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- This book is featured in The Book of Heroic Failures, which has made me cry with laughter since I was a child. Delighted to discover that it's real
- My favourite book ever is "The Book of Heroic Failures". It celebrates failure. In the introduction, Stephen Pile wrote:
Success is overrated. Everyone craves it despite daily proof that man's real genius lies in quite the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at: it is the quality that marks us off from animals and we should learn to revere it. Of course, the occasional Segovia does slip through the net with the result that we all cut sandwiches and queue in the rain for hours to watch him play the guitar without once dropping his plectrum down the hole. But this book is not for the likes of him. It is for us: we, the less than good, who spend hours shaking the plectrum out and impress only our mothers. Here, collected in one anthology for the first time, are the great names: Coates, Falconer, the abysmal Nuttall, the immortal Carolino, the dire Foster-Jenkins and McGonagall. People who were so bad in their chosen sphere of endeavour that their names live on as a beacon for future generations.
I am sure that I am not the only one who cannot do things and the slightest investigation reveals that no one else can do anything either. This being the case, it seems to me that Mankind spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the things he does well, when these few blades of grass are surrounded by vast prairies of inadequacy which are much more interesting.
More and more I find myself agreeing with the author.
- Tangentially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Heroic_Failures
I have a copy. It is a much-beloved source of joy.
- This guy created the museum of failure. I really hope he consulted Stephen Pile, who wrote The Book of Heroic Failures (possibly the funniest book of all time).
- Speaking of vacuum cleaners, Stephen Pile, my very much favourite author ever, wrote an entry in his hilarious Book of Heroic Failures about the man who almost invented the vacuum cleaner. I reproduce it here verbatim, under the principles of fair use (transformative, educational, not for profit and a tiny amount of his work that won't impinge on his profits - buy his book!)
The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner
The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost invented it.
In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets. The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top.
After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze -- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room.
"It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards.
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There's a story here somewhere that aught to relate to mathematics, if only I could find it...
- > There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S.
I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker:
'Take me to Detroit', he said. 'We are already going to Detroit', she replied. 'Oh...good,' he said, and sat down again.
