A hard worker who kept creating opportunities, inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) was born in Milan, Ohio. Nearly deaf, Edison could not hear in his left ear and had about 10% hearing in his right.

That didn’t stop him. At just 10 years old, he set up a laboratory in his basement. “A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job,” he once said, and he believed his deafness helped spark his creativity.

In 1877, Edison invented the original cylinder phonograph quite by accident. While trying to record telegraph messages, he moved paraffin-coated paper tape at high speed through a receiver. A needle embossed the tape with dots and dashes. On one test run, it made a sound similar to human speech.

That got his attention.

Always curious, he connected a telephone diaphragm to the needle and designed a tinfoil-covered cylinder with a crank. He spoke into the machine, then replayed it by moving the needle back over the grooves.

Edison recited Mary Had a Little Lamb, and his voice was almost perfectly reproduced.

Just one of his 1,093 patents. Not bad for a man with only three months of formal schooling...

In every workshop, sketchpad, or quiet idea scribbled on paper, Edison’s spirit lives on. His genius was a little bit magic and a lot of momentum. He reminds us that great things grow from effort and hard work.