A Quote from Nikola Tesla and a Meeting Announcement

I am currently reading "A Rabble of Dead Money" which is a depiction of the financial, military and political threads which ultimately led to the Great Depression in the United States.  Excellent read, but a striking quote which comes out of the second chapter is that of Nikola Tesla in reference to Thomas Edison's persistence in discovery - recall that he tested some 3000 variations of the light bulb before finally arriving at the incandescent bulb.  Tesla's quote is "a little theory and calculation would have saved (Edison) 90% of his labor".   Rationality and logic before perseverance and heroism.

Broken down a different way is that a lot of time can be spared by avoiding randomly testing variation after variation, ie guessing, to arrive at a desired result and instead think the problem through from what is known and then working toward the conclusion, either through calculation or by deduction.  Then and only then run the study.

I like this, especially since field testing of something like a fumigant alternative is an enormous undertaking and randomly testing stuff just to see if it works is not efficient at all.  Let's start by putting together what we know so far about the fumigant alternatives, what happens to the soil when we use them and then make some decisions on what to test from there.

Which we can very well do.  A good point to start would be a meeting being arranged by Farm Fuels, Inc. of some of the local greats of our soil science and pathology group which will meet this upcoming August 9 at the auditorium here at my office.  Looking to engage in discussion and get into some good takeaway advice.  More details to follow - save the date.

Were 3000 attempts really necessary to discover this light bulb?

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