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Comment by cgrealy | Hacker News Reader

Obligatory Oatmeal reference to Tesla being better than Edison. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

That oatmeal comic is ridiculously inaccurate and in the author's rebuttal he pretty much says as much. Please stop posting it as it has done huge damage to the conversation on Edison vs. Tesla. Just one quick example: in the comic it implies that Edison, out of some sense of rivalry with Tesla, used his position on the naval board to prevent Tesla from getting a grant to utilize Tesla's method of submarine detection. Tesla proposed using radar to track the submarines which the naval board rightly rejected as radar is quickly attenuated underwater.

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...

That forbes "contributor" site you linked is sloppy. Oatmeal did a rebuttal to that: https://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response

The author even had to correct basic factual inaccuracies in his own article based on reader comments.

This is the usual 'us VS them'/'innovator vs business' narrative. But its an old narrative you find everywhere from the Wright Brothers to Heaviside to Marconi to Steve Jobs etc etc.

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.

"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can." - Bill Hicks

While funny, taken seriously this is the terrible, toxic bullshit that GP's excellent comment was getting at.

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?

Tesla was the better engineer; Edison was the better organizer and a great industrialist. At his peak Edison could conceive, plan, and build a significant factory in a week. He didn't personally invent the practical light bulb, but he had 200 people around the world searching for filament materials. Edison could never have achieved what Tesla did, and visa versa.

I can’t help draw parallel to Jobs inventing the iPhone. Or is that inaccurate?

Don’t understand the downvote. for a hacker it seems Tesla is a much more interesting and sympathetic figure than Edison. Also I don’t like putting emphasis on individual people ... the genius of Edison is also related to the genius of other people surrounding him and living during the same time. What would Einstein have been without Goedel etc.? We don’t know .... we don’t understand the influences.

> What would Einstein have been without Goedel?

Gödel was a child when the theory of relativity was formalized.

Sorry, it might have been a misleading example. Yet, for me Goedel showed actually the impact of the field equations of Einstein. Still I don't like the narrative of the genius ... It takes a lot of intelligent people to create sth. lasting. Goedel and Einstein contributed a lot to our current understanding of maths and phsysics (as well as a lot of forgotten geniuses).

interfixus has a point as well. If time is relative, you cannot be sure about your statement :)

> 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 :)

Einstein developing general relativity exists in both the past and future light cone of Gödel being a child.

Happy? :)

Einstein became a worldwide celebrity in 1919 and was super well known among scientists and interested laypeople before that. Godel was 12 in 1919 and had yet to do anything of note.

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