After millenniums of musings and a century of failed attempts, astronomers first detected an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a normal star other than the Sun, in 1995.
But, despite half a century of failed industrial policy, the belief that it should be able to do something persists; and, with an election three weeks away, it is unlikely to try to disabuse voters of this idea.
Following nearly a century of failed rival leagues and legal battles, Mr Miller's canny collective bargaining led to the abolition in 1976 of baseball's odious reserve clause a system often compared to slavery, which bound players to their employers and grossly reduced their wages.
It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People's Republic of China and to reorient America's posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America's interests extremely well for more than 30 years.
After a century of failed opportunity, a new political space has opened for creating a joined-up food policy, with the potential for input from a wide policy community.
There was much talk in the early twenty-first century of failed states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Haiti.
After a century of failed attempts at Arab-Israeli peace, the Obama Administration may have accidentally just produced the key breakthrough to success.
More significant, however, Mr. Gehry's towering composition of clashing, undulating forms is an intriguing attempt to overturn a half-century's worth of failed urban planning ideas.
A loss in his home state would be particularly brutal for the once-promising young Senator, and it would effectively banish his "New American Century" to the flea-market dustbins of failed, forgotten campaign slogan history.
