Complex Numbers

Failure Is Victory

Whaddaya know—it turns out that nobody's perfect, though some seem to be less perfect than others. Here's a Cracked article for examples, because I am in no way referring to recent real-world revelations.

    The Most Embarrassing Failures of Famous Geniuses  
They can’t all be winners, even from the biggest winners in history

Yes, even I make mistakes sometimes.

5 Benjamin Franklin’s Turkey Electrocution

At one point, he became convinced an electrocuted turkey would be tastier than a normal one, and in attempting to demonstrate this, he accidentally touched the electrified wire intended for the turkey and electrocuted himself instead.

As far as I can tell, this, unlike certain other Founding Father stories, actually happened. Except for the word "electrocute." That was unknown until a century or more later, when Edison coined the word in an attempt to make Nikola Tesla look bad (long story). It's a portmanteau of "electro-" and "execute," as in, one can only be electrocuted if one dies from it. As Franklin continued to live, he wasn't electrocuted.

4 Francis Bacon’s Frozen Chicken

Mmmm... bacon and chicken.

In 1626, Bacon was determined to prove that you could freeze and preserve a chicken by stuffing it full of snow.

Okay, fine, a hypothesis. Which he went and tested. This is science. Every scientist makes hypotheses that reach dead ends. So, in this case, it's a literal dead end, which is why this counts as a failure, and not merely a falsified hypothesis.

3 Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Doll

In 1890, the world wasn’t ready for Chatty Cathy.

It may be that the word "electrocute" from above was the only thing this guy ever actually invented, rather than stole from his employees. Point being, he probably didn't actually invent the talking doll, either. But he certainly marketed them, which led to people finding dolls creepy forevermore.

2 Mark Twain’s Ill-Fated Start-ups

Twain was one of the highest paid authors in 19th-century America, but it somehow wasn’t enough for him.

Some people are good at lots of things. Others, not so much. Thing is, you never know which you are until you try, and possibly fail.

1 Albert Einstein’s Cosmological Constant

When Einstein was forming his theory of general relativity, it was believed the universe was static, so when his equations kept predicting some wacky expanding universe, he added a term he called the cosmological constant to make them work.

I'm not sure this was such a failure. He seemed to think it was, but it's just an extra term in the equation, easy enough to take out. We did it in engineering school all the time; we called it F_f (read "F sub F"), for Fudge Factor. Let's also remember that this was back when people thought our galaxy was the extent of the universe.

I see it more of a lesson about examining your assumptions, even the unspoken ones. Which we should all be doing, scientist or not.