The Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Méliès had intended on US distribution for the film, but before he could make that happen, someone working for Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of the film they had, and Edison then made copies which he redistributed in the US. Méliès didn't see a penny of this, and went broke within the next few years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi...
Thomas Edison
Of courser he did. He had the concept of a high voltage being applied across a high resistance filament, which turned out to be the key insight to making a lightbulb useful. Other experimenters were stuck on using low resistance, high current filaments, which just couldn't be made into a useful bulb.
Facts are inconvenient to popular historians and PhD candidates desperate for tenure.
Fred Mullens patented the lightbulb 20 years before Edison, and Joseph Swan a UK patent for essentially the same design Edison got a few months or years before Edison. He was already lighting a theatre with his lamps when Edison got his famous patent IIRC. There are probably a dozen other people from other countries who achieved and patented something before Edison.
Edit: Note, Swan successfully sued Edison in the UK. After which Edison's continued presence in the UK was via a joint venture with Swan.
Who discovered America?
"Columbus of course!" - No, wrong! It was some Asian Indians and some vikings who did it hundreds of years before him.
Nevertheless "columbus" ist still the response many people would answer that question with because in the view of the western part of the world the colonization columbus started was the most important event.
You can go on with the invention of the paper press (most will say "Gutenberg") which also happened hundreds of years earlier in China.
I think it's really strange to emphasize this kind of "knowledge" so much in our schools as it just frames the thoughts of people so they think better about their "very important" ancestors. Actually this kind of "knowledge" doesn't get you anywhere besides bragging to be very educated to get some more attention.
And then of course it helps to identify who is "better". Did men invent more than women? Did white people invent more than colored people?
This is irrelevant and I think we should care less about why our ancestors were supposed to be geniuses and take more effort into fixing our education to be a more enlightened civilization that probably can exist without so many wars and destruction.
Who is the monster of world war 2? We say Hitler, just Hitler. We ignore the killings don't by Stalin and the fact that concentration camps were Churchill's idea in Boar war in Africa and that ethnic superiority was first claimed by American scientists in some European conference, Hitler just implemented what they said and then those scientists denounced Hitler as if they never said anything about ethnic superiority/cleansing.
p.s. Churchill was a war correspondent during the Boer War. No one in the military would have listened even if he had thought them up at that time.
We also don't talk about how Churchill killed millions of Indians in Bengal famines. It is well documented. He diverted everything to the war and when asked about starving Indians, he reportedly asked, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?"
+ There had been a series of natural disasters coming one after another - a major hurricane, a flood, a major crop disease that was spreading through the region.
+ The biggest single cause of famine was the Indian princes of other Indian states closing down trade to Bengal thanks to the fall of Burma. This resulted in Indian merchants profiteering and the price of rice and grain sky rocketing. Due to the vassal nature of the Raj, these were still independent choices. Could they have been persuaded or compelled to change? Merchants profiteering maybe, the Princely states probably not.
+ Burma had just fallen. Bengal had imported much of their rice from Burma. This was the second major cause. That trade was no longer there, and it was thought likely Bengal might fall. Countless troops and Burmese refugees were flooding into the region - most of whom were ill from the trek through Burmese jungle or injured. Which would have triggered a crisis without any of the rest. Control of the sea and sky in the Bay of Bengal had been lost, and it was expected that the region might fall any moment - it was the new front line. The actions of Japan against any civilians or troops in regions they captured are well known. Had Bengal fallen the famine would have been a trivial side issue as 10x or 100x more would have died, been enslaved or raped. Compare mortality and conditions in Burma and Nanjing under Japan with Bengal.
+ Mounbatten did request aid, but at that time the UK was barely receiving adequate food and war materiel to continue the war, let alone send food aid half way around the world. The cross-party war cabinet voted not to. Had they done so the losses would probably have been colossal. Could he have turned that decision? Who knows.
+ Losing Bengal, then likely India would probably have lost the war.
