I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

We searched for a primary source in Edison's own hand — his collected correspondence, published writings, and archival records including the Edison Papers Project at Rutgers — and found no document in which he writes or speaks this exact sentence. The closest documented material traces to Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin's authorized biography *Edison: His Life and Inventions* (1910), where an associate, Walter S. Mallory, recounts Edison describing his storage battery work in the spirit of having found many thousands of things that would not work, and to early-1920s press accounts (echoed in the Yale Book of Quotations) giving the variant "I have not failed 10,000 times—I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work." The polished modern wording checked here appears to be a later condensation of that documented sentiment rather than a verbatim Edison sentence. A live library search surfaced the exact phrase widely — in Camille A. Farrington's *Failing at School* (2014), Allison Ching's *You Don't Suck* (2023), and numerous other volumes — but all credit Edison and none predate him or name a rival author, so these confirm popularity, not origin. We found no credible competing claimant and no documented earlier use by anyone else, which rules out both misattribution and a genuine authorship dispute; the substance clearly ties to Edison, but the exact wording remains unconfirmed by any primary source. This quote is attributed.