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Faraday gave this three-word reply when the young chemist William Crookes asked him the secret of his success as a scientific investigator. The exchange is documented in John Hall Gladstone's biography Michael Faraday (1874), p. 123. Crookes, who would go on to discover the element thallium and pioneer cathode ray research, was seeking advice from the most productive experimental scientist in Britain. The maxim distills Faraday's entire working method: not merely to do experiments, but to complete them and share results with the scientific community — a discipline that produced his Experimental Researches in Electricity, published in three volumes between 1839 and 1855.