Thomas Edison’s brilliant life, told in reverse
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
(1) cheated Nikola Tesla,
(2) hired labworkers to steal neighborhood pets (dogs and cats) to practice electrocution during the war of currents, and
(3) had a circus elephant publically executed via electrocution for his own greedy business purposes.
Having read outside the hero worship sources kind of wrecked Edison for younger me, obviously.
Edison is currently the goat and Tesla has been elevated to heroic status rather recently. I expect things to reverse in another 10 years or so.
As for the elephant thing, I find it highly abhorrent that anyone could do such a thing. But keep in mind that the only reason Edison could have done it at the time is if common attitudes at the time allowed it. It is a lot unfair to judge people by standards that become ascendant 100 years later.
It also allows us to go further back to more brutal, death ridden times and understand there probably was little place
So it's perfectly OK to pour scorn and revulsion on Edison, and judge him and his peers for electrocuting elephants and family pets, whilst acknowledging Franklin appears to have learnt from and been deeply affected by his (eventually successful) attempt at turkey electrocution.
As usual it pays to dig a little deeper, thanks. :)
The relevant part for people who don't want to search for it.
Both men were genius. It’s my own opinion that there is more to learn from the life of Edison and the work of Tesla than the other way round.
But in this particular case Edison was a patent troll. He took someone elses invention that had been built in that form and patented it to prevent others from using it.
What the Hughes article makes crystal clear is that Edison didn’t iterate on 3000 different versions of the lightbulb because he was bored. He did so because most configurations were low voltage, high current - this required thicker copper which was the limiting cost to electrification - by finding a viable configuration that was high voltage, low current (and patenting that configuration) he could mass produce light bulbs and the necessary grid behind them at a cost lower than natural gas.
An analogy is perhaps Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car, but he released it in a form (along with a supercharger network) that made mass adoption viable over the competing gasoline based network. Following a period of over-infatuation with Musk, it may be likely that 140 years from now we condemn him as not really inventing the electric car, saying his patents over battery production technology were trollish, and hail Mark Eberhard as the true unsung genius. For obvious reasons that interpretation is problematic and kind of misses the point of what these people actually did.
I really don't get the Elon Musk hero narrative. It's actually the very reason that throws him off track, since any kind of valid criticism gets lost in noise. Tesla depends on a whole bunch of high precision components of older manufacturing companies that Tesla acquired.
The reason why Tesla does so well is a mixture of good consumer oriented product development and the collective ignorance of the old farts in the car industry who are all buddy buddy with their government subsidies to keep their old factories afloat. It's very hard to compare that with the Edison case.
(4) took credit for all the inventions his employees invented
vs say Westinghouse who let his employees put their names on the patents for their inventions.
In other words, he wasn't as prolific an inventor as claimed since he took credit for others work.
Also, the fun part of telling his story backwards ("This ludic approach makes for some awkward challenges for the reader, who meets Edison as an old man, his children as adults and his second wife before his first." wrote the reviewer) is that it makes a parallel to Merlin who lived his own life backwards, sadly knowing that his "future" was for everybody he knew to forget him. Still, a nice parallel.
Edison's only problem was that he was constrained by the technology of his day. We're not. I recently started a microgrid energy company (strata.energy) that will be my small homage to continuing the work / ideas of this amazing man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehemiah_Hawkins
Regarding Edison, I assume you're referring to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1917_Hawkins_Electrical_G...
I think "Edison-worship" was pretty common at the time, since I have some other electrical books by other authors which prominently have a picture of Edison inside the front.