Thomas Alva Edison
(11 Feb 1847 - 18 Oct 1931)

American inventor.


Science Quotes by Thomas Alva Edison (3)

Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.
— Thomas Alva Edison
Francis Arthur Jones, The Life of Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life (1932), 371.
See also:  |  Genius (17)  |  Motto (4)

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
On first wards spoken on a phonograph.
— Thomas Alva Edison
Byron M. Vanderbilt, Thomas Edison, Chemist (1971), 99.
See also:  |  Invention (32)

Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's ... scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!
— Thomas Alva Edison
Matthew Josephson, Edison (1959), 283.
See also:  |  Algebra (5)



Quotes by others about Thomas Alva Edison(3)

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him.
Reflections of a Physicist (1950), 81.
See also:  |  Civilization (10)  |  Men Of Science (47)  |  Religion (29)


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I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy. --Albert Einstein
I try to identify myself with the atoms...I ask what I would do if I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom. --Linus Pauling




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