A former Special Correspondent for The New York Times, John J. Geoghegan is a journalist, author and educator with four non-fiction books to his name. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Science section, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, BusinessWeek and numerous other publications. John has also been a featured presenter in documentaries for PBS-Television and the Smithsonian Channel. He is teaching "White Elephant Technology" with us this spring — a subject based on his book of the same name which has been optioned for a cable TV series.
In a society that prizes success, you’re definitely bucking the trend. Why the interest in failure?
I think you can learn far more from failure than you can from success. When I started to interview some of these inventors about their inventions, I came to see them and their quests as the truest expressions of the human condition. There was drama, there was suspense, there was passion and there was tragedy. I find their stories far more incredible, fascinating and moving than the typical success stories we all know.
Life doesn’t always have a happy ending.
Exactly. Many things don't work out. On a commercial level, just look around: 85% of new products in the grocery market fail. About 80% of all books fail to turn a profit. 80-85% of all movies fail to make money. We’re surrounded by failure, which I think we’re blind to, particularly in our culture.
Do these inventors share certain traits?
Congenital optimism is one. You also have to be tremendously resilient. You have to have determination and courage. You have to have laser focus. You have to believe in what you're doing and make tremendous personal sacrifices to do it, often against all odds. Plus, across the board, the inventors I’ve interviewed and those I’ve researched were eccentric, and didn’t necessarily have the personal skills to be able to interrelate with other people in ways that could help them advance their invention.
Success stories tend to be well-documented. How did you go about researching the flip side?
I have a radar for what I call “White Elephant Technology” — or “WETech” for short. I've been collecting these stories and these inventions for nearly 20 years. Three of my four books have a WET invention at their center. I find them in a lot of different places — patent applications, newspapers, books, inventors telling me about other inventors. There's no shortage. In my files, I have close to 2000 of these inventions.
When you look at patent applications in the United States, more than 90% that are granted never generate any money. But there's still a tremendous base of invention and creativity to be found in them and elsewhere.
For example, in the beginning of the early 20th century, a tailor named Franz Reichelt developed a wingsuit parachute that he was convinced would save the lives of aviators. He tested this thing multiple times and kept perfecting it until he took it to the top of the Eiffel Tower and jumped … leaving a six-foot hole in the ground.
Oh dear.
Some stories are grim, some are inspiring, and some are just plain funny. Many are all three.
If you could bring back one of these failed inventions, which one would it be and why?
One thing I'd love to bring back for the sheer romanticism of them are zeppelins. Zeppelins were an incredible technology. They were the largest, most sophisticated, most expensive aircraft in their day. I think they were beautiful and graceful and Rube Goldberg-like all at once. I’d bring that back.
There are some other aircrafts I might bring back that were not particularly successful, like the Goblin, which was this tiny, one-man fighter that they would deploy from a bomber. There were giant underwater submarines that the Japanese built during World War II that carried aircraft that were launched on the surface. And I’d probably try to bring back a few of the flying cars from the past. And maybe a jetpack or two, because they're always fun.
Jetpack’s are hard to beat.
I think some of the inventions in the 50s and 60s like jetpacks and flying cars were ahead of their time. Today’s materials and technologies have many practical implications for them. As a result, we’re beginning to see a whole slew of them being introduced.
Of all the inventions you’ve researched, which one do you think deserved to fail the most?
Back in the 1960s railroads were bordering on bankruptcy because of the prevalence of cars and the growth of airlines. The New York Central thought they could get passengers back into trains if they developed a high-speed version. So far, so good.
But their solution was to buy two surplus General Electric jet engines, which they mounted on the roof of a railcar and sent on its way, rocketing down the tracks at 200 miles an hour. I have some film footage of it, which I’ll show in the class. I mean, that thing definitely deserved to fail. First of all, it nearly shook itself apart. Secondly, it was so loud that people along the train tracks thought that there was a jet making a low-altitude pass. And the engines on the roof were so high off the ground that the thing couldn't fit under bridges or through tunnels. I think it must have been an amazingly fun thing to drive, but definitely not a winner.
What are the most common reasons for failure? Lousy idea? Bad marketing? Impossible to manufacture or scale up?
There are a couple of short answers to that question. One is money. These inventors were always short on money. The second is that it always takes longer to perfect the invention than they anticipate, which is a huge turn-off for investors if they happen to have any.
Another that’s really important is that most inventors who have the skills to create something from scratch do not have the skills to scale it up. The personality and creativity it takes to come up with an incredible invention are very different from the skills to build manufacturing capabilities. These are two different skill sets, and they usually reside in two very different types of people.
Sounds like some founders of tech companies. They could envision it and create it, but not lead it.
When I taught the course about airships at OLLI, one theme I kept going back to is how inventing and manufacturing them was just like the start-ups in Silicon Valley today. The exact same dynamic.
What do you hope OLLI members take away from your course?
The course will be entertaining for sure. But ultimately, I’d like members to come away feeling more positive about failure. That they'll see that there's no path to success without failure, that there's so much to be learned from failure, and that we shouldn't fear it to the degree that we do.