The following is excerpted from the essay "Hailing, Failing, and Still Sailing," by Richard Saul Wurman, from Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned, edited by Steven Heller, published by Allworth Press, 2008. Used by permission, all rights reserved.

I am interested in failure because that is the moment of learning - the moment of jeopardy that is both interesting and enlightening. The fundamental means of teach a course in structural engineering is to show the moment when a piece of wood breaks, when a piece of steel bends, when a piece of stone or concrete collapses. You learn by watching something fail to work. William Lear, who invented the jet that bears his name, invented a steam car and all sorts of other things that he was certain would fail. He felt that there was a cyclical relationship between failure and success, and that failure was the necessary first part of the cycle.

I often think that one's life is molded more by inability than ability. When I visited the aerospace museum in Washington, C.C., as marvelous as it is, I missed the epiphany of things that failed. A few years ago, to celebrate the anniversary of the Wright airplane, there was an article in Scientific American about the Wright brothers and their inventions. It made me think about the beginning of that wonderful film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, in which you see a litany of failed aircraft. You laugh, but you also see how seriously involved everybody was in trying to fly. All the failure, all the things that didn't work, make you realize that the Wright brothers were really something. All the paths taken, all the good intentions, the logistics, the absurdities, all the hopes of people trying to fly testifying to the power we have when we refuse to quit.

There should be a museum dedicated to human invention failure. The only problem it would face would be its overnight success. In almost any scientific field, it would add enormously to the understanding of what does work by showing what doesn't work. In developing the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk spent 98 percent of his time documenting the things that didn't work until he found the thing that did.

A scientist's notebook is basically a journal of negative results. Scientists try to disprove their ideas - that is the work they do...

If you put a camera on the Golden Gate Bridge and photographed it for 20 years, you wouldn't learn very much because the bridge succeeded. You learn much more from the documentation of failure. So failure can be defined as delayed success.