In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act. Any adult head of a family could claim 160 acres of public land for about 18 dollars in fees. After five years of living on and improving the land, the title was theirs.
The law invited action in plain terms. Nobody assigned the land or approved a plan. Single women, immigrants, and freed slaves could claim. Nearly four million people did over 123 years.
In 1968 a 3M scientist named Spencer Silver created an adhesive with a problem. It stuck lightly and came away clean. For years nobody at 3M could find a use for it.
In 1974 a colleague named Art Fry found one. He sang in a church choir, and his paper bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal. Silver’s adhesive held them and lifted away without damage.
The product still almost died. A 1977 launch in four cities failed. 3M tried again with free samples in Boise. More than 90 percent of the people who tried a pad said they would buy more. The national launch came in 1980.
American schools grade an early version of an essay. It is called a rough draft. The name teaches the lesson. The first attempt is expected to be rough.
The rough draft is not a private note. Teachers read it, mark it up, and hand it back. The Library of Congress describes student research in exactly these steps. Outline first, rough draft, then the polished final draft.
In 1950 Philadelphia held the first National Science Fair. Behind it stood decades of organization. E.W. Scripps had founded the Science Service in 1921. Westinghouse began its science talent search in 1942.
The format is unchanged. A student builds or tests something and presents it at a table. Judges question the student. The largest fair, ISEF, now brings more than 1,600 students from over 70 countries.
Silicon Valley’s favorite advice fits in two words. It is “fail fast.”
The phrase has a traceable history. Jack V. Matson, an engineering professor at Penn State, taught a method he called “intelligent fast failure” in 1989. The shorter form spread through the software industry after about 2001.
Critics point out what the phrase leaves out. The point is not failing. It is learning quickly enough to try again.
In January 1975 Popular Electronics put the Altair 8800 computer on its cover. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw it. Gates was a 19-year-old Harvard student. Allen worked at Honeywell.
They called the maker, MITS, and said they had a BASIC for the Altair. They had no Altair and no code. They wrote the program in eight weeks on a simulator. Allen finished the loader on the plane to Albuquerque.
The first time the code ran on a real Altair was the demonstration itself. The machine answered two plus two with four. Microsoft was founded that April.
In 1938 Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented a house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The rent was 45 dollars a month. Packard lived there with his wife. Hewlett slept in a shed outside.
The garage behind the house served as lab, workshop, and factory. With 538 dollars of capital, the two men built their first product, an audio oscillator. A coin toss decided whose name came first.
California later named the garage a historic landmark. It is called the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
In the fall of 1901 the Wright Brothers doubted the published aerodynamic tables. They built a wind tunnel in the back room of their bicycle shop in Dayton.
They made between one and two hundred small wing models and tested them. By December they knew that a single constant everyone used was wrong. Lilienthal’s tables were largely right. The error sat elsewhere.
They rebuilt their glider on their own numbers. The 1902 glider was fully controllable. The 1903 machine flew.
In 2011 Eric Ries published The Lean Startup. The book named a practice already common in new companies. It is the minimum viable product.
Ries defines it as the fastest way to get through the build-measure-learn loop. His example was Zappos. The founder posted photos of shoes from local stores online. When an order came in, he bought the shoes at full price.
The test answered the real question. Would anyone buy shoes on the web? The website cost almost nothing, and it produced a real answer.
American business talk has a phrase for testing many ideas cheaply. It is “throw it against the wall and see what sticks.”
The phrase comes from advertising. A sister phrase from the same industry is “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.” Both phrases assume the same thing. Nobody can know in advance. The test is the idea.