Edison: Never waste time inventing things that people would not want to buy | Hacker News Reader

Edison: Never waste time inventing things that people would not want to buy

thomasedison.com

33 pointsskbohra12321 comments

It is interesting how, any mention of Edison on the internet quickly turns away from his achievements to an impromptu discussion of how he was a dick and tried to fuck Tesla over. Every single comment in this thread is about Tesla. This amuses me greatly.

Maybe because those same articles are trying to portray Edison like a genius inventor, which he clearly wasn't.

Tesla was the genius inventor, Edison was "just" a great businessman. There's nothing wrong with being great businessman, but don't try to present him something that he wasn't.

Yes, it sucks that Edison screwed over Tesla, but how about the fact that he had serious BALLS?

And Steve Jobs wasn't a dick at all? C'mon.

Edison was a great entrepreneur. Despite his personal failings, he had the vision and determination to bring a lot of great things into the world.

Yes I see the correlation, come to think of it Steve did kind of screw Woz over that breakout game.

Anyway maybe it doesn't suck at all, I believe Tesla needed to learn the customs of the American entrepreneurship if he was about to start his business there. And, um... I am afraid he didn't. :(

american craptalk alert! Actually J.P Morgan OWNED HIS BALLS. Typical poster boy, kind of Einstein was.

Edison was exactly the kind of person that I do not want to become.

He is the exact opposite of what defines a "hacker".

Unfortunately, many modern hackers (myself included heh) are adopting Edison's method: Build before learn, try everything, bruteforce a solution, skip math. Hackerspaces are particulary guilty of this non-optimal behaviour. The opposite of this is a man of science.

He was a bro.

Relevant : http://flyingmoose.org/truthfic/tesla.htm

The other side of the coin. Edison had a large vested interest in the DC power plants which he had been building.Therefore he was opposed to introducing AC power plants and transmission because it would not make him money.

Edison was the father of FUD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)

He electrocuted an elephant (Topsy) in New York just to prove how "unsafe" AC design was.

Honestly? Your reply is what's FUD. I clicked on that link ready to be outraged, until I saw this:

Topsy belonged to the Forepaugh Circus and spent the last years of her life at Coney Island's Luna Park. Because she had killed three men in as many years (including a severely abusive trainer who attempted to feed her a lit cigarette),[1] Topsy was deemed a threat to people by her owners and killed by electrocution on January 4, 1903, at the age of 28.[2] Inventor Thomas Edison captured the event on film. He would release it later that year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant.

He didn't electrocute an elephant just to prove the unsafety of AC, he filmed an electrocution of a previously (even wrongly) condemned elephant. Yes, he may have been a heartless bastard to take advantage of the death sentence of a beautiful (innocent?) animal to further his own goals, but it wasn't as senseless a killing as your reply would suggest, and certainly not him that did it. He was the guy behind the camera.

Edison was my hero when I was a kid. I used to believe of Edison as one of the greatest inventors of all time. As I admired him, I started digging about him. Slowly I realized Edison was one of the greediest, heartless, criminal of all time. He not only bought and stole inventions of others, he cashed on killing of people. Most people know how he screwed Tesla. What many people don't know about Edison is that his employees created electric chair which is considered as device of cruel punishment. So, he made money by selling this device of painful death. He even took opportunity to film the electrocution and killing of Topsy (elephant) to demonstrate superiority of his DC system over Tesla's AC.

Edison is an example of what one should never become in life.

Edison: Never invent anything if you can fuck over Tesla to get it for free.

If you think that the Edison-Tesla fuckover was epic, read aboit how Sarnoff screwed up and stole Farnsworth invention, i.e. the TV (incidentially, part of that story explains why there's no channel 1 on TVs in the US).

Edison: Never waste time inventing things that can be stolen on the way to the patent office.

Tesla: do as much cool stuff as you can, no matter what kinds of trolls get in your way.

The Tesla vs Edison personality duel is equivalent to Knowledge vs Brute-force, Science vs Business, etc. At the end, Edison may be more known for the general population, but the standard unit of magnetism is named after Tesla.

What Edison >>actually invented<< ( not steal or buy )?

Well, according to The Simpsons, it was a chair with an extra set of hinged legs to stop you falling over backwards when you swung on it...

I am amazed by how, you, in one sentance have succeed to capture the exact essence of what I imagine Tesla would be like. :-)

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