Even Intelligent People Can
Fail
1 The striking thing about the
innovators who succeeded in making our modern world is how often they failed.
Turn oil a light, take a photograph, watch TV, search the web, jet across the
Pacific Ocean, talk on a cell phone (手机). The innovators who left us these
things had to find the way to success through a maze(错综复杂) of wrong
turn.
2 We have just celebrated the 125th anniversary of
American innovator Thomas Edison’s success in heating in thin line to white, hot
heat for 14 hours in his lab in New Jersey, US. He did that on October 22,1879
and followed up a month later by keeping a thread of common cardboard alight
(点亮着的) in an airless space for 45 hours. Three years later he went on to light
up half a square mile of downtown Manhattan, even though only one of the