I just read a truly inspiring story about invention and disaster, and how they’re often side-by-side in life, in a way that it makes you think it couldn’t possibly be otherwise. I’m a firm believer in duality, and this is the kind of story that contributes to such belief. As it turns out, Henry Ford (who would later invent the automobile and introduce industrial assembly lines), performed a miscalculation during his early youth that might have been disastrous. When he was ten years old, legend has it that he decided to experiment with a boiling teapot. He had decided that if the steam was trapped inside the teapot, then it would float; consequently, he tied down the lid on a clay teapot, and he set it upon the fire, waiting patiently to see what would happen. Naturally, the pot exploded, and young Henry Ford was not only scolded for breaking a window and a mirror, but he was actually scalded from the explosion, suffering a minor scar from a shrapnel as well as burns from the water. Nonetheless, the seeds were planted, that would allow him to invent the combustion engine, just over a decade later.

Now, my thought is that young Henry actually learned a lot about inventions, that day, and about his destiny as well. He must have been incredibly lucky not to get severely hurt, and yet his spirit was not put down by the disaster; he would go on to set his name upon history as one of the most prolific and influent inventors of the modern age. That day, Henry Ford learned from an exploding teapot that invention and disaster walk along hand in hand, trough the garden of good and evil.

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