• shortypants@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    65
    ·
    2 days ago

    1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 day ago

      Edison being a giant dick of a patent troll is one of the main reasons Hollywood exists. I’m not sure Musk has anything that impactful on his resume.

    • sharkaccident@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      Don’t get me started. He did not invent the lightbulb. Did he “perfect” it? Maybe? But only after trial and error of 100’s of filaments including human hair.

      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        20 hours ago

        Can it even be said that it was perfected when later we switched from carbon filament to tungsten, and from there to halogen-surrounded tungsten.

        And on the other side, Edison’s lamp wasn’t even the first one to be mass produced and commercially sold.

        There’s a certain style of education that really wants to draw a hard line between “before the thing” and “after the thing”, and credit its invention to a single guy. But really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.

      • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 day ago

        Oh, it wasn’t just elephants. He did it with dogs, monkeys, etc. This wasn’t a one-time thing, he provided this “demonstration” on a variety of occasions.

        All because he wanted the world to adopt his standard for electrical transmission, direct current (DC) instead of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC).

        Tesla was a brilliant engineer and inventor. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing (though later he did get a little nutty). Edison just yelled at engineers he hired to do work for him.

        I am so sad that Tesla’s name has been ruined. He was wildly intelligent and though he was a prominent figure in his prime, he died broke. It’s not bad enough that he went out like that, now we have a fucking clown pissing on his grave by using his name to sell his bullshit nazimobiles.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        He was trying to prove that electricity was dangerous. Even at the time though a lot of people pointed out that the voltage used was not the voltage used in mains electrics so it was basically a pointless thing to do and people quite upset about the elephant. He did receive a fair amount of bad press for it.

        • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 day ago

          He wanted to show that AC lines with their heigh voltages are dangerous, as he sold low voltage DC power.

          • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 day ago

            Edison’s electricity was the same 110volts. But it it was 110v from generators to peoples homes and thus suffered greatly from resistance losses.

            Telsa’s AC however used high voltages for distribution and step down to 110v at the final destination, so the resistance losses were much lower. Edison’s propaganda conveniently glosses over that fact.