According to the legend, rumor, conspiracy theory or however one wants to label this alternative history, the young Tomás Alva immigrated to the United States either with or without his parents when he was between the ages of 12 and 20. It was well accepted during his lifetime that Thomas Edison suffered from partial hearing loss and that was the reason for his occasional mispronunciation of words and unusual way of speaking. The hearing loss supposedly occurred when Edison was a boy, when he was throttled by the ears by an angry train conductor. Those who subscribe to the alternative history of Edison claim that this story was a cover for the fact that English was not the famous inventor’s first language. A curious piece of trivia about Thomas Edison is that he did indeed speak fluent Spanish. When one of Edison’s assistants overheard him speaking Spanish one day and asked him about it, Edison replied that he learned the language in preparation for a conference in Brazil that he wound up never attending. An interesting thing to note is that the language spoken in Brazil is Portuguese and not Spanish and Edison probably made up the story on the fly so as to quell the curiosity of the assistant.