The most mundane things that you use every day (think post it notes, rubber bands, concrete) often have fascinating stories behind them.
In fact, people often only notice how something's designed when it goes wrong. But the process of discovery, testing and prototyping anything, no matter how ordinary, is full of pitfalls and the occasional exhilarating breakthrough.
Thomas Edison
One of the most prolific inventors in history, the American Thomas Edison holds 1,093 US patents and, according to one count, another 1,239 patents in 34 other countries. Born on the 11th of February, 1847, he received only three months of formal schooling and was deaf from an early age.
Edison was granted his first patent aged 22, for an electric vote recorder. Many of his early inventions concerned telegraphy but the one that first made him famous was he phonograph, an early type of record player that reproduced music recorded on tinfoil cylinders.
He would invent many items we today take for granted, including the electric light bulb, carbon microphone (which was still used in telephones in the 1980s), an early version of a motion picture camera, power distribution lines and the fluoroscope, a machine for taking x-rays, the basic design of which is still used today.
Buckminster Fuller