4. Thomas Edison Ate a Poor Man’s Breakfast
At 22 years old, inventor Thomas Edison was not making any money yet. He was so broke, he wandered into a New York restaurant and offered them a tea bag in his pocket for whatever he could eat. We don’t know why he was carrying around a single tea bag, but the restaurant owner must have taken pity on him, because he gave Edison much more than a tea bag’s worth of food. It was a perfectly hot apple dumpling, and a cup of coffee.
If you have never eaten an apple dumpling, it is an Amish tradition. It is basically a miniature piece of apple pie, except that you have the pie crust wrapping the cinnamon apples in a little ball. Topped with vanilla ice cream, it’s delicious. Thomas Edison never had an apple dumping until then, and he apparently felt so happy and satisfied to have that food, that he decided to start eating apple dumplings and coffee every day for breakfast, even after he became rich and successful.