By day, he experimented with new technologies—one of which was his first patented invention, an electrographic vote recorder.
The device allowed officials voting on a bill to cast their decision to a central recorder that calculated the tally automatically. But when he took the vote recorder to Washington, Edison was met with a different reaction. It was an early lesson.
As railroads and other companies expanded in the late 19th century, there was a huge demand for tools administrative employees could use to complete tasks—including making multiple copies of handwritten documents—quicker.
Enter the electric pen. Powered by a small electric motor and battery, the pen relied on a handheld needle that moved up and down as an employee wrote. Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in , hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic. The first problems with the invention were purely cosmetic: the electric pen was noisy, and much heavier than those employees had used in the past. But even after Edison improved the sound and weight, problems persisted.
The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar. By , Edison was involved in the telephone and thinking about what would eventually become the phonograph; he abandoned the project, assigning the rights to Western Electric Manufacturing Co. Edison received pen royalties into the early s. Albert B. Edison debuted one of his most successful inventions, the phonograph, in Maybe those failures are just parts one and two of a three-part drama, necessary precursors to inevitable victory, yet they're reported as miscues.
When I started my own independent consulting business more than 20 years ago, I never knew how unlikely my success was, and I'm really happy no one told me! I recall a great experience being on the team that delivered the largest civilian U. Navy management-training program in history. We trained 18, senior managers in 18 months. Statistics pertaining to failure rates are often misleading in other contexts. Babe Ruth was at the same time the home-run king and the fellow who struck out more than anyone else in the majors.
How can that be? Well, the simplest explanation is that you have to swing the bat many times to hit the most homers, and swinging the bat many times also brings many strikeouts. So, the very thing that causes your success contributes to your failure. Apart from invention and entrepreneurship, it is all too easy to be daunted by statistics in our personal and family lives. He meant the chances for having a baby with birth defects, which of course, is a serious matter. Just yesterday, I happened upon a book that discusses risk taking, and the author confirmed that most of us overreact to statistics regarding possibilities for failure.
Worse than misinterpreting or having incomplete statistics is the widespread tendency to simply give them far too much weight. We cede to them the power to curb our goals and to intimidate us, and the authority to rationalize retreat. I was only the 20th Black Belt promoted by our dojo since its founding, in They interpreted the statistic in exactly the opposite way that the Sensei had intended. He was actually complimenting them on their grit and persistence. He said they had staying power, and they thought they were being shown the door.
Statistics can never intimidate us unless we allow ourselves to become manipulated by them. Remember that scene in the original Star Wars movie when Han Solo is about to launch hyper-drive to evade Imperial captors?
For every statistic, apart from death and taxes, there are exceptions. You might say exceptions are reserved for exceptional people. Boldly become one of them. Such is the case of Thomas Edison who took more than a thousand tries before he successfully developed the light bulb. A failed experience delivers a great lesson that forces us to make new connections and link the dots that we had missed.
We learn more from our failures than from our success. A glass is either half full or half empty, depending on how you look at it. So start viewing your failures from a different perspective! While we there was no actual tabulation of all the steps along the way, there is a very precise number connected to the experiments surrounding the bamboo filament -- 2, It's cited in a Rutgers newsletter on the Thomas Edison papers here: No one, including Edison, ever counted the number of experimental lamps that they made.
There were hundreds of experiments before he developed the bamboo lamp. And many additional experiments before the lamps were adequate for commercial production. In a letter to Edison in spring , Francis Upton noted that the lamp factory had conducted 2, experiments presumably since it had started operations in October Inside Edison's Lab.
Photo by Ariella Brown The link in that paragraph take you to a digital image of a handwritten note on the bamboo lamp. What to make of the famous quote about Edison claiming not to have failed 10, times but to have found 10, ways that did not work? There's no record of that quote with respect to the electric bulb, though he did say something like that about his experience with the battery.
Martin, first published in Edison's friend and associate, Walter S. Mallory, offers this account: This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison].
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