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Asked by haron338 to Rory, Roma, Mark, Jaz, Cathy on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by ninjaturtle.
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Cathy Fraser answered on 16 Jun 2014:
When asked about the invention of the lighbulb, Thomas Edison was aked “how did it feel to fail 1000times?” his reply was that he didn’t fail, he found 1000 ways that didn’t work – or that the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.
Engineering is as much from learning what doesn’t work or solve that problem as it is solving a problem! Great things come from other things not working – did you know that post-it notes came from a failed attempt to make a super strong glue.
It’s all about how you look at what you do – of course things go wrong – but what you do with what you’ve learnt is the crucial thing!
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Roma Agrawal answered on 16 Jun 2014:
Yes many times, but we usually catch mistakes quite early in the process! Very important to learn from what went wrong so you do it better next time- as Cathy says, that’s the best way to invent new things.
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Rory Hadden answered on 16 Jun 2014:
I think Cathy has nailed it!
Engineers continually learn by failures. This is what happened from the earliest days of human civilisation. The men who build arches were expected to stand underneath them as they were completed to show their confidence in their design. Needless to say this quickly sorted to good from the bad! We continue to learn through failures today but we try to use all of our know-how to minimise the consequences.
Rory
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Mark Greaves answered on 16 Jun 2014:
In my job things have gone wrong! Look at my profile and you’ll see a photo of a water leak. This was caused by a lack of understanding of the equipment being worked on…a valve and gearbox assembly. Unfortunately someone turned the water main back on!
A few years ago we had an explosion on one of our sites caused by an auto-ignition of methane in a gas clean up plant.
The lessons learnt from these accidents are very valuable and help us to avoid them happening in the future.
Mark
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Jaz Rabadia answered on 16 Jun 2014:
Great responses engineers. Things go wrong all the time, remember don’t practice till you get it right, practice until you can’t get it wrong !
Jaz
Comments
haron338 commented on :
that’s like writing a story at school , if you get it wrong you learn and do better