In This Chapter

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible, the well-known British mathematician and physicist William Kelvin assured everyone in 1895. Man can never tap the power of the atom, said Nobel Laureate and physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, credited with being the first to isolate the electron and measure its charge. Everything that can be invented has been invented, stated another man of vision, Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office in 1899.

TRW, Inc., the global technology, manufacturing, and service company, listed these observations in a Wall Street Journal ad tagged with these lines: “There’s no future in believing something can’t be done. The future is in making it happen.”

What Kelvin, Millikan, and Duell didn’t understand, quite obviously, is what inventors in everything from high-tech labs to basement workshops across America are proving each day:

Pessimism arrests growth and sensitivity. It has the same effect on you that leaving the cap off a bottle of Coke has on the pop—you go flat. What you need in order to have any chance at success is tons of energy (or, in soda terms, high carbonation). You’ll never reach your limits without being fully charged.