Thanks for pointing all of that out. I forgot that those things predated the comic.

Wow, the full text of that paragraph is even worse:

> Interestingly enough one of the largest sources of exaggerated Tesla history in the last few years was a cartoonist (Mr. Inman) who runs the website "The Oatmeal". A cartoonist (a guy with no engineering, legal or historian background) born in 1982 on the wrong side of the continent felt the liberty of making passionate statements about New York's electrical history based on crap he read on the internet. After a Forbes article by Alex Knapp about the myths of Tesla inspired by this Edison Tech Center article came out, the cartoonist attacks Knapp in the arrogant and cynical style typically demonstrated by the worst of US-born Millennials. Mr. Inman, like many comedians seems to be fundamentally unhappy and finds an outlet through humor. Oddly enough his behavior is similar to Tesla's in that he reacts in a nasty fashion if someone challenges his ideas, even when they mean well.

You're cherrypicking the part of the document that addresses the comic and I do agree the tone could be more professional, but it a fairly serious rebuke of some pretty terrible claims. Ironically, when Hawkings, Linus, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc use the same tone, the tech community seems to not have any problems with it. The factual aspects of this page are pretty good and I'm hard pressed to find any issue here historically. I'm something of a amateur Edison-era historian, love this period, and feel that if we want to properly honor history and the lives of the people who more or less helped build the modern world, then we should be honest about the facts and park the fanboyism.

I do feel they gloss over the elephant electrocution and even by standards of that time was a bit shocking, even if there were almost no animal welfare laws. To be fair to Edison's group, this PR stunt was tasteless, but the elephant was already sentenced to death. My understanding is the alternative would have been a grisly shooting with an elephant gun which is far less humane than electrocution.

Again, the Oatmeal comic is pretty poor representation of the period. I understand its popular and ties in with Tesla fandom and an over-represented demographic on the web, but I think those honest about knowing what these men did should dismiss it and dig into more academic sources. This period is so exciting and interesting, its a shame a lot of youngsters grow up with a simple minded 'Tesla vs Edison' narrative which is such a stupid oversimplification of an amazing and progressive period in US history.

About the only way you can gather some semblance of "historical truth" or "historical facts" about either Edison or Tesla would be to read as many biographies and books about both men, both contemporary accounts, auto-biographical accounts, and later historical treatises.

In short - read everything you can about both individuals - their life, their history, their accomplishments, and their rivalry thru the years.

At one time, I was more on the "fanboy" side of things with Tesla; for years, from about 1992 or so (long before the Oatmeal piece, and certainly before "The Prestige" was published), I collected many books and anything else I could get my hands on about Tesla. Prior to that, as a teenager, I had heard about him thru histories of Edison - mainly in connection to the "Tesla Coil" as well.

But I had neglected Edison. At some point, many years later I decided that having only a one-sided view of things wasn't right, and started collecting and reading things on and about Edison.

What I discovered was ultimately, neither man could be claimed to be "all that" and both were products of their times. Both had their greatnesses, and both had their lows. I consider both men to have made many contributions, but they also had plenty of faults. I also consider it one of those "historical tragedies" that the two men became bitter rivals, rather than working together. I believe that Edison could have gone so much further with Tesla's guidance and temperament as an engineer and scientist (Tesla being more of a theoretical scientist before an engineer, and Edison being more an experimentalist engineer before a scientist). I often wonder what would have happened if Edison and Tesla had explored the "Edison Effect" - the world would probably not be the same today, certainly.