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When there’s no experimenting there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.

— Thomas Edison

Experimentation is vital to the development of understanding and the discovery of truth. There are two kinds of experiments: The first kind of experiment helps us verify the validity of the work of others. Ideas, be they scientific, business, artistic or political, are tested in the real world and judged by practical results. Through this process — where second-hand knowledge is exchanged for first-hand knowledge — fact is separated from error. There is also another kind of experiment — the kind that lives on the edge of human knowledge staring out into the murky unknown. When we forge into this unknown we become the cartographers of human progress, mapping new intellectual territory for ourselves and others. Both kinds of experimentation are essential to the development of expertise.

To illustrate the necessity of experimentation to increase human understanding, consider the Wright brothers and the invention of the airplane. When the Wright brothers read of the death of the leading aerospace expert Otto Lilienanthal, who died in a glider accident, they got the aviation bug. At the time, their intellectual map of aviation was more of a blank sheet of paper. Their first step in the learning process was research. First, they turned to their encyclopedia to see what they could find, which was not much — just a few articles on bird flight. Next, they visited the Dayton public library. At first there was not much to be found, again, just information on bird flight. Eventually they came across excerpts from the book L’Empire del’Air by Lois-Peirre Mouillard, which were published in The Smithsonian Institute’s Annual Reports. Of Mouillard’s work, Wilbur wrote that it was “one of the inspiring causes in the efforts of the Wright brothers.”

From their research, the Wright brothers knew that the Smithsonian Institute had been interested in the problem of flight. Wilbur wrote to the Institute stating:

I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English Language . . .I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite to help the future worker who will attain final success.

The Smithsonian Institute sent Wilbur reprinted articles from the Institute’s Annual Reports which included an account of Samuel Langley’s power-model flights of 1896, descriptions of Otto Lilienthal’s experiments, and a list of books that were commercially available. The Wright brothers ordered the books and devoured the information. As they did so, their intellectual map of the subject took shape.

One of the books that was ordered was Octave Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines which, Wright brothers biographer Fred Howard describes as a “veritable Old Testament of aeronautics, to which the three Aeronautical Annuals were a latter-day Gospel bringing the story up to date.” Howard goes on to say that the Wright brothers had at their disposal “the entire record of human flight.”

They took the further step of contacting author and glider experimenter, Octave Chanute, because as Wilbur put it, “the problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.” Of course, Wilbur’s primary collaborator was his brother Orville, but he did reach out and receive assistance and even mentorship from Octave Chanute, especially early on.

The stage was set for experimentation. The learning methods of reading and collaboration were insufficient by themselves. After all, since no one had solved the problem of human flight, no book or collaborator had that information. Although what had come before would guide them, hey had to move into uncharted territory.

There was also another problem that needed to be found and solved through experimentation. Namely, the information that they were working with was wrong. Where they expected to find a road to travel by — Otto Lillienthal’s air data table — they ran into a dead-end. Through experimentation they came to the realization that the air data table was incorrect for the wing shapes they were testing. In their experiments, the Wright brothers’ gliders did not have the lift that Lilienthal’s table predicted. Because their glider received only one third of the lift that the tables predicted, the Wrights began to think of their experiments as a failure. In truth, their failures were in fact very informative and brought them closer to solving the problem. Their experiments uncovered the fact that the information that they read in Lilienthal’s experiments was incorrect. As this dawned on them, they conducted their own experiments for the express purpose of testing the validity of Lilienthal’s data. Wilber wrote to Chanute in 1901, “I am now absolutely certain that Lilienthal’s table is very seriously in error.”

To discover this fact and to solve the problem of wing shape, configuration and size, the Wright brothers created a homemade wind tunnel at very little expense. They conducted three weeks of experiments to systematically test the affects of wind on 38 different wing configurations. With the air table corrected with their own data, the Wright brothers were much closer to solving the problem of human flight. Octave Chanute offered to calculate the result of the experiments and finished his work by December of 1902. The intellectual map that was once blank — then inaccurate — became a reliable guide for the final leg of the journey. Armed with accurate information, the Wright brothers were able to solve the design problems of their airplane and successfully achieved human flight with their flight experiments twelve months later.

As can be seen from the Wright brothers example, when charting new territory there is only so much that one can learn through books and collaboration. By definition, innovations break new ground. For a modern day example of experimentation, consider Michael Dell. Where the Wright brothers applied experiments this to aeronautical science, Michael Dell applied his experiments to business. In his book, Direct from Dell, Dell states:

There were obviously no classes on learning how to start and run a business in my high school, so I clearly had a lot to learn. And learn I did, mostly by experimenting and making a bunch of mistakes. One of the first things I learned though, was that there was a relationship between screwing up and learning: The more mistakes I made, the faster I learned.

Chapter 3 of Direct from Dell is titled, “Learning the Hard Way.” In the chapter Dell lists many of the missteps his company made while trying to grow to a 2 billion dollar company. The title of the chapter is a bit misleading. It eludes to the possibility that there was an easy way to learn how to innovate an industry. Forging into uncharted territory is inherently time consuming and arduous. Every fork in the road and dead-end has to be painstakingly mapped out. Without the aid of reading and collaborative learning to let Dell know which of the paths would be dead-ends, he had to travel them himself. In a way, all experimentation is learning “the hard way.” Like Michael Dell and the Wright brothers, we shouldn’t shy away from it or avoid it — we should simply understand it.

Learning through experiment is typically difficult and awkward by nature. Experiments are often wrought with mistakes and outright failures. Accepting this will help develop the necessary character trait of resiliency. After all, innovation is impossible of one quits after failures. Only with experimentation accompanied by persistence, can breakthroughs occur.

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