4:43 AM
The inspirational story begins by recalling how Thomas Edison’s grade school teacher wrote to his mother that Edison was “addled” and wouldn’t be allowed in school anymore. When Edison asked his mother what the letter said, she supposedly replied:
His mother’s eyes were tearful as she read the letter out loud to her child: Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training him. Please teach him yourself.
fter many, many years, after Edison’s mother died and he was now one of the greatest inventors of the century, one day he was looking through old family things. Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: Your son is addled [mentally ill]. We won’t let him come to school any more.
Edison cried for hours and then he wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the century.”
While the idea that Thomas Edison’s mother hid the fact that a schoolteacher had called him “addled” so that he could reach his full potential is inspirational — it’s also false.
First, Thomas Edison was dyslexic, which would have made it difficult for him to succeed in an 1800s classroom. Research on dyslexia didn’t begin until the early 1900s, decades after Edison had left public schools, so little was known about it at the time.
Thomas Edison’s struggles in school have been well documented over the years, as have his teacher’s view that Edison was “addled.” But the idea that Thomas Edison didn’t know that he’d been called addled is false.
