Edward Page Mitchell

Edward Page Mitchell was born in the USA in 1852. When he was young and travelling by train with his father, Edward put his head out of the window and was hit in the left eye by a red-hot coal from the engine. As doctors were trying to get his left eye working again, the right eye suddenly went blind and, although the left one recovered, the uninjured one never did and had to be removed in an operation. Mitchell went on to become a short story writer for a newspaper and later an editor. He was very rich and never interested in becoming famous as an author. It was only in 1973 that his stories were re-discovered – forty-six years after his death. Mitchell is now seen as one of the earliest writers of science fiction and the inventor of many ideas, like time travel, invisibility and thinking computers, as well as electric fires.