Maturity Is Often More Absurd

I Didn’t Fail Ten Thousand Times. I Successfully Eliminated, Ten Thousand Times, Materials And Combinations Which Wouldn’t Work.

Results? Why, Man, I Have Gotten Lots Of Results! If I Find 10,000 Ways Something Won't Work, I Haven't Failed. I Am Not Discouraged, Because Every Wrong Attempt Discarded Is Often A Step Forward.

I Am More Of A Sponge Than An Inventor. I Absorb Ideas From Every Source. I Take Half-matured Schemes For Mechanical Development And Make Them Practical. I Am A Sort Of A Middleman Between The Long-haired And Impractical Inventor And The Hard-headed Business Man Who Measures All Things In Terms Of Dollars And Cents. My Principal Business Is Giving Commercial Value To The Brilliant But Misdirected Ideas Of Others.

I Speak Without Exaggeration When I Say That I Have Constructed 3,000 Different Theories In Connection With The Electric Light, Each One Of Them Reasonable And Apparently Likely To Be True. Yet Only In Two Cases Did My Experiments Prove The Truth Of My Theory. My Chief Difficulty Was In Constructing The Carbon Filament... Every Quarter Of The Globe Was Ransacked By My Agents, And All Sorts Of The Queerest Materials Used, Until Finally The Shred Of Bamboo, Now Utilized By Us, Was Settled Upon.

Surprises And Reverses Can Serve As An Incentive For Great Accomplishment. There Are No Rules Here, We're Just Trying To Accomplish Something.