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Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Chester Carlson must’ve seemed like a hopeless dreamer. Working in the patent department at Bell Labs, he wrote down hundreds of ideas, the vast majority of which never amounted to anything. He was eventually fired from his job and went through a few more after that. Chester wasn’t the type of man satisfied with the mundane, everyday.
There was one idea, however, that would keep his interest. He worked on it for years, even while holding down a day job and going to law school at night. When his wife got tired of the explosions he made mixing chemicals in the kitchen, he moved his experiments to a second floor room in a house his mother-in-law owned.
Eventually he conjured up a working prototype and his invention truly would change the world. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. It would still take decade to transform Carlson’s invention into a viable business and many twists and turns to the story after that. The one constant was that when a challenge arose, what saved the day was off the beaten path.
An Unexpected Innovation Of A Completely Different Sort
The computing pioneer Howard Aiken advised “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” That was exactly the case with Chester Carlson. Having proved…
