Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. He combined existing pieces. Interchangeable parts came from the armories. Moving overhead trolleys came from Chicago meatpacking.
Ford said so himself in 1922. The idea “came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.” The packers took animals apart. Ford put cars together.
The first moving line ran at Highland Park in October 1913. A Model T that took 12 and a half hours to build soon took 93 minutes.
SpaceX built rocket boosters that fly back and land themselves. The first years of attempts failed. In 2017 the company collected the crashes into a video.
The video’s captions read like punchlines. One booster is shown landing in flames. “Well, technically it did land,” the caption says. “Just not in one piece.” Another flight ends in what the company calls a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
The jokes were earned. The first landings succeeded in December 2015 and April 2016. Reused boosters now land routinely.
Baseball keeps a number that defines its view of failure. It is the batting average. A hitter who reaches .300 fails seven times out of ten.
That failure rate earns stardom. The average Hall of Fame hitter batted .303. Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball describes the game’s greatest heroes as “the men who fail seven times out of ten.”
In 1941 The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Peter Arno. A military plane lies in pieces. An engineer walks away from the wreckage, blueprints under his arm. The caption reads, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”
The phrase spread through the war years and then through American business. It treats a failed design as a design problem. The next version starts immediately.
American children learn the recovery rule as a rhyme. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
The rhyme has a paper trail. William Edward Hickson published it in 1836 in The Singing Master. The American educator Thomas H. Palmer printed it in 1840 in a Boston teacher’s manual. Palmer used it to encourage schoolchildren with their homework.
A famous quotation is attributed to Thomas Edison. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Edison never said it. The documented remark came in 1910 from his associate Walter Mallory. Edison had run thousands of battery experiments. Mallory asked about results. “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
The polished “10,000 ways” version first appears in 1967. The rough original is the better evidence.
In April 1985 Coca-Cola changed its formula for the first time in 99 years. The new drink had won about 200,000 taste tests.
Customers revolted. The company hotline, which had taken 400 calls a day, took 1,500. About 40,000 complaint letters arrived. On July 11, 1985, after 79 days, the original returned as Coca-Cola Classic. Peter Jennings interrupted General Hospital to report it.
The company now calls it “the most memorable marketing blunder ever.”
In December 1914 fire swept Thomas Edison’s works in West Orange, New Jersey. Thirteen buildings burned. More than half the site was lost.
Edison was 67. “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow,” he told a reporter. His son Charles remembered him saying, “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”
Rebuilding began the next morning. Edison kept his employees on the payroll.
In 1997 Nike aired a commercial in which Michael Jordan recites his failures. He had missed more than 9,000 shots. He had lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times his team had given him the final shot, and he had missed.
Jordan did not write those words. They were written by a copywriter named Jamie Barrett. The numbers were Barrett’s estimates. Asked about the missed game-winners, Jordan said, “It sounds about right to me.”
Nike’s trade record notes that of all his commercials, Jordan was proudest of this one. The spot took “a glimpse at his humanness.”
In 1985 Steve Jobs lost control of Apple, the company he co-founded. He was 30 years old. “I was a very public failure,” he said later.
In 2005 he told Stanford’s graduating class the rest. “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.” In the five years that followed he founded NeXT and bought Pixar. Apple bought NeXT in 1997, and Jobs returned.