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

3.7. Lesson 19: Problems Are Directions

When Edison decided to reinvent the storage battery, his very first step was to inventory the problems of the batteries already on the market. They were legion. Early storage batteries were nasty and unreliable contraptions. They lost their capacity to hold a charge after repeated discharge and recharge cycles. They contained solid lead electrodes, which were very heavy—a great disadvantage when the batteries were used to power electric vehicles. In Edison's day, it was more expensive to run a car on electricity derived from storage batteries than to run a car on gasoline. Moreover, because the batteries were so heavy, an electric car had to be built on a sturdier chassis than the gasoline-powered equivalent, ...