this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.
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.
I'd say PayPal was a pretty big deal but I'm not sure what his level of involvement was
Intellectual jokes like this are one of the reasons I'm on Lemmy.
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.
He wanted to show that AC lines with their heigh voltages are dangerous, as he sold low voltage DC power.
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.
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.
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.
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.