Magnificent Failures

It is one of the more curious features of human history that some of our most celebrated achievements began as spectacular disasters. Not until Spencer Silver had spent years failing to create a strong adhesive did he stumble upon something far more interesting: a weak one. What he had produced — a glue that stuck without sticking permanently — seemed, to most of his colleagues at 3M, entirely pointless. It was only when his colleague Art Fry needed something to stop his hymn book bookmarks falling out during choir practice that Silver's magnificent failure found its purpose. The result was the Post-it note, now one of the best-selling office products in the world.

James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before arriving at one that worked. Not once during those years of relentless iteration did he consider himself a failure: he preferred to think of himself as someone conducting 5,126 experiments that happened not to succeed. What the outside world called failure, Dyson called data.

Then there is WD-40 — the lubricant found in every British garage — whose name tells you everything you need to know about its origins. It stands for "Water Displacement, 40th attempt." What became of formulations one through thirty-nine is, presumably, best not dwelt upon.

Penicillin, famously, was discovered because Alexander Fleming went on holiday and returned to find his petri dishes contaminated with mould. Had he not been untidy, had he not been absent, had he not been — in the clinical language of scientific rigour — somewhat incompetent, millions of lives would never have been saved. It is not too much to say that Fleming's greatest scientific contribution was made on a day when he was doing everything wrong.

There is something gleefully counterintuitive about all of this. We are raised to believe that success is the product of meticulous planning, flawless execution, and the zealous suppression of error. Yet the evidence suggests that hubris, haste, and happy accident have given us medicines, technologies, and confections — including, by most accounts, chocolate chip cookies — that careful competence could never have produced.

Different cultures handle failure differently. The Japanese concept of kaizen — continuous improvement through iterative experimentation — actively requires failure as part of the process. Silicon Valley has turned "failing fast" into a competitive philosophy. The British, characteristically, prefer to change the subject.

Perhaps what unites all magnificent failures is not their scale, but what they reveal: that the gap between disaster and discovery is, in the right hands, extraordinarily thin. Every cloud has a silver lining. But only if you resist the temptation to throw in the towel before the weather clears.