WHAT BECAME OF THE BOY WITH A HUGE HEAD AND ALWAYS IN TROUBLE

From her earliest childhood, Nancy Elliott had demonstrated a maturity and intelligence beyond her years. But what her family would remember best about her, even as a little girl, was her profound courage. It was a fortitude she would one day desperately need.

Nancy eventually married a lumber and feed dealer named Samuel. They began a family, but in the harsh winters of Milan, Ohio, tragedy struck. Their children began dying—first a son, then another son, and then a daughter. All were lost.

It was during yet another bitter winter, in February of 1847, that Nancy, now middle-aged, awaited the birth of one last child. The village doctor was present for the baby's arrival. He did his best to conceal his concern as he examined the newborn, but Nancy, despite her exhaustion, noticed his grim expression.

“What is wrong?” she wanted to know.

The doctor spoke softly. “Your new son has fair hair and beautiful blue eyes, like his mother’s,” he began. “But,” he continued, his voice trailing away, “his head is abnormally large. I fear he may have brain fever.”

Though no malady by that name was entirely understood in the 1840s, the implications were clear even to a layman. The little boy would very likely not survive. And if he did, he would probably grow up—in the euphemism of the day—defective.

Weak and frightened, Nancy did the only thing she knew: she prayed. She prayed that God would not take this last child from her. She prayed that if He did not, and her son turned out to be slow or strange, she would care for him anyway and protect him to the very limit of her ability.

Well, the little boy with the huge head did not die. As a toddler, and then a boy of five or six, his behavior proved as peculiar as his parents had feared. Seemingly irresistibly, he repeatedly ran off, constantly endangering himself. He fell into a nearby canal and nearly died in a grain elevator. He was always in trouble.

Family and friends sympathetically observed other incidents which, if not life-threatening, were even more bizarre. One afternoon, he disappeared for hours and was eventually discovered in a neighbor’s shed. There, on a nest he had made of hay, he was solemnly sitting on a dozen or so goose and chicken eggs, trying to hatch them.

But then, one day in 1853, he set fire to his father’s barn just to see what it would do, as he calmly explained. The building was destroyed; the entire town might have been lost if there had been a strong wind.

Enough was enough. Defective though he may have been, the child’s indifference to the consequences of his actions had to be cured. So, Samuel notified the neighbors, and the following morning, in the cobbled village square, he publicly thrashed his young son—an experience the boy would remember for the rest of his life.

Years passed, and the so-called "defective" youngster showed himself to be not disabled, but merely extraordinary. It is this latter condition for which he is most often credited.

And so, you have now met the boy born with a huge head, whose future seemed bleak at best. The boy caught sitting on a nest of eggs, hoping to hatch them. The child who would grow up to give us the phonograph and motion pictures, and turn off the darkness all over the world: Thomas Edison.

And now you know the rest of the story.