The vibrating experience of the world's greatest inventor - a lesson to be drawn by Ethiopian entrepreneurs

By Tafessework Wondimu

The career of that man started at his prime age of twelve, when he embarked on selling newspapers, apples and candies at the railroad in Detroit , USA . At those early years, he developed partial deafness as a childhood attack of scarlet fever. He considered it not as a handicap but as an asset, particularly, when he wanted to concentrate on an experiment.

Modern entrepreneurial talent development underlines that entrepreneurs are not born but made. This principle that characterizes this category of people was obviously seen in that young man who had only a three-month formal public education. The rest of his lessons of reading, writing and some arithmetic were only given by his mother at home.

At the age of 15, while still working at the railroad, he bought a small secondhand printing press of 136 kg type and installed it in a baggage car and soon began printing a newspaper, the Weekly Herald, which he printed, edited and sold on the Grand Trunk Railroad. The calendar date was 1862.

He started to experiment the telegraph at home through the teaching he received as gratitude offered to him by the stationmaster for saving his three years old son from being run over by a box car.

It was at this prime age that young man had started working in his laboratory and spent whatever he used to get on laboratory, and what he assumed at the time, electrical equipments.

He was a twice married man as the result of the death of his first wife. He then had some children by his two wives. He had devotion for his family but little time for them as he was totally attached to his experiments.

He had a different approach to work. He read all the literatures available on a project idea before embarking on experimentation to avoid repeating experiments that other people had already conducted. Perhaps, as has been observed, the best illustration of his working methods in his own famous statement. “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspirations.”

Yes, that eminent man was Thomas Alva Edison, one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, inventors-philosophers, who was born in 1847 and died in 1931. I was so fascinated when I heard the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Dashen Bank, Ato Teklu Haile, referred to this great inventor at a dinner speech organized on the occasion of the 12 th Annual General Meeting of the Bank at the Sheraton Addis as a motivator in spirit to all of us and to all generations to come. It was that auspicious moment that ignited my feelings to write something on that great personality. Indeed, Thomas Edison during his life time patented more than 1000 inventions that include the incandescent electric light-bulb, the phonograph, and a transmitter that made Alexander Bell's telephone a usable instrument on a wide scale.

One of the underlying principles that an entrepreneur or a successful business man should ascertain is the level of development of his personal competency. Hence, one of the most developed personal competencies of Thomas Edison was demonstrated in his tenacity of persistence. He was a unique man who lived to discover the electric lamp. He failed to win it right away but only through his multiple experimentations until he exhausted nine hundred ninety-nine discoveries of different types of inventions. Finally, he conquered it and changed the face of the world and our total life to this day.

He confirmed to the world that entrepreneurs learn from their failures and never give up in the words of Aristotle who said, “Our greatest glory consists not in ever falling but in rising every time we fall.” He was not a fool though. All his discoveries were patented and commercialized and he was made a multi-millionaire until the time he elected to resign from the commercial side of his endevours in preference of concentrating only on his laboratory experimentation, this time on the distribution system of electricity. When he died in 1931, Herbert Hoover, who was then the President of the United States of America , asked the nation to dim its light in his honour.