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Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.

Edwin Land

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Edwin Land
Age: 81 †
Born: 1909
Born: May 7
Died: 1991
Died: March 1
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Photographer
Physicist
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Edwin Land
Edwin Herbert Land
E.H. Land
Must
Unexpected
Much
Definitions
Every
Several
Years
Invention
Would
Significant
World
Prepared
Startling
Learned
Characteristics
Come
Definition

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Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.
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The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.
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Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
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It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.
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An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
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In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
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As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.
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It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
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I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.
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You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.
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Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
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A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.
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Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.
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Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.
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There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
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Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
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I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.
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Don't do anything that someone else can do.
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Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.
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The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.
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