Thomas Edison — "Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent."
Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent.
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More from Thomas Edison
"The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense."
"I am not a scientist. I am an inventor."
"There is no substitute for hard work."
"I never had a bad break in my life. I have had a lot of hard ones, but never a bad one."
"You will have many opportunities in life to keep your mouth shut: You should take advantage of every one of them."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
An invention is worthless if no one will buy it. Edison is saying he refuses to spend time on ideas that lack a market, no matter how clever or technically impressive they might be. Practical commercial value, not novelty or pure curiosity, is the only test that matters. If a product cannot find customers willing to pay, the effort that went into creating it has been wasted and should never have started.
Relevance to Thomas Edison
Edison held over 1,000 patents and built Menlo Park as the world's first industrial research lab, explicitly organized to convert ideas into revenue. He famously lost the War of the Currents because Westinghouse's AC sold better than his DC. The phonograph, light bulb, and motion picture camera were all pushed toward mass markets, not left as demonstrations. This quote captures his self-image as a businessman-inventor, not a scientist.
The era
Edison worked during America's Gilded Age industrial boom, when Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan were building empires and venture capital first flowed to inventors. Patents had real monetary value, and General Electric formed around Edison's commercialized work in 1892. Universities still treated applied science as lesser than pure research, so framing invention as profit-driven pushed back against that snobbery and matched the era's worship of productive, wealth-creating enterprise.
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