Don’t Quit: Ask anybody who invented the telephone and most people will correctly reply, Alexander Graham Bell. What most people don’t know, however, is that the telephone was almost invented years earlier by a German schoolteacher, named Reis. The earlier experiments succeeded in producing a device that could carry whistling and humming sounds but try as he might Reis just couldn’t get his apparatus to transmit and receive voice messages.

A few years later, Alexander Graham Bell discovered the flaw in Reis’s design. A single screw controlled the balance of the electrodes and by adjusting the screw just a thousandth of an inch, Bell was able to transmit and receive human speech. That minor adjustment was the only thing that separated success and failure – that, and a lack of persistence.