James E. Homans, editor, The Cyclopædia of American Biography… (1918)
“ Edison's fertility in invention is nothing short of amazing. It has been said that his guess is more than a mere starting-point, and often turns out to be the final solution of a problem. Even “the failure of an experiment simply means to him that he has found something else that will not work, thus bringing the possible goal a little nearer by a process of painstaking elimination.” ”
