Thomas Edison
Being an inventor, says Thomas Edison, is not all about having great ideas; it’s mostly about working hard and never, never giving up.
Thomas Edison is known as one
of the greatest inventors in history - the light bulb, the phonograph, the
world’s first movie, the stock ticker, the talking doll - more than a thousand
different patents have his name on them! There’s no doubt that Edison had a
very sharp mind. But the man who was called a genius by the whole world said
his success didn’t have much to do with being smart; he put it all down to hard
work.
And it is true that few people
in the world work as hard as Thomas Edison did. He was known for working half
the night and falling asleep at his workbench. If he had a problem to solve, he
would skip meals and go on a few hours of sleep for weeks on end.
Edison simply never gave up.
He would keep working, no matter how long it took, until he found the best way
of doing things.
His gift for inventing and his
determination to succeed almost went unrecognized. Growing up in the 1800s,
Edison had seemed doomed to fail. He had two problems that caused him real
trouble in school.
First, he was very hard of
hearing (this was before hearing aids were invented). Second, he just couldn’t
seem to focus and sit still. These days, teachers would identify him as having
a learning disability; back then, they just said he was unteachable.
So, his mother pulled him out
of school at age ten and set out to teach him herself. She knew that her son
was much smarter than his teachers thought. And she saw that he never
stopped thinking about better
ways to solve a problem.
In his first job, when he was
a teenager, Edison was taught how to use a telegraph. He saw that it could be
improved, so he was soon inventing new and better telegraph machines. The
perfect example of his approach is his most famous invention, the light bulb.
Edison tried more than a thousand different ways of getting electricity to make
light. He refused to stop trying until he found the material that worked.
As Edison liked to say,
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” In
other words, having a good idea is just the beginning: it’s the effort you put
behind that idea that gets the results.
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