NOT BY ACCIDENT AND NOT FOR FUN
“Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions? Do they come to you while you are lying awake nights?” I asked him.
“I never did anything worth doing by accident,” he replied, “nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph.[[4]] No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.”
[4]. “I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone,” said Edison, “when the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of my fingers held just behind it. That set me to thinking. If I could record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk. I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered. That’s the whole story. The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger.”
“I have always kept,” continued Mr. Edison, “strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders, valuable only as novelties to catch the popular fancy.”