All of the above should be on Wikipedia. So is Gandhi's racism and ongoing feud with Ambdekhar (writer of India's constitution, leader of the Dalits, and probably the most remarkable and influential Indian ever).
Now then. The governor of Bengal certainly made some questionable decisions, one very suspect decision and the little aid that was provided was inadequate - yet they prioritised ensuring Bengal did not fall. No one makes memes of that guy or claims his role is "well documented". Just about no one at all knows who the governor even was. Under Japan it would have been a hundred times worse. There would be memes complaining of Churchill's stupidity sending aid instead of preventing the fall of Bengal that result in hundreds of millions of deaths at the hand of Japan.
There could have been far more local action from the neighbouring Indian states. Perhaps more could have been done to require those vassal states to send aid to Bengal, but I'm not sure that could have been achieved. Perhaps Australia or NZ could have done more, yet as dominions they were voting their own choices...
With the Columbus myth I always thought the best part of the tale was not his supposed discovery, but his ongoing insistence for years that he had not found America, but Asia by another route. Which is presumably why America was named for Amerigo Vespucci. Though I thought the Viking and Asians getting there first was fairly well known now?
As for Edison's patent mill, well who knows how many of "his" inventions were from one of his many utterly forgotten researchers. Unlike Newton, he made no mention of seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Mind you, that famous Newtonian quote wasn't, it's much older - it may have been parallel invention as he thought it a cute phrase.
TL;DR the whole patent system is broken, and we should be far more aware of the sweep of history than the individuals. :)
The vikings essentially forgot about it and nobody knew until archaeology provided proof they had gotten to America. It had no effect on history.
But Columbus' discovery changed everything overnight.
"But what really set Gutenberg apart from his predecessors in Asia was his development of a press that mechanized the transfer of ink from movable type to paper. Adapting the screw mechanisms found in wine presses, papermakers' presses and linen presses, Gutenberg developed a press perfectly suited for printing. The first printing press allowed for an assembly line-style production process that was much more efficient than pressing paper to ink by hand. For the first time in history, books could be mass-produced — and at a fraction of the cost of conventional printing methods."
https://www.livescience.com/43639-who-invented-the-printing-...
Gutenberg's press changed the world almost overnight. It enabled the vast dissemination of knowledge, mass literacy, and was essential to the advent of the industrial revolution.
Swan's high current, low resistance design was NOT the same as Edison's and was a dead end.
Edison's low current, high resistance design was the key to success.
"Swan's carbon rod lamp and carbon filament lamp, while functional, were still relatively impractical due to low resistance (needing very expensive thick copper wiring) and short running life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan
Gödel was a child when the theory of relativity was formalized.
Relativity does away with the concept of simultaneity. Your statement may be true but unprovable :)
Happy? :)
interfixus has a point as well. If time is relative, you cannot be sure about your statement :)
It's also an unhelpful/superficial narrative that creates automatic misunderstandings and mistrust as soon as speedbumps are hit, when science/tech and business interact. It gives me heartburn whenever I get pushed into a room where science/tech ppl and biz ppl are trying to dominate each other. Because they have been feed this self reinforcing narrative that one side has to win.
The real Tesla/Edison story, is the innovator was a bad businessman and the businessman was a bad innovator(Edison was barely educated). They both squandered a whole lot of time and resources because they couldn't work together. And progress happened in spite of all the drama between the two. That's the real story. And it plays out constantly even today.
The narrative needs to change. Because in today's fast changing world both sides cannot survive without each other.
No, people don't just innately, magically notice genius, innovation or progress. Inspiring pictures of a bright future have to be painted, ideas have to be communicated, minds have to be persuaded.
If you failed to persuade people to use your thing, did you even do anything?
There is a bit of a nasty strain of hero worship in some parts of the tech community.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola-tes...
The author even had to correct basic factual inaccuracies in his own article based on reader comments.