February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
He had more than a thousand patents to his name, including those for electric lighting, electric power generation, the phonograph, the basics of movie making, and even wax paper. If Edison wasn't a genius, who was, is, or could ever be?
There is no question that Thomas Alva Edison was and remains the name-brand marquee inventive genius—a "modern Prometheus" no less or, at the very least, the "Wizard of Menlo Park." And for us nongeniuses, that is precisely the problem. Real geniuses may create any number of wonderful things, but otherwise they're really of no use to the rest of us. What can we even pretend to learn from them?
Imitate Beethoven. Think like Einstein.
Could any advice be more useless? Such people are made of different stuff ...