Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

5.3. Lesson 35: Define Yourself

During the inventor's long working life and afterward, a host of critics and commentators debated whether Thomas Edison was or was not a scientist. For Edison himself, there was never any doubt. To a newspaper reporter he famously explained that he was "not a scientific man [but] an inventor," and he went on to explain the difference. "A scientific man busies himself with theory" and is "absolutely impractical," whereas an "inventor is essentially practical." Indeed, Edison declared, the scientist and inventor "are of such different casts of mind that you rarely find the two together." Edison believed that the two outlooks could not "very well co-exist in ... one man." He continued: "As soon as I find that something ...