7 ms·

The Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius

64 points by tintinnabula 7y ago

cgrealy 7y ago
Obligatory Oatmeal reference to Tesla being better than Edison. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla
- kgarten 7y ago
  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.
  - vtomole 7y ago
    > What would Einstein have been without Goedel? Gödel was a child when the theory of relativity was formalized.
    - interfixus 7y ago
      > 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 :)
      - DavidSJ 7y ago
        Einstein developing general relativity exists in both the past and future light cone of Gödel being a child. Happy? :)
    - kgarten 7y ago
      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 :)
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    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.
- hirundo 7y ago
  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.
  - travisporter 7y ago
    I can’t help draw parallel to Jobs inventing the iPhone. Or is that inaccurate?
- hos234 7y ago
  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.
  - jgpeak 7y ago
    "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
    - martythemaniak 7y ago
      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?
- pretendscholar 7y ago
  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-tesla-wasnt-god-and-thomas-edison-wasnt-the-devil/#1afce5021a21 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola-tes...
  - purple_ducks 7y ago
    That forbes "contributor" site you linked is sloppy. Oatmeal did a rebuttal to that: https://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response https://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response The author even had to correct basic factual inaccuracies in his own article based on reader comments.
gregmac 7y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon
mxcrossb 7y ago
I couldn’t quite understand the part about Edison printing newspapers on the train. Was he copying newspapers to sell them cheap?
- analog31 7y ago
  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.
  - andrewf 7y ago
    The USPS used to sort the mail on trains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    Concrete trucks are mixed on route aren’t they?
    - analog31 7y ago
      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.
      - philliphaydon 7y ago
        Cool. I didn’t know that!
pmoriarty 7y ago
"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." Thomas Edison
WalterBright 7y ago
> 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.
- thewhitetulip 7y ago
  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
  - fsh 7y ago
    Tesla probably made up the story about the bet with Edison in his autobiography. It is not mentioned anywhere else, not even in Tesla's diary.
    - thewhitetulip 7y ago
      If this is true then how come books are being printed with this falsehoods?
      - InTheArena 7y ago
        Narratives are always more powerful then fact - until someone really takes the tune to construct the truth. The it takes decades to fix. Facts are inconvenient to popular historians and PhD candidates desperate for tenure.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Many people challenged Edison's lightbulb patent in court, and lost.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago

64 points by tintinnabula 7y ago

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

kgarten 7y ago
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.
- vtomole 7y ago
  > What would Einstein have been without Goedel? Gödel was a child when the theory of relativity was formalized.
  - interfixus 7y ago
    > 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 :)
    - DavidSJ 7y ago
      Einstein developing general relativity exists in both the past and future light cone of Gödel being a child. Happy? :)
  - kgarten 7y ago
    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 :)
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  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.
hirundo 7y ago
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.
- travisporter 7y ago
  I can’t help draw parallel to Jobs inventing the iPhone. Or is that inaccurate?
hos234 7y ago
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.
- jgpeak 7y ago
  "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
  - martythemaniak 7y ago
    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?
pretendscholar 7y ago
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-tesla-wasnt-god-and-thomas-edison-wasnt-the-devil/#1afce5021a21 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola-tes...
- purple_ducks 7y ago
  That forbes "contributor" site you linked is sloppy. Oatmeal did a rebuttal to that: https://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response https://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response The author even had to correct basic factual inaccuracies in his own article based on reader comments.

gregmac 7y ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon

mxcrossb 7y ago

I couldn’t quite understand the part about Edison printing newspapers on the train. Was he copying newspapers to sell them cheap?

analog31 7y ago
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.
- andrewf 7y ago
  The USPS used to sort the mail on trains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  Concrete trucks are mixed on route aren’t they?
  - analog31 7y ago
    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.
    - philliphaydon 7y ago
      Cool. I didn’t know that!

pmoriarty 7y ago

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." Thomas Edison

WalterBright 7y ago

> 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.

thewhitetulip 7y ago
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
- fsh 7y ago
  Tesla probably made up the story about the bet with Edison in his autobiography. It is not mentioned anywhere else, not even in Tesla's diary.
  - thewhitetulip 7y ago
    If this is true then how come books are being printed with this falsehoods?
    - InTheArena 7y ago
      Narratives are always more powerful then fact - until someone really takes the tune to construct the truth. The it takes decades to fix. Facts are inconvenient to popular historians and PhD candidates desperate for tenure.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Many people challenged Edison's lightbulb patent in court, and lost.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago