He was a dreamer, it was true—but no inventor lasted long in his or her career by giving in to dreaming. The moment something didn’t work, either due to a misunderstanding of how a metal behaved or how steam would push a certain way, you had to immediately stop and think and figure out what the cause of the problem was and start again from there. Practical, pragmatic, dogged—these were all the adjectives used to describe successful inventors.
