Witnessing the Meltdown

I suspect a sympathetic editor was working the OpEd desk at the Statesman on Nov. 3....

Evans: Failure is often the foundation of invention
Harold Evans, SPECIAL TO LOS ANGELES TIMES

The striking thing about the innovators who succeeded in making our modern world is how often they failed. Turn on a light, take a photograph, watch television, search the Web, jet across the Pacific, talk on a cell phone. The innovators who left us such legacies had to find the way to Eldorado through a maze of wrong turns.

We have just celebrated the 125th anniversary of Thomas Edison's success in heating a spiral of carbonized cotton thread to incandescence for 14 hours in his lab in New Jersey. He did that on Oct. 22, 1879, and followed up a month later by keeping a filament of common cardboard alight in a vacuum for 45 hours. Three years later he went on to light up half a square mile of downtown Manhattan, though only one of the six dynamos in his design of his central power station worked when he pulled the switch on Sept. 4, 1882.

"Many of life's failures," the supreme innovator said, "are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." Before that magical moment in October 1879, Edison had worked out no fewer than 3,000 theories about electric light, each of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true — but in only two cases did his experiments work.

No one likes failure, but the smart innovators learn from it. Mark Gumz, the head of Olympus America, attributes some of the company's successes in diagnostic technology to understanding failure and acting on the knowledge. His mantra: "You only fail when you quit."

Over two centuries, the most common quality of the innovators has been persistence, which is another way of saying they had the emotional resilience of character to cope. Walt Disney was so broke after a succession of financial flops that he was stranded shoeless in his office because he could not afford the $1.50 to reclaim his shoes at the repair shop. Henry Ford failed with one company and was forced out of another before he got on the road to the Model T.

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	Witnessing the Meltdown Home Get Email Updates What I Do for a Living Email Me Admin Password Remember Me 13545 Curiosities served Share on Facebook				2004-11-08 10:14 AM No Reason to Give Up Previous Entry :: Next Entry Read/Post Comments (0) I suspect a sympathetic editor was working the OpEd desk at the Statesman on Nov. 3.... Evans: Failure is often the foundation of invention Harold Evans, SPECIAL TO LOS ANGELES TIMES The striking thing about the innovators who succeeded in making our modern world is how often they failed. Turn on a light, take a photograph, watch television, search the Web, jet across the Pacific, talk on a cell phone. The innovators who left us such legacies had to find the way to Eldorado through a maze of wrong turns. We have just celebrated the 125th anniversary of Thomas Edison's success in heating a spiral of carbonized cotton thread to incandescence for 14 hours in his lab in New Jersey. He did that on Oct. 22, 1879, and followed up a month later by keeping a filament of common cardboard alight in a vacuum for 45 hours. Three years later he went on to light up half a square mile of downtown Manhattan, though only one of the six dynamos in his design of his central power station worked when he pulled the switch on Sept. 4, 1882. "Many of life's failures," the supreme innovator said, "are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." Before that magical moment in October 1879, Edison had worked out no fewer than 3,000 theories about electric light, each of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true — but in only two cases did his experiments work. No one likes failure, but the smart innovators learn from it. Mark Gumz, the head of Olympus America, attributes some of the company's successes in diagnostic technology to understanding failure and acting on the knowledge. His mantra: "You only fail when you quit." Over two centuries, the most common quality of the innovators has been persistence, which is another way of saying they had the emotional resilience of character to cope. Walt Disney was so broke after a succession of financial flops that he was stranded shoeless in his office because he could not afford the $1.50 to reclaim his shoes at the repair shop. Henry Ford failed with one company and was forced out of another before he got on the road to the Model T. ... more (may require registration). Read/Post Comments (0) Previous Entry :: Next Entry Back to Top