"They were impatient, they wanted it to happen immediately, and they could not believe the patience of Edison.

"Every day, Edison would come fresh, young, excited, and they would say to him, 'We have experimented in so many ways, and we have failed in every experiment. Why not change the subject? We should work on something else.'

"Edison would say, 'Who told you that we have been failures? Each failure brings us nearer to success because there must be only a limited number of doors. We knock on one door, and it is not the right door – but it is not a failure. One door, a wrong door, is eliminated; success is closer. We knock on another door; it is not the right door. But we are even closer to success – two doors are eliminated. Soon we will be knocking on the right door.

"But the patience that he had is part of a very intelligent and very genuine seeker. After three years, in the middle of the night, he knocked on the right door. For the first time, the human eyes.

"He was alone, all his colleagues had left; he was tired, utterly exhausted, and thinking himself almost mad. He was alone when he discovered the electric bulb. It had taken three years. Day and night he had been thinking only of one thing – from where to approach this? And when the room was lighted up with electricity, he was sitting there in utter wonder. He was the first man to see something which had never existed before. He could not take his eyes off the electric bulb.

"It was getting late, and finally his wife shouted from the other room, 'Put that stupid light off!' She was not aware that it was electricity. She said 'Come back, and go to sleep.'

"He said, 'It is not the stupid light that you are acquainted with; it is what my three years of patience has created. You should come here and see!'

"Because of his patience – he has a uniqueness in the whole history of man – he discovered one thousand inventions. Anybody else could have done it, but nobody had that quality of patience."