When a reporter asked Thomas Edison how
it felt to have failed 25,000 times in his effort to create a simple storage
battery, his reply was, “I don’t know why you are calling it a failure. Today I
know 25,000 ways not to make a battery. What do you know?”
Thomas Edison was probably one of the greatest
inventors in history. When he first attended school, his teachers complained
that he was
The young Edison was fascinated by
science. At the age of 10 he had already set up his first
chemistry laboratory. Edison’s
inexhaustible energy and genius (which he reportedly defined
as “1 percent inspiration and 99
percent perspiration”) eventually produced in his lifetime more than 1,300
inventions. When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 2,000
experiments before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to
fail so many times. He said, “I never failed once. I invented the light bulb.
It just happened to be a 2,000-step process.”
Thomas Edison’s laboratory was
virtually destroyed by fire in December 1914. Although the damage exceeded
2 million dollars, the buildings were only insured for $238,000 because they
were made of concrete and thought to be fireproof. Much of Edison’s life’s
work went up in spectacular flames that December night.
At the height of the
fire, Edison’s 24-year-old son, Charles, frantically searched for his father among
the smoke and debris. He finally found him, calmly watching the scene, his face
glowing in the reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind. “My
heart ached for him,” said
Charles. “He was 67—no longer a young
man—and everything was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, ‘Charles,
where’s your mother?’ When I told him I didn’t know, he said, ‘Find her. Bring
her here. She will never see anything like this as long as she
lives.’”
The next morning, Edison looked at the
ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned
up. Thank God we can start anew.”
Three weeks after the
fire, Edison
managed to deliver his first phonograph.
He was Famous inventor who held over
1000 patents for his discoveries and inventions. He set up a
laboratory in his father’s basement
when he was 10 years old and began experimenting even then. Although he had
little formal education, he had tremendous genius. He invented the mimeograph, improved
the typewriter, and was the pioneer of the telephone, phonograph, and motion
picture machine. He also helped make television possible when he discovered the
“Edison effect” by accident, which became the basis of the electron tube. His
most important invention was the incandescent light.
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