Thomas A. Edison
Thomas A. Edison
Thomas Alva Edisonwas an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionInventor
Date of Birth11 February 1847
CountryUnited States of America
Thomas A. Edison quotes about
It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. As a result, a genius is often a talented person who has simply done all of his homework.
Problems in human engineering will receive during the coming years the same genius and attention which the nineteenth century gave to the more material forms of engineering. We have laid good foundations for industrial prosperity, now we want to assure the happiness and growth of the workers through vocational education, vocational guidance, and wisely managed employment departments. A great field for industrial experimentation and statemanship is opening up.
I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.
It is very beautiful over there. (last words)
It is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency-instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds. If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector-for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges-then you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.
I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.
Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.
The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan's principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.
Perhaps dandruff is the excreta of the mind the quantity of this material being directly proportional to the amount of reading one indulges in. A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit.
The Bible of nature is the best damn Bible in the world. Its laws are perfect and grand, and all the prayers in the world can't change them. There is intelligence and law in this world, and there may be supreme intelligence and law, but so far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is all a damned fake.
As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.
I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.
In creating technology for ourselves we created it for the world.