Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work.
What it means
A failed experiment isn’t a lack of results. Each one tells you something that doesn’t work, and that knowledge is progress toward what will.
Edison is turning the word “results” around: what looked like months of nothing was, to him, thousands of answers.
The context
Edison was trying to build a new kind of storage battery. His associate Walter S. Mallory recalled finding him at a bench covered in “hundreds of little test cells,” after “more than five months, seven days a week,” and “over nine thousand experiments” that had “not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question.”
Mallory said, “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?” Edison “turned on me like a flash, and with a smile” gave this reply. By the time Mallory returned a few weeks later, the experiments had passed ten thousand and Edison had found “the missing link in the combination sought for.”
Why it matters
Persistence is easier when you count what each attempt teaches you, not only whether it worked. Edison’s reframe turns a long run of failures into a growing body of knowledge.
It’s a useful way to talk to yourself, or to a child, after something hasn’t worked: not “I got nothing,” but “now I know one more thing that doesn’t work.”
About Thomas Edison
American inventor and businessman, 1847–1931
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on 11 February 1847 and grew up in Michigan with little formal schooling. He became deaf as a child and learned through books and tinkering, and as a young railroad telegrapher he spent much of his time inventing improvements to telegraph systems.
He developed Menlo Park, now considered the first industrial research laboratory, and is known for his work on the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, electric power distribution and early motion pictures. He registered 1,093 patents in the United States and died on 18 October 1931.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Recalled by Walter S. Mallory in Dyer and Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions, 1910.
We matched the words against the Project Gutenberg text of Dyer and Martin's 1910 biography, where Edison's associate Walter S. Mallory recalls the exchange. These are Edison's words as Mallory remembered them, not a statement Edison wrote. We last checked this on 9 November 2026.