One of the ingredients for
success is perseverance. Great persons in the past as well as in the
present ascended to great heights through their hard work and strength of
mind. Thomas A. Edison recalls his most difficult innovations, i.e., the
invention of incandescent light. One October evening the
thirty-two-year-old inventor sat in his laboratory, weary from thirteen
months of repeated failure to find a filament that would stand the stress
of electric current. The scientific press, at first politically sceptical
was openly derisive. Discouraged backers were refusing to put up further
funds. Idly, Edison picked up a bit of lampblack mixed with tar, rolled it
into a thread. "Thread," he mused, "...thread...thread.. carbonized cotton
thread." He tried every known metal.
It required five hours to carbonize
a length of thread. The first one broke before it could be removed from the
mould; likewise a second and a third. An entire spool of thread was
consumed; then a second spool. Finally, a perfect filament emerged, only to
be broken in an effort to insert it into a vacuum tube. Another was
destroyed when a screwdriver fell against it. After two days and two nights
the filament was successfully inserted. The bulb was exhausted of air and
sealed, and the current turned on. "The sight we had so long desired to see
met our eyes!"
And then Edison, after working
continuously for forty-eight hours, sat for an additional forty-five hours�until
the light blinked out�gazing intently at the world�s first
incandescent electric lamp
.
