’s Phonograph Doll,” which featured a tiny wax cylinder phonograph embedded in its chest that played a recording of a nursery rhyme. The mechanism was fragile, the sound was harsh and scratchy, and children found the dolls terrifying. It was pulled from the market after just six weeks.