Question: does Thomas Edison get a bad rap these days? It seems to be accepted wisdom on Reddit, at least, that he was little more than a con man who invented nothing but took credit for the work of *actual* geniuses like Nikola Tesla.
I have no doubt the heroic picture of him we had for years was heavily airbrushed, but I feel like this new portrayal of him as a villain is just as oversimplified.
I completely agree. I think it stems, in part, from an old-fashioned and romantic notion of invention as something done by solitary geniuses, so when people look at how Edison operated -- highly networked, highly iterative, a great deal of collective work -- they think "that's not what invention is." But it is. As for Tesla, he was a genius, absolutely, but I think his worshippers too often wilfully ignore his many mistakes and failures -- not just business mistakes and failures, but scientific and technological.
Question: does Thomas Edison get a bad rap these days? It seems to be accepted wisdom on Reddit, at least, that he was little more than a con man who invented nothing but took credit for the work of *actual* geniuses like Nikola Tesla.
I have no doubt the heroic picture of him we had for years was heavily airbrushed, but I feel like this new portrayal of him as a villain is just as oversimplified.
I completely agree. I think it stems, in part, from an old-fashioned and romantic notion of invention as something done by solitary geniuses, so when people look at how Edison operated -- highly networked, highly iterative, a great deal of collective work -- they think "that's not what invention is." But it is. As for Tesla, he was a genius, absolutely, but I think his worshippers too often wilfully ignore his many mistakes and failures -- not just business mistakes and failures, but scientific and technological.
Being a genius in one area doesn't mean you can't be a crank in another. Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with trying to make alchemy a thing.
One of my favourite comics, Atomic Robo, took these obsessions of Edison's and turned him into a quasi-villain in the series as a result of them.
https://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/v4ch4-cover