"Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly."This was the sound advice of one friend to a discouraged inventor named Hiram Maxim, who went on to invent the machine gun.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/03/the-roots-of-genius/2908/
