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Thomas Edison’s 1888 To-Do list will make you feel inadequate

Are you an underachiever? You’ll probably feel like one now.

IT’S HARDLY SURPRISING that same man who brought us recorded sound and electric light had a very packed schedule.

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings has dug up Thomas Edison’s five-page list of “things doing and to be done” dated January 3, 1888.

This was just a couple years after Edison moved to his new laboratory in West Orange, NJ — the place where he mass produced phonographs and built the first motion picture studio.

The notebook of ideas and tasks comes from The Thomas A. Edison Paper Project at Rutgers University, which has digitized nearly 175,000 documents from the inventor’s life.

What types of things were on the agenda?

Oh, just a cotton picker, deaf apparatus, electrical piano and a hand turning phonograph, to name a few.

You can see more of Edison’s notes and drawings here.

Thomas Edison’s 1888 To-Do list will make you feel inadequate
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