I stand corrected. Lots of good stuff I never knew. We just plain fucked up because we thought Edison was a god.
He was a brilliant engineer, sadly also a brilliant liar (pr, marketing etc) and greedy bastard. Tesla was a brilliant engineer, but not as good at lying, which meant he had a harder time fleecing money out of investors.
I'm not so sure Edison was a "brilliant engineer" either. What he WAS good at was stealing inventions from his subordinates and claiming them as his own.
He certainly fucked Tesla over.
-Pat
It's Edison's fault. Had they obeyed Tesla and Westinghouse a bit earlier, they'd have a much better system today.
I don't think anything that treats Neutral and PE as similar would be to code anywhere. Not that it stops the hot air cost-cutters, though.
Edison just couldn't get over thinking in terms of DC. Motherfucker was much better at turning inventing into a factory than at actually inventing; also very good at shamelessly self-promoting and electrocuting small animals in public squares.
Westinghouse had the right idea; turn Tesla's genius loose but hand the reins to Edison to ensure something useful and profitable was produced. Sadly, had they realized the true depravity of the slave-state economy/ideology they were birthing, I suspect even Edison would have balked.
mnem
*currently somehow home alone without wife or chiddlers*
Yeah, that was all alluded to in my post above. Tesla was the brilliant engineer and scientist; Edison plodded like a mule, but he was systematic and doggedly determined. These properties made Menlo Park a great place for him to work and to take credit for the talents of folks with a lot more genius and a lot more actual scientific chops than he had himself.
He created the world's first "Invention Factory", which was truly his greatest, most lasting invention: turning engineering and invention into something that could be hitched to a corporation. As bd said, natural management material.
Tesla worked with the man twice; first in his Edison Machine Works (where he made Edison's DC motors work properly, and probably came up with the principles by which his later induction motors worked) and later at Westinghouse's insistence on the Niagara Falls generator facility.
Tesla was brilliant when it came to anything relating to oscillation; from subsonics to ultrasonics to radio and even broadcast energy, which he proved possible to a small extent with a field full of neon bulbs sticking up out of the ground like potatoes at Wardenclyffe... but he at the same time stated he didn't believe in subatomic theory or flow of electrons as the basis of electricity.
He was also flaky AF, and hopelessly altruistic. His dreams of broadcast power were all about freeing humanity from drudgery; he sought to unleash us from our servitude to "The Machine".
Ironic that we now are all now ultimately enslaved by the energy industry in its many forms...
Tesla's assessment of Edison after his death was probably most telling:
"He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene ... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense."In short, sortof like that episode where Homer Simpson decides to quit work and follow in Edison's footsteps...
mnem