The Power of Persurverance

By Bob Cox

“The Wizard of Menlo Park” was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. At a young age, the boy had a bout with scarlet fever and several untreated middle ear infections. These conditions would eventually lead to severe hearing difficulties in both ears and he would become nearly deaf as an adult. On top of that, he was a hyperactive child, prone to distraction and was labeled "difficult" by his teacher. His mother quickly took matters into her own hands and after just 12 weeks pulled him out of school. She taught him from home and as he grew older, the boy developed an insatiable thirst for knowledge on many subjects. Later on in his life, he was quoted as saying, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." The boy’s name was Thomas Alva Edison.

Edison would rise from these obstacles to go on to become one of the greatest inventor’s and entrepreneurs’ in American history. Over his extraordinary lifetime, he held 1,093 patents for his inventions, such as the telegraph, the phonograph and the kinetograph, which was a camera for motion pictures. But no invention lit up the world like the electric light bulb that was patented by Edison in 1879.

Edison did not actually invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. In 1802, Humphry Davy created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum. Unfortunately, the bulb was not bright enough nor did it last long enough to be practical. It was; however, the precursor of numerous attampts by experimenters over the next 76 years.

Edison was determined to succeed where everyone else failed. His goal was to come up with a high resistance system that would require far less electrical power that was used for arc lamps. In 1878, Edison and his associates began work on thousands of different theories to develop an efficient incandescent lamp. He tested the carbonized filaments of a wide variety of plants, including bay wood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax and bamboo. He even reached out to biologists who sent him plant fibers from the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was very tedious and demanding on himself and all his associates but he refused to give up.

Edison and his team worked tirelessly in his laboratory, which was actually a glass blowing shed where the fragile bulbs were carefully crafted for his experiments. By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light; however, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. Finally, Edison and his team broke through by selecting a carbonized cotton thread filament. When voltage was applied to the completed bulb, it began to radiate a soft orange glow for approximately fifteen hours before the filament finally burned out. Further experimentation produced filaments that could burn longer and longer with each test. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park, where he said, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

Because of his hard work ethic and unshakable determination, Edison finally succeeded. Edison would go on to say, "Before I got through, "I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material."

If you’re trying to accomplish something great in your life and you are being held back by a variety of different obstacles, don’t be afraid to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison. Don’t allow disappointment and despair to sabotage and derail your dream. Be committed to learning from your previous failures. Why? So that you can make brand new ones! Better yet, instead of viewing each mistake as a failure; be like Edison and live by of his most famous quotes, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
― Thomas A. Edison