
Thomas Edison’s brilliant life, told in reverse - ohaikbai
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/thomas-edisons-brilliant-life-told-in-reverse/2019/11/27/8c92139c-dfbb-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html
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jjtheblunt
I find myself wondering what fraction of HN readers think of Edison as other
than the person who, without shame in all the following,

(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.

~~~
paulgerhardt
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.

[1]
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103115](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103115)

~~~
rjzzleep
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.

~~~
paulgerhardt
Yes, that is the common narrative.

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.

~~~
rjzzleep
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.

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gumby
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.

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grizzles
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.

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8bitsrule
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.

~~~
userbinator
Audel/Hawkins has some written some very interesting books, many of which you
can find at archive.org

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehemiah_Hawkins](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1917_Hawkins_Electrical_Guide_-
_Titlepage.jpg)

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.

