EDISON:

One day, when I was a boy, my teacher berated me and gave me a letter to take home to my mother, told me not to read it. I got home. I gave it to my mother. She read it in silence.

I asked her, \"What did it say?\" She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and she said that I was \"too brilliant,\" \"too smart,\" that I was \"ahead of all the other students,\" which is why my teacher and the other teachers were ill-equipped to teach me. They didn\'t know how to handle a child as advanced as I was, so they suggested that I be home schooled.

So, from that point onward, my mother became my teacher. I read constantly and learned all that I could about chemistry. (beat) When she died, twenty years ago, I was going through her things, and... I found the letter in the back corner of one of the desks in her home.

It was faded, a little crumpled at the side. And it said: \"Dear Mrs. Edison, your child, Thomas, is addled. He is problematic. He is slow. We do not know how to teach him. He constantly falls behind. He needs to be at the home. We are expelling him.\"

I cried all night, and barely slept. Because that woman, my mother, because she lied to me, that is the only reason I am here today. She couldn\'t find it in her heart to tell the truth. She believed in me, and here I am. Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the century.

 

(Edison pulls out Tesla\'s letter of recommendation.)

 

And then a young Serbian shows up at my factory and gives me this letter. It says:

\"I know two great men. One is you and the other stands before you.\"