Thomas A. Edison Light Quotations

We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb

I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one.

I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.

Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.

I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.

We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.

It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.

I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

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. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.