An often quoted example of the Edisonian approach is the successful but protracted process Thomas Edison is reported to have used to develop a practical incandescent light bulb.
Inventor Nikola Tesla is quoted as saying "[Edison's] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labour" (Wills I.
Based on detailed study of his notebooks a number of scholars have pointed out that Edison generally resorted to trial and error in the absence of, or lack of awareness of, adequate theories.
Edison was not alone in using trial and error (more accurately termed by Hughes as "hunt and try") because he, like others, was working at the edges of contemporary theory.
Thomas Midgley (who held a PhD and was the inventor of tetraethyl lead and halogenated hydrocarbon refrigerants) said of trial and error, "the trick is to turn a wild goose chase into a fox hunt" (quoted in Hughes 2004).
(Friedel and Israel 1987) Once he had established the need for a high resistance lamp he was faced with a lack of optical emission theories to describe the behaviour of materials when heated to incandescence.
Interpreting invention as a cognitive process : the case of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the telephone.