Fail and Triumph like Einstein and Szilárd!

Failure can be a painful experience, and the automatic reassurances of "it's OK" from others might not always be comforting. It's normal to go through a grieving process when you've invested emotionally in something, even if that failure had been building up over time and become foreseeable. Conducting a postmortem to understand its causes is often necessary for personal closure. This reflective process can lead to significant revisions of the original idea. You might also discover that your initial concept has the potential to be completely transformed and applied in a different context. That's why I decided to share the story of the setback that Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd experienced.

Throughout history, innovators have been motivated by the belief that "there must be a better way." This was certainly true for Einstein and his former student and friend, Szilárd, who sought to improve refrigerator technology. Inspired by a tragic news story about a family in Berlin who died from toxic gases leaking from their refrigerator, they set out to design safer cooling mechanisms in 1926 (patented in 1930). However, despite their best efforts, their venture stumbled.

Neither Einstein nor Szilárd were strangers to success. Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 and was an internationally recognized genius, and Szilárd was known as an outstanding thermodynamicist. So why did they fail in this endeavor? It's difficult to say for certain.

They worked hard on the project, partnering with various manufacturers and even selling one of their patent applications to Electrolux in Stockholm. Eventually, they developed an electromagnetic pump that was mounted in a General Electric refrigerator and went into continuous operation at the A.E.G. Research Institute in 1931.

Despite some lingering issues (such as noise), Einstein and Szilárd were confident that they could succeed, especially since they were supported by a competent team. However, their efforts ultimately came to a halt when A.E.G. eliminated nonessential projects in a depressed economic environment, and both Einstein and Szilárd were forced to flee Germany in 1933 because they were Jewish.

It's possible that their solution was too difficult to implement, especially compared to the approach taken by Charles Kettering's team at General Motors, who adopted a different gas (trademarked as "Freon"*) for refrigeration. Additionally, the political and economic climate of the time made it difficult for them to find partners for their project.

The challenge they faced was a "wicked problem," a term later coined by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber to describe complex issues with no obvious solutions. However, in a twist of fate, the duo was effective at convincing President Roosevelt to start the Manhattan Project to produce nuclear weapons to outpace Nazi efforts already underway. This early mechanism turned out to be a first step in Szilárd’s approach to cooling nuclear reactors.

This story serves as a reminder that that failure can be a stepping stone for something else—with an even larger impact, but also that innovating is an all but certain endeavor. This will be the topic of my next post: From Entrepreneurship to Innovation: Cultivating an Adaptive Mindset to Embrace Uncertainty.

*Deemed to be safe at the time, Freon was banned by the Montreal Protocol of August 1987 as being responsible for ozone depletion.

You can pre-order my book, Beyond Eureka! The Rocky Roads to Innovating, published by Georgetown University Press!