In 1982, eighteen students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The testing service found the scores suspicious. Fourteen students were asked to retake the exam. Twelve agreed.

All twelve did well enough to have their scores reinstated. Their teacher was Jaime Escalante, who had begun teaching at Garfield in 1974. He called the later film about the class “90% truth, 10% drama.”

The 1988 film Stand and Deliver told the story. Edward James Olmos played Escalante.

Americans describe taking over a cause with a flame. The phrase is “carrying the torch.” A related phrase is “passing the torch.”

The torch metaphor is ancient. Greek festivals ran torch races, and the prize went to the runner who finished with the flame still burning. The torch-bearer as a leader of a cause dates to the 1530s.

John F. Kennedy fixed the modern form. In his 1961 inaugural address he said, “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

In 1937 a supermarket owner in Oklahoma City noticed a limit on shopping. Customers stopped buying when their arms were full. Sylvan Goldman owned the Humpty Dumpty chain.

With a mechanic named Fred Young, Goldman built a basket on wheels, modeled on a wooden folding chair. Shoppers ignored it. Goldman then hired models to push the carts around his stores.

The customers copied the models. The carts caught on, and Goldman collected a royalty on folding carts across the country.

Edison did not invent the light bulb. Many incandescent lamps existed before his. Joseph Swan held a British patent on a similar lamp.

What Edison built was the whole system. His Pearl Street station opened in September 1882 and lit a district of New York. Swan and Edison later merged their British operations into one company, Ediswan.

The credit went to the man who made it a system.

For five years after their first flights, the Wright Brothers barely flew in public. They wanted signed contracts before showing their machine.

On August 8, 1908, Wilbur Wright flew at a racetrack near Le Mans, France. His first flight lasted one minute and 45 seconds. He flew banking turns and figure-eights. French aviation pioneers watched.

The French public flocked to the field by the thousands. The United States Army signed a contract for 25,000 dollars. The brothers had sold the airplane by showing it.

In 1943 a naval engineer named Richard James watched a spring fall from a shelf and walk. He spent two years turning it into a toy. No store wanted it.

In November 1945 Gimbels department store in Philadelphia gave the toy a counter and a demonstration. James sat at the counter and coiled the spring down a ramp. Four hundred Slinkys sold in 90 minutes at one dollar each.

The navy had never wanted the springs. His wife Betty found the name in a dictionary.

Lockheed’s secret division began as a joke name. It is now an everyday business word. A skunkworks is a small autonomous team allowed to build something away from the main organization.

Dictionaries now list it as a common noun. It sits near “brainstorming,” another business word that began at one company.

Spencer Silver’s weak adhesive sat unused for years. Art Fry sang in a church choir. His paper bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal.

In 1974 Fry remembered the adhesive and coated his bookmarks with it. The notes stayed put and lifted away cleanly. 3M allowed employees to pursue such side projects. The company called it “permitted bootlegging.”

Fry then championed the product through a failed 1977 launch. The Boise free-sample campaign in 1978 saved it. More than 90 percent of the people who tried a pad said they would buy more.

In 1983 Apple created a job title that had belonged to churches. Guy Kawasaki became the software evangelist for the Macintosh.

His task was to convince developers to write for a computer with zero customers. Apple chose the word deliberately. The company viewed the Macintosh “as not merely another personal computer platform, but as good news.”

The title spread through the industry. “Chief evangelist” is now a standard role at technology companies.

In June 1943 Lockheed’s chief engineer, Kelly Johnson, received a secret request. The Army Air Forces wanted a jet fighter. Johnson assembled 23 engineers and 103 shop mechanics.

The team worked in a small shed in Burbank. They finished the XP-80 Shooting Star in 143 days, seven days ahead of schedule. The formal contract arrived four months after work had begun.

The name came from a comic strip. An engineer answered the phone with the words “Skonk Works, inside man Culver,” borrowing the name from Li’l Abner. The name stuck, and Lockheed later trademarked it.