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
People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest.
I have far more respect for the person with a single idea who gets there than for the person with a thousand ideas who does nothing....
Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can't afford to lose.
Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.
Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.
We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.
Success is the result of hard work.
We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man's character.
I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. I take half-matured schemes for mechanical development and make them practical. I am a sort of a middleman between the long-haired and impractical inventor and the hard-headed business man who measures all things in terms of dollars and cents. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.