filament

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

– Thomas A. Edison [1847-1931]

you're fired

Before making it big, Walt Disney was fired for not being creative enough. Jerry Seinfeld and Thomas Edison were also fired in their early careers. 

kaleidoscopic imagination

"An inventor needs an enemy."
- Thomas Edison on Alexander Graham Bell; the importance of competition.

ingenious

Inventions of the ancient Islamic world here.

variation on an ancient Japanese proverb

"Vision without execution is hallucination."
- Thomas Edison

eureka

"' I do not depend on figures at all. I try an experiment and reason out the result, somehow, by methods which I could not explain.' And so it was that by testing 1,600 different materials, from coconut fibre to fishing line and even hair from a colleague's beard, Edison finally found a particular type of bamboo which could be used, in carbonized form, as the filament in the first proper incandescent light bulb. He demonstrated it on New Year's Eve 1879 at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey."
- The Economist December 5th 2015

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

- Thomas Edison