Thomas Edison was probably the greatest ________in American history. When he first attended school, his teachers complained that he was "too slow"and hard to handle. _______, Edison's mother decided to take her son out of school and teach him at home. The young Edison was fascinated by science. At the age of 10 he had already ________his first chemistry laboratory. Edison's inexhaustible energy and genius ( which he reportedly defined as more than “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”) eventually _______ more than 1,300 inventions in his lifetime. When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 2, 000 experiments before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times. He said, “I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2, 000-step _______.”