Thomas Edison, famous for inventing the lightbulb, is said to have had dyslexia.
But the lightbulb isn’t all he’s known for. He developed the motion picture camera, the phonograph, an electric car battery and 1,094 other US patents, not to mention a large number in the UK, France and Germany.
This man had humble, and challenging, beginnings.
He was born in the middle of the 1800s in the United States and from an early age was labelled as having an ‘addled’ brain due to his tendency to trail off in class and lose his focus. After only three months of school, he was removed from institutional learning. He continued to struggle due to some hearing loss and eventually focused on his interest in maths and machinery. The same child who could not focus in class was using his vivid imagination to create new inventions.
He sold vegetables by day and spent his free time conducting chemical and mechanical experiments, along the way founding 14 companies including General Electric which is still one of the largest companies in the world.