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

2.4. Lesson 5: See It

Given the more than a thousand patents Thomas Edison had to his name, including breakthroughs that created major modern industries and transformed civilization itself, it seems both perverse and mean-spirited to focus on the limits of his imagination. But it is those limits that reveal much of what is most useful to us—as innovators and would-be innovators—about his creative fertility.

In 1922, Edison wrote of his intense interest in the nascent field of atomic energy, but he observed that "we have not yet reached the point where this exhaustless force can be harnessed and utilized." Why not? Edison explained: "There is nothing to hang the imagination on."

In that simple declaration rests the heart of Edison's inventive ...