Mickey Rooney stars as the boy who would become one of the greatest inventors of the modern era--a Young Tom Edison. Edison (Rooney) received only three months of formal education: the precocious boy's curiosity was too disruptive for the one-room schoolhouse in his hometown. But his parents encouraged the voracious reader, who'd read Newton's Principia by the time he was twelve. At an early age, Edison also lost most of his ability to hear, which only helped him to better focus his concentration. Finding work as a "brass pounder," an operator in the new, cutting-edge telegraph industry during the United States Civil War, Edison moonlights on his own inventions--an automatic telegraph repeater, the light bulb, the phonograph--that will change the world.