Well, you have to give him credit. I spoke to him very recently, and he's also doing the rockets, he likes rockets, and he does good at rockets too, by the way. I never saw… where the engines come down with no wings, no anything, and they're landing. I've said I've never seen that before. And I was worried about him, because he's one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. We have to protect Thomas Edison, we have to protect all of these people that came up originally with the light bulb, and the wheel, and all of these things. And he's one of our very smart people, and we want to cherish those people, that's very important. But he's done a very good job. Shocking, how well, …how it's come so fast. You go back a year, and they were talking about the end of the company and all of a sudden they're talking about these great things. He's going to be building a very big plant in the United States. He has to. Because we help him, so he has to help us.

Edison invented inventing.

I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.

Black Thomas Edison’ because of all his inventions. In fact, Edison even tried to hire Woods. Alexander Graham Bell’s company bought Woods’s ‘telegraphony’ invention.

From a very early age Edison became used to doing things for himself, by necessity. His family was poor, and by the age of twelve he had to earn money to help his parents. He sold newspapers on trains, and traveling around his native Michigan for his job, he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw. He wanted to know how things worked — machines, gadgets, anything with moving parts. With no schools or teachers in his life, he turned to books, particularly anything he could find on science. He began to conduct his own experiments in the basement of his family home, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix any kind of watch. At the age of fifteen he apprenticed as a telegraph operator, then spent years traveling across the country plying his trade. He had no chance for a formal education, and nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor. And so in lieu of that, in every city he spent time in, he frequented the public library. One book that crossed his path played a decisive role in his life: Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book became for Edison what The Improvement of the Mind had been for Faraday. It gave him a systematic approach to science and a program for how to educate himself in the field that now obsessed him — electricity. He could follow the experiments laid out by the great Master of the field and absorb as well his philosophical approach to science. For the rest of his life, Faraday would remain his role model. Through books, experiments, and practical experience at various jobs, Edison gave himself a rigorous education that lasted about ten years, up until the time he became an inventor. What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline. He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was

Edison was not a loner. For the invention of the lightbulb, he had thirty assistants, including well-trained scientists, often working around the clock in a corporate-funded state-of-the-art laboratory!

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. — Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

One day a partially deaf four years old child came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, “Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of school.” His mother read the note and answered, “My Tommy is not too stupid to learn, I will teach him myself.” And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling.

I failed my way to success. — THOMAS EDISON

In 1914, Thomas Edison, at age sixty-seven, lost his factory to fire. It had very little insurance. No longer a young man, Edison watched his lifetime effort go up in smoke and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burnt up. Thank God we can start anew.” In spite of disaster, three weeks later, he invented the phonograph. What an attitude!

Thomas A. Edison "failed" ten thousand times before he perfected the incandescent electric light bulb. That is--he met with temporary defeat ten thousand times, before his efforts were crowned with success. p. 73

As Thomas Edison famously said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

To his teaching we owe it there is such a thing as Irish Nationalism and to the memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the memory of ‘98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland.

Albert Einstein’s remark that ‘We owe a lot to the Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.’ Then