Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

2.6. Lesson 7: Do the Thing Itself

Popular culture, including the 1940 Mickey Rooney film Young Tom Edison, has made much of the budding inventor's ill luck with formal education. In fact, Edison's scant time in an elementary school classroom and his subsequent home schooling by his mother were hardly unusual in the nineteenth century. That is, Tom Edison was neither more nor less formally educated than the vast majority of American males of his era. Nevertheless, it is also true that most of Edison's education came entirely through his own efforts. He was an autodidact who devoured books, among which—by his twelfth year—was Natural Philosophy by a Boston high school principal named Richard Parker.

During the historical period encompassing Edison's ...