American heroes regularly cycle between hero and goat decade by decade.
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's unfair to judge them exceptionally when comparing among the range people and views of that earlier age, or to hide behind supposed earlier universal standards which often turn out to have been anything but. In the pantheon of world history it is perfectly reasonable to judge, question and doubt. Plenty of people of those ages found such things abhorrent and banded together to end child labour, animal mistreatment and slavery among countless other horrible behaviours. After all that is how we got our hopefully better and more enlightened standards today. The ASPCA was formed in the mid 19th century after the RSPCA was formed in the early 19th.
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.
Interesting, so they were much more incidental to events than has entered popular awareness. Also the somewhat inevitable nature of events given publicity hungry keepers who'd mistreated the animal - unsurprisingly it reacted to being badly treated by drunk handlers. Also an early result (of sorts) for the ASPCA preventing a public hanging of the elephant - for spectacle, and thanks to paid admission, profit!
As usual it pays to dig a little deeper, thanks. :)
> On January 4, 1903, in front of a small crowd of invited reporters and guests Topsy was fed poison, electrocuted, and strangled, the electrocution ultimately killing her. Amongst the press that day was a crew from the Edison Manufacturing movie company who filmed the event. Their film of the electrocution part was released to be viewed in coin-operated kinetoscopes under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. It is probably the first filmed death of an animal in history.
The relevant part for people who don't want to search for it.
Also that the electrocution took place 10 years after the end of the "current war". Blaming Edison for it is like blaming CNN for the events in the news footage they run.
I confess I too was once a diehard Tesla fanboy. It was only after reading T.P. Hughes “The Electrification of America: The System Builders“[1] that I came to appreciate the accomplishments of Edison and the unfairness of the pervasive one-sided boosterism for team Tesla.
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.
I'm a bit puzzled why people don't mention the obvious. I'm not a Tesla fanboy nor do I like Edison, but this shouldn't really be about whether Edison did or did not invent the lightbulb. There were so many people involved in the invention and multiple steps of bulbs.
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.
Actually he didn't even find that configuration. He just patented it so that others couldn't use it. That's the point.
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.
What is there to appreciate? You cannot call yourself a trailblazer if you follow someone else's trail. Edison just reproduced other people's work, that doesn't make him exceptional at anything.
I've always wondered about the connection between Mr. Edison and the mysterious Theodore Audel. Many of Audel's (at one time) ubiquitous tech-craft books promoted the immortality of Mr. Edison.
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.
The review doesn't mention that he was a patent abuser (though that is why the film industry grew in California).
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.
From the perspective of this moment in time, when I think of Edison, I think he was right. About everything.
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.
22 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] thread(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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(elephant)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
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.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103115
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.
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.
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.