Can an Experiment Fail?

Sham Misri

Thomas Alva Edison was an inventor who revolutionised the way of life of humanity with his more than a thousand patents. Edison was a genius of his time who improved the bulb and who gave rise to automatic telegraphy and put the phone into operation and also gave us the opportunity to listen to the music through a phonograph. The man was a legend equal to the one that circulates about his birth and his Mexican origin. The story about the Mexican origin of Edison tells that he was born in  Zacatecas on February 18, 1848, and not in Milan, Ohio on February 11,1847 as claimed.

Thomas Edison believed that no experiment could be a complete failure. When he was developing the incandescent light, he searched for a substance that could serve as a filament for the light bulb. Edison tested thousands of different substances before he found one that he could use in a practical, long lasting light bulb. While Edison was still hunting unsuccessfully for a good filament, he was asked whether he considered the experiments to be failures. He answered that they were not failures because, as a result of the experiments, he knew thousands of substances that could not serve as the filament of an incandescent bulb.

Edison was right. You can learn something from every experiment, including those that seem to "fail."