Edison's 3,000 ideas

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He set up the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved.

This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... 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.

For more, see:

• Wikiquote: Thomas Edison