#4 Thomas Alva Edison

Age: 84yrs

Birth Place: Milan, Ohio, USA

Industry: Science

Influence: His Inventions Changed the World

Net worth: $12,000,000

Website: www.thomasedison.com

Why they made the list…

I felt obligated to add Thomas Edison to this list due to his motivation and persistence which makes him a true entrepreneur, even after thousands of failures. Now although Thomas didn’t have a terrible upbringing in terms of the money sense, he was a very poorly child. Ill a lot of his early life, he suffered from a severe ear infection that rendered him deaf in one of his ears although it has been said he was deaf in both. He also developed scarlet fever as a boy nearly dying because of it, but it didn’t stop him. After becoming a minor celebrity for saving a toddler from being hit by a train, Thomas was offered a job as telegraph operator.

Thomas went on to create thousands of inventions and patents, failing a lot more times than succeeding. However his first taste of glory came when he developed the tin foil phonograph, after working as a telegraph operator he wanted to create a way of making a telegraph transmitter to work in a more efficient way. He did this by realising that it sounded very similar to spoken words when the tape from the machine was played at a fast pace. Developing his idea further he went on to record a message through this means creating his first successful invention that lead the way for many more. Thomas Edison was a very patient and passionate man, motivated by success he went on to try and fail thousands of times before getting some of his inventions to work. Some of his inventions we still use today, and most of them are historical for changing the world.