I happened to just finish watching the HBO Miniseries From The Earth To the Moon [1] last night. The last episode features a side-plot about the french film Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès, which had an interesting tie to Edison I had never heard of before.
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.
> Edison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course.
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.
I read that he has researchers working for him who worked on the bulb. Then there was the DC motor fix which Tesla is said to have done but Edison didn't pay him as promised
In a period when the US did not allow non-nationals to take out a US patent. Rather weights the game.
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.
"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.
> You can go on with the invention of the paper press
"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."
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.
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.
Well actually... They were innovated by the Spanish in the Ten Years War before Churchill was even born. Nor do we or did we ignore Stalin - he was, at best, thought to be a necessary anti Nazi evil.
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?"
It is "well documented" in memes and sources with an axe to grind - well, mainly one well known revisionist source. Read even just the Wikipedia page and he was clearly not solely and singularly responsible. Even the parts he contributed were probably near unavoidable. Purely from memory:
+ 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...
The West has always indulged somewhat in this form of celeb culture, now rendered absurd with actual celebrity culture, along with startup and political deity worship. It partly ties in with the insistence of knowing so many simple facts for exams of yore who, what, where, when and not so much of why.
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. :)
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
It's conceivable that they printed papers on the train to save time. In a similar vein, a relative of mine worked for a company that made a product by pouring the ingredients into a tank truck with a built-in mixer, and letting it mix on the way to the customer's location. It was some kind of simple stuff that really was just a mixture of a few things.
Yup. And it leads to an interesting issue. The angular momentum of the rotating barrel causes weird handling issues for the truck driver. If they try to take a turn too quickly, the truck will tip over due to the gyroscope effect.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon