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

2.7. Lesson 8: Cut and Try

For Edison, creativity was always more a matter of investigative labor than of imaginative inspiration. His most famous aphorism—"Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration"—testifies to that. His creative methodology has often been described as a process of cut and try. When he was on the hunt for the ideal filament for his electric lamp, he collected a sample of every conceivable substance that could possibly be formed into a filament, and he tried each, recording the results of thousands of observations. There were few theoretical shortcuts in this process. Whatever worked worked. Whatever did not did not. And once something was found to work, Edison might use it—but he would rarely stop looking ...