Word: inventive
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...labyrinth of Government regulation has not only shifted research from new products to the "defensive research" necessary to comply with burgeoning environmental and safety rules, but has also increased the cost of bringing out new developments. Says Chrysler Chairman Lee lacocca: "I never invent anything any more. Everything I do is to meet a law." In the early '60s it cost $1 million and took up to five years to bring a drug through the Federal Drug Administration's regulatory maze. It now costs $18 million and can take ten years. As a result, the number...
...fact he rarely slept at home, preferring the laboratory. His first wife died grossly overweight; his second once said their marriage had been "no great love." The Hollywood picture of Edison as a dedicated battler for the good of humanity could hardly be more wrong. Much as his inventions did benefit humanity, Edison's object was to make money, as much as he could. His first patent was on a device for automatically and speedily recording votes in Congress and state legislatures; but because such a machine was seen as a threat to the filibuster, the legislators...
Another reason for Edison's inability to hold on to money was his extravagance. He excelled at raising venture capital (J.P. Morgan helped to bankroll his effort to invent the electric light), but had a genius for spending even more than he raised. Not on himself; his oddball personal habits were far from extravagant. But no sum was too great to lavish on his laboratories; Edison ordered the most expensive materials on earth, like platinum, by the pound. He was also the creator of the modern research and development lab, which he called an "invention factory...
...that can still be useful to would-be inventors and their bosses. One was simple-but incredible-persistence. It was Edison who said that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." No matter that he hired assistants to do the sweating while he provided the spark; nearly all his inventions came after thousands of experiments that failed but taught him something. The only device that worked on the first try was the phonograph. It was a piece of serendipity; Edison had been trying to invent a device that would permit telephone messages to be sent over telegraph lines...
There were technical differences between the bulbs that, Edison's partisans say, made his superior. For example, Swan's carbon rod was fairly thick, Edison's filament was thin. But a crucial difference was that Swan stopped with inventing the bulb, while Edison took what would now be called a "systems approach"; he saw that the bulb had to be only one of a whole series of inventions. To make it in the first place, he and his assistants had to produce a more complete vacuum than had ever been known before. Then they had to devise...