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Thomas Edison thought his poor hearing helped him to concentrate.

As he grew older, Edison became completely deaf in one ear and partly deaf in the other. A childhood case of scarlet fever might have been the cause. “Earache came first, then deafness, and this deafness increased until at the theatre I could only hear a few words now and then,” Edison wrote. Yet he felt that his hearing problems gave him a career advantage: They made it easier for the inventor to concentrate on his work without aural distractions. “My deafness has not been handicap, but a help to me,” he claimed.
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Building Charles Babbage's Computer from the 1830s

Charles Babbage designed a fully functional mechanical computer called the Analytical Engine in 1837. It used gigantic stacks of cogs for memory (capable of storing 1,000 numbers to 40 decimal places), a CPU-like computing engine developed using gears and wheels, a printer (numbers only), a plotter (for graphics...ish), and even a programming language (Ada Lovelace wrote the first program, and the system used punched cards for program input). The Analytical Engine was the first Turing complete design for a computer, this effectively meant it was the first modern computer, but it was designed more than a hundred years before modern computers like ENIAC. The only trouble is that Babbage's grand machine was never built. A partial prototype was made, but the grand scale of the Analytical Engine was never realized, and Babbage died without seeing it constructed. 

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