He goes on to quote Thomas Watson of IBM, who said, and quotes Thomas Watson of IBM who said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
In my life I did incredibly well at keeping my failure rate high. Learning from mistakes and not making them again came harder. Still, I learned photography from the Ansel Adams photo book series and a lot of experimenting and learned to see by looking at a lot of photos, paintings, drawings and graphics. Very few people simply succeed. An unbroken procession of successes would be reasonably impossible, boring and not lead to new ways of seeing or thinking. Of course I was not launching spacecraft.
A wonderful book also reviewed when I first started writing for Blogcritics is Inventing Modern America by David E. Brown. David writes biographical sketches of inventors. Many are examples of those whose most lasting discoveries were the result of learning from previous failures and the "lucky" accident (wherein the questing mind sees the possibilities that have opened from the unforeseen event).
One of my favorite of David's histories is of Wilson Greatbach who invented the pacemaker (I now am kept alive by a much more sophisticated version - a bi-ventricular pacing device with an internal cardioversion defibrillator). The fun part of the story is that Greatbach was
...building a small device to record the sounds a heart makes. He reached into a box full of resistors ... and pulled the wrong one out. ... The finished device did something odd: it sent out a short pulse of electricity at an interval of one second. This was not useful for capturing heart sounds, but the mistake happened to be exactly what Greatbach was looking for.
His was not the first attempt to apply electric current to the heart and the first pacemakers "were simple and vulnerable devices." By 1960 he had made about 50 of them in a workshop in his barn. However, they immediately began extending lives. His physician friend, Dr. William Chardack, and others began implanting them. "The first recipient lived for 18 months: another led a normal, healthy life into the 1990s."
Mr. Brown tantalizes us again with the story of Percy Spencer, who began his path to inventing the microwave oven when he discovered that a chocolate bar in the pocket of his lab coat has suddenly become "a sticky mess". It was 1946 and Spencer was working with a magnetron ("... the tube that powers radar systems") in the labs at the Raytheon Company where he had worked since the 1920s. Someone who could not understand the need for failures and accidents might have decided that the chocolate had melted from body heat. Spencer guessed microwaves.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Very interesting, Howard, please do cross-post this to DC