In making a sales pitch for his product, lean, scholarly Joseph Chamberlain Wilson once quoted in Latin a homily from a Montaigne essay: Fortis imaginatio general casum (A strong imagination begets the event). In his own case, it took twelve years of imagining the possibilities of an obscure invention for any historic event to occur, but the result was one of the most successful single products ever put on sale: the Xerox machine. By the time he died of a heart attack last week at the age of 61, while lunching in Manhattan with Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, Wilson...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
