Some incredibly useful and others… not so much. Edison even invented a version of the telephone. They allowed us to see at night easily. Having a convenient light source changed peoples lives. Gone were the days of not being able to go out at night. This vastly changed nearly every industry. Restaurants, cafes and even offices. With a convenient light source, people were able to work longer which led to even more technological innovation.
The phonograph was another Edison invention. It allowed people to record their voices and play them back. Eventually, this was used to record and playback music. Over time a smaller version was invented, and soldiers took the phonograph to war, almost like an old-school boombox.
There would have been no record players, walkmans or eventually I-Pods. Would Michael Jackson, as we knew him, have even existed? Thomas Edison invented the alkaline battery. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr.
Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on. Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people. So, too, was the drudgery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory.
Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert K. Merton put forward a theory concerning simultaneous invention, or what he called multiple discoveries: think of Newton and Leibniz coming up with calculus independently but concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace thinking their way to natural selection at nearly the same time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and Britain sorting out steam engines within a few decades of one another.
The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing theories and technologies. Merton provides a useful context for Edison, who, as he himself knew, was never inventing ex nihilo; rather, he was nipping at the heels of other inventors while trying to stay ahead of the ones at his. It may be satisfying to talk of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, but Elisha Gray filed a patent for one on the same day, and Edison improved on both of their designs.
Similarly, we may safely refer to Edison as the inventor of the phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola. It seems odd to judge Edison negatively for making fuel cells before their time, or for trying to find a viable domestic source for rubber, even if, on those fronts, he never succeeded.
He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok.
Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material.
When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended himself on the ground that he had found Reagan too boring for a standard biography, then later claimed that his performative style had been mimetic of his subject, a performer whose entire Presidency, he suggested, had been an act. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging.
Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in and runs until , Part 2 goes from to , and so on. The whole thing has the halting feel of two steps forward, one step back: Edison has a second wife before we ever learn what happened to the first; Menlo Park has already been disassembled and re-created as a museum in Michigan before we get the story of its founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.
Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy.
Because Tesla pitched radar as a means of tracking submarines. Members of the Naval Consulting Board I can't find documentation as to whether Edison was directly involved noted, correctly, that water would attenuate radio waves to the point that they'd be useless for tracking submarines.
That was true during World War I, and it's also true today. That's why the Naval Consulting Board pursued sonar instead. Which is still the way submarines are tracked. The Consulting Board didn't get far, though. The British were way ahead, having developed a sonar prototype in So did Tesla invent radar, like The Oatmeal claims? He pitched an idea, but never developed a prototype. That said, a lot of his work did become the backbone for radar research in the s, but there was a lot of work done between Tesla's work and the eventual development of radar.
Tesla pointed the way, but there was a long road that had to be dug out of the jungle. Oh, and just one more note on the Naval Consulting Board.
Unlike Tesla, who pitched "death rays" and other weapons to countries in his later years, Edison's condition to working on the board was that it would work to develop defensive technology only. That was true for his entire existence. Edison once remarked that, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. That's something Tesla can't say. In the course of researching this article, I surprised myself by learning that Tesla did not, in fact, discover X-Rays. I'd been under the impression that he had.
He played with them before Wilhelm Rontgen, that's true. But other researchers were also experimenting with them. It wasn't until Rontgen, though, that some of them knew what they were dealing with For example, Ivan Pulyui's work pre-dated Tesla's, but he didn't realize he was working with X-Rays until Rontgen published his work.
The Oatmeal also correctly notes that Tesla did identify the dangers of X-Rays and didn't experiment with them much. This then leads to one of the most morally reprehensible portions of The Oatmeal's comic, where he takes the tragic death of Edison's assistant Clarence Dally and Edison's disability as an excuse to pummel Edison again.
Here's what the Oatmeal says:. This is some of the most anachronistic, patronizing things I've ever read. Please, readers, turn the clocks back to the early s. People didn't really understand how radiation worked and how dangerous they truly were. When it came to Edison's X-Ray experiments, the "human trials" were conducted by Edison on himself and his assistant, who readily volunteered. Not yet understanding radiation, they both took excessive doses and suffered for it.
This was the fate of a lot of brilliant researchers in the early days of radiation. Like Marie and Pierre Curie, for example. What's more, Edison was haunted by Dally's death to the end of his days. It agonized him. While Dally was alive and suffering, Edison kept him on the payroll and took care of all of his expenses until the day he died. In the early 20th Century, let me assure you that keeping employees on the payroll who couldn't work was not a common practice. Had he worked for most of the tycoons of the time, Dally would have probably ended his days a beggar in the streets.
Giving credit to the one who perfected it is like saying Michael Jordan invented basketball. He may have perfected it; he did not invent it. Edison killed an elephant with one of his cometitors inventions to get them out of the way and his name was nikkala tesla my great great great grandfather.
Con Man Edison was ahead of his time, at the cost of others. Louis Le Prince in was on his way to the US to demonstrate his invention, he spoke to his wife saying how excited he was, will see her soon.
Unfortunately Mr. Louis Le Prince, his Camera and documents disappeared. Suspicious indeed, Con Man Edison around the same year received the credit for the invention. A photograph of a drowning victim shortly after was found, which resembled Mr. Louis Le Prince. The photograph was in police custody. As of this date, the photograph and information regarding the photo has disappeared. Edison stole the improved design for the light bulb from another man, a move he would proceed to repeat a lot on his life.
Just Google all his achievements, none of them where his. Frankensteins Colton Kruse , October 29, Or Not Weird News. Ripley's Believe It or Not!
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