Tony Stark is a self proclaimed genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. Genius being the important word. And while Tony is lauded for his tech skills, the real mark of his intelligence is his ability to learn from his mistakes. Every time Tony Stark loses, he uses it as an opportunity to improve his Iron Man suit, Peter Parker’s Spider-man suit or his Iron Legion bots. Here is every instance where Tony Stark learned from his mistakes.
The Icing problem
In Iron Man when Tony Stark first takes to the skies in his shiny new suit he encounters the icing problem due to the composition of his suit. Tony finds that at high altitude his suit starts to ice over due to the low temperature. To overcome this Tony builds his new suit using a gold-titanium alloy from an earlier satellite design that wasn’t prone to freezing.
Almost freezes to death so puts a heater in Spider-man’s suit
In Iron Man 3 after Tony narrowly escapes death when his home is attacked, he finds himself lost in a snowy part of Tennessee. He then proceeds to freeze his butt off while carrying his Iron Man suit behind him for miles. It isn’t until Spider-man Homecoming that we realize Tony has come up with a solution for this. A heater for Peter Parker’s Spider-man suit which dries the wall-crawler instantaneously after he becomes wet.
Tony got kidnapped so added a tracker to Peter’s Spider-man suit
Iron Man’s origin story is something that most Marvel fans will be familiar with. Tony gets captured by the Ten Rings and builds the Mark 1 Iron Man suit in order to escape. However, this would have been much simpler if Tony had a tracking chip on him at the time of his capture. This is why he installs one in Spider-man’s suit in Homecoming.
Whiplash’s electricity damaged Tony’s suit so he made it power-absorbent
In Iron Man 2 when Iron Man is facing of against Whiplash on the Formula 1 track, the Marvel villain uses his electricity whips to attack Tony. In The Avengers we find out Tony has overcome this issue by giving his suit the ability to absorb electricity. Something we see when Tony takes on Thor in the woods. Thor’s electricity powers up the Iron Man suit by 400 percent.
Tony’s suit stops working in space so he makes the nanosuit suitable for space travel
In the closing scenes of The Avengers Tony saves New York and defeats Loki’s army by re-directing a nuclear missile into space to destroy the Chitauri fleet. While in space Tony is rendered unconscious due to his suit’s inability to operate in space. Something Tony rectifies for Avengers Infinity War where we see Tony flying to space with no such issues.
From an easily-defeatable Iron legion to a group of smart law enforcement bots
In Iron Man 3 fans are finally introduced to the Iron Legion. Tony’s own private robot army. The only problem? They are kind of useless and are easily defeated by Aldrich Killian and co. Fast forward to Avengers Age of Ultron we see a much stronger, smarter Iron Legion with the ability to intelligently assist law enforcement on the streets.
Ant-man got inside Tony’s armor so he built a nanotech suit with no gaps
In the Captain America: Civil War in the airport scene, Ant-man is able to get inside Iron Man’s suit and cause some damage. Tony fixes this by ensuring there are no gaps in his nanotech suit in Avengers Infinity War.
War Machine crashed to the ground so Tony added a parachute to Spider-man’s suit
In the Captain America: Civil War airport scene Vision accidentally shoots down Rhodey from the sky with his energy beam. Rhodey then crash lands from hundreds of feet in the air. We see Tony learns from this in Avengers: Infinity War by incorporating a parachute in Spider-man’s suit.
Tony was defeated by Captain America in hand-to-hand combat so he added melee weapons to his suit
In Captain America: Civil War Iron Man faces off against Captain America and The Winter Soldier at the same time in close quarters. Cap eventually gets the better of Tony in hand-to-hand combat. Tony clearly remembers this because we see him add multiple melee weapons to his nanosuit in Avengers Infinity War like energy blades and battering rams.
