"Did you ever see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great? He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon held down by his big feet. Who are the great men and women? My attention was called the other day to the history of a very little thing that made the fortune of a very poor man. ...[B]ecause of that experience he—not a great inventor or genius—invented the pin that now is called the safety-pin, and out of that safety-pin made the fortune of one of the great aristocratic families of this nation. A poor man in Massachusetts who had worked in the nail-works was injured at thirty-eight... He was employed in the office to rub out the marks on the bills made by pencil memorandums, and he used a rubber until his hand grew tired. He then tied a piece of rubber on the end of a stick and worked it like a plane. His little girl came and said, "Why, you have a patent, haven't you?" The father said afterward, "My daughter told me when I took that stick and put the rubber on the end that there was a patent, and that was the first thought of that." He went to Boston and applied for his patent, and every one of you that has a rubber-tipped pencil in your pocket is now paying tribute to the millionaire. No capital, not a penny did he invest in it. All was income, all the way up into the millions."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Russell Herman Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (1915) pp. 48-49.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Millionaire
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Millionaire
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