Perseverance: What Keeps You Going
Perseverance
When you’re faced with a difficult task, how do you respond? Perseverance is the quality that helps people achieve something that may seem impossible. Having perseverance means you continue to do something even if it is difficult or challenging, or even if you make mistakes. You might have to change the way you’re doing it, but the important thing is to keep trying.
As you watch this video, listen for information that answers the following questions:
- How old was Edison when he began to lose his hearing?
- How did he turn his disability into a strength?
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
Edison practiced sending and receiving telegraph messages for up to 18 hours a day.
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s, the telegraph is a machine that uses electrical signals to send messages long distances almost instantly. A telegraph operator in Edison’s time sent messages by pressing his or her finger on a lever and tapping out short and long signals, called dots and dashes. Different combinations of these dots and dashes, called "Morse code," could be used to spell out the letters (and numbers) of a message.
