You’ll never believe that Thomas Edison, who became world-famous for his inventive mind and natural talent for earning money, had made this self-deprecatory statement: “I never had an idea in my life... I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born. Everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment.”
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IMAGE CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION: ARSH RAZIUDDIN; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / GETTY
In a review in The Atlantic Magazine of Edmund Morris’s new Edison biography, Derek Thompson says the “baroquely detailed portrait” presents an Edison as a workaholic whose final résumé boasted 1,093 patents and countless inventions—including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline battery, the X-ray fluoroscope, and the carbon-button microphone—but whose “most important idea wasn’t something anybody could patent or touch.”
Read “Thomas Edison’s Greatest Invention” in the November 2019 issue of The Atlantic Magazine now! (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/edmund-morris-edison/598357/)
Check out this related 2014 reading in the Forum, “Challenging the dogma that our IQ sets a limit on what we can achieve” (http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6185.0), and this 2010 reading, “How genius is within everyone’s reach—but even wisdom, too?” (http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=595.0)
